 March neighborhood meeting and we want to particularly thank Principal Sparks and Lamar Elementary for hosting us and he will be our first speaker this evening and give us an update on all the exciting things that are going on at Lamar Elementary and then we'll be having a continuance of our discussion about the planning that's going on with SA Tomorrow as a follow-up to our last the month's meeting with Garrett Phillips. He's here with us again this evening but we want to have more of a back and forth discussion and there we will wrap up with some announcements and also I want to point out that we have a lovely fiesta wreath that was left over from our garden party the community garden party from our silent auction and if any of you would like to bid on the wreath the proceeds will be going to the community garden but there is a silent auction sheet if any of you would like to make a bid during the meeting please feel free to do so we'll cut off the bidding at 8 30 but let's go ahead and get started starting with Principal Sparks. Good evening everyone uh Brian Sparks Principal here at Lamar it's my fifth year here at the school uh I started my career up in northeast I taught special ed in fifth grade up for a number of years and I was a math coach in northeast schools over at Alma Sullivan Tree we are the high school and then I graduated so with the Trinity program moved here to Lamar there's a big draw for me to come here and work with the program to build out the school in this great community this is a really wonderful community as you all know but when you're an educator or working in a community where there's so many things to learn from the people who are willing to help with our school it's made a big difference just kind of working here relative to other schools that I've been at with the community support so thank you all if you've helped in any way to help frame that out for us I really appreciate it so tonight I hope to give you sort of a landscape of where the campus is where it's been where we're going in the future I'll talk for about 10 to 15 minutes and have time for questions at the end if you have any questions or anything along the way then feel free to cut me off I don't like talking along periods of time as all my teachers know so if you want to jump in feel free to do that as you go here so our campus right now is 352 students so when I came here we were 210 students it was on the talking box for being shut in the next couple of years so we've really taken it in strides to try to build up the environment by giving interesting things for the campus to draw in people at the school both locally in the neighborhood but also outside of that as well we serve K through sixth grade students which is a difference in the last couple of years we used to serve only fifth grades from pre-k through fifth grade the district is making a move more towards absorbing the middle school grades into elementary schools thinking that that would help to retain our enrollment but also help to help those students to be successful when they go to middle school we see a lot of struggles in middle school kids when they go to sixth or seventh grade for a lot of different reasons but trying to keep them on again a smaller environment has been a big move to the district we serve primarily Hispanic students and mostly English dominant students at our campus we give a part of our students who are a Spanish dominant who are in the bilingual program and we're moving towards a dual language program now where it's in the first year of in our kindergarten grade level and in that dual language program when we have English and Spanish dominant kids in one room together we'll then cycle up over the next several years and the both of our enrollment growth has been in pre-k through third grade so we have about 350 kids who are currently on the waiting list for next year we'll be able to admit about 50 to 60 of those kids for next year and then we'll still a lot of kids who want to go to schools like like ours not any of the schools in our district and we just don't have room to have them come here because we're space limited this is our mission this is our mission that we've worked less several years to construct I'm not going to read it to you but our goal there at the end is really to help kids become advocates for their learning both locally here at the school in our city but also in their world we want them to think big here even when they're three four five six years old we want them to think about how what they're doing in the classroom matters to what we do in our community so we're trying to connect those dots for them while you're here just a little bit on the partnership with Trinity I'm a Trinity grad so I am very biased but I think the program which is a wonderful program to help educators become trained and how to teach they really focus a lot helping their undergraduate graduate students become advocates for all kids especially in urban settings and so we have undergraduate students here for a number of prep courses there's a science class there's a early childhood class there's math classes lots of different exposures for them as they ramp up towards their MAT year their master's of arts and teaching year and then many of them come here for their one-year internship where they spend the full year interning in one of our classrooms here we also share that with ALA the advanced learning academy where we we have some of the interns here and then they have some of the interns over there so it's sort of that co-partnership to support the program and then we have a lot of college professors here who are coming through our classrooms drop for us feedback but also offer our younger teachers feedback on their practice so it's really a great place to learn if you're a young teacher if you're someone who's new to practice to get a lot of support from people both who work in the school but also support systems from outside the school as well so we are finishing here the next couple of months our first year as an district charter school so that's not like a hip or great hearts or public charter school operating outside of the district we are still part of the district so we're still part of San Antonio ISD the reason why we did it is because we were successful already so a lot of charters go to places that are not successful and then they try to turn them around we already had a pretty solid record of success we wanted extra flexibility from our district and from the state our district our district has a lot of wonderful things about it and there's also some things that are also wonderful sometimes so this allows us to get some flexibility away from some of the things that we wanted to kind of opt out of so in the charter you have to outline a number of things that you want exemptions from you have 13 exemptions in our charter all the way from staffing to curriculum to how we spend our money that we had to ask for those who aren't filled into every school and then it also got us to make some money from the district and then from the state so we had $800,000 to spend for this year plus next year on technology staff development extra hours for staffing or furniture so all sorts of things to help get started and then we also have a quarter million dollars every single year to pay for extra days for our staff and then also for staff development on a continuing basis and we wouldn't have gotten those resources without problem in our charter and then we had to kind of make a case of the school board to justify why we're doing it how we're doing it and then we'll need to go back every year to reaffirm the charter and then every five years to formally refile the charter if there needs to be any in this or if we're not successful over time so on your table you have a handout that looks like this this is very small I know you probably can't see it so on the handout this just sort of outlines in a snapshot view what we're about here we had a number of meetings some of you were at those meetings a number of years ago to vision out where we're going as a campus and what our hopes and dreams are for our kids and the middle five the learners right there that go vertically are five primary focuses while we're here in our building and those the bottom five the base of the structure are the actual tangible things that are happening in the building that anchor to those goals we want kids just for the goal to be curious kids learners a lot of kids lose that over time especially third fourth fifth grade when we start testing and they don't enjoy coming to school anymore it happens in a lot of schools you want to maintain a sense of curiosity wonder in their work a lot of prepaid kids have it almost all of them do and you sort of see a slowing lane over time so we're trying to be intentional about how we maintain a sense of curiosity in our building we with our dual language program we are launching that this year so we're trying to merge populations together rather than have two tracks of kids that go along through our school either an English comment or a bilingual track one of our classes will merge those populations together starting this year and then over time and that also has residual effects for the rest of the campus and how we've been out activities that we do how we involve parents we have an emotional intelligence component our our kids are stressed out much more so than they were when I started my career they're hearing a lot of things that we just weren't exposed to growing up from the news from their parents from watching TV watching movies sitting there on your iPod that lots of sources are flooding them with information and it's stressing a lot of them out and you can see it how they handle challenges here at school so we try to take steps to intentionally teach kids skills and strategies to work through challenges knowing that they're going to come here with them we can't filter out all those things on the outside school but we can't handle them over years we are working really hard to develop a sense of collaboration in the building as well we want kids to want to know how to work together whenever we look for teachers to interview one of our interviewing components is to do a group interview protocol where you give them a task and they have to work together and and then we also have an individual interview task as well and a lot of the people who can do the individual interview and answer questions that they probably memorize out of the book or or you know have kind of been trained on they don't have the soft skills I mean the interpersonal skills to know how to work with one another and we want to teach kids that when they're really young here at school and want them to know that they have control over what they're doing and that they have some power and learning comes with power just a couple of more tangible pieces that are happening we have a longer slider here so it's we know that kids when they have 11 or 12 feet softer in summer even as a really active kid it was involved a lot of things I still sat around and watched and watched all sorts of stuff I didn't watch and I was at home by myself a lot and I had my parents you know like so so I really involved parents so a lot of our kids don't have the level of support that many of us grew up with we want to try to shorten the summer down so we can keep them busier during the summer but also spread out those breaks during the year so they can stay fresher during the course of the year our our staff is also enjoying those breaks during the year too so they've gone on lots of trips this year off at off travel time so it's been great for them but it's also helped to keep them fresh when they come back to work teaching is really arduous and it can wear you out very easily and we want to keep them fresh so we don't have our job here at the school we do have as we have five more school days here than the rest of the school district because of the charter and then every school day here's 30 minutes longer than other schools in the district as well because of the charter is lost and our teachers are being compensated for that so we can then compete with other campuses around our district by then paying a little bit more money which has been a great thing for our staff I already sort of get on these points about the emotional intelligence piece but every single morning every kid is in a thing called tiger time where they spend time connecting with one another they're sharing something about their lives it's given our teachers a lot of input that they wouldn't otherwise have access to from our kids lives it provides us a specified amount of time to teach specific social emotional strategies that we've learned through a variety of inputs and it's been great when you start the day a lot of schools start with intervention where you walk in the door and you're said go to a reading group or go to a math group where you're struggling it's a really hard way to start the day so we're trying to flip that a little bit and have a softer injury into our school day so this is just a snapshot of what we're doing during that morning time it's trying to help you to identify what they're feeling and then working towards a helping them regulate their emotions over time and so it's interesting to hear the language that pre-k, kinder and first grade kids have about what they're feeling how that shifts over time as they go towards fourth this sixth grade and as you plot more of these tools it's helped kids to both understand what they're feeling and then know what to do with it it's pretty cool to see them over the span of a year just to see how much they've grown the biggest curriculum component to our campus is project-based learning and that houses kids thinking about real problems that are facing their lives locally at the school in our city in our community or possibly in a wider lens so our kids have done all sorts of things in the last year plus to think about how we can meet the state standards but also how we can do it in a really authentic way which is not how I learned as a kid growing up when I think about what was authentic about my learning experiences I think I have one or two experiences in high school but almost nothing in elementary or middle school it was a lot of stuff that I think I was a good student so I learned but there were a lot of kids who were struggling to work learning who weren't really engaged in what they were doing I know what they were doing so this is an example last year we did a voting project where kids got to actually register big there were there there was a registrar who came here to school to help families register to vote they were grandmothers who were registering for the first time in their entire lives to vote here and kids got to be a part of that process kids did promotional videos to try to get off the vote for our community as well and so instead of doing like a I'm going to go vote for this president or that president which also what we're doing we tried to have kids read a lot about what our voter turnout was and they were incredibly dismayed to hear what our voter turnout was in Texas and you know just lightning that little bit which they were watching but it's frustrating for them to realize that and I didn't actually know how low it was until the kids started to research it you've done a number of other things our garden fronts tied to pvl projects where the kids had to measure out think about the actual cubic capacity and how much dirt to put in the garden what plants would do while they're and all ties into standards there's a lot of reading involved a lot of research involved which it doesn't really mean all the way for kids the biggest drawback is that it's a heavy teacher load to write a lot of curriculum so you have to find people who are going to be talented to write curriculum and make it customized on student interests I mentioned our dual language program the kids who were living in the new language program in kindergarten will receive 80 percent of their instruction in Spanish 20 percent English regardless of your of your language of your home language so we have English comedy kids in our kindergarten classroom for who are learning 80 percent of their name Spanish and you can start to hear them over the course of the year refer to all sorts of things in Spanish so you can see this sort of migrate over towards speaking a lot of Spanish even when they're five years old and this human kids interact with each other has been really cool because before they were separate now they're having conversations together and playing together it's been a great thing that campus so far I want to give you sort of a snapshot of some pictures give you through the essence of what talking here's the clips here they're looking at you got seven clips classes from one of our one of our parents here's the voting event there's one of our students presenting at SAMA where he got to see his work up on the big SAMA display wall at the Museum of Art where every kid goes every grade level every kid goes every single year and then there's somebody who's actually a parent of ours now who comes to preach each a lesson so the kids have some access to the content that they're about to be exposed to at the museum and then there's also a follow-up lesson as well with the kids this is our B project for the kids that learn all about pollinators and why they're so important to our world and how we wouldn't have many good things to eat that are fresh even now pollinators and kids I know idea a lot of us just had no idea about how important these were so really it's educating our kids but it's also educating us about things that really matter to our world we had a birthday a couple weekends ago and it was a great turnout we had a lot of families who took part in it and we planted a bunch of fruit trees it's also tied to a pvl unit our staff is wonderful and you won't find anybody hard of working with our teachers and our staff here this is Andrea Lucas who won our fictional teacher of the year and then she was a top three finalist for the state teacher of the year she's incredible and she's one of many people who are worthy of that award here at campus every year we've got a trinity to do a lot of learning that's off-site kind of gives us a break from the building here so I know it's a fast and furious any of you are welcome to come any day to come visit the campus visit classrooms to the volunteer kids mentor kids hang out with them at recess and laugh a little bit you want to smile go to a pre-k class and just hang out there for a little bit and be a lot of fun because they have a lot of fun in there are there any questions about the campus or about sort of future directions here as we work away I came in a little way have you talked about the award report information so we won't lose teachers here our enrollments going up we won't lose people here you know what that was part of the goal of the charter to seeing our enrollment seeing the grants and and and house prices in the area you would lose some kids over time so it was a way for us to keep the enrollment I don't anticipate losing teachers here we should we should actually gain a couple we're going to be in one of the six make the game on somewhere else not sure yet so our enrollment's going up and we're not going to lose now what will happen is that somebody else will lose and they'll need to lose people off their campus and see it open until we might absorb it in the arts which is good and bad depending on who the person is there are other questions um so I think we'll know more next year about it will go through eighth grade if it does it will require either moving through first off campus and having the satellite campus somewhere else or moving six through eighth off campus and having the satellite campus there all to the same umbrella same same mission same vision but just two separate physical spaces unless they were to build a third floor here which would be five to eight years off and lots of money so there could be a band-aid solution to keep it all on the same same goals but it's likely and it's also dependent upon how much our families wanted to do I know a lot of them are interested so um there are there are there are definite pros and cons for us here at the campus level but at the community he really wants it and then I hope that they'll speak to the school board and and my supervisor and sort of share those concerns and questions with them but if I had to guess right now I would say it's like 51 49 yes the more people who speak up the better but I what is the name of the charter are you yeah it's still a little more elementary no but who's under who's funding us so the state of texas so so tea texas at the texas education agency has grants that are set aside for innovative schools to so it's not under some of these charter schools no and in our district using their regular budget uh provided us that money to help to about you know 240 thousand dollars to help a manual basis for the campus and so we have to prove that that's working we're all right through results right through family satisfaction it's worth mentioning that six graders just added this year correct last year okay so we were only um pre k through fifth before that yeah we added some additional three k classes to help those in one man in that in the sixth grade class students was great there's also an agreement this is going back to that all of our students can go directly to junior high at popcorn so that they can stay together um if there's not a good solution on this campus when some of the other ones age out so it's a nice temporary setup for our neighborhood yes ma'am so you were talking about the spanish and i was wondering you said uh 80 spanish 20 english yes ma'am okay and that goes to what grade so in kindergarten it's 80 20 first grade same thing 80 20 and your specified subjects that are better than taught in spanish or english uh second grade it goes to 70 third grade 60 40 and then fourth grade it flattened out 50 50 so it wouldn't go over 50 50 either way once you go from fourth through sixth grade which is different than our current model okay so you don't have spanish immersion oh we know spanish immersion is typically where you're in spanish um 100 percent of time and typically you're around english dominant peers where everyone speaks english but they're just sort of dumped into a spanish classroom there's a lot of great things about that model the biggest drawback is that you don't have spanish dominant peers to then build off of and they don't have you to build off of as well and that um in most spanish immersion programs it's it's mostly um uh english dominant students and it can be done different ways but but our district is doing a dual language model where it's it's evenly spanish and then english dominant students in the classroom so that's district wide and district wide standard every campus where they have enough spanish dominant students they are trying to do a dual language model where it's evenly split the issues that certain communities have fewer spanish dominant students certain communities that that are more rare have not enough english dominant students who want to go to school um possibly because of the area it's in to then build up the to make a 50 50 but the goal is to get it as you didn't even spend a kid's number