 We'll call them, we need to order at 540. Thanks for your patience. Sorry, Jerome, for the space being occupied. Any revisions to the agenda? Are there any public comments and correspondence? There can be any comments. Is there a motion to approve the minutes of October 17th and November 6th? I'll move that. Second. Is there any discussion on the current articles? Minutes? Okay. Three minutes. Oh, yeah. Is it Jack Darnall? No. That's all the other discussion. No, we don't need to pause on how we shift mental gears. Yeah, sorry, the draft minutes. I need a discussion on the draft minutes. None of those in favor of approving the minutes of October 17th and November 6th. Please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? So, the first discussion item is the budget draft. Which is on page seven. So, this hasn't changed the draft you have in front of you of the budget that was in the packet has not changed since the last time you have seen it. What has changed is the assessments. And I wanna give a real big note that's on the bottom before we even start to talk about this. We do not have equalized pupils from the Agency of Education. Things are behind. So, these are the best estimates that can come out of this office. We know what we submitted from here, but we don't know what other schools are submitting. You may have heard of the statewide longitudinal data system is coming up to speed and there are many schools that are very behind in submitting in what, as you know, equalized pupils gets adjusted based on the whole state's population. It was actually, we had some funny back and forth between Lori and myself and Michelle. And I said, let's just give them the best estimate we have. And Michelle and Lori usually show on the game that their best estimate is probably within two or 3% error. So, we wanted to, I really wanted to point out that note for you on the assessment. Peace. And have you asked any questions of what you see? Lori's gonna give you kind of what the changes were due to changes in student population. I know you have that Lori. So, some of these assessments have increased and decreased due to what you see at the bottom there and the change in student population. Overall, we're down a few students in the SU unequalized pupils. So, so a note change like U32 actually means an increase because the overall relative percentage increases. So, we're down a few students across the SU. So, I don't know Lori, you wanna go through that kind of what's happened because a student, just the change in student says change the assessment first. So, if you look at the bottom where it says change, you'll see from our current projected equalized pupils, Berlin is projected to be down six, which means the assessment change that you're seeing would be less than the draft you had in the packet because if you have less equalized pupils, it means the assessment would go down. Same thing for Calis, Pismont Pillar and you've already done your happy dance, Steven, that it would be increasing. And so, you pay a higher percentage of the WCSU budget but there will be additional revenues projected when we calculate tax rates. And then, middle sex, you also went down and you see that we're actually projecting your assessments would be less than the current year budget. The same list is up, same happy dance, Steven had. And for U32, your share went, yeah, from 49.8% to 50.3% of the SU. And then your assessment change gets spread out amongst the towns based on their equalized pupils. Just the, yeah. The total's the same, the 174, 284 is the same total, it's just a matter of redistributing and probably another note is just that because we're doing the equalized pupils, the special ed isn't spiking, going up and down by school district based on individual students like it had been in the past. So this has been a nice buffer for people. So this is what you've seen on paper, I wanted to go over that first, the majority, I should say again, majority of this budget presentation is to answer the question around what can we do to increase for math. We wanted to just, really nothing's really shifted in the budget that you have presented to you tonight besides the assessments because there are best estimates of equalized pupils. So we just wanted to kind of go through that first, we're thinking the majority of this presentation of what we're gonna talk about tonight is what more can we do to help increase student performance in math, which I think Carter was the one who asked that last time. Any clarifying questions or comments about what you see here for if we were to stay in an assessment? Is our student population down due to mergers around this? No. No, okay. Nope, our student population is down because we're down in the student, we're losing student population within our tenants. Our tuition, our tuition's are actually up higher than we estimated for this year. For you 32. That seems like trend, I mean 12 more students, I don't know, the SC. Well, what do you mean from the number? It seems like we look, every year we're losing change every day. Those numbers actually don't matter. I'm assuming it's based on... This is how many of these changes from last year? In terms of equalized students. Equalized students. Equalized students. True. Right. Okay. Bodies really, bodies don't equate into the, directly equate into budgetary, equalized pupils are what we have to go by for every year. So, we're down in equalized pupils and we're down in enrollments. Some places are up a little somewhere down to overall, we're down to the issue. The comment you mentioned, I'm sure everyone's aware of a special education that's close to 50% of us, basically. That's more than that. That's more. It's almost 62%. Okay. Yeah. Who's that? That's for the services provided. Yeah. And has it as a percentage of overall? Not just the CSU budget, but all the... I don't have that. The entire issues. I don't have that with me. Can you imagine? I'd actually like the administrator budget. Of this budget, we're ready to have it. Yeah. And I give you that as a rough 62% because I just think of it as five eighths when we look at the overall expenditure. About five million is a special education. It's eight million overall. Any other questions about the assessment summary? And maybe? No, if we're ready, we'll move over to the question about the math question. That's why I asked Jen to be here tonight to really help support and present that. We go at the November 6th meeting, you asked how, because we saw the percentage that we were at the 1.96%, you asked what more could we do to support student achievement to increase in math. And so I wanted, before we get into that, I thought I asked Jen to kind of, if she could review with everybody what we're currently doing to improve math performance. And a lot of it's through professional development, but Jen, maybe you could get some kind of update about the current status. So I'll give you a little bit of information sort of historically since I've been here and then that'll lead into what we've been doing. You may or may not know that we hosted a math lab school in 2013 and 2014. Many, many, many of our teachers who teach mathematics participated as did all of our administrators. So much so that our administrators worked directly with students as well. The second time we hosted it, I got that opportunity too. I had my hosting responsibilities enough under my belt that I got to work directly with a student as well, which was amazing. The math lab school is still happening in some way, shape, or form. This past summer, it didn't happen in the way that it has historically due to enrollment and a few other things, but we have partnered with other supervisor unions who are approaching mathematics in many of the same ways. And so we've moved the hosting responsibilities around and we still have teachers or new administrators who attend that lab school. We engaged in a comprehensive and collaborative review of mathematics in 2013 and 14, much like the literacy audit many, many years ago to hear both commendations and recommendations. We've implemented a lot of those recommendations and a number of them were about more professional development and math. You're gonna hear more about that a little bit tonight, but the biggest piece I think that came from that work was the idea of hiring a coach to help us with mathematics. So we did hire a coach in 14, 15. That FTE, the full-time equivalent, has varied a little bit over the years. We've been relying on Title II A funds to support that position. And we've changed the focus of that work and the structure of that work over the year to try to maximize the position. This year, I believe that we have two math coaches now. We have one who is 0.8 FTE and we have one who is 0.4 FTE. So we've really tried to hone in on more impact cycles with coaching and working at fewer schools rather than spreading one resource to them. We've worked with a consultant and a neighboring supervisory union over the years as well to create benchmark assessments that are common assessments that we administer three times a year across the system that are aligned to our performance indicators for kids. Our math coaches routinely hire curriculum topic study or host curriculum topic studies or lesson studies in mathematics. So a few times a year, which are some intensive professional learning opportunities for our teachers to engage in. We, since we first started curriculum camp, math has been a stalwart in terms of participation. We've had more people participate in math than in any other content area. And the work has been pretty deep and pretty rich. We've done a lot of work on revising performance indicators as our teachers have gotten more knowledgeable about what the expectations are for kids. We've created scope and sequences in mathematics and most recently we've been focusing on effective instructional practices in math at curriculum camp. And then another thing that we're doing right now is we're looking at math programs. So we've been engaged in a math pilot. What happened a number of years ago when the Common Core came on board is that the math programs that we had were no longer in alignment with our student learning expectations for kids. And so we were distancing ourselves from a program. We were really concentrating on bolstering the professional knowledge and skill of all of our instructors of mathematics. And when we asked experts in the fields, what do you think about a program? What do you recommend? They said there is no program out there that is aligned enough to the Common Core that we think it would meet your needs. So we sort of held off. And now after all these investments, we are hearing from both our teachers of math and our principals that a program as a resource would be a really helpful tool for our teachers knowing that their professional knowledge and their professional judgment really needs to come first. But we are piloting a number of programs. We are only looking at programs that have met criteria on focus and coherence, rigor and usability based on a source called ed reports. And of those, we're getting our teachers together. We're engaging in curriculum topic study. We're doing an analysis of the programs based on what we've identified as the most effective teaching practices in mathematics. We've piloted one program at the elementary level, one at the middle school and one at the high school level and we're getting ready to take on a second and possibly a third program. We've done our research budgetarily so that we would be prepared one way or another. We've been thinking as we plan ahead to professional learning about what it would take in terms of any in-service time or other PD to adopt a program with fidelity. So those are some of the inputs in recent years and most currently. I think one thing, you said it quickly, Janice, just because you live in this world but you said TOTA is funding our curriculum camp and that's federal funds. And we, every year, I'm sure whether we're gonna have, we're the way, the nice thing about the timing of curriculum camp and when we apply for federal funds, there's a year or so if we do in a year. And one of the reasons I'm highlighting this for you, I'm gonna give you some costs of some things. I'm gonna give you some general areas and we'll talk about these different places and how strategies you might wanna use budgetarily for things we may wanna do. Gloria, I forgot to bring in some chart paper that's in my office on the norms chart. If you can just grab the whole piece. I'm sorry, I was running from one meeting to another. Thank you, Gloria. So before we start talking about any of these ideas, we spent six hours in this room as a leadership team last Tuesday to really tackle this question. And the thing that isn't fair really for the whole system or I've learned through the whole system is that while the leadership team had a chance to talk, we didn't have a chance to engage our staff. So tonight I'm gonna be as vague as possible and give you as much specifics so you feel like you're there. But this is a discussion and I was saying this last night at East Montpelier is that it's hard to have this discussion without planning with the staff. And what I've learned over the years of serving you as superintendent is it's not get the board on board first or get the staff on board first, it's get everything together. The hard part about this budgetarily is you've gotta make some budget decisions. So I wanna really honor that the staff hasn't been in this conversation, the leadership team has been in this conversation, with the staff's been in the conversation of everything Jen just talked to you about but to look forward and project of additional resources, we're gonna talk about four key areas. So I wanna talk and I asked Lori to go get some charts from that day so you could actually say, yeah, you got it. Bring it all right over here cause I'll have to go through it. There's one Pt piece of paper on one off of there that I didn't grab. It's really a picture so be careful. Well, it's plastic, it's not even right. Well, we spent the day, and just give me a minute, I'm just gonna grab one piece of paper. So we went through the day and we started using a protocol. We really took the question that you had sent for us. Math goal, to increase achievement as measured by star 360 from 45% proficient as measured this September to 71%, which is if you remember the teachers went out and we asked all the teachers of the instructors of math what do you think your kids can be in June? Proficient by June, 2019 ensure at least 90% of our students make at least one year of growth in math achievement as measured by star 360. So that's what we reported to you in the student monitor. So the SUY goal, as I said, was created with teacher input. This fall our teachers looked at their student performance in star 360 and set classroom goals accordingly. Then our principals created school goals based on their teacher's goals and finally we compiled one as the SUY that gets to that 71%. You asked us on the six, what resources do the schools need in the next year to improve student performance in math? So to that end, the leadership team took up this question at their meeting on November 13th. We prepared tonight to share with you the process we went through. So I'm gonna talk to you about the process and then with what our conclusions are. After that meeting, we shared a collaborative document that we started to really try to write this out because we couldn't get that all done in that meeting and Jen and I were the leaders of that, mainly Jen, and putting this document together to come around four central themes that came out of that day. We started with a protocol called the Futures Protocol which is really a strategic planning protocol that says take a time and period ahead in time. So we took three years, although our current implementation plan, we're in a third year or a five year implementation plan. And we said, what do we want to look like around here for instruction three years from now? So all these pieces of paper that you just saw the cat can come in are brainstormed of what's it gonna look like in the future? And we got outside of math pretty quickly and Jen, interject here if I forget something, I think there's something important. And I'm gonna, I should have said to be, I'm gonna set the context and then Jen's gonna talk about each of the separate pieces we came to. We spent the morning really saying, these are all the different things we need to do, lists got really long. And so after lunch, we kind of reset and said, hey, we were asked about math, what's specifically in math? And one of our colleagues who's really good at protocol, she said, we're using the wrong protocol right now. She said, we need to stop and we need to use what we call the five Y's protocol. But you say you're asked a question and you say, why, five times, why is that happening? And you try to get down to what you think the root cause might be. And so I'm gonna show you that piece of paper. And I think it's really powerful because one of the things you're gonna see and one of these four, I don't think you, you're gonna expect to hear from us. So we said, math scores are low. There's a lack of opportunity to, what, math scores are low, why? The first Y was there's a lack of opportunity to reteach in a timely manner based on formative assessments. Why is that? Students don't have skills identified in math in each grade level. Well, why is that? We started, the schedule doesn't give it to us, give us time to do it. We don't have the materials. We don't have the expertise. We don't have the FTEs, number of teachers we need. Community beliefs, this came out really strong. We all, I think it was about 30 seconds, we said, that's the thing. Our community doesn't believe in math. So why is that? Why is that? People lack the importance given to external data and actively resist against, the culture actively resists against data and math and quantitative number crunching. We're seeing that. So there's no urgency. We said there's a lack of accountability in places you could do. So where is math used? I mean, what do you use it for in your job? Do people see the importance of math and that it's not just a calculation. We really came down to is, it's a perception about math of, what is it that math's not just a calculation. It's a way of thinking. It's a problem solving. There's beauty in math and that perception that we have. We have the US culture thing, but it's also something that's very strong in our communities. So our number one thing that we came up with was we need to really get a community engagement going about why math's important to learn. And we need help doing that. We really need to build this strong. The second thing we came up with was professional growth to support high quality math instruction. Jen just talked to you about a lot, but we're gonna talk about, she's gonna talk about the details of each of those. There are structural slash organizational changes to the system. Specifically, we need more time for instruction and more professional collaboration within a school and amongst our teachers, so cross schools. And we need to meet our students' emotional, social and emotional needs. When Jen and I were playing this together, we came up with, is it four parts, Jen, you were looking at that, right? Yeah. Four parts how we broke down into it. We want Jen to talk to each of these. Would you say just more time for social and emotional needs? Meeting students' social and emotional needs. Meeting students' social and emotional needs. Is that particularly on the math or just general? Overall. This is what was hard for us. And we spent the morning, look, we got out of math really fast and that's why we had to refocus in the afternoon. We got to these whys and then it's really starting to focus on math. But it was really interesting how quickly we got to that cultural belief of where we are with math instruction. And that was pretty, I think it was pretty unanimous that we were all there. Yeah. And we didn't know it was there. It was pretty phenomenal. It's one of the nice things about this five whys that I ask you to dig it deeper into what's causing it. So we wanted to give you a little bit more information about what we're thinking about more specifically for each of these themes. And when we think about community engagement about the importance of mathematics, we're really talking about wanting to increase the knowledge of math and appreciation for math in the community and to increase support for math education in general. So we're talking about almost a PR campaign, right? Like I went to see the Sunday matinee of Little Shop of Forest and the auditorium was absolutely packed. We wanted it to be absolutely packed for some like math extravaganza, right? Same kind of thing. So we're talking about, I mean, some of what Bill mentioned is that societally not just unique to our community, it is perfectly fine to say, I don't like math, I'm not good at math, I don't do math, it's not societally okay to say that about other subject areas. We also know that there are studies that will link sort of achievement mathematics with your overall earning potential as an individual. We know that when we're thinking about our transferable skills and the problems that we're facing in the world that STEM education is fundamentally important and math is absolutely a huge component there. So I think that rationale is clear. We're thinking about how ways that we can engage the community in deepening their appreciation of math, ways that we can be more intentional in celebrating mathematics, in educating families about the teaching of mathematics, about conceptual understanding as well as procedural problem solving. We wanna do more education with you as board members too so that you're understanding what's going on in the world of math education. What are those effective practices? What do we need to do to implement them? And in terms of your role most immediately, we're hoping that you are willing to take a stand about the importance of mathematics that when we talk about community engagement and the goal that you have realized as a board or articulated as a board about community engagement that part of your actions will be focused on mathematics as well and be willing to make some hard choices when it comes down to what is most important for our students because there will be hard choices because there are finite resources which I'm gonna segue to the next one then. We're talking about building our professional growth to increasing the knowledge and skill of our teachers of mathematics. And you know, when I think one of the things that Bill may not have said. Can I interrupt from the term teachers of mathematics? What does that mean? Anybody who teaches math. Yeah, yeah. But not any teacher. But not necessarily, right? So not necessarily a Spanish teacher. So the other thing I wanna say is that we ground, we spent some time in the morning before we delved into those protocols, grounding ourselves in some of the research, some of the meta-analyses that Hattie has done, that Marzano has done. We looked back at the DMG report and some of Nate Levinson's work just so that we could have some of that common conversation and grounding before we delved into the Futures Protocol and the Five Wise. And there are recommendations in some of those reports that we really wanna explore more thoroughly around. Again, the importance of knowing that anybody who is teaching math really needs to know the math at least two or three years below them and two or three years above them in order to understand and meet students' needs developmentally in mathematics. To make sure that our students who have the greatest difficulty in mathematics are taught by the teachers who know math the best, that is not happening universally in the system yet. And to really capitalize on building those job embedded structures. Our coaching has been a step in the right direction, but a 0.8 math teacher, even a one point, or a math coach, even a 1.2 in this area is spreading our resource pretty thin. So the board's role I think is, again, supporting us with the resources and supporting the concept that students who have the greatest need are taught by the teachers who have the greatest knowledge and skill in the content areas that they're serving. Since when would you say the, since then in math class in 2013, 2014, in math school labs or math lab school? What has been the improvement or development of mathematics in our teachers since then through today? Yeah, I think that if I were to summarize the greatest shift, I think it would be that the math labs will help us deepen our conceptual knowledge as math teachers so that then we could understand the student levels of knowing around, sort of having some intuition around math, needing to use some concrete materials then representing, then thinking about math more abstractly and procedurally, and then thinking about applying and transferring their knowledge. But, you know, I would throw myself up there. I learned math very procedurally, but I didn't learn it conceptually. I didn't really have a thorough understanding of additive reasoning or multiplicative reasoning and how what I was learning as a third and fourth grader with multiplication would serve me when I was learning algebra. I didn't learn that at all. I've learned it now as a curriculum director, guiding teachers, right? And so that's the kind of stuff that we're trying to do so that we're really intentional in terms of our learning targets and our levels of knowing and scope and sequence for our students. That's what's been there so far and any measurable in math abilities of our students? You know, I think anecdotally, but you've seen the scores, Chris. And, you know, they're pretty, they're flat and they're low. They should be, we should see growth and we should see higher scores for as well resource to community as we are. We would expect more. And I'm grateful for you all for asking this question because we've rattled off the inputs and we haven't seen the changes we would expect to see. So posing the question, being monitored more carefully, engaging in cycles of action research, that's what we need to be doing. We owe it to our kids. And so some of these are tough questions and tough conversations, but I'm thrilled that we're having them. Yeah, no, they're just, no, just informational. Yeah, yeah. The third theme is really about the structures and the systems to support all of our students and specifically more time for instruction and for professional collaboration. I think if you've heard me ever talk about proficiency-based learning, you've heard me say that in a proficiency-based learning system, achievement is the constant and time should be a variable. And that's true. All of our students need to achieve proficiency in these rigorous standards, but right now we're still really time-based. So we need to be thinking about how do we create a structure that's more flexible around time so that students who need more time have more time and just as importantly, we know that all of our students should be engaged in high-quality first instruction, what we call tier one instruction and a multi-tiered system of support and that any additional supports that they need, be it intervention or IEP supports, should be in addition to. And we are not set up right now in a way that allows for that to happen for all of our students, especially students who have needs in both literacy and mathematics. And why are we not set up that way? Because, I mean, in part, there's not enough time in the day, in part because this goes back to some of the community engagement questions. We're making hard choices or we're not making hard choices around, you know, I mean, even, let me give you a super concrete example. If a student in elementary school needs additional supports in literacy and additional supports in math, and we want them in 90 minutes of instruction for lit and we want them in at least 60 minutes for mathematics, then there's morning meeting, there's art, there's music, there's PE. What are they? Can I just add another thing? I will say this for me. I have felt the community pressure to make sure we have all the extras before we have sufficient time for core instruction. I'm not saying that I shouldn't have felt it, that's what I've perceived. And so now I'm going to ask the hard question to the board, as you've heard me ask Chris. What are your priorities? You know, it's just, it's a question we were asked right at the Rundee Board meeting last time, you know. And it's a, you gave a beautiful response about when someone said, well, wouldn't you want it to be everything for the whole child? And the answer is yes, we'd all want to answer yes to that. But sometimes there's some priorities and are we willing to, you know, that's the question that we have for the boards of, are we willing to say there's some things, whether you want to use guarantee or something else that we don't have 60 minutes of instruction for math for every kid in the system. It's not happening today, every day. Just, if there's 60 minutes allocated and you said that there's not 60 minutes for every kid, is that because it's not being allocated or just both, you know? Yeah. We have some schools that don't have it allocated every day. That's 60 minutes of, U32 does not have 60 minutes of math instruction every day. I think, I think another thing, and again, this goes to some community engagement is, well, first of all, let me back up. I want to acknowledge that these are hard conversations. These are conversations about our values for kids and hard choices. So engaging people in a really authentic and honest way is going to be really important, right? I think the other thing is, sometimes we are taking the short view instead of the long view. And when we can think about a kid's experience in our system from pre-K through graduation, we know that it's really true that if a student needs intervention right now when they're entering middle school right now, the interventions are set up as classes like reading strategies and math strategies that kids are taking and they need to be taking them, but it limits their choices even more drastically than choices may have been limited in the elementary school. And so by considering what is most important in our elementary schools or prioritizing, then we ultimately, and addressing them, then we ultimately open up more choices for kids as they get to middle and high school. But I wanna, I mean, these are not easy conversations to have. Like it makes me nervous to just put it in the room, quite honestly, because I know, I mean, I know people have very different values. So again, it's all, these are four themes, but they're all interrelated. We're gonna have to make that decision as a group here. And then, so I think that's probably enough on that one. And then the final thing is that you know that we've been thinking a lot about meeting our kids' needs, not just academically, but socially and emotionally. Many of our students are coming to us with greater needs than they have in the past. We're doing a lot of learning about how to meet their needs socially and emotionally so that they can access learning. And so we just wanna make sure not only that we have the professional knowledge that we need among our staff members so that we can meet needs, but that we also have adequate staffing to meet their needs. We wanna articulate or at least explore the possibility of a social-emotional learning curriculum for students. And that again, all of that would take some support on your end as board members, both in terms of resources and priorities. But we know from our work already with Dave Melnick and others that if a student is not available for learning, we can have the best academic interventions in the world and it's not gonna make a huge impact on them. So again, I just wanna underscore what we're sharing is at this point is sort of the broadest of brush strokes, the things that we've engaged in these conversations over the years with, certainly with educators and with you in some way, shape or form, but to put it all together and focus it, well, to answer the question that you've asked. We just wanna say, these are the themes, but it really takes many more people and many more conversations. Yeah, sorry, I had a question. I heard Bill when he said that he was gonna be vague, but I'm wondering if there's even in broad strokes anything specific you could say about what a socio-emotional learning curriculum would look like or continue to follow. So I'll tell you one thing for sure that we did was this summer, we had, through our transferable skills, we, at Curriculum Camp, we had a group of teachers, administrators and school counselors get together and look at our transferable skills and start to revise them to ensure that we were really honing in on some social-emotional learning, but there's a, there are all sorts of strategies that we could more intentionally, I guess, implement around emotions, feelings, self-regulation, mindfulness, empathy, those sorts of things that we would wanna look at a little more systematically than we have. And there's been some talk about also a way of, I don't wanna use the word assessment because I think that's too strong, but a way of understanding where students are at through their developmental progression from pre-K to graduation in social-emotional learning. Yeah. Yeah. And that's been a conversation that's just started in the past one month. I think one of our counselors brought that to us and said, hey, we should be thinking about how we're tracking social-emotional growth for kids. So we know where they're going. Other questions for Jen, because I wanna sum this up and I wanted folks to have. So is the social-emotional curriculum a broad-based, all students, or more? Well, we would, I think we would approach kids meeting social, kids social-emotional learning needs the same way we approach them academically, that there's sort of a universal approach or curriculum that's gonna meet the vast majority of our students' needs. And then some students may need a little bit more. We're already doing some of this stuff around PBIS or Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. There's a tier two, like some kids in order to regulate and get positive feedback needed a more formal check-in and check-out system, for example, than many students. And we have some of those supports in place. And then there's some kids who have even more individualized or significant needs who may need more support than that. So that we would approach it very similarly. And when you read the literature and the research around what broadly in the nation is response to intervention, not multi-tiered system of supports or MTSS, but RTI, they talk about that too. Just the idea of academics and behavior, social-emotional stuff coming together to support kids. So I appreciate the importance of the social-emotional. And I know it's increasing, becoming more difficult. However, and I can only draw on East Guantelier, our literacy is trending up. Our math is trending down. It's the same kids. So I find it hard to accept that. Social-emotional is causing the math problem. That's not what we're saying. Yeah, it's not. Okay, but so then I'm trying to bring us back to, this is about math and the budget and resources in my mind. And I don't wanna get drawn so far afield of that. You know, I can get focused. So this has been very informative, but I wanna get back to math and are we gonna allocate resources for math or what are we gonna do to improve our math? That's what I wanna know. And to me, social-emotional isn't gonna improve our math. Well, no, it will, it'll improve everything. It's not just quite as direct. Yeah. Yeah. But it's pretty important. Like I understand that. But I mean, from a harsh perspective, so I bring my military background, you don't reinforce a failure. To me, math's been a failure. We've tried some things. We've allocated resources. We've done some things. None of it's working. We've tried some things. We've allocated some resources and literacy and we're seeing results. It's working. So I'm hesitant to allocate more resources to something that's not working. I mean, is it more fundamental? So I wouldn't say that because it is more fundamental. As we quickly went over the professional above needs and specialization of the amount of knowledge an elementary teacher has in literacy compared to their knowledge in math is a huge gap. To come out with an elementary education endorsement, you need one course in math that's either pedagogical or content. You can have your last content course and be algebra two, your junior year in high school. While in literacy, you have a lot more expertise and so we haven't been willing to make the shift and include myself in this to saying, we're gonna put our best math teachers and have them be the instructors in math that's talking about specialization in elementary schools. Same, because you need a master's degree to be an effective teacher in any content area. I mean, you really do, and we have a lot of elementary teachers that have a lot of expertise in literacy. We're not there in math. And... We don't have teachers. Right now? That would even fit the need. If the criteria is a message to me. There are enough teachers in Vermont to go higher if we had to hire more to do it, Chris. We have to build our own. That's the message I would give you. And we have the right people. I think there's people here to do that, but you've got to build from within. The hiring climate and what there is. If you want to hire a math teacher, especially at the middle school or secondary level, you better get it done by April 1st because they're not there anymore. So you've got to get folks that have that type of content and pedagogical knowledge. And usually the ones who do come out of pre-service, if they do, they have the content knowledge but not the pedagogical. Would you agree with me on that, Janet? Yeah, I mean, it's generally one or the other. It's generally not... So content but not method? Yeah. You mean by pedagogical? Right, yeah. Yeah, it's like, I know how to do the math, but I don't necessarily know how to teach it. Teach it. But that's what my bias is. Yeah. To math specialists in elementary school. But, so let's do an F. We'll go, not the Ys, we'll go to the three years nature. But the reality might be we're allocating enough resources for math coaches. The problem is we've got too many teachers that we're trying to elevate their performance in math. So if there was, and I don't know if six, no, I don't know if five, one in each elementary school is the number, but if it's one in each elementary school, so it's five teachers, then 1.2 FTEs of math coaches might be enough for five teachers. And if we want enough math coaches for all the elementary school teachers, does it make any difference if there's one, two, or three? Probably what we need is a dozen. So we're never gonna get there for allocating math coaches at the elementary school level. So I was waiting to hear what you had to say structurally, I was wondering if there was gonna be some, I agree that I think structurally, and I don't know if I'm math specialist today, but I think structurally we need to do something. And my, so my limited experience is I would be in agreement that all students, particularly at the elementary school, do not receive the same quality of math experience. It varies greatly from teacher to teacher. Some are very good, some are very poor. And it's a crap shoot on who you guys an elementary school teacher on how well you prepared math was. Going to Steven's structural question. Yeah, I mean, again, some of these conversations are ones that we've started with over the years, but haven't had recently around do, are we looking at specialization in elementary schools? Does that mean classroom teachers? Does that mean special educators? Does that mean, do we have enough resources allocated to math interventionists at all of our elementary schools in some elementary schools? We do have designated interventionists and others. We don't, or we have like a fraction of what we might need. The schedule one is one too, right? Like when you actually try to build a schedule, it's almost impossible enough to do everything without sacrificing something, right? And I didn't even mention, I don't think science and social studies at the elementary level, which I mean has a lot of room for improvement as well. Strictly from a time allocation point, quite frankly, let alone looking at inquiry-based approaches to science and global citizenship. So these are the conversations, Stephen, that are hard ones, I think, to have. And they're ones that we've, in this particular context, not taken the questions back to the people who'd be most impacted. Well, and I appreciate that this was more of an overview thing, but so from a board member, and I try to be very clear. Yeah. If there's an expectation for additional resources, then I don't want it put in the same place because I'm not seeing, as a board member, I'm not seeing our investments panning out from a strictly business point of view. Can I just ask, Stephen, what you're saying is you don't want it, are you talking specifically about coaching? Is that what you're talking about? I'm talking about how are we going to improve math. Right. And I'm hesitant to spend more money at allocating more resources for things that we've been currently doing that haven't yielded any results. So it sounds like you're looking for a business plan of saying if we put in this much money, how would it be used, and what about the expectation? And I'm saying I cannot give you that business plan in two weeks because of the culture and the way expectations are to work in Washington Central. You, I've learned and learned through experience that if we don't bring the staff at the same time we bring the boards, if one is before the other, someone doesn't get the full story and then the learning doesn't happen at the same time, then it usually causes a lot more I think clean up, not clean up, trying to figure the right word here. It causes a lot more angst. And so to come back to you as a board in two to three weeks to say here's the full, Jen and I could have gone and done a plan and brought it back to you. Or the leadership team could have gone and done a plan and brought it back to you with a full business plan, look at all that, but we haven't done it with the staff. So there's gonna be staff that are passionate about some other, they're gonna say why did you pick math? And I'm passionate about my area I teach. We could take whatever of the SLOs you want that we haven't talked about between literacy and math. Any of those others you would hear there would be and that needs to be understood. That's back to our marketing piece about our community values. We, I hear very loudly in Washington Central that the arts are very highly valued. So I'm sure we would hear from folks that value that. Not good, bad, and different, just we would hear from it. And so I think it's about bringing everyone together. So to say that there's a dollar figure, I mean I've run numbers, back the envelope numbers, to say here's the type of cost for different types of professional development. The structural things, I agree, I believe we need to do some structural things, but I'm not willing to go out there and do it because what I learned from Romney this past year was it's, even though it may work in one other school to do a schedule the way it's been done, that if it's not done the right way, it causes a lot of time to do a lot of explanation. So we've got to put in the front end time to do this. And so that's the way I've learned about our five towns in Washington Central. And so I'm not willing to go out with much more specifics. And if you're not comfortable with the board, that's fine. We'll keep working, we'll keep shifting things when we need to and come to you if we need extra resources. But I'm not going to come to you with a full-fledged plan unless the staff and the boards are doing that not necessarily together in the same room, but in parallel tracks and talking about what we're trying to do. That's been my learning. I have a question. So are we looking for options? For instance, I'm hearing that we need more time, that our teachers need to be more proficient in teaching math. Those are the two big things I'm hearing. So my first question is what are the carrots we've put out there to get all these teachers who are probably not a lot interested in math to choose that as a focus to improve themselves? Now I don't know anything about how the contract works or how the assessment works when I know the teachers meet with their principal or whoever and they talk about what needs to be done. But I guess kind of goes along with community involvement is how do we get the community to say to the schools and the teachers, we want you to focus on math and get the teachers focusing on math too. To me, that sounds like a lot of work, but I think that's where we need to find a path to get it done. We, is the most pressing thing time for like four hours in the day? So I've done some numbers. If you wanted to add 30 minutes to the schedule based on the current contract, it's a million dollars. Is 30 minutes sufficient? No, it's not. I mean there's 180 days in the school year. You know, I mean, we are competing internationally. Our kids, my daughter who's a sophomore in high school is not competing with Vermont kids for a job when she gets done with a job. She's competing with kids around the nation, around the world. She's competing against kids that have 220 days of school for eight hours a day and have a thinner curriculum than we do in the US. So I mean jobs are being outsourced every day. Engineering jobs are the things that are flying out of this nation right now. Not the telecommunication and network support type stuff, but people who are designing. And China has more English language speakers than we do in the US. So we're competing against their best and our kids are gonna compete against their best and they have to be really flexible and really creative thinkers. That's what puts the US in the place where our kids can compete is when they're in the creative thinking pieces. And so we have to be able to say, the kid, this is back to math being a thinking, it's a way of thinking. Most of us who have succeeded in math have done so under, just as Jen said about herself, a procedural math. You know how to do math. You may not know why it works. I'm one of the people that's a conceptual math person. I always have been strength of mine because I can see the numbers and see how they, in my head, I can see how they relate to each other and see those relationships. I'm on the rare side of that just because that's kind of how I was a son of a math teacher who taught me that way. I would have been the procedural learner. I was lucky to have one of those. But we want all kids to have that access. And so we have to have teachers that can teach conceptually, which is a very different type of teaching than a procedural. You can all think of how maybe you were taught to divide fractions. And there's no rhyme that I can ever remember about invert and multiply, instead of I never ask why. But yeah, I've heard many people say it, and I just can't remember the rhyme language. But why do you invert and multiply? But you have to understand what's going on. That's the point of really understanding math because our memories can only hold so much information. The few times I taught high school math, the kids that didn't understand fractions were tripping up when I was teaching tree calculus. And maybe we didn't see it. And we lost a lot of kids around that time in the math program here. We don't have many kids going for that upper level. We have to get, we need that peace. And so I can give you other figures of other things you know about, but I can't give you a plan. And that's why I want to respond to Steve. Any card, one that is. Oh, well, I think I was going to summarize that point, which is a couple of weeks ago, we asked for a recommendation for next year's budget to improve math. And what you're, what I'm hearing you telling us is it's a much bigger strategic conversation that you're not ready to make a recommendation. I'm not ready to come and say, I need X amount of dollars tomorrow and I know exactly how to spend it. I can tell you that, I can tell you if you gave us this amount of money, I can give you some target areas, but we have to develop to get everyone on the bus. And there's certain areas we think we can get to by June, but not a full-fledged strategy. And I think the strategies that we're doing are going to pay off. I actually disagree with Stephen that if you think you're going to get changed in three years in instructional technique, you're not, it's a five to seven year peace. And we've been working on that, but we've got the structural operational things or the things we need to do next. And as your superintendent, I need to know that all the boards have the back of us when we make some of those changes. And if we have to do it in certain ways, I'd rather know upfront because it's, we're gonna, I look for a tipping point and not for consensus. I look for, when 75% of the people are on the bus, we go, we don't wait for a hundred percent. Because if we wait for a hundred percent, we're not going to affect change. In terms of, wouldn't you expect to see some, at least in the earlier grades, some different math achievement because it's, you know, the change could be three years ago. So, Jen and all our math teachers in the elementary grade have taken that math lab school. Not everything. Yeah. Not every single one. It's by choice. Okay, the math lab school. The math lab school. Okay. No, it's by choice. It's by choice. So, if we're gonna go through specialization and like have one math teacher for the entire elementary school. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying, I mean, that's, we don't, we haven't, we haven't planned it out. I mean, this is the other thing is, I can't say exactly how we do the specialization. Some places have done it by. Some of our schools have already chosen to do it. So, for example, there's a, there might be a team of teachers that teach third and fourth grade. And one teacher teaches math to third graders and math to fourth graders. And the other teacher is the literacy teacher for those third graders and those fourth graders. That, that is happening in some of our schools. It's not happening in all of our schools. And there are all sorts of reasons why in some places it happens and in some places it doesn't, right? Some of it is philosophical and centered around the whole child. Some of it is really just pragmatic and numbers. Some configurations change year after year based on the numbers. We've experienced that at Romney over the years. We're certainly experiencing that at East Montpelier right now. But even Berlin has done it, right? Like, yeah, Calis right now. I mean, some of it's a, just a response to numbers and class size and how best to meet kids' needs. So, so what's happening in different ways in different schools for different reasons, all of which are legitimate. So. Hermos of which. Hermos of which. Hermos of which. Hermos of which. I'm sorry. I just want to try to, I don't know, figure out how we move forward in this conversation. And I've just been kind of letting the conversation go because I'd like to, I'd talk about this all night if I was given the choice. Maybe you should. I mean, just because of it's that fundamental. Well, what I, there's a couple of things I want to know. Not all night. What, what, it's a couple of things I want to ask. One is, you know, again, we are a committee. We're not the sort of SU board. And this seems like a conversation that, you know, it's well worth bringing to the SU board. So that everyone is hearing this and everyone is kind of, you know, engaged in the conversations. That's just one observation I would make. And the, the second question, the thing or question I guess is, I take the point that, you know, there's not really much, there's not really much logic to kind of making a piecemeal decision about some minor budget allocation, you know, at this specific point in time. And that there are a lot of issues to wrestle with. I think there's not a, there's nothing that you have put on the table tonight that in my mind is out of bounds or shouldn't be considered or there shouldn't be some plan around how to shift or change or drive or advance them. So I guess the question, and I feel like this is, it's dovetingling in a way with our, with our conversation about goals for educational outcomes. The School Quality Committee was talking, for example, about asking the leadership team administration about what would a three year, you know, goal look like. And maybe there's a larger question, you know, or sort of maybe, maybe it's what is a five year strategic plan look like to dramatically improve student learning outcomes. And I mean, dramatically improve them, like ambitious, you know, to do that. And I guess, so there's, there's, there's two things that I am, I am personally, I don't know if this is the sentiment of the committee or of the SU Board is only personally extremely interested in hearing that plan. I am wondering, you know, given everything, I mean, there's nothing more important than this, I guess. So I was gonna say given everything that's on the people's, people's, you know, plates, like what's a reasonable sort of timeline or a process. So I want to respond to that, Matthew. I feel a bit of a trap from that question. Because I finally see the board for the first time this year really take an interest in data. We don't see that in our staff yet. They're growing, different places are at different levels. I don't see that in the community. So this is why I ask you, where are you gonna stand as a board? And where are all the boards gonna stand in taking and being bold? Because when we come out with that plan, if we don't do it collaboratively, like I said, we could do that as a leadership team. But without having done that with the staff and with the boards at the same time, we're putting ourselves out there and my experience has been with the boards in Washington Central when one or two people complain about an issue or bring question about an issue, there's usually the boards pulling back from where they might have been. And so I'm asking, where do you stand governance wise? If you wanna task us with doing that, we can. I'm saying I wanna do it with the staff and I want some time to do that. But I also need to know that we have, and you have right to hear about what the plan is and to give us feedback about the plan, but there's gotta be a place where it's at, there's a level and I wanna know where the level is where the administration and the staff have right to say we're gonna change this and we're gonna do it, we're gonna stay with it for a while. And that's the structure, that's the structure is an organizational piece. Do you understand why, do folks understand why I'm saying this back to the question that you're asking? Yeah, I think that what I'm trying to wrestle with, I guess, then is sort of this endless cart horse, cart horse thing. Like, you know what, I guess the question would be, what do you want the boards to commit to? Is it any change of anything? Like, in these areas or in any area? First, I don't even know if the boards, if the boards really feel math is, if there's a prioritization in the SLOs. That's what I wanna know first. I've been asking that question. I haven't seen a direct response. I've seen some conversation, but I haven't seen a direct response. So, that's the first question, is that important? I don't think I've heard the question, specifically for the boards individually. And I think, I don't think every board would say, of course we think math is important, and it's foundational. I think most would say that. And, but I also think that most boards and communities would wanna know what the plan is, because if things haven't been working in the past, we'd wanna know what the plan is, and why you think it's gonna work differently in the future, especially since we're gonna be making this additional investment in it. And the other thing I would like to throw out there is that having the boards and staff together in terms of the educational part, I think would be helpful. Because instead of having three different silos, meaning the leadership team, the boards, and then the staff, there's more of a co-mingling of those entities and can hear each other's thoughts. I mean, we don't necessarily know what the staff is thinking or the leadership team is thinking other than through you. And the same thing with the other boards. We don't hear that unless we have a specific discussion at a carousel meeting. But I think what I hear Bill saying, actually, if I'm hearing it correctly, is that we know too much about what the staff think. I would not be saying we and the staff are gonna propose the plan, because that's a collaboration I heard, that's what I heard, as opposed to a dictation. And that's a very different dynamic. So I think we'd be remiss to say we don't wanna know what the staff thinks about things because when it comes down to it, implementing a plan is by the staff. So my experience is when one or two staff members are gonna be really direct, when one or two staff member complains, but the rest are silent, the board listens to the one or two staff members and you don't know what the whole staff is saying and they won't come out and say it. I think that would be something we have to work on. So everyone could speak, every staff member would feel free to speak. And we've hopefully modeled that for our students and we're not doing that. I mean, I know, maybe you're saying, Chris, you're in a crazy line right now, but it's just. So when you say, we asked a different kind of question, you're saying that the board, and you wanna bring the board and the staff at the same time, what does that mean? That means that as we, as I believe in the governance model of what you have, the board sets the priorities of what we're doing. The board has not done that and has liked to do that. I said, you know, when I've asked, what are your priorities? What do you want done? The only board that's done that is East Montpelier that said, we want kids to improve in literacy and math. Every board has to say that, though. Yes. I believe we did. I don't know where we're in there. Yeah, a lot that you get, you get, you clouses down a lot of holes. Thank you. I think the boards do need to say that because what I hear, what I hear is when we get into individual meetings, well, what about this content area? What about that content area? And when we have to make tough choices, Chris, we need to know what the prioritizations are from the community and the board is the representative of the community because it must we have a 220 day school year and eight hour school day. I mean, we know we don't have enough time to teach all the SLOs. Honing might be, I'll say, a unifying factor. I don't think it's a good term. But from a, just give me a second. I'm trying to bring all this stuff together. From a board perspective, if we say we want math results to improve and there has to be more time in the day allocated to studying math and the board expects there's gonna be more time in the day spent on studying math, then it falls to administrators and the staff to clearly understand we want math scores to improve. We want more, and we think spending more time, so it doesn't have to be this, this is an example. We think spending more time studying math in the day is important. Find more time in the day. So then there's only so many hours in the day. The plan could be we need a million more dollars and to extend the day or two million dollars to extend the day by an hour. And then we have to manage the community and manage the staff. Or we need to find more time within the existing time in the day. And if the answer is you spent, it's always extreme, you spent half as much time on art and music as you do now. That's the only way you can get the time. If math is our priority, we go, okay, we deal with that, we'll support it. And then we have to fight the battle with our communities to say the priority is math. Those other things aren't priority. We have to do less of those so we can do more of math. That's a stance the board can take. That's the stance we took on tier two. We had to fight it for three years at budget every year. We don't want to lose these things. We don't want to lose these things from the staff or we don't want to lose these things from the community. No, we're committed. We're going to improve this type of training. It takes this resources. It takes this schedule to do it. It takes this amount of time to do it. We're committed, we're doing it. And other things we're sacrificed. To me, we can't say we want everything. We can say what we want and prioritize it. So I'll use East Montpelier budget. Last year, our budget, we wanted cuts. We wanted less money than in draft one. And we said you cannot touch tier two. That was our priorities, that was our directive. So for Bill and Alicia, it was very clear. They had to cut this much out of the budget and they could not touch one penny from this. So bring us a plan. They brought us a plan and it wasn't, we didn't, I don't think we did. We didn't micromanage it. This is the lowest priority. That goes, so you can keep this. Okay, thank you, we appreciate the work. That goes. And I think from a board perspective, I think that's part of what administrators are looking for. We're committed to this. If we're committed to math, then how are we gonna commit to improving the math scores? I hope the administrators heard from East Montpelier. Yeah, we heard that. Our extreme satisfaction with literacy, which is brilliant. And we're actually closing the gap for frame-reduce lunch. They improved more than the non-framed. It was like a static. How did you come to settle on those priorities? We wanted, we wanted to make an improvement. We wanted to move the dial between frame-reduce lunch and non-frame-reduce lunch. And the plan that was brought to us from the administrative team was to increase tier two, do this type stuff. It involved restructuring our staff. It involved taking some of our best teachers out of the classroom. Not the whole day, but part of the day. It involved some changes. We said, okay, we'll commit to it for three years. Let's see what it showed. And it looks brilliant in literacy. And I'll just speak for myself. I was tremendously disappointed in math. So now it involves tweaking. Some of it, Jen pointed out very adequately that we have a lot of students that are underperforming in math and literacy. And when they're underperforming in two areas, it really, you know, so we kind of, I feel like we've solved the problem around if they're struggling in one area. But we haven't, East Montpeyote hasn't solved it on if they're struggling in two areas. So you didn't set a target for a number of kids meeting proficiency. So specifically the issue you wanted to focus on was eliminating the achievement gap. That, or you wanted to- You know, is that a fear of way to approach? I mean, this is like- Yeah, I would say you also said you wanted to improve student performance. And you were willing to say, go design it. And, you know, you can move, you can increase class size. And, you know, it was really around design a system. And it was based highly on embedded coaching, professional development at the school level. And it, you know, there's the thing that, you know, we're trying to figure out exactly why some of the math, we know some more than why some of the math. We didn't give all the time to cook last year and the year before we had to sacrifice math, coaching and math interventions to student need, individuals to some of the individual needs within the building. And Carter couldn't put her time in that she was going to try to put in because we had special ed needs. And she was a special educator and we had to move those over. We think this year at the back. Chris, that's where I think, and I mean, our board does a lot of bad things. It's not like we're great board. But in this one particular area, I mean, I think we're pretty laser focused. And when we get results, we're waiting to get the results and we want to see what they are. And we have expectations on what's going to happen. And we continue to support the system. And when staff or community members argue, we listen patiently and we explain why we did that and what our priorities are. And if they want to disagree, then that's okay. But that's what we've asked and we're supporting it. Did you have community input into the initial decision making? Probably not. No, I don't think you really did. I think you just said as a board, we're going to take the stance and we're going to stay with it. And you gave us two years, start showing us results in two years. And you really let the administrators design the system with the staff, which is something Marianne had been dying and Alicia's continued with. Bill, and you're, I don't know, I'm interested in either one of your takes on this, but are the goals that the School Quality Committee has drafted to present to the SU Board? Are those advancing or in service to this vision of? I think it's the first prioritization that you're describing. It's the first step. It's the first step for the Board to say, we're looking at the data because it's the first time that all our math teachers have set goals on student performance. We've not done that before in Washington Central. Yeah, you might say it's the first step or it might say the first step was defining the learning outcomes. It's been five years we've been working towards this. What you're describing I think is the direction for the SU that you're just further along. And it's harder for the SU because we're just six different entities, I think. Yeah, we just have, the data piece is much different in different schools because different schools have different levels of experience in using data to inform instruction. So for some of our schools, we talked about East Montpelier at School Quality. Why were they the lowest and they have the most experience in using data than have the lowest scores? And I think it's from that knowledge of knowing their kids because they've been looking at data for a long time. Where some schools, the teachers, this is the first year or the first year in a while, which they've really kind of sat down and really think about that data piece. One specific point is, so we asked for, tell us, give us a goal for significant improvement in math and literacy. And we got that with math and we expected to hear some kind of resource plan with that. And one of the resources you're asking for is prioritization from the board. I think we have to be really clear about that point. I don't know exactly what it looks like, but at some point, we do need a board level statement saying we want to prioritize math and literacy above all other things, which is what you ended up doing, right? That was a big part of the success. Well, we may not have said it that way, but we said this is the priority. Some version of that. And we haven't done that, but I think that's an appropriate response to us when we say we want to see significant improvement. You say, well, I need dollars, I need time, I need prioritization. And see what I, so yeah, I mean, my hope has been really since March and the whole idea of setting goals with all the boards and particularly this unique moment in time is that boards as we exist now would express what our priorities are educationally. So that if there's change coming in terms of how we're structured and how our communities interact with each other, that there's a clear expression of what our educational priorities are heading into that process. You know, I'm actually, Stephen, to be honest, not quite comfortable with the lack of specificity in the way you described your priorities. That you wanted to see improvement or you wanted to, I like targets. I like specific targets. I think it just, you know, sharpens thinking and sort of, you know, makes the planning that much more specific, I guess. So I've thrown out an idea, you know, I'd like, I'd love for at least a first target to be at 80% of kids that are proficient in literacy and math, you know, and there's also been a thing that I've seen around that from one time or another through tier one instruction is like another piece of that goal that's been thrown out. So yeah, I mean, there's different ways of doing it. We could do that or we could go to, I guess this is a question then for the committee is that we're supposed to, you know, the school quality committee is gonna do a presentation, has been preparing a presentation to the SU board for our next meeting. And I guess a question for the committee is, you know, do we wanna come out of that meeting and put something on the table for the SU board and the boards separately to consider in terms of adopting priorities or sort of stating, you know, what our priorities are. So that the leadership team then has a clear statement from us that this is what we wanna get behind and defend and will demand. I don't know if I said that one a lot. So we're building the December 5th SU budget agenda. We are, that's on our agenda for tonight. And we've talked time at the schools on math that can conceivably improve math results. We control time at the SU board meeting. And I was a chair for a lot of it. So I'll take some of the fault. We've never allocated time, a lot of time to a full board meeting to have a discussion what say about student learning outcomes around math. And what is, okay, you know, here's a presentation, here's some education. What do we expect? What do we as an SU board expect? Do we want math and literacy proficiency at 80% through tier one education? That to me is a pretty, you know, and over, you know, percentage increase over X number of years. That's what the boards expect. Administrators, there's your marching orders, go design something, bring it to us and ask us to resource it. Or ask us to reallocate resources that exist to support that. And our response can't be, we'll know we don't wanna reallocate those resources. Has to be okay in your professional opinion. Those are the lowest priority resources, they need to be shifted from here to there. We go, thank you very much for your work, let's shift them. But my point is to spend time in the December 5th meeting, allocate a sufficient amount of time to have this discussion. What I wanna say to that is that the December 5th meeting uniquely in recent months is not a carousel meeting. It is only an SEO board meeting. So if we want to structure it to have more time and specifically invest time in having this conversation, we have that option. Well, maybe instead of, it's just, I don't think we've allocated a lot of time. We haven't. I guess. As boards to set priorities. And I have heard, I have to say, like every board in one way or another having this conversation. Not the specific conversation, but they're talking about educational outcomes and they're talking about how they want educational outcomes to improve. And they're talking about math and literacy. So I've heard that at every single board. But it needs to be the. I understand that. What I'm trying to say is that, so I hear that we have been, we had the retreat, we've had other conversations. We asked the school quality committee to come with a recommendation on goals. I guess I'm asking, like, is there enough? And Bill is saying this is the first time he's heard the boards kind of wrestling with data and really sort of interested in this conversation. I don't know. I'm asking if it's too ambitious, I guess to, or if it's just ambitious enough for us to think we can go into the meeting on the fifth and walk out of that meeting with some decision by the SU board about what its priorities are. And I think making a significant decision like this in one more meeting does a disservice to the conversation in reflection. Over two meetings, I would say yes. But over one meeting, I just, I think it does a disservice. Yeah. So we're blending into the school quality committee topic and goal number two. But what the committee, the first part of what the committee is going to recommend for a goal for this year is exactly what Bill and his team proposed in the student monitoring outcome report for math proficiency this year. And just to remind everybody, SU-wide, we started the year at 45% proficiency. They are proposing themselves to be at 71% by June. The committee looked at that and said, that's a pretty ambitious goal. That feels like a lot of growth in not even a full year, well, one school year. We'd be very happy if we achieve that. I also haven't heard any kind of request associated with that specifically. Nope. So I've even asked, I've heard the prioritization request. Right, I mean, I'm at the point where I need to have to know, I need to know the board has our back and this is your priority and when pushed by the community. And if you say we need to have more conversations within the community, I'll wait. But I need to know, I need to know those from each board. I think we need to have a sense of what we might be giving up or might be. So with the current resources and the current time, you will have to give up something in your schedules. There isn't, there are very few schools. There are a couple that have 60 and Jen, correct me if I'm wrong, but that has 60 minutes of math instruction plus interventions outside of math instruction happening every day. So what is the time component that you need for math? Is it 90 minutes? 60 minutes at least is best practice. Don't these say what do you think works? I mean, because it's a 68 least and a lot of people are meeting that, a lot of schools are meeting that. I'm not saying they're not, Chris. I know, but you said, it sounds like you said not all are, which indicates some are. Yeah, I mean, some have a 60 minute math block. I would say that, I can't call this for you off the top of my head, but few have a 60 minute designated tier one math block plus supplemental instruction for students who need it that does not take them away from at least part of tier one. Yeah, and especially, I'll go back again to the even the Espan Poehler example, even when there's a designated intervention block which only used for that purpose, if a student needs both math and literacy, it's, they can't get them both at the same time without sacrificing something, so. So, what's, can you do to have a sense as to how much time is needed every day for math? I mean, I think. That's what you just told us, 60 minutes. Oh, no, well, it sounded like more from dead. At least, I mean, in part, I told you we're exploring various programs as resources for math. One of the programs we were exploring said 80 minutes for mathematics, right? Some say, some don't even allocate time in that way, they talk about lessons and it's not, so I think it is minimally 60 minutes right now, we've been saying that for years and our math scores aren't moving right now, so do we need to look at even more than that? We need to at least look at that possibility, maybe. But we can't even say, we have 60 minutes of instruction everywhere. Universally, without exception, no, we can't say that that's in place yet. So you're asking for that this year? So, this is my experience. One of our principals at Romney was bold enough to go do that and we got a lot of community pushback, but it's still staying, it's still staying, it's still staying, but it was, so from that experience, I wanna know where the boards are because I didn't ask the question where the boards were before that experience because my experience has been the principals and most of the districts are able and most of the schools are able to move the schedule around. So I wanna, let me finish this. So, I wanna know the prioritization because it is, right now, there is unfortunately somewhat of a limit of, there's six and a half hours of elementary time. There's six and a half hours at U32. Right now, in middle school, is it 75 minutes? Two or three times a week. Two or three times a week, that's not enough. High school, same thing. Elementary schools at Berlin, lots of intrusions and not every day math is happening. At Cal's, it's gotten, we've gotten to 16 minutes, but I can't tell you the interventions are happening. I'm gonna go right through the schools and so we had to, in some of our places, we said, hey, it's, we want, we have extra much more time than needed and I'm not trying to attack any content area. In our Unified Arts, Art Music's PE guidance, not so much guidance, but those three, in some of our schools, we have way more time than is required. I'm not saying it isn't needed. I'm just trying to tell you what the, and as Jen said in science and social studies, we're lucky if that's happening a half hour every other day. So, if we know if kids aren't grounded in literacy and math, that we're seeing them lose opportunities in middle and high school and elective, and we're not even gonna have electives anymore because of the way proficiency's going, but they don't have fewer choices of courses they may wanna take. And so, while we let the, for the whole child piece, which I totally agree with, but when I look at resource piece and the time we have, if we have limited time, and I've gotta look at pre-K through graduation, I'd rather have limited choices or limited opportunities at the elementary school to ensure the basics are done to give more opportunities at the middle and high. I don't feel, and I wanna use that word appropriately, I feel that that's where our communities are. And so, that's why I'm asking for the board prioritization. And I was just gonna say, I don't think among the folks who are complaining about 60 minutes of math, it's complaining about sports loss. And so, that's where it becomes a community conversation is, what do you, what, and they see hard community choices. These are things that need to be done. And now, details which were in the backing order, these other things, these other like art and music and PDE, where they stand. Unless we expand the day, because there is a limitation in time. I don't get it. Or we extend the school day. That's what I meant. That's what I just said. Yeah, we can expand this again, we've asked that question, and we were in a negotiation here, but just if you take the simple calculation, I asked Laura to do it the other day. I said, you just do a quick, back the envelope calculation. It's about a million dollars to get a half hour. So, two million, what's one person, like 37 million? Our budget? Our total budget's about? Total budget's about 37 million. 37? If you're adding everybody up. 27, I thought we were right. Well, I think he's not knitting out some of the Washington Central Assessments. Oh, okay. Yeah, I think again, we're, I guess I'm pushing a little bit because I feel like we're long overdue to have this conversation, and we're coming to it also late in terms of other things that are happening right now. I guess I'm convinced that stating our priorities ought to be done. It should've been done maybe a while ago. I feel a little bit embarrassed actually and guilty perhaps for our kids that we haven't done. I also feel like politically speaking, if there's going to be a consolidation and there's gonna be a new board, and that new board is gonna be the one that is stating the priorities and trying to make some of these changes. There's gonna be this kind of sense of like, here's this new board coming in and kind of ordering everybody around and sort of trying to do this new way of doing things. And this is exactly what we were afraid of and all this kind of stuff. And I think that's unfortunate because I think that it's been our job to put on the table what we think is important and to insist that it happens. We just haven't done it as effectively as we could have. And I, me first of all, and so that's why I've been pushing this hard over the last several months. I guess I'm just saying to this committee is just to say it aloud, it's incredibly important to me that we try to push this as far as we possibly can as constituted as we are now because I think there's value in it. For us, for the kids, for the transition, that it seems like we're about to go through. I would push them. I don't know. I hate what you're saying, Chris, about this is the conversation that I feel like we've been trying to have really for the last several months and we have been moving in the direction of having it. So I hear what you're saying, like doing this in one meeting is not enough and maybe there's appetite to have two meetings or maybe, I don't really know, but I guess my own sense of urgency about it is that I would push. All the options, essentially, on including expanding the school day. I mean, because there are important things that some kids will not get unless they're getting through school and I think about art and music, things like that. I think our job is to say at a high level, at a 30,000-foot level, like what do we think is bottom line, non-negotiable has to happen and then we ask the administrators and the educators who have the experience and the training and the knowledge of the system, what do you come back to us with a plan for how to do this? And that all looks community-input because some communities may value certain things and should be represented by our communities and expanding the school day. I agree, but that's not what we have to do on December 5th. I was a little excited, but, well, I don't know if I was expanding the school year. Talk about trying to address the priorities. I mean, I think Bill said that there's not enough time to do the student-learning outcomes as it is. And so we're offering a goal that we cannot even support, but we shouldn't be offering a goal that we know is unattainable and not because we don't have the time and resources to do it right now. But that's the conversation that we should be having with ourselves and with our communities. That's the conversation. So we're saying- What student-learning outcome we're willing to- Not pursue? I think we're- I mean, that's what he's saying. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. Have that conversation. Have that conversation. And I think as a board, you should have that conversation first. Where do you stand as a collective board? I think you know, I don't, I actually find it hard to believe that our board members don't understand what their communities are saying. I think you know your community's very well. As I watch all their boards, you know your community is- One, you say that, but then you talk about the pushback. With some members, fairly by some members, but then that is kind of crazy to, the teacher's not speaking up. Not all community members will speak up. And so do you, the ones who do speak up, you're saying that they're the representative of the staff. You say no, because you don't hear from the others. Same thing. Same thing with the community. I'm suspecting. So, I just, I do believe in community engagement, but I also feel like it's a, that we practice representative government. And that it's our job to do what we think is right. And it's also our job, if we feel that it's necessary to go out and explain that to people who disagree with us, or if there's pushback or two, and to say like, we have had the conversations, and the kids are the most important thing. This is the entire reason for our being here, is so that our kids will acquire and master a certain skills. And we're just not gonna, if you want somebody a different approach, you'll like somebody else. I actually, I honestly feel that way about it. Well, yeah. So, maybe. 720, so. So, to get back to the budget, what I'm hearing is, there's no request for additional resources at this time for the budget. I don't think I was hearing that before. No, you didn't hear that. What I said to you is I won't give you a plan. I can give you numbers and additional money, but where we think we can get to, because we had three years ago around this table, it talked about trying to have an additional job coach. I'm not necessarily gonna, as you know, we haven't stayed necessarily with job coaches without money. We've just stayed with professional development. I can tell you right now that the curriculum camp that's funded right now for this year, we can pay for with Title IIA federal money. I can't guarantee that's gonna be there. That's been your biggest, for lack of better words, research and development work for your staff has been totally funded by federal dollars. That costs about 60,000 is about the most expensive of the last three years as I look at total cost. I've told you what an extra half hour will cost, and I would tell you right now if you wanted to add an extra in-service day, it costs about $70,000, and an additional cost you $80,000. This is adding to the schedule beyond 175 days, is that the thing? Yeah, we have 190 days, 190 days, we have 10 in-service days. There are some of those that are called for in the contract for certain activities to happen. So you're saying if we wanted to make 195 days and we wanted five days of in-service, it would be $300,000, roughly speaking. Whatever, 70, yeah, 70 times five is 350,000. But that's a negotiation issue also. Well, we'd have to get into negotiations. Yeah, some of the stuff, I'm being a little cagey on numbers. We've got negotiations we're in the middle of. But I'm also being pretty transparent that a half hour, when you add up all the pair of educators for an extra half hours, about a million dollars. So those are the places, Chris, as you said, having those conversations with the community and with the boards about where are the priorities. The thing I want to protect very, I want to ensure to protect, and I think if we found out that we were losing our Title 2A money, we would scramble and have to look at and look at fund balance for coming up with $60,000 for the next year and get it into the budget. I think that's a tenuous place. I think the curriculum is cool. The curriculum, we call it curriculum camp. Yeah, okay. At the end of the year, where there's three days for teachers. We have some local money, not much, most of it's grant money that comes in for that. You know, we had thought about an extra coach. What we have found and Jen was talking about earlier, we have spread our coaches too thin to really have much impact. So when Stephen says, you know, what's the change? The best coaching happens when the coach is in the buildings down the hall. It doesn't happen when it's scheduled up C ever six or eight weeks. You know, we hear that from the coaching experts. We just spent a couple of days with Jim Knight. He's one of the leading experts in the nation about how coaching works well, what works for coaching. You know, and that's what Eastmont could have success is they were willing to say, we're gonna take two of our best teachers out, part of them. And it was one FTE total and put them into coaching along with intervention. Some of their other work was interventions. And give them high, give the coaches high PD, a lot of PD to work. So, you know, if I were looking at a money and I were looking at something, I first want to make sure I had the 60,000 for curriculum camp doesn't mean that it would be used that way. If we still had federal funds, we'd use it for other professional development. My next place would be looking that either an additional day and some of this we might be able to do in contract negotiations about saying, how can we get more freed up in service days? And some of it is increasing, you know, or, you know, that extra day is $70,000, you know? I think I, and Jen tell me, I mean, you tell me if I'm going on. We've talked a little bit about this today, but you know, I think I will look at those before additional coaching, but we may want to. And that's where we need to have more conversations with our staff. You know, we just haven't gotten to that. I can't give you that specific because I want to be able to engage our staff and what they think will help them as well. And you've got to have, you know, for people to grow and improve, it's, there's needs to be ownership. Yeah, I mean, there's all sorts of research too about you can't, you can't force coaching, right? Like you can't, you can't prescribe, right? You, coaching needs to happen because people want to leverage the coach to improve their professional practice. And one of the things we just talked about with Jim Knight at the training the other day is that the sign of a professional is that the professional is committed to continuous improvement, right? So that, and that's the culture that we are continuing to grow in this learning community, but you can't say, oh, the coach is here, you've got to sign up for a coaching cycle because it's not going to be impactful. Somebody who has an aspect of their practice that they want to improve, and they set a meaningful goal with the coach and then decide what's the, what is the data? What are we going to look at? What are we going to try? How are we going to know what's working? Those sorts of things. That's where we're going to see the difference with coaching. Remind me, what is 1% of the SU budget? Sorry, I don't know. 3,000? How much? Roughly 9,000 to 93,000 depending on how you're looking at it. So the numbers you get in my left hand came up to like 210,000 if I added in the 80 for the coach. If you had the 80 for the coach, otherwise it was 130. Yeah, I mean, the only day of in-service is 100, but I'm not saying that's the answer. I'm just going to give some relative numbers and saying we would look at that towards professional development in which ways it's going to best impact. But I don't want to, this is back to being vague and specific as trying to balance that. Which number do you have in your mind? I mean, you have a number, it's just how I'm going to use it. I'm in that 130 area, when I was thinking about it is about an area, but I just don't know how we're going to use it. And I'm someone who tends to be like Steven and like I want to plan before I go ask him for money. That's who I am. I'm saying that if you just went to the affiliate board last night. But, yeah. You're saying that if you just went to the affiliate board last night. Yeah. There was a question in their budget about, you know, should we just put in extra money for some purpose related to your professional development? And he was saying like, that's not what we do. Like tell us what you want to do and then we'll allocate the money for it. I'm just speaking for you Steven. So, we'll be back. Yeah, I mean, it's a little, it is vague. Yeah. So congratulations. You've succeeded in making it vague. I don't know exactly. It's sort of, you're saying here what all the things cost. Do something if you want to. So this is why I feel this way. And part of it is the ambivalence of where we are with governance and where we're going to be with an SU budget. You asked me last time as well to look at what's the right size for the SU for the supervisory union budget. As we look at it now for fund balance and where should we be at? We haven't had time to do that. Laura and I talked about the time it would take to do it but in the priorities or everything to get done here it hasn't hit the list to be done yet. Of like, what is the right level? And then, so if you think about that as just only a Washington central budget but you think about that as a merged supervisory union, what is the right piece? It's not gonna be 4% of all the $28 million of budget that we need in fund balance and reserve. We know, I know it's gonna be less. I don't know how much less it's gonna be because we haven't, I mean I've asked Laura some questions just today of like, so like what's been some of the biggest years that we've gone beyond our budgets? What's been that amount if we total that up? And then start to look at risk analysis. So there might be money. I just don't know that sitting here today for you. So I can't be a planful CEO for you and say so well maybe, hey, if we use half the, if we need half the general fund balance then what we currently have in all these separate entities what do we do with that money? Do we put it into capital plans for the buildings? Do we put it into improved instructional, improved instructional abilities of our staff? There's many things we can think about that. I just don't have a planned out you know, sequence for the use of those fiscal reserves. So the question that is, does the executive committee want to propose to the SU Board that we increase the budget from the draft we've been given for an unspecified, for unspecified cost related to professional development? How about anticipated professional development? As opposed to unspecified, I mean it's just, oh I know, it's just language, but what's anticipated? I think that there'll be, if there will be something planned, there'll be more information as it evolves. Half hour or whatever. Well, half hour would be a lot of money. There'd be a million dollar budget. Right, excuse me, I just, that's the answer, whatever. And that would be to the SU budget would be across the board. Right, they'd each have to have it. So I'm going to say this, is a lot easier to plan it when it's in one budget than when you have to pull it through each individual. It's going to happen with all the teachers, but if you say, hey, sprinkle this out into all the school entities, it just makes it a lot harder for Lori to have to track and us to combine. We do that enough with enough other things we do. Well that's going to happen in next year's budget. So yeah, what we're discussing now seems a little abstract. It's $100,000 and a $39 budget is what we're talking about. Or, you know, I think it should be more, actually, than that, because it sounds like that's the minimum, and it sounds like we want more than the minimum. So, actually, $200,000, at least. You know my answer you saw me last time. Oh, let's hear it. Yeah, I haven't even told you, but go ahead. My votes, no. I'm not supporting money in the budget that we don't know how we're using, or that it's vaguely defined. Not doing it. The place to take that from was where we heard last night. Where? From the surplus. Yeah, fund balance. That's what you were talking about, but I didn't know what the fund balance would be needed in a merged system, and there may be places to go from there. Or we may come back to you and say, take it from fund balance when you have a request. Our projected fund balance in the SE budget is $267,000 right now. I have no idea. I don't have the data or probably the vulnerability to understand what a fund balance should be on the combined school system, or what it will be once the fund balances are combined. A little over $2 million, right, Lauren? Well, it is, but I started totaling up where everybody's from making restrictions. Yeah. So it's about $1.7 million after everybody's done doing the restrictions that I'm aware of. Yeah. But that's like 6% of a $39. Yeah. Yes, it is. Let's see. I go back to what I said, structural way back. So I'll say no cost. It involves a reallocation. So no additional cost. Priority, the boards can make, is all elementary schools will have 60 minutes of tier one math instruction. If an elementary school is already meeting that, it's being met. Or it could be we want 60 minutes of tier one math instruction all the elementary schools, and we want 30 minutes of tier two available in all the elementary schools. In the middle school and high school, we want an hour math instruction every day on making stuff up. So we wouldn't be that, the boards might not be that specific, but we want, or maybe we could be that specific. So it's not, I don't want to say we'll take more money that's not specified yet, but will be specified because we want to improve math. I think we say we want math to improve, bring it up to minimal standards, or increase the time available for tier one math than what's currently being offered, something like that. And I think that would be, and it doesn't require extra money and as you budget, it's just, it's taken a statement to the U32 high school and middle school and the five elementary schools, you will do this. You will do this. You will increase the amount of time spent in tier one math instruction, and you will build time in the day to provide some tier two interventions for math if you know what I'm already providing. And then it's up to the individual schools to say, all right, to do that, this is what we're going to give up or to do that, this is how we're going to make a change or not make a change. So I'm going to, it's just been here a long time, it's 7.35 or a well past. No, no, no, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to sort of point that. No, no, no, I didn't take it that well. Personally, I'm censoring myself. I would like to dispense with the budget issue and move on to other ideas in the agenda. So I think honestly that the time for us to have expressed our priorities, sort of maybe reflected in this budget was probably in June or the latest August or September. We didn't do that. So I guess, you know, we're not, there's not a clear ask. I hear the sort of, you know, the expression of the larger picture is very useful and motivating, I think, but in terms of making a small decision about this budget doesn't seem forcing, I guess. So I propose that we, that we not change the budget. But I think I would probably couple that with a strong sort of desire to go into the SU Board and try to get something done in terms of prioritization so that in the future, when these conversations come up, you know, it's, I don't know, we're making better and more informed decisions that are aligned with priorities that have been set. So that makes any sense. To dispense with the budget issue, you can pull that back. I guess I would just, I'm the chair. Does anybody else have a different proposal from the table? Does anybody else want to propose something different leaving the budget as it is? Can I just, can I make an observation? Yes. Okay, I'm just going to, so I've heard a lot of words like push, defend, demand, they, us. And I just want to make the observation that if we're going to move forward, we all have vital roles to play across the SU and service to our kids. And I just want to put out there that it needs to be we, and it needs to be a shared vision that we can all get around so that when things get hard, which they inevitably will down the line, we're united and we know that each of us has a role to play. But that we're doing it in service to our students and in collaboration with each other. I just, the whole, like the rush, there's a push and a pull that I'm hearing right now and I just want to reflect back and acknowledge also that in the uncertainty of whatever's going to happen governance-wise, that we can frame it as an opportunity as well to come back and have a conversation. So I feel like that was completely improv and I hope I'm not defending anybody, but I just wanted to reflect back some of the words that I heard the most tonight in this conversation. I would move that we increase the budget by $130,000 because that's what I'm hearing is needed for professional development, which is opposed to time allocation, which I think is a very different animal. And just, you know, even without knowing the details. Could you streamline the motion? Yes, I move that we move to increase $130,000 for professional development. In any area or in math? As our administrators seem fit. As our administrators seem fit. Is there a second? Motion passed. You need one to recommend, I'm sorry, it's not on the action items. To recommend? Usually this committee votes to recommend it. So I'll move that we recommend the budget as well, too. Can we do that if it's not on the action agenda? You can always do that. It's your decisions of what you want to do as a board. Is there a second? A second. Discussion? Further discussion? All those in favor of recommending the budget to the SU board as presented, you say aye. Opposed? Nay. Abstentions? Motion carries. Thank you. 2.2. I think we can 10 minutes. I propose we table that one. Let's table this one. Act 46. Do we want to have report outs from the committee? I think everyone in their individual boards has had report outs, pretty much, from the two committees, what's been going on. I don't think anything has substantially changed. The articles committees planning to kick into high gear here and spend a better part of the day trying to draft something so we can get it polished off and now to legal review and individual board review, too. Right. Tentatively looking at December 7th, having to check with Bill about that day. Anything else on high 46? School quality committee? Yeah, so here's what we're prepared to recommend that the SU board adopt the set of math learning goals that are in the student monitoring report. There'll be a committee memo that lays this out and that we then request comparable goals for literacy. Right, so there'll be more work to be done. Bill said that's kind of one of the risks that can be done in a reasonable amount of time. And then, complete this year, ask for some reflection by the staff, individually and collectively about how the goal setting process went and how the actual student learning performance went and from that develop a set of proposals for multi-year goals, plans, resource allocation for math and literacy. Significant improvement in math and literacy. So we had come into this thinking we would be asking for multi-year. The staff came back with a one-year. We're satisfied with that, we don't want to lose sight of them all the year. So that's what we came up with and will be proposing and talking about it. I wonder if we want to allocate some of our December 5th time to a discussion about prioritization and how how strongly do our boards feel about math and literacy as top priorities? I'm not sure exactly how to frame it. We could probably spend some time off-line but do we want to allocate time that night to having that discussion? It seems like if we're moving towards a multi-year plan for significant improvement we're going to have to answer that question. Quality subcommittee is going to come up again under the SU agenda but anybody have any questions for Kari? I would just like to thank that committee for what I think has been continued very high quality work. Thank you. So yeah, let's try to see if we can get the SU agenda. There is a budget presentation obviously and a recommendation executive committee. I believe when we created the two of the 46 subcommittees we required that they report out at the December 5th meeting essentially the progress of their work. So that will have to be on the agenda as well. The school quality committee we've asked to come with this report that Kari and colleagues are preparing. I'm not sure, Bill, if there are other things that have to be on our agenda for December 5th but I'm not. We're going to know a lot more in a couple of weeks. Yes, that's right. Because there are traditional things that do happen there but they may not. Alright, so we're just going to question Mark. Well usually we're approving a budget and then I have to go look at the old agenda and I always go back and look at the year before about the required motions that have to be done by the SU Board and they may or may not have to be done. Chris, I don't remember those right off the top of my head. I would suggest that anything that we think needs to be required to be done at that meeting should be done in the off chance that an injunction is issued just because it's a time factor and it's a consideration that we're not quite short. You know, contingencies certainly but I think we just would have to have other meetings. I think we would have to have other meetings. And then what's the Executive Committee's preference with regard to putting something else on the agenda about this larger conversation or do we think the School Quality Committee's report would lead into that or... I think we should be specific to that. Okay. Just having a specific journal and some people forewarned rather than just assuming it will be part of the School Quality Committee presentation. Do we want to say what do we want educational priorities? Forward discussion on educational priorities and trade-offs because just putting it as priorities without taking into account the trade-offs doesn't mean much. But could we still build it off? I'm just going to notice. Build priorities off what is presented. I would just hate to have... We're going to present some information and some recommendations. To me it would be efficient and constructive to now take what we've heard and how do we want to prioritize that? Or do we want to prioritize that? So that instead of everyone coming in and we've got 30 different ideas on what we want to talk about prioritizing, we want to talk about this information. Do we want to prioritize it? And if we do, how are we going to prioritize it? Well, with this information in the context of the whole. It's not a standalone. We're not prioritizing among this narrow group of information. We're talking about in terms of the entire school day. So let me... Yeah, and I don't know exactly how to do this. I didn't hear Bill and Jen's presentation before tonight, so... Anyone got to pick up out there with lights on? Looks like someone has a pickup truck with lights that are dying? Yeah. Someone got a pickup truck? No? Okay. Just making sure. Just because we see. It's been out there. No, it's my husband. Waiting for me. Oh. Sorry. Yikes. Yikes. And he goes... Sorry, I just saw it. It got dimmer and dimmer. Yeah, I told him to comment seven. Sorry. No, it's okay. At least we know it's no one breaking in or doing something. Yeah, and I think there's value in kind of what Jen and Bill presented in terms of framing the conversation. I don't know how it syncs up with what Kari, the School Quality Committee, has been talking about. I don't know how to... Yeah, so my thought about having the prioritization discussion is not so much about this year, but about before we get to this multi-year plan proposal, let's not have the staff come back and say, well, what is the priority? Let's start to get clear now. It might take more than one discussion. Certainly by the time the next round of budgeting happens, we want to have some clarity on prioritization, as we've been told, but that's really... I like that, yeah. So basically the School Quality Committee is coming, and one of its recommendations is we want to ask the leadership team for what a three-five-year plan looks like. But in order to do that, we're hearing back from the leadership team that we need the boards to say what our priorities are, something like that. Does that make sense? Yeah. I can flesh out the memo a little bit to frame that. Okay. Is that... Do we need that discussion at all for actions for this year between December and June? Send more about that, Chris. Not quite fine. Well, within two weeks, there's a goal to improve if a proficiency from 45% to 71%? That's a quarter? 26%? Yeah, it's quite a bit. So is there a need for clarity in terms of the movement of the schedule of teachers to achieve that goal, or the schedules and the signings that are in place now are expected to achieve that? That's a really good question. Well, do you think about it? Can I...? Yes, please go ahead. I don't think that requires any port actions. Tell me if I'm wrong, but that's what the teachers said they would do. Yeah, based on... They didn't ask for anything. Their expectation is... They set those goals based on... The expectations are we're going to be able to get to 71%. Okay, so doesn't require any administrative action in terms of allocation of resources, time, and anything like that? So I would add... I'm going to go to the same place where Stephen is. The reason why this goal is so powerful, and for some of our teachers, it's the first time of really declaring this is where I think my students will be. I think for some of them they'll obtain it, and some of them they won't. But that's the learning. That's the action research part, and the learning from using data to inform their instruction. So I think that's... I think changing inputs at this point, after we've already asked them to make those goals, we're going to learn from it. We may or may not achieve it. I don't think that that's what's the most important thing of it. The most important thing is how are we using data, and how are we using that to judge where our students are at, and what actions did we take? So I think leaving it right now where it is is probably the best thing, because we're going to get a lot of learning out of this. This is our first time doing this. So trying to change up the variables and the inputs are already two months past that, or a month and a half past that decision point, I think we keep going with what we're going with right now. I don't know if you have any different thoughts. We really asked folks to set what they thought were realistic goals, and based on what the current status is. So I think they were prepared to do that. I think they were very thoughtful in their approach. They were looking at both achievement and growth, and doing something like this for many folks the first time. Good faith effort, good attempt, and let's see where we come. I mean, I think Bill's exactly right. It's a learning experience for everybody. We might be right on track. We might not hit it. We might exceed our goal, and we can analyze what happened, reflect, and do better next time around. And that's where we'll get a lot more, a clearer plan of what do we need to move forward, because we'll be collecting the School Quality Committee asking for that reflection, ensuring that reflection happens on an individual basis. That becomes a step in bringing the staff along. So math was a priority. We asked for your input. This is what you thought was realistic. It was realistic, and you did that. So understanding that, if we want to move the needle a little bit more, is it realistic to think you can improve by five more percent, and we can just say we want you to do it, or do you need resources to do that? And then over multiple years, what would that look like to support and resource? But as a board member, when I saw staff say, they think this is realistic, how is this data cut? If we can hit that. I think we know we're thrilled. We'll be thrilled. It's a lot easier from my perspective. It doesn't make it easier for the staff. They'll be working their butts off. So yeah, I haven't heard any requests for resources. They think they can do it. So let's give them the time and the space to do it. And in the spring, either have a celebration or a commiseration, and if it's a celebration, let's keep going if it's less than that. Okay, we have faith in you. What do you need to hit that goal the next time? Okay. So I think we have a pretty full agenda, actually, for the SU meeting. I'm assuming there are no other sort of burning suggestions for what needs to come up then. I guess I would also ask if it's the sense of the executive committee that there can be a little flexibility in terms of billing myself, planning for the timing of that meeting. I want to make sure that we sort of do some real thinking about how to do that. Hopefully, more efficiently than we did tonight. Will we need to spend the time? I think so. I don't know what we would normally budget for that meeting if it would be too much. We'll just look at it, I guess, and try to make sure we're confident that you and Bill can develop a proper agenda. We'll try to live up to your kind expectations there. Yeah, we're here, but for the action item, I'm not sure where the bill goes. I'll make a motion to approve board orders in the amount of $890,474.16x. I'll second. Can I ask a question before we vote? Oh, sorry. Yeah. So aquatic rehabilitation? The students have it. The student has it written into their IEP. Okay. Any more pointers? Okay. Any other questions or discussion about the board orders? All those in favor of approving the board orders? We'll say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Motion carries. Accepting the retirement of a special ed. On page 15. I would make a motion to accept the retirement of Susan Deneth as a special education teacher. Is there a second? Any discussion? All those in favor of the motion? They say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstentions? Motion carries. The superintendent's report is on page 16. So I thought I'd give you a highlight just some great things that have been going on this fall. If you don't follow me on Twitter or Facebook, there's a lot more on there than what we've selected we've pulled out of here. So try to fix up that with every couple things every week. What went up today was celebrating. We had a great story on CAX about it. They turned it kind of into a bullying story about how we're supporting bullying and improving that, but it was really started out as a trauma. Well, I saw it at 11 o'clock. I don't know if that was a full one. That wasn't the full one. Because I didn't come away with bullying. Yeah. I came away with being just supportive of getting kids to talk. And it started as supporting kids with their trauma transform work that we've been doing. And they all used it for where they wanted to go. And they talked about it. It really did a nice job of both at our elementary school and U32, the work we were doing with kids to work together to solve issues. So I just watched the long version right before at three o'clock today. So it's on the BCAX website. Was it reported tonight? It was reported last night, on the six o'clock. But I think you've been probably... You can get it right off the website. It's right on the website. Sarah, the second thing I'd let you know, and I did let Matthew know this, Sally Hall, our HR coordinator, had tendered her resignation. She was moving on to other opportunities. Her last day of work was last Friday. So we're hiring right now for HR coordinator. And if we had more time, I would discuss this more with you. But the whole central office we've been talking about, the work we're doing, the roles and responsibilities, some of that was aligned with the work on salary levels and the non-bargaining levels and starting to look at that. And Laura and I have been talking and we really need to look at our... to get ready for looking at how we're compensating people. We need to look, especially in the central office, we need to look at workloads on our business operations. So we're starting to look at that as well. I may come back to you asking to expand the salary piece so that we have our business operations, especially our HR working. We have different folks who do different parts of HR that really aren't under the HR coordinator. For example, our payroll person does a lot of benefits support to personnel. So Lori was the one who brought it to me. She said, you know, we should really look at our operations here and what we're doing before we do a salary analysis. As I told you last month or last meeting, November 6th, we haven't been able to get to that work. We're really trying to say, are we doing things right? And some of that's not only come from the HR piece and the salary, but also from the software transferring to a new fiscal software. Lori said, hey, we're going to make this switch to software. We should really, software mirrors our operations. We should ensure we're doing this right. So we're starting to take some looks at that as well. And I'll bring you more information next time we meet on that. Thanks. Any questions for Bill? Any director's report on page 19? I just want to say I really like it. I hope that David Melmick class goes every year. It's great that there's that much demand. I really like the Zenith program. That sounds awesome. I'd love to hear more about that at some point, but that's not an official request. I'd be careful to say that. The finance report is on page 20. Nothing's changed. We just met two weeks ago. Thanks for being here. We had a clock to tell us. We're good. You need to be here for the budget conversation. Both Jen and Lori need to use that. The policy committee was postponed. The school quality committee heard negotiations. We're going to be starting negotiations in Monday. Feature items, special educational hiring process. I'm not sure where we're going to get to that. Honestly, it's fine. Are there any other future items? Would it be worthwhile to keep prioritization on there? To me, you understand. I'd like to see that one more. I do. Educational. Just before we adjourn, since we're quite late, I just want to say, Bill and Jen, how much I appreciate the response of the leadership team to that question. I think it went in the direction none of us were really expecting, but I really appreciate the thinking behind it and the conversation that sparked. I think that it's the sentiment I'm gathering from this evening because it's our intent to respond, to just express appreciation, I guess, and the leadership team on our behalf. I appreciate that. With that, we are adjourned at 8.05. Apologies and thanks for everyone's patience. Thank you very much.