 The May 18th, 2022 Fairbanks Barrier Board of Directors meeting, 6.31. Okay. So first order public comment. Any comment? No. Any on the, on the screen. Looks like you have Zach on the screen. Yeah, so I don't see any of the public. Sorry. Great. I have a motion to approve that consent agenda. I would like to approve the consent agenda. I'd like to pull the superintendent's report and the June one. draft agenda, please. Second. Also favor. Can you oppose? I'm here. I'll talk about the, the. Which should you pull the draft agenda for six one and the superintendent. Okay. I just wanted to say thank you for. Sharing with us how. Once again, how tough it's been. And also. A snapshot into what you're preparing for. You're using to prepare for. And the focus on community building. And. You know, bringing everybody back together. I just think it's. I think it's so important. So I just, I just wanted to say thanks. And I think it's also important for us as the board and for the community. You know, Hundreds of people who read the superintendent report as part of our board packet. To also know. Just how difficult it has been. Not necessarily because there's much we can do about it, although. Always this is once again, you know, anything. Anything that we can do, please let us know. But also just, I think it's helpful for us to have that awareness so that we can contribute to trying to make things better in any interaction that we do have with. Teachers and administrators and so. It's helpful. It's really helpful. Thank you. The June one agenda. I just had some, an idea that may be helpful. It looked like the board discussion section was a little light. And I thought it could be a use of, a good use of time for us to prep for the retreat, which is happening on the 13th. If we haven't already thought of that. And then. Great. I also just wanted to confirm that we are having a board meeting on the 15th. As well, even though the retreat is on the 13th. Because the retreat really is making up for not having July meetings. Or. Yeah. Typically it's replaced it. Let me know. We're not able to have a really big Friday, which is. I don't know. What's the general sense of the board? Do you feel like you want a meeting on Wednesday after Monday? My vote. Probably not. But if people are. Just. I feel like we should have it June 15th and whatever we don't finish. The retreat is always not. Like, we always have things that we don't do afterwards. So we could just use that time to finish whatever it is that we didn't finish from there. So. My vote. Probably not. But if people are. Just. I feel like we should have it June 15th and whatever we don't finish the retreat. So we could have things that we don't do afterwards. So we could just use that time to finish whatever it is that we didn't finish from the retreat. There's always work that we could do together. I feel like since we're not having a meeting in July, we cannot ban some of these conversations. That I'm hoping we get to on the retreat, but also probably not. So I think we should have it. We are not meeting in July. One thing comes to mind that's on the June 15th agenda, which is the transportation discussion. That's very. Transportation. So that is one, especially if we're not meeting in July and we wouldn't have an opportunity to reschedule that. Yeah. Let's have it though. Let's try to make it. So let's try to make it. Two hours or less. So we'll be June 15th and no meeting in July. Correct. Yeah. That sounds good. And I just had one other thing that is sort of. It's maybe like I'm. Well, I have a little bit of a preamble and I'm a little nervous about this. So I wrote a little script for myself. And I'm going to read it out. My other folks on the board, if you're, if you scroll through the Facebook page, like I do from time to time and community members. I had seen that the event that was advertised as a. Learning session around teaching about racism in our schools. And spoiler alert for those who didn't see it, but I know that there's a lot of information about racism and the hard truths of our. Country in our schools and it was supposed to happen last Friday in Montpelier and another one on Saturday in Williston. I don't know if they actually occurred or not. To be perfectly honest, one of my defense mechanisms around these things is to pretend that they are not happening. But I also know. If that that's not very helpful. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. What perhaps we could do as a board. Particularly because there is some sort of. Well, it's connected to education. And I would like to offer that. I think a statement in support of our teachers and particularly in support of teaching hard things. Would be somewhat useful from the board. I don't. Find, you know, statements to always be particularly. I think that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. I think that's a good idea. I think that any time we can make a statement in support of our teachers in particular, it's a good idea. And so that's a suggestion that I have for the board. To maybe also have on the June 1st agenda. And I would be happy to draft one for us to discuss on June 1st. I don't think that. Any of us is prepared to have that conversation today. And I don't want it to rail today's agenda with it. And another idea that I had is to volunteer the equity committee. It's really about our opportunity meetings to figure out how to do this as a learning opportunity for our. Entire community. Not necessarily. I'm not just thinking about teachers or inner schools, but. Parents were engaged in the, or caregivers were engaged in the conversation on Facebook. And it was supposed to be happening. In our town. maybe we come up with something. So I just wanted to see, you know, much mad and see what folks thought about having that be something part of the conversation, the next board meeting. Wait, it looks like Amanda might have. Is that a discussion? Should we have, is that, are we having a discussion about it? Or just, I thought a lot about statements and I don't like them, especially, you know, last year we did a great statement around the Apita community, but it was also on the same, like there was some active work that was happening in the high school specifically with the TA. There was like the RJA really did organize something that students had discussion in their classroom. So it was accompanied by a series of things that they reached just as a lens was also doing. So I think that if it's just for the statement, I just don't think that, I think we should be looking at our policies. We should be looking at how do we strengthen curriculum? How do we, you know, supporting the teachers? Yes, to teach the hard histories, but there's also some inequities around curriculum that we've talked about it a couple of times already that I'm sure teachers are working hard to kind of listen to the students. But I just always think that statements is not at this point of the game in the racial justice community is just performative and I think we should be looking more into what can we do to advance some of these policies in our equity policy and other policies that can come to mind to strengthen that work within the racial justice, whether it be, you know, supporting the librarians, supporting all of that in more concrete ways. But I appreciate you bringing that up, Mia. Yeah, I get that, Amanda. I appreciate for you guys as well, and I did see the flyer and you still got it at my place of employment, Vermont Higher Education Collaborative of Life. So what do we do? And I know there's a discussion among other organizations about like, do we respond to this? How do we, you know, and there's this fine line of like this work does not reflect the values of our community, you know, the work that the message that they're trying to spread is, and my greatest hope for that event was that they came to Montpelier and had a pretty empty space. And I think that's that our district living its principles and our, you know, teachers delving into tough topics with the support of the community. I think that's sort of the best response. But I also agree with Amanda that we could take a harder look at some of our policies and just see like one of the policies that came to mind too was the actual event rentals space. Like if a group comes in and wants to rent a space, you know, there's the freedom of speech thing, but it's like, what do we do when somebody comes in and wants to host an event like that in our district space that doesn't align with our values or our policies? So I'd like to sort of take a look at that end of things. And I would welcome the discussion on an agenda. That's a tricky discussion. We're going to get into free speech things, like we can't discriminate. We can't discriminate. And also I think part of what we should teach is that part of being in a civic society is being able to tolerate opinions that you don't agree with, that you find offensive, that you find obnoxious and being able to deal with those in an open forum and have discussions not having to direct your friendship with them. And that's one of the things that I've seen about when I talked about if they actually have to use this as a learning opportunity around that. And there is a discussion between hate speech and freedom of speech, which are two different things. And you could argue that too, in freedom of speech, there's not, you know, we can't tolerate somebody calling using the N word in a space like ours. So like there is a big difference. So there's no, it's, yeah, it's a whole conversation around hate speech and freedom of speech and what do we allow? That doesn't mean that I'm, yeah, I'm not gonna allow. Yeah, so it's a conversation and there's, it's outside of these two and it's national and there's lawyers involved and there's all, I think that we also have to just look up the big context around some of the policies and laws that are also being passed in the state and in some of the districts. So I think we need to approve the thing with those two and maybe you can send some suggestions about how to deal with this on the June 1st agenda. Yeah, so I moved to approve the superintendent's report and the June 1st draft agenda. Do you have a second? Second. How's the favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? So the next item is second barracks, student update. Aye. Do you need to broadcast? We got, yeah. I love it, I love it. So, Zach is going first on the first item. Could it be, I mean, could it be screencasted to Zoom? I don't know if y'all can see it, but. Zach, we had to do a little different setup this time around. Do you have the presentation in front of you? I have it up for the board members. I have it. So I can, I just, if that was easier. Yes, thank you. So this is our agenda and what we're gonna cover and our update, some of the things are going to be events at MHS that are upcoming, that are currently happening and recently happened, sort of a community update. We also wanted to bring into thought some student needs that were brought up in previous listening sessions to sort of remind ourselves and the board sort of what the community is wanting as well as current issues for students. And then we're just, we're gonna give our upcoming plans update. So let's get into some kind of events that have been going on at MHS. The first event that occurred at MHS from May 5th to May 7th was the Allstate Music Festival. And this was an event where high school students applied and were accepted into this festival where they could showcase their musical talents. And so from MHS, we had 10 students who were accepted to the program and they performed from May 5th through 7th. So congratulations to them. And then we have prom is happening this weekend. There have been a lot of students and staff who have been working and coordinating. All the things needed to do a fun event and it's gonna be good. Our last little update was that this week the applied chemistry class has been selling soap in the front lobby of the high school. Looks like Olivia's seen it. Always get me some soap. Yeah, so it's kind of just a little promotion if any of you want to buy some of the last sale to buy the soap is tomorrow. So feel free to stop by. They're there pretty much the whole day. That is an awesome picture. Good stuff, soap. Yeah. And then we wanted to, here's our student needs a refresher on sort of what's been going on in the past. Some of the things that have been brought up which are still current issues, but we heard them in the past. So that's why that's why they're in that category. So concerns were about awareness and flexibility within classes surrounding the mental health of students, especially with COVID. I think a thing that students have been pushing for a lot is, or at least I've heard, have been teacher and course evaluations to just as like a standard for all the classes so they can give feedback in a way that isn't intimidating or like very, isn't scary. And there still have been problems within curriculum that we've been talking about regarding a lack of diversity and either ignorance or just like not knowing how to address microaggressions when they happen within the classroom. If it's from student to student or even from student to teacher and sort of around that and around mental health, there was a lot of wanting to build into teachers like plans and like their minds that for really heavy topics, especially if it's like in form of like a video or some like documentary alternative spaces should be given for students and they should be warned about that a few days in advance or like a day before. So it's not, they don't have to make that decision whether or not they can deal with that sort of content sort of in the moment right before it's gonna happen because that can be really difficult. And then some current student concerns are still the parking lot. I know work is being done on that and we all know about the parking lot problem but that has been a thing I heard when I sort of asked what people are feeling what's going on for them and then a recent thing was on two of the three multi-stall bathrooms in the high school, the doors, the outside doors were removed sort of leading into the room with the stalls. And there was an explanation given essentially that it was like to prevent that behavior from students or like there was something happening that like wasn't okay from a group of students but everyone is affected by that sort of, everyone is affected by that. And there's been a lot of talk about students feeling unsafe and sort of like vulnerable in like a, in a way they didn't know was sort of possible because it wouldn't have been something they imagined happening. And I've heard from both faculty and students that it's like kind of weird and uncomfortable to just have like a place be so open to the outside. And a lot of the single stall bathrooms are like always in use now and because everyone's uncomfortable in the multi-stall ones. And that means a lot of the problems that were happening in the multi-stall ones are now happening in the single stall ones. And also people who are uncomfortable being in that environment of like a multi-stall bathroom which is made worse by the door now no longer have that option of like as a direct result. And like I know personally it's been a little not fun. It's been a little uncomfortable to like be in school and have to like navigate that. Yeah, so that was a current student concern that I heard a lot when I asked people. I just wanted to add real quick on the student concerns. And I've said it in the past few meetings but in bringing these concerns to the board so we're not recommending or saying that the board should take action on any of these concerns that we heard. But we do want to bring them up to the board and to the community to show that they are on the radar of students. And yes, I've also heard all these concerns and continue to hear all these concerns. So moving forward our upcoming plans are going to be as student representatives to be continuing to bring awareness to these student concerns through these board meetings and through these presentations and also just by continuing to reach out to students, continuing to hold listening sessions at UES and RVS as well as continue researching as we spoke about our last few meetings how we can approach our schools' curriculum and instruction with the goals that we heard from student concerns over our past two listening sessions. Like how can we improve that curriculum or that instruction? So those are our upcoming plans. I don't know if anyone has any questions for us but that is our presentation for today. Thank you. Good to have you. When we were getting our building tour of the facilities, we got a building tour of high school and we sort of briefly discussed the parking lot issues. Is the main issue that students are concerned about is the number of parking spaces available to them or? So the main issue is that there aren't enough parking spaces in the high school. So that's causing just students to park and sometimes awkward places like the handicapped spots or just parking spots that aren't supposed to be where cars park. So there's just like a huge sprawl of cars and a parking lot that cannot support all of them. Do you know if there's, I know that Meg Bozian was at that facilities tour and she's part of the earth group and they were talking about like having brainstorming sessions with students to talk about like incentivizing or somehow changing the culture around driving to school. And I wonder if there could be some brainstorming session hosted to, there could be some of the ideas were like, if you carpool, you get better parking spots or something like that. Yeah, right, permits for seniors or things like that. So those discussions about potential parking solutions, they took place in student council hours at the high school and also in earth group. And some of the solutions that were discussed was more emphasis on carpooling especially, more emphasis on other forms of transportation like bikes. But since those discussions there hasn't really been any action. Gotcha. Yeah, those are the exact type of things that in achieving net zero, like building more parking spaces is very much within the opposite direction. So there should be solutions more aligned with carbon reduction. It's certainly difficult and it seems the easiest solution is to encourage more carpooling. But then there has to actually be action on that for any difference to take place. Feet and bikes are good too. But I know that- Would you say Jim? Feet and bikes are good too. Yeah. I know that there's talk of next year instituting parking permits at the high school to hopefully cut down on the car or sprawl in the parking. I would also wonder if the earth group has ever reached out to like it's green out in transit in terms of, you know, accessing I'm not familiar with all the boots and not failure but, you know, organizing a meeting with GMT and having them come, students having the opportunity to like what does it mean to ride the bus? What does it mean to get a ticket on the bus? I mean, public transportation can be really intimidating if you have an experience before or use it before. So it seems like possibly it could be another option if there's a route that goes by the school. The bus manager has on-demand busing that works kind of for students and kind of not for students. They can call and just get a ride. It does not work for all students, but it's also free. There is no payment for it right now. It won't be free forever and the district has already worked with GMT to get bus passes for everybody. So when it's not free, then we will pick up the tap for any student but it's not, it doesn't work. It doesn't work in a way that we need it to work right now. Yeah. And then Green Mountain just approved free for next year. So it doesn't, now it's continuous to be free until 2023. They just approved that today or like this. Also one more thing about potential busing. Student council did have someone from my ride who actually came to one of our meetings and talked about potentially encouraging students to use my ride when they went into school. But there wasn't really much action after that meeting. So, but we did have those discussions. I have one little add-on which is another and sort of what's happening in the school's announcement just for those of folks who don't have elementary school students themselves but the revamped book fair, the UES loves book this week is in conjunction, is next week and it's in conjunction with Bear Pond. So I can share the link out once we have all of that but it's not just for families at UES. Anybody in the district can do it and part of the cool thing you can do is teachers will have wish lists for their classrooms and so you can, even if you're not looking for a book yourself, you can buy a book to donate to the classroom. So anyway, another what's happening in our schools. Yeah. Thank you. Sure. Any more questions for American Zach? Great. Yeah, thanks again. These things are great. Really helps keep us the better pulse on what's happening in the schools. Mr. Barry, I think you're up. Yeah. Okay. And I don't know where it's best for you to, yeah, wherever is easiest for you. Hi everyone, thanks for having me. I'm here to talk about the annual snapshot and try to answer as many questions as I can about it. The annual snapshot is an online tool that the AOE produces. And it's used to measure whether my schools are doing well, what they've changed since the previous year. Helps us see how schools are supporting achievement, show us a list of U of school quality and all of these components. It's made up of these three areas for the domains. So you see there, there will worry up there. We've got academic proficiency, personalization, saving of the schools, high quality staffing and investment priorities. And then there are the metrics that they use, which are going to be the fun things to explain. And then you see the ratings down there and the little circle for the not achieving the full circle for achieving for that. When the latest education law came into being, states have decided how they were going to assess schools out of a certain list. So in Vermont chose these. These are all the elements that make up the snapshot. And I'll go through them because I know it's blurry here that you have a presentation in front of us. So for this domain of your academic proficiency, the use of English language arts, this is the SBAC assessment. And the scale, that's a scale of 50%. That's the scale score of the assessments with a wrong number of different assessments. And the growth is a comparison of that student's growth from the previous year. It becomes a problem when you don't assess them. It's going to be too much of a bit. Math comes from SBAC. English learner proficiency comes from the VEDA assessment which is the RPL language assessment that's given you. Graduation rate is there. The science assessment comes from Vermont Science Assessment. College and career ready, those are actually components of ACT and SAC scores. And then post-graduation is 16 months post-graduation where it's going to start. And I'll talk about that some more in a second too. In the second domain, personalization, the use of the flexible pathways measurements that's pretty much what comes right now from that. All three of those are kind of flexible pathways. High-quality staffing, they use the licenses and endorsement information, state goals, three-year turnover rates, professional developments, satisfaction and evaluation data. I'll talk about all of these a bit. Safe and healthy schools up in the right-hand corner there is disciplinary exclusions. And then they mentioned two school climate components. And then investment priorities is financial, financial basis for people costs and there's a bit of staffing ratios in there. And if you go to the next slide, everywhere there's a check mark, the data was impacted in some way. The green top one, green represents anything that was impacted by COVID. The red, those are measurements that were not used at all in producing this year's snapshot. So things like, oh, that was the post-graduation. So when I talked to the agency of education about how they collect that data, they admitted that they're having a significantly hard time getting that data. You know, part of it is military, sharing students that are enrolled in military after 16 months, employers that they're having a hard time tracking students other than college bound. And even then, they're having trouble assessing that 16 months out from that. So I put a little last word there. So it wasn't necessarily impacted by COVID, they're not necessarily not taking it, but not really. All questions to the head or ask the person? You can wait till the end, we'll do it back to you. So this slide, this very slide here, this represents the equity index which I asked a ton of questions of the AOE and Patrick, I'll shout out to him, he's been really helpful. And at the same time, doesn't really have a lot of answers about how the equity index is created. But so the equity index refers to the difference between students have been historically marginalized and down here it shows those categories in comparison to students who have not across all those other areas that I just showed. Now there's, I have a technical manual here that I've read several times and I just have a stats class. So I feel really confident about my abilities to decipher this, still really hard to understand. If a marginalized group, let's say that a marginalized group is represented by five students, that may not be enough to calculate the equity index in their form. If it's 25 students and that same 25 students were here the year prior, it may work in the equity that's happening. But if you go back a slide back, all of these were impacted by COVID. So the number of students that took the S back exam impacted, the number of students that took the Vermont science impact, the number of students that took the SAT in the ASIC, impacted because this data that you're seeing on Snapchat this year is based on class. So flexible pathways, we had fewer places we could place kids. So flexible pathways were impacted. Professional licenses, we had a lot of provisional licenses, we had a lot of staff. They didn't do a staff stability report. They didn't do anything with professional development. They didn't do anything with valuation. They didn't do some climate surveys. They didn't do student climate surveys. And our staffing rates were all as few because we had less positions and things. So all of these were impacted by introducing this year's snapshot. So the AOE, even on the snapshot page at the top there's a disclaimer that basically says, we don't use this for anything other than a glance. And Patrick Galladay, he's doing a great job where he says we're hoping to have some sessions in the coming years to really on the back of the snapshot works, work with curriculum directors in particular to understand the metrics within it. And I think this is my opinion, not what I heard from the AOE. I think they're kind of restarting the process this year because they lost the years worth of data because we didn't get from the assessments in 1929. So I think that they're looking at this as a chance to say, okay, this is our year one. And this entire machine works on a three-year average. I don't have three years to have the running spray. So there's a huge disclaimer. This talks about the impact of COVID. So for example, we had a total of 118 students that were virtual last year that could take the assessment. 57 did not take it. We had a total of 548 students in the whole district including virtual that could take the assessment. 81 did not take it. That's 15% of our population. So all of those things that are measured in the snapshot impact is pretty big way. So there's several things that we put out to mention that. And they say at the top, this is used for reporting not accountability. So that means that if there were things that we were doing really, really wrong, they recognize that they can't tell that from the status. There were sports that we needed to make some sense. So this is Roxbury's snapshot. And there's a couple of things to point out on here. So one is that if it's less than 25 kids that can't report on it in any one of those categories. So that's why there's no academic proficiency out of there because there weren't more than 25 students in Roxbury that took the SAC assessment. Same with personalization. I found out an interesting thing about these metrics. So down here where it says investment priorities. Yeah. Roxbury would never have an abortion, yes. So an interesting thing about this. So investment priorities, it says not meeting. That's if you're below or above. So since this is a per pupil cost, it's showing that Roxbury is a club and that's why they're not meeting. So they're not meeting the rule of the sector. And that works on these other categories. The change columns, essentially we need to ignore because it's comparing against data that is not accurate from the previous year. Hopefully next year when we see the snapshot compared to this year, it'll be more accurate. But all of those change categories just aren't. And the investment priorities, it's only based on staffing ratios. So union kind of the same story there. The same thing stood out. The one thing that was different here was the high quality staffing exceeding. And then it says that we're going down. So exceeding, but we're actually declining. It's a conflict, but we think that that was because of the interest in our traditional slices. Main street middle school. Same things point out there. The high school got a little more personalization by school pathways information came in there. There's a little bit more information. This slide actually shows how we did do on the SX assessment on the left-hand side. So this represents only the students that took it. So it doesn't represent the 800, but not the receipt. That's not back into this. That's a whole wrap. So we had 65% provision, ELA 45% proficient in math and then 56% proficient in science. So where do we go from here? Well, I'm not saying that the snapshot isn't important. I think it will be a valuable tool. I think this year is not the year that it's super valuable to be one. But I think it's going to be one of those tools that they're going to refine. It's going to be understanding the metrics and explain how the data is harvested. And we'll be able to really use it. So a lot of this information came from data that we already have. So we know where we need to go. We need to really focus on those two or three structure systems and interventions for the students to be remediation and intensive support. We're doing a lot of work on that right now. We need to continue our focus on restorative practices. We have improved data systems. That's pretty much my e-zone I'm living in. Increases student voice, focus on staff wellness, and then the PLCs. We have a big lead, especially as we move into next year with our brand new administrative team and a bunch of new teachers as well. This is the time to really build up those practices. Next question. Can you just start that crowd? The profitioner that did the green? The David you get. The last box really is. Because I know a lot of students don't take them all that seriously. It depends on what you're looking for. So if we're looking for a 30,000 foot view of how students are doing, I think there's some actors to do it. If you're looking for really mighty details about how one student did and what was going on, you can dig into it. And you can see, so if we took the aspect assessment and compared it to something else, I mean the student did really well. And if we saw that at a distractancy, we could understand what happened. And for the students that do take it seriously, we can think a little bit deeper, but it doesn't give us a lot of the actual information that they think it does in terms of tailoring that student's instruction. It can, we can see trends. So for example, there's, maybe I just forget this a little bit, but there's this learning targets within the S10. So we can look at it and say, you know, wow, what's the next concern? Really doing well about that position. Whereas I think if you ask people a lot of people would assume, well, we need focus on the factor. We need focus more on the factor. But we actually see a trend versus doing better well. So you can try to see it. It's not super specific. But math is a little better. So we can get a little more specific on that. ELA is the one that I think is a little bit of a question. And then the science is still kind of a new assessment. So we're trying to understand that one. That's a great question. I actually think it's a great problem to me that there's just a lot of stress when it comes to things like very long tests. So I think that's what we want to do. Well, because of that reason and also just, I mean, I can't really speak to all the reasons why students don't take their tests super seriously like for S-facts. But probably also another factor is probably that they know that it doesn't really matter for like their grades. That's just like so many other questions around why we learn for me. But, you know, like we all learn for grades. So that just opens up so many more questions that I think are worthwhile to dig into. And based on our scores at the higher levels, our scores at the higher levels are actually pretty good when you compare them to the state. So I'm not positive how many kids actually do that or not right now. My question is also related to this. One of my questions is related to the slide. And sort of your point about like how relevant is the data, but I do think it's relevant when you compare it to other things like what he's talking about, like compare it to statewide because I'm guessing sort of the number of kids, the percentage of kids that sort of are like, this doesn't apply to me. It's not making it. It's probably similar across the board in most states and at least in Vermont in most schools. So I think you could at least compare it that way. Is that available online? Like those bars? Can you see our school district versus the state? And can you also see our state, our school district versus the country? Or is it just, this is just. So this is, this is just. So you can see other states that take the aspects. It's just, it's just, our school district versus the state. Data. Interactive data. I don't know about. Question. So is this, are we doing this in part because it's required? Because it sounds like if you hit certain marks, it can be tied to funding or kind of catarization that would yield funding. So I'm just curious, you know, because it also sounds like it's, its value is yet to be fully. Yeah. Manifested or seen or known. So when you say, you mean the annual snapshot? Yes. I'm no annual snapshot. Yeah. Yeah. Cause there was a, there was something I said that like, you know, we're not going to be really treating this as true data this year. So it's not going to be tied to, I forget what it was. Yeah. So I'm just curious, you know, is it required? And is that why we're doing it? And, you know, and have we ever received any, you know, state support based on. Our results here. So yes, it's required. Yeah. Well, the state makes this. We don't. Right. They need the platform. Yeah. But we need to do it in terms of the accountability. I mean, are they looking at this too? All the data, except for on that check mark page, there's a couple of points there that we don't collect. Like we, I don't think we hold information. Where students are 16 months out. So they, there's a couple of points on there. They have to get from other sources that sounds like there's the rest of that information. It lives in the state. So that's that. So they're accessing their own systems. This report together. We never really submit anything to this, but other than this. Yes. So, and then that supports. We don't necessarily understand what folks look like. They're there. We can act. Yeah. Last question first. I speak again. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Okay. So the, the safe healthy schools measure. Was only the only data that used for that. disciplinary exclusion. Can you explain exactly what that means? First of all, an expel. So if I'm reading this right then, okay, so all schools are exceeding. Is that right? And what is that measured against? It's just like there's a certain number or percentage of exclusions that sort of rises to the level of concern. Not sure. Hey, we didn't have any data in that category last year. Oh, so it's like zero. So they're like, wow, that's amazing. And allegedly somehow, you know, that data is also farced through demographics and comparisons from previous years, but they didn't have that data from previous years. And last year was an anomaly almost everywhere. Yeah. A couple questions. One is to make sure that we're understanding, again, with the caveats you have said, that when we look at the academic proficiency in Union, Main Street and Montpelier, kind of the non-equity index is meeting, but then the equity index shows not meeting. So what we could surmise from that is that the students that are in those historically marginalized communities are not meeting whatever the standard of academic proficiency is. No. Okay, good. No. Okay. I don't think we can assume that. Okay. This year, I think that's ultimately how the tool works. Okay. But not this year. Because there's, as far as I understand, there's two metrics that play in there. One is the number of the category of marginalized population. The total number of students that fall into that category. Right. There is a list. That list. Yep. Right. Then there was a comparison of that group to their non-marginalized peers. Right. But only if there was a certain number in that marginalized group. Both. Right. Right. And they don't take that whole list as an aggregate where they are they taking the each individual group on that list as I see. Yeah. Right. Okay. One, two. Yep. That's that's my understanding of it. Okay. And so you're talking to the AOE and they, again, they plastered it all over the site, like the change menus and the equity index, like hold on, not really digging into that. Okay. I think what we'll see as we get three-year average, we get a three-year point, I think this will be much more accurate. We have consistent data over three years with those groups. Right. And then they'll also work into that. I believe the, so the change comparison or the things like academic proficiency are based on that student's scores for three years. So did they improve each year? So that cohort of students in the marginalized group would also have that metric. They just don't have it. Right. Okay. Having said that, we know that our students who are eligible for frame-reduced lunch and are eligible for an IEP, do not perform where their peers to and not marginalized groups. We know that. This snapshot is only so good, but then when we use it in conjunction with other tools that we have, it helps give us the information that we really need. And it seems to me that at least for a while at our, in our district, our numbers in some of those categories of communities are still going to be pretty small. Yes. And so, and this is one of the challenges that we've had. And I know we can't see Amanda right now, but maybe she's got her hand raised. But Yeah, she does. One thing that she's shared with me is that one thing we could look at, even though it's not, our district is the whole state. So that would be another way that we could use this, this tool, but as a benefit to us is even if we don't have the volume or the numbers, the quantity numbers that we need, we could still look at statewide numbers using this tool and say, okay, well, we can probably surmise that our students that are in these categories are probably performing same as their peers all, you know, statewide. And so that will give us some data that we can use again in conjunction with other tools that we have assumption that I'm not, I don't know if I'm comfortable making for all categories. I just don't feel comfortable making that for all categories. I think, I think being eligible for free and reduced lunch has all that probably we can make that assumption because national research bears that I think we can make that assumption. I'm not positive that we could make that assumption for kids who are BIPOC, for instance, in our school district. I'm just not positive we could make that assumption. We could maybe, but I don't know if it's a safe one to make. There a way to dig underneath that where we could say that's not enough information for us, but we can go to something else that is more about our district and to. We can do it like kids who are who fall in the BIPOC category, we can get that data. We can't share it publicly in many cases by grade level because they're not enough kids. Yeah. Right. It has to be 11 for us to be able to share data with the board at a public event. Right. But we could take an aggregate problem, maybe for some categories of the whole, all the kids who take the SBAC, right? It just can't be, you know, in future years we'll break the SBAC scores up. Here's our third graders did in the LA, here's our third graders did in math and we chose not to do that this year. We just kind of chose it because the SBAC scores are so interesting and different this year. So in future years we could aggregate our groups that way, possibly depending on the number of kids. SBAC data. I think I might have said a hand up for us. Yeah, I have a question regarding, so if you have that data, how do we just like thinking of this and moving the district forward with policies and like thinking of budgets and not, you cannot share that data, but you know there are some, they're making this up, this assumption that there are some disparities on data that we cannot access. So how do, what is the best way for us to be able to understand that that is happening? So we know low income students are facing disparities with COVID, national trends, statewide trends, and I am assuming our own trends as well, but I'm just like thinking to make responsible decisions like how do we support it, how do we understand? That's one question that I have. And then thinking of looking at disciplinary exclusion, did you say that you didn't collect that data or that there was nobody suspended or expelled last year? We just had a really excellent year. Everybody reported that because of the POD system that we had in schools that discipline incidents were way down, we also had a significant portion of our population that was virtual and not in the buildings. So it was decreased class sizes in many cases. Not saying it was great, but it was kind of this interesting side effect of the COVID situation. We took note of, so what worked about that? You know, like at the elementary school, for example, they noted that there were significantly fewer transitions for students. And so we held on to that little gem and said, okay, how can we use that? So we just didn't, we didn't have a ton of disciplinary issues last year. And so the question that I am trying to juggle with these numbers is, is this equity index is looking at a difference between students who have been historically marginalized and they're in relation to their peers. So is this, so that's what this is giving us? There, that's, or is this the overall climate, for example? I'm very confused. It's supposed to give us the difference between the two groups across the academic domain. This year for this snapshot, it's not mathematically possible to do it based on the data that they have. Okay. And they get this information from us? So they're getting it from SBAC results and things like that. And you'll notice on the slide where it's student surveys and staff surveys, they didn't do that. So they didn't collect that information. And I think Libby and I heard about these mystery surveys for four years running now. We still haven't seen them. So they just based it on state collected assessments. And expulsion rates. That's what it was based on this year. I think their ultimate design is to be more inclusive of other data sources, but they're just not there yet. And do we collect other data? Yes, but like what? I don't know. What data, because I know you're working on data systems right now. So what kind of data are we collecting systematically? And when would that give us a picture at some point? Yeah, so what we're looking at for next year is really rounding up our common local assessments. So assessments that are given commonly across grade levels for content areas. So that we can have access to that diagnostic assessment. So things like the FMP, we're looking at collecting those into a place where we can really access them. That's where we can get more valuable information about students reading. Benchmark assessments that we have in various units and things like this. It was a huge task that the teachers said this year through the curriculum committees and they did an amazing job. So we've got this complete list of assessments when we give them, if they're common across grade levels or content teams. And then I'm going to take that this summer and put that into our academic data system. So that we have places to put that information through next year. So that it's finally accessible across areas and we can take a student and look at their progress and FMP, SBAC, FriendStar, local assessments, word recognition, whatever it is, we can go through and we can see a full profile of a student in one spot. So that's kind of our goal for next year is the local assessment component. And then we're also working on systems to make that really accessible to school leadership teams so that they don't have to become spreadsheet teams like myself to be able to understand it. They can go, they can ask a good, a high quality data driven question and we can provide access to that data for them. So we're doing, we're doing a lot of that work. I was just wondering is, is there a place we can get the actual data rather than the picture? Yes. Yeah, we can send you the snapshot link. It's on the Vermont agency of education website. Okay. Do they have a follow-up? There's an interactive snapshot view that you can go into and you can look at each school and you can do those things. Do they have the actual data? Like, oh, it's 3.75 and not a circle to hold in. Yeah. So the public view is only the circle with the hole in it. Okay. The administrative side, so they sent to data managers, I'm going to say this without being snarky, one week prior to publicizing the snapshot, they sent an email out to us and said, please check all this data to make sure it's okay. One week prior. Actually, our principal's names were raw. So we had access to the raw data, but it was just this, it was a massive file that, if you could pick out what was wrong with it, it would be amazing. So the public only has access to the circles. As we get our goal, though, as the data programmatically means more last year, it wasn't given two years ago last year, we can take it with a grain of salt, then we'll be presenting that to the board. We did it four years ago when the data becomes available to us and available to the public. The challenge, one of the challenges is that we get it a year after kids take it. So how usable is that information? It's only usable for programmatic measures, truly, when we get it that late. Well, the aspect this year was in cargo just two or three weeks ago. So we couldn't do anything with the data. We could share it with anybody until two or three weeks ago. That's this, right? Yeah, yeah. Last year. Yeah. And that's typical of one year. It was a little longer this year. It was a little longer than usual this year. I think it was because of the snapshot. I think they were waiting to get the snapshot ironed out. So then they could produce new cargo information. Snapshot. Yeah, sorry. I have a follow up on the climate survey, which is that, you know, we are about to send one to our faculty, but it sounds like what that's not, they wouldn't use that. They would have their own. Yes. Oh, good. Yeah. Great. Yep. One last question. Let's start, Reiko. Well, I've heard a lot from America. I think I've heard from you. And maybe even in this room, the SBAC is not, it's a flawed assessment measure. And a lot of what you guys are doing is really driving in a better culture for assessment, a better set of assessments and a better way to collect your data and organize it. So is the intention to create your own snapshot, or would it be a bad idea to sort of hold up the data that you've got from local assessments next to this very shallow, I think, probably sort of look at how we're doing. Would that make this look bad? I mean, I think that the goal is to get to a much more specific level than what this is doing. And I think that that work is happening. Will that information come to the board? How might it come to the public? So a couple of things. I wouldn't call the SBAC a flawed assessment. I would say that you have to use it for what its intended purpose is. Exactly. It's a programmatic measure, right? So it's a way we can compare how our students are doing across the state. It's a way for us to dig into the domains in literacy and say where informational reading, for instance, our kids don't do as well in informational reading as they do in fictional reading, you know, like their bigger programmatic things that we can take a look at. Obviously, our literacy scores are much higher. They are traditionally not just last year than our math scores, which is why we've done a lot of professional development around math and it's gotten math and a regentist. So like there's some reasons for it, you know. But yes, it's also one way to say, well, look, our third grade teachers are reporting that 95% of their kids are proficient on the FMP, which is a diagnostic literacy exam. Yet they're scoring 1% at all. Found us in Penel. Yeah, found us in Penel. Sorry. Everybody knows that, but you don't know that. Everybody knows that. So if they're reporting that 95% of our kids are proficient, you know, and yet this isn't happening, but 20% are proficient on the S back. That's a question to ask. Like why is that happening? And what other data can we look at to try and triangulate that to get a better question at it? Like Mike and I can geek out on these kind of questions forever. But yes, the answer, though, is that we want a truly, excuse me, well-rounded assessment system where we can look at kids and make very targeted goals for kids to move them along in their growth, you know, and that everybody has access to the data. Right now, if I said the UES or RVS for that matter, if I went and said I need to know their FMP scores, I'd say, Mike, how do I get the FMP scores? And he'd say, well, you got maybe we can get it from a principal and they'd send, they'd share with me four different Google sheets, you know, like it's just not, I should have that in my fingertips. So that's some of the difficulty that we're having right now. So as a follow up, we have a lot of groups of students that may not meet that 11, that threshold of 11. And how do we, how do we work with that data? And how do we look at that data as a board, as from that, from a, from not a 30,000 feet, but from a 10,000 feet, say, through this, this venue, is there a way to sort of make any of, make, find any trends when we don't, when I'm thinking of here and I'm thinking of our BIPOC community, I'm just thinking of different groups that there's not a big enough group to have a generalized say of how the trends are going. Is there any thought into how that, how we might figure out how to communicate how things are going for small groups? Because we have a lot of small groups. Yeah, and if there is, you know, one of the, the distinctions is, what can we publish the report? How can we publicly report it? Which doesn't mean that Libby and I can't come to you and say, here's the trend that we're seeing in this population. Here's what we're doing to deal with it. But it may mean we can't show you a bar graph at the grade level, because it would be too identifiable for that student. You know what I mean? So we can tell the story of the data, and that's, that's our goal. And are any of you spreadsheet fanatics? Anyone? Slightly? Anyone? So we are trying, one of the things that we're working on is to use Google Data Studio to present dashboards of this information, because everything basically boils down to a spreadsheet. All the static boils down to a spreadsheet. But when you're meeting with your leadership team as an administrator, you don't want to look at a spreadsheet. You want an interactive visual that gives you the information that you need to have a conversation and sparks the conversation. So we're working on dumping these things into Google Data Studio, which creates this dashboard that's interactive. And we see some great examples from other schools that they've used that can even be on the public page that show your demographic trends with n sizes larger or number of snow days or whatever it is, it can track anything. So we are working on building our own version of that for next year to make data more accessible. I kind of made this commitment within myself after a decade of trying to train people how to use data systems. I'm going to stop doing that. I'm going to get them the data instead and train them how to ask good data questions. So that's, that's my plug there. I've spent over 15 years training people how do you speak at? I'm just not going to do that anymore. I had one last question, Jim. Is there a way to use or look at the trend of the civil rights data? Since we have that for these districts through, you know, like 2017 is the last one, we'll be able to say, okay, in the past three years, I'll give the example of like the exclusion of black students that we had in 2011. And so like getting at making that system better and saying, look, this part is that we did have with students with disabilities not graduating. So can we look at that to get better knowing that we do have some of that data? Yeah, I think the CRDC data upload was a nightmare. I want to add to you about that. That was a super pill. But we're doing it again next year. So this is the first year that they've ever done it in two consecutive years because they delayed it one year because of COVID. So we'll have two years back to back of CRDC data. I'm not sure what else will come out of it. It does have, it measures a lot of the same data expulsions. But it does look more at our programmatic, like it looks at number of courses in mathematics specific to algebra one, algebra two, and it takes all of those things. I don't know that there's a summary report yet for this year's submission. But I think that that will be interesting to see two years back to back and what comes from it. It's a very complete set of data. Thank you. So you kind of touched on it a little bit, but I just want to kind of get firm on what the answer is. So from slide four, the climate surveys, the staff and the student climate surveys. How long has the agency of education been doing this particular data collection process? Well, so it's, but it's had a slow start. Yeah, maybe five or six years. And have, and are you saying they have never done the climate surveys for either students or staff? That's right. Okay. And is the data available for previous years for these other measures? Some. On the website? Some. Okay. And any sort of like explanation of like, we've been collecting this data for five years, there's supposed to be these three data points for us to determine health and safety schools, but we haven't been doing two of them for the last six years. We plan to... Very valid questions. No, I think I have good faith that they are trying to make a very useful tool and have met many obstacles along the way. I believe that the vendor that supports the snapshot was changed three times over the last several years. So that's an obstacle. And I believe that there were teams within the ALEE who were responsible for the snapshot that have changed multiple times with turnover. And I believe in the first three years, the data they collected was extremely limited, even more so than today, what I showed you today. I think it was just ASPAC. We didn't have the Vermont Science Assessment until three years ago. So that didn't exist. We've never seen the surveys. I don't think they were collecting post-graduation data prior to the last couple years. Right. So I think there's a lot of questions. And I think that's why the ALEE said, you know what? We're going to really unpack the snapshot with break-in directors and superintendents next year. That's... We have these things every week now, coffee and conversations with the agency of education, where they go over information that's relevant. And now they're going to rotate in, work on the snapshot so that we can all understand it. Yeah, because it does feel... I mean, it sort of goes back to Kristen's point about like, why is it even being reported at least in this sort of like view? Yeah. And language like safe and healthy schools really only boils down to this one. Data point that... I mean, it just feels misleading and not user-friendly, like if the public was trying to look at this. Emma, and that's why we wanted to... Like when it became public, should anybody find this? I think... And I know the ALEE has downplayed it this year. So not a huge press release and all that kind of stuff. Oh, just for the fun. Yeah. But we wanted to make sure... You get asked questions like this, right? So we wanted to make sure that it's nothing to hide about, but we wanted to make sure that you all could talk to it. You know, like when somebody says something about safe and healthy schools, you can say, well, actually, it's not really a reliable measure, you know, because ding, ding, ding. Oh, yeah, I see. Right. But the green and red check once that was a graphic that you added to this stage. Yes. So that is helpful. Yeah. Thank you for that. You're welcome. He was very proud of himself. I was. We just wanted to make both of that together. It's all awesome. Oh, Shauna. Wow. Yeah. I had one more person for me. Where do we go from here? Slide. All the things on that list look excellent to me, and I'm curious just for any examples of what you're thinking about, what increasing student voice looks like. Yeah. So I think we've had a lot of success with our Affinity Spaces, and we're looking at increasing that work at the middle school in particular next year. We have increased student voice sitting right here and online that has just been amazing, you know. They're meeting with me on a regular basis for having conversations about how we can continue to do that, reflect really good data from students. So I think we've got a lot of ways that we're looking to do that, and I think right now we're having more conversations about how do we take these, instead of three administrators sitting in a room trying to figure out how to do that, how do we take that conversation to students and say, how do we do this? Yeah, so I've seen that actively happen actually today, that just happened. So I think we're in a really good track to figure that out and get some more information. I personally am looking at some systems for more benchmarking around SEL components, like how are our students doing? We hear a lot from vocal students. I'm also worried about the kids that don't talk, like what is going on. So finding out ways that people collect that data. And then affinity spaces at the middle school, just because I don't know, is that just affinity that I am a student? Or is it an affinity based on another identity I might hold? Another identity. So maybe there's like a queer student affinity space and a, okay, cool. Thanks a lot, Mike. This was super cool. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks, Mike. Thank you for your presentation, Justin, and that's the problem. Yes, yes, yes. Any progress? Super 10 evaluation committee update is our last and final item yet. Just kidding. I think this will actually be pretty quick. And largely because I made the mistake of not sending you all the evaluation before the meeting, which I'm happy to send after the meeting. But the update is that it's very near finished. We have a meeting, we're trying to schedule a meeting with Libby early next week to work out just like some very final details around one question or sort of competency that we want to measure actually having to do with data, bringing it back to our conversation from tonight and just the dissemination of the survey. So let me back up a little bit because we do have some new board members and we might have community members watching who aren't familiar with this. The board conducts an evaluation of Libby or any superintendent every year. And as part of that, Libby does her own self-assessment and she shares the evaluation tool with, I think, 14 staff, basically her direct reports and central office staff. And we compile all of that into essentially a summary of these are the places that Libby is really strong at and demonstrating strength and here are areas for growth. And then set goals around that. So that's the whole purpose of the evaluation tool. And it is kind of like the Snapchat and has been an evolving one over the last three years and the committee took some time this past year to do some updates to it. The biggest ones were we shifted the timeline so that it lined up more with the school year and we added some self-reflection questions or reflection questions around what demonstrates strength and what demonstrates room for growth. And we tried to tweak the competencies themselves so that the language of them was oriented more toward these are the outcomes that Libby is going for as our superintendent rather than these are some tasks that we are asking of her to do. So those are the updates that we have made. And like I said, I'll share the actual, I mean, you all have access to it. It's a shared Google Doc right now, but I will resend the link so you can actually look at that and process that and not just have to hear it and try and internalize it. But yeah, we're very close to finishing it and then we will actually do the evaluation almost on schedule for the new timeline. Yeah, just to remind her, I know that a lot of this work happens in the committee and thanks to all the committee members, especially me, I have to really put a great touch over it this year, but as a board function, superintendent evaluation and overview is probably about three, three ones. So this is, you know, we, you know, fortunately it's made pretty easy on us because everybody's superintendent, but but it is, it is definitely something that is one of the bigger responsibilities the board has to make sure that the superintendent is doing her job and fulfilling the expectations. And so they take this work very seriously. And just to say that a little bit further, you will also see this when I share the link, but you'll see in the timeline that the committee, as Jim said, the committee kind of holds the process and at points when we're ready, takes, brings it to the board. So the board certainly, you know, the committee doesn't do all of it. That is, there are points at which the board actually engages as a full board and not just delegated to the committee. Any questions? Thank you, Mia. Thank you for not taking 40 minutes. Motion to adjourn. You make a motion to adjourn. We'll take that as a second. Any opposed? Great. Feel better, Amanda. Thank you.