 All right. Well, good evening everyone and welcome to the first session of the community conversations for the Arlington Public Schools. I'm Jillian Harvey, the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Coordinator for the town of Arlington, and I'll be your moderator for tonight's discussion. So tonight I'll be joined by school leadership and building administrators to discuss school discipline. And during the panel discussion, building administrators will present some recent discipline data, give an analysis around that data, and identify some next steps to address some issues of disproportionality, and then we'll be responding to some questions from the community. So I just want to go through who we have with us tonight. We've got a pretty large panel, so you'll get to hear from most folks. So tonight we've got Dr. Kathleen Bodie, the superintendent of schools, Dr. Roderick McNeil Jr., assistant superintendent, Dr. Matthew Janger, the principal of Arlington High School, Brian Merranger, the Audison Middle School principal, Fabian Pierre Maxwell, the Gibbs School principal, Wendy Salvatore, the assistant principal at Gibbs. We've got Kate Parrots, the Hardy Elementary School principal, Fad Dingman, the Dallin Elementary School principal, Dr. Michael Hanna, the Stratton Elementary School principal, Stephanie Surchkov, the Brackett Elementary School principal, Andrew Hamadi, the Pierce Elementary School principal. And additionally, we've got a few more folks too. We've got Cindy Curran, the court and home liaison and diversion coordinator, Rochelle Lubino, the assistant principal at Audison Middle School. We've got Veronica Tivnin, the dean of students at Arlington High School, Robert D. Loretto, another dean of students at Arlington High School, Mark McEnney, the Bishop Elementary School principal, Paula McKnight, the dean of students, and Maureen Murphy, the assistant principal at Audison Middle School. So now I'm just going to turn it over to Dr. McNeil and Dr. Bodie for some opening remarks. Thank you, Ms. Harvey. Good evening, everyone. Thank you for joining us this evening for this important conversation on discipline. The issue of discipline disproportionality has been ongoing discussion and focus in the Arlington Public Schools for many years and was recently talked about by students in the Globe article and the rally for Black Lives Matter in June. I want our students to know that we are listening. We acknowledge that discipline disparities remain a problem. And the fact that the progress has been made in reducing these disparities is something we have worked on, but it still exists. We know that it is not enough to just focus on reducing disparity numbers in our discipline reports, but to look more deeply at the cultures we have in our schools that have an effect on learning and behavior. We know that the environments in our schools are important in fostering a feeling of belonging and appreciation of who you are. Improving the social-emotional cultures in all of our schools has been a district goal for many years and has included professional development and culturally responsive teaching and implicit bias. Our goal in the district is equity. What I want the community to know is that the Arlington Public Schools remains committed to this goal. We will continue our work to ensure safe and supportive schools and reducing all racial disparities. This commitment has been there and will continue to be there this year and the years ahead. Thank you. And Dr. McNeil. Thank you very much, Dr. Bodie. One of the strategies that we utilize in order to ensure a welcoming environment for all students is professional development. And I'm going to share some of the professional development workshops and trainings that we've offered to all staff throughout the past couple of years. At the elementary and middle schools, we have invested in responsive classroom and other SEL curricula to teach students how to cultivate and maintain positive relationships, become self-aware of their own emotions, increase their social awareness, and become responsible decision-makers and understand how to self-manage their individual behaviors and impulses. Additional training opportunities have included an annual district-wide professional development day for the past three years focused on race, equity, and inclusion. We've contracted Dr. Liza Touloucen to lead parent forums on how to talk about race with children, applying forum receiving funds from AEF to contract an outside consultant to conduct an equity audit of the district's K-12 curriculum to ensure that the resources used for instruction are inclusive of all cultures and devoid of misinformation and prejudicial material that may represent specific cultures in a demeaning manner. In addition, district administrators have participated in a book study of culturally responsive teaching and the brain promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students by Zereda Hammett, and applied for additional funding from the AEF to contract ideas which stands for initiatives for developing equity and achievement for students to facilitate workshops that train teachers and staff in anti-racist teaching practices. In fact, two of those sessions are taking place this summer, one for administrators and one for instructional staff and nurses. We have also applied and received a Chinah 17 grant to study the barriers that may prevent our black African-American students from accessing the mental health professionals within the district. We have used the funding, we've also used the funding to send our school counselors and social workers to the ideas anti-racism class and funded leadership training for the student officers in a black student union at the high school. In addition, I have created an equity and inclusion web page that contains resources that Arlington staff can access to learn more about the topics of race and sexual orientation. We understand that despite the efforts that have taken place thus far, as mentioned by Dr. Bodie, we openly acknowledge that much more work must be done to reach our goal of providing an equitable learning environment in which all students have an equal opportunity to be successful. Now at this moment, I will recognize the elementary building administrators or I would send it back to Jillian, Ms. Harvey, so that she can take us through the next part of the presentation. Great, thank you. So that really helps us lay out some, an idea of what the objectives are for tonight's discussion. So tonight this panel is going to touch upon sharing information and provide some transparency with the Arlington community to help us dispel some of the assumptions and misinformation that's been going around. So we're going to be addressing some questions that community members have by using the facts and the data that the school district has. And we're really out here like Dr. McNeil said to own it, that there is disparity, there are issues, but this school district is working really hard to combat those issues and address these disparities. So what we've been doing with these community conversations is setting up some guidelines and ground rules. And so tonight I just want to remind folks of those. So we only have so much time, so we can't address all of the questions that have come through, but we'll do our best to do so. And just to remind her that the session is being recorded, it will be available through ACMI, it's being live streamed as well. So there's a number of ways to view. The chat box will be turned off, but we are accepting live questions. So at the end of the presentation, we'll be taking some time to address some of the questions that were submitted beforehand and then take some that are live. And with that, for those ground rules, we just want to reiterate that we all have the responsibility to respect and build on the strength that diversity provides. And we will engage in polite, constructive and productive dialogue and feedback. We will respectfully disagree with each other. Unless you are a designated representative of an organization, opinions are considered your own. When sharing a question, we ask that you keep it short and to the point. And we want to use this moment in space to take some time to allow for self reflection. Lastly, take some deep breaths. We are engaging in some really serious and difficult conversations and topics that are uncomfortable to talk through. And so taking deep breaths and trying to stay calm throughout that will help. So to get us started, we're going to start the presentations and we're going to hear first from the building administrators at the elementary school level. All right, Miss Harvey, thank you very much. This is Michael Hannah. I'm the principal at Stratton Elementary. I'm one of three elementary principals who will be speaking tonight. We have most of the elementary administrative staff here this evening. I wanted to just thank Dr. McNeil and Dr. Bodie for their leadership of the principals as we continue to grow in skill and capacity in our leadership around these really important topics. I wanted to just let people take a look at this slide and give a read and I'm going to reiterate as you read that at the elementary level, we really are considering constantly the developmental need and abilities of the children. We do peer to peer conflict resolution and we spend a lot of time directly teaching social emotional skills. So our discipline system is more of a developing a habit of self discipline by explicitly teaching community building, working with the children to understand logical consequences to both preferred and unexpected behavior. We have a large scope of professional development for the adults working with the children that focuses on really positive teacher language, culturally proficient practices. And again, really emphasizing positive reinforcement and a network of not just safe adults but what we like to do is create models of conversation and interaction among the adults so that children have a constant source of what it is that they're aiming for. One framework that is particularly helpful for that is the responsive classroom. We have had many faculty trained in this area. And you can read here the different elements of responsive classroom and their guiding principles. And while all of them are important, we feel the last two on the list are the most relevant to this conversation that are proactive and very positive approach to discipline and responding to misbehavior. So relies on our understanding of the children that we teach so we aim at the development of self discipline for every student and misbehavior we see as an opportunity for growth and reflection. So this work is done primarily in the classroom with the classroom teacher with occasional support and collaboration with the school social worker and other behavioral support staff who will hear from in a moment. In very rare circumstances elementary staff and administration may use suspension from school as a response to very acute misbehavior or to address the needs of students who are adversely affected by really acute misbehavior so school staff always seek to use alternatives to suspension whenever that is the most effective and appropriate to the circumstances. But as outlined in the elementary handbook the use of suspension as a consequence can be instituted for a variety of reasons that you can read in the elementary handbook. But again, we anchor our response to misbehavior as a as a opportunity for teaching. And for that reason, suspension is very rare. And we have steered away from the consequence of sending children to the office and and interventions like that. And in so doing we found that we've been really effective in cultivating a strong community of learners who see misbehavior as an opportunity to learn even further. There are opportunities, there are occasions where all students need even more support and for that reason we have a really nice network of behavioral support staff and I'd like my colleague Kate Parrots to talk a little bit about that. I bet you would, but instead you're going to get me. Sorry. We want to add Dingman and the down elementary school. One of the core parts or core pieces of our philosophy and our approach to discipline is using a network of staff members to help manage complicated behaviors so what our goal always is in an elementary school setting is to ensure timely, compassionate and calm responses when students struggle to different degrees. To that extent, we have in all of our elementary schools, I'm brought in the role of a clinical social worker and the social worker has played a very important role in helping us establish our different management systems when it comes to students and student behaviors, both proactive and reactive so we'll classroom teachers require support. They have an entire team of educators at their disposal, including building administrators. In our social workers where a range of different hats in our building they provide direct support in the moment for students. They organize peer resolution. Sometimes that's called circles. Our core parts of restorative practice, particularly when there's conflict that takes place between students or between students and adults. Our social workers are coaches indirectly they coach staff who are asking for support or seeking support and creating classroom communities that are pro-social. When things are going well and when things are not going well and they're also co-teaching classrooms or social workers are directly instructing students in areas such as anti-bullying, some of our schools mindfulness. They're bringing their expertise into the classrooms with teachers. Our social workers are wonderful consults for our staff and students but also for our parents and they are key in emphasizing social emotional learning and it's many varied practices in our school. Our social workers on top of all those are also really key members for students with IEPs in consulting the teachers and ensuring that accommodations and best practices are implemented during the school day. And the reason why a social worker is an important role to discuss tonight is because the social worker is allowing for our schools to deconstruct systems that value power and hierarchy. And in our elementary schools what we are replacing that with priorities on relationships and teaming. We are committed as adults in our school to know every one of our children because the relationships with the children will help us better respond when there is moments that require more intensive discipline practices. So that's just an example and hopefully gives people a perspective on what it looks like in an elementary school when we are responding to a misbehavior or responding to a conflict. A team of adults led by staff members with the most expertise handling it calmly, compassionately and ideally in the most supportive way. And now we're going to move on to our next slide. And now you will hear from Kate Peretz. Now you get to hear from me. Thank you, Mr. Dagman. Dr. Hannah. So moving forward it is important that we take a couple of minutes just to talk to you all about our next steps at the elementary level. Because we are here to talk about discipline and data and the disparities that we see there. And so, as was previously mentioned, at the elementary school, types of discipline that you might think about from the past are things that we've moved away from. There is no detention at the elementary level. And an out of school suspension would be something that was very rare indeed for an extreme breach of the code of conduct, we believe that having a child be removed from their classroom community is really a very severe consequence. If there were to be suspensions, they would most likely be an in school suspension. And that time would be spent really working on learning and growing through that making, you know, making it right. So having said that, looking at the data, that data set is very small when we're talking about something like an in school suspension at the elementary level. So what we've been really thinking about is in addition to the continued support of our educators in the building of the adults in the building, working with students, the professional development that we need to put in place, which we will continue to do, but it's important to explore what are the most important pieces of data that we need to collect. And that's a real growth area for us at the elementary level is when a child is removed. When a child does need support. When someone does need to go to the office to speak to someone like the principal or the assistant principal, who is being sent. And are those numbers really disproportionately reflective of our special education community, our EL community, our students of color. And so that's something that we're working on and have been working on for the last couple of years to think about a way to do that that is consistent. One thing that I want to make sure everyone understands through our professional development is that piece of processing those moments when things don't go right is that those those events that happen. You know, there's a lot that the adults can think about about what they could have done differently was there something there. And then we have to create an environment in which someone did not feel safe, and then a student was responding to that unsafe element of whatever was happening during that day. We know that behavior is a communication of need. And it's very important for us to be able to meet that need every day, so that we can have a safe space at school. The moments of discipline really do have lasting effects on students and we want to make sure that we're putting positive things in place for them at all times and knowing that we care about that development we care about that safe space and we want children to be successful. So that data is something that we will be thinking about how to collect and thinking about how to share out with you as we do that work in the years to come. So that's the that's the story from the elementary level. And I will pass it on to Wendy at Gibbs. Thanks Kate. Hi, my name is Wendy Salvatore. I'm the assistant principal at the Gibbs middle school. Miss Pierre Maxwell is here also I am presenting as Miss Pierre Maxwell just started with us July 1 and during remote learning so she doesn't have firsthand information for what we've done for the last two years but she is present to answer any questions that anybody might have as we move forward. I just want to kind of repeat what the elementary teachers have done so the elementary schools are doing responsive classroom and Gibbs is also responsive classroom school. So we follow the same processes that the elementary schools are doing. We look at the kids do a sixth grade lens. You know we're really trying to help them figure out who they are and you know in our discipline system. We try to have very clear posted expectations. We have the expectations posted throughout our building the students take part in creating those expectations in the various areas of our building. We do a lot of skill building when we are working with students when we are redirecting them and when we are reminding them of what our expectations are. We do hold problem solving conferences between students and teachers and students and students when it is possible when students feel comfortable coming together with each other to talk about their differences that they might have had in the situation. And we reinforce again a lot of the expectations. We also do logical consequences at the Gibbs. So we have it's part of responsive classroom we have break it fix it if students do something. They steal something from the cafeteria they might have to do something in the cafeteria to fix that relationship with the staff there. If there's something in the school that they've destroyed we try to have them work with one of our custodians to try to to find a way to fix what they've broken. We use time and space in our classes if kids are struggling in class instead of sending them out of class we have a time and space space in the classroom where kids can go and sit and take some time to think about what they can do next. We have loss of privilege we have loss of privilege slips that we use in our building and we use them for cafeteria infractions recess infractions. Dress code infractions late to class time owed if students are late to class or if a teacher has to speak with them outside of the classroom. That's time that they're taking away from the classroom so they might owe that time back with a teacher. And again as I said the logical consequence slips they all go together. Thank you. One of the things that we noticed at games when we were going through our data is that you know one of the first things that happens when we go to the elementary school is the fifth graders will always say to us do we have detention. I don't know why they are there but they're always very curious about that and we tell them no you do you know that is not our practice is not to have detention. You know we like I said we have break it fix it or we have loss of concert loss of privileges. Well some of the other things we noticed is that the same students were showing up on our list more than once. Teachers are showing up on our list more than once teachers who are having incidents with students we were starting to notice a trend with that. The behaviors are you know most of them are disruptions in class. Students might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Students are being physical with each other when they're not supposed to be. Students are experiencing experimenting with inappropriate language when they get to sixth grade. And we did notice that we had infractions more with males than with females. You know I think it's something to the Gibbs is kind of that first experience that the students have is that big kind of melting pot in Arlington. You know they're they're leaving their little neighborhood schools and coming to the Gibbs there's seven elementary schools coming to the Gibbs. So the kids are really experimenting with creating relationships with teachers creating relationships with other students and really kind of experimenting with kind of what they can get away with and what they can't get away with. And so at the Gibbs we really try to work through the responsive classroom lens. We really try to work through the lens of their sixth graders. They're experimenting. They're trying to figure out what's okay to do what's not okay to do. What can I get away with what can't I get away with. And so we work really hard with modeling. Excuse me modeling and having appropriate conversations with them so that they can learn from their experiences. And I know that we will get to the specific data at the at the end of the presentation. Some of the next steps that we're going to do at Gibbs is we will do a better job at keeping track of the subcategories. When we're recording our logical consequences. We will think about how we're going to explore the data with the teachers. We probably would have done that in the spring. We just didn't have the opportunity to do that because we weren't in the building. And we will continue to support our students with skill building because we think that that is the most important thing that we can do. We need to teach them skills on how to how to get along. And with that's my last slide I believe correct Miss Harvey. Yes and now I'm going to pass it to Brian marriage or the principal at the Odyssey Middle School. Thank you. Thanks Wendy so my name is Brian marriage or I am the principal at the Odyssey Middle School. I just wanted to thank it looks like we have close to 200 people tuning in tonight. So I know this is a very important topic here in the community and I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time out to meet with us today. So I just wanted to go over a few quick things at the Odyssey and I know people want to get to questions. First of all there's kind of a twin pillars that we want to really drill down with our students. And first is that every student feels physically emotionally and psychologically safe in order for students to do their best work. They have to feel like they're supported and valued at school. The second thing we really try to emphasize at the Odyssey is you can't disrupt the learning of others. I don't think there's anything worse than when I was a teacher is to get a phone call from a parent saying that my child can't learn because of the behavior of another child. So those are two important things that we really emphasize at the Odyssey. One of the big things that we also recognize is that we have 13 and 14 year old children in our building. We have 899 of them. They make mistakes. We hope to treat them like teachable moments. We want to teach them not only civics and science and five paragraph essays but for some students we have to teach them how to get along with each other. How to be able to interact with adults. And so I think it's important as the kids leave the Odyssey and go to the high school. They have certain skills that hopefully can put them in a great trajectory to really do great things at the high school and beyond. The other thing is when we deal with students we really make sure that we try to understand their perspective. And we also try to if they've made a mistake to own their own what their behavior was reflect and learn on it. So we really want to have a learning stance here at the middle school. Kids are going to make mistakes. We want them to be able to bounce back. And as we say to kids a lot of times their character is not a mistake. It's how they recover from the mistake and how they repair it. I did want to mention something quickly about data. I think one of the things the recent conversation has talked about is looking a little bit closer at detention data. For the past few years we've focused on suspension data. It's something that the state requires us to do. The detention data was not looked at very carefully. One of the things that we did try to do this year at the Odyssey is instead of having secretaries input the discipline data including detention. We've really switched it over to the assistant principals because they're much more likely to see trends or issues with particular adults that need to be repaired. So I think we've taken a small step to hopefully get better data. I know that Dr. McNeil has really stressed with the administrators the important of looking at data to ask questions but also offer solutions. So I think in the future our data will be a lot better and hopefully we'll be able to get to root causes. Next, what we have learned. Male students are more likely than female students to be suspended or have detention. This year for example we'll get into some of the other data later but we had about 110 detentions. 102 of them were to males, 8 to females. It is dramatic how much we're giving consequences to our boys and not to our girls. Special education students. I think we'll talk about this. This is a question that someone has brought up. Two years ago 34 students were suspended. Half of them were special education students. This year so far there were 25 students that were suspended. 19 of them were special education students. It's something that we have to do better with and have an environment to accept kids who might be frustrated and act out but because of a disability is something that we have to work on. We also wanted to acknowledge like other in the elementary schools and Gibbs I think it's K through 12 the disproportionate amount of African-American students that are getting suspended. You can see they make up about 3% of the population 3 to 4% and we're suspending them at the oddison anywhere between 12 and 16%. So it's over representative. I did want to make sure that I think a lot of times we talk about discipline and I hope we're keeping the focus on different subgroups but I did want to put out that we have 899 students and we were averaging less than one detention a day. Most of the kids that come to our school in the oddison are very well behaved. It's rare to get more than one or two detentions a day. Most of the kids come to school ready to learn. One of the things I would like to talk about a little bit later is we are having an increasing kids who are getting in school suspension. I think that's a little bit of a result of students who are having difficulty in classes or in the hallway and might be part of a plan. And a lot of times we use it as a time time out for students and to rebuild relationships and try to get them back on track. So where do we have to go from here. I think there's a few places the oddison needs to go. I think we need to be a little bit more consistent with both the Gibbs and the high school and our approach. We also look at the different data that we can all glean so that we're on the same page. We don't want kids switching from the Gibbs, the oddison to the high school to have a different experience and not understand kind of the rules of the road. We also need to look at our anti-racist curriculum. We need to start acknowledging and I think we have through the leadership of Dr. McNeill with a lot of the professional development, our white privilege are looking at our own implicit bias and looking at systemic racism. I know that's something that will continue and is important to the district. We also need to develop skills that we give to our kids so that they can navigate difficult situations and they can learn from their behaviors. So with that, I hopefully kept that relatively short. I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Jengar. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thanks again to all the folks in the community who have chosen to come out and listen to this talk. I really appreciate it. Thanks to everybody else who went before. I don't know about you, but as I listen to what each person says at each level and I think of all the different directions and things that we can talk about on this issue, it's a little bit like drinking from a fire hose and so I appreciate people taking the time. So every time I do these sorts of presentations on data, I'm always a little nervous about kind of the fine points of it because I used to do this. And so it's important to understand that the data that we're drawing on right now is taken from our own power school as given to us a few weeks ago. And as that goes through the state process of adjustment, sometimes we add or sometimes we lose as different incidents get coded differently. The conclusions in the main part are very much the same and it's something we usually spend the summer working and planning on and then present more on in the fall. The main focus I think of this conversation is about racial disparities, but as folks have talked about there's also significant disparities in terms of gender. And we see consistently the same sorts of disparities in terms of special education and I'll talk about that just a little bit at the end. In general, when Willan looks at the sort of general picture of the Arlington Public Schools and certainly the Arlington High School, we talk about numbers as being overall relatively low. It's a safe school, people generally if you go into the cafeteria there's 400 kids eating lunch and one person watching them while eating popcorn and you might have an incident or two in the course of the entire year. It rises to some sort of a significant discipline. Nonetheless, one of the things that's really important for us to understand is that students experiences of implicit bias or bias incidents in the school, even very small ones regardless of the intent can have an enormous impact on their experience in high school. And so both of those realities are things that we want to really be attentive to, because we don't want any student to have a negative experience in school. So when we look at discipline data, one of the things that we've really been trying to get at, and we're getting better and better at that, is discipline data really tells us two things. One, we're trying to look at student behavior, because what students are doing, whether they're having fights, whether or not they're tardy to class, whether or not they're attending class is the thing that we are trying to improve. And second, what we track here and what we're discussing here is not the student's behavior necessarily, but our response. So when we talk about out-of-school suspensions or in-school suspensions or detentions, those are three of a very limited toolbox of disciplinary responses that we have. We have a whole host of other things that we do in terms of interventions, conversations, working with the students, giving them support in all kinds of different ways. But what we're looking here is tracking student behavior and staff response. And what are we looking for? We're looking for improvements in student behavior, equity and the effectiveness in staff interventions. So one, we want to see reductions in the challenging behavior. Two, we want to check to make sure that the challenging behaviors and our responses to those challenging behavior are equitable. And last, we want to figure out whether or not the things that we are doing are effective in improving student behavior. So one thing I'll just talk about a little bit here is that middle category, because that's the first thing we really look at. When we look at the number of out-of-school suspensions and in-school suspensions, the first question we want to ask ourselves is, are we giving different consequences for the same behavior? As far as we can tell, looking underneath, we don't. Out-of-school suspension is limited primarily to major infractions, particularly drugs, substance issues, fights, significant violations of a bullying plan, hate speech, and then sometimes to extreme chronic behavior at the end of a contract. And then in-school suspension is other major infractions or often some of the higher level infractions after some sort of restorative justice or a plan has worked out so that it's really a placement to allow the student to do their work. So those are the two that we really do for major infractions. And what we see is that students are basically, if a student gets in a fight, the student gets a suspension. Whether we like that consequence or not, it's equitably given for the same behavior, but you'll see throughout all of our data a pretty consistent disparity in terms of race. And that racial disparity bounces around because the numbers are small. And so you go from three to six from one year to the next in terms of the time. And I'll toggle very quickly through the tables. They told me not to put the tables in the presentation, but I hate not having the tables near where I am. So I'm not there yet. In a minute, I will toggle through all those numbers, but you can look through them in more detail. So you can run back up to the top. So some of the things that we've been doing in order to address our discipline in order to improve student behavior. The first is collaborative problem solving. That has become, in the last couple of years, one of our major strategies for trying to improve equity and student behavior and relationships and outcomes for students in special education across the board. And I'll talk more about that later. We've also done every year for the past as many years as I can remember equity training in a number of different ways. Dr. McNeil talked about a lot of the work that's been done district-wide. We've also worked using our behavioral data and our discipline data to try to keep on identifying areas of need in order to bring in resources, whether it's a mentoring program or a drug treatment program or a specialized program for support students. We've tried to develop those so that we're putting students in situations where they'll be successful. We've reviewed the curriculum. Again, Dr. McNeil talked more about that to try to make it so that students, because if your culture and climate is not one where students feel welcome, then students are going to be more stressed out. If they're experiencing microaggressions through their day, they're going to be more stressed out. And so you're going to end up with those challenging behaviors which will be shown in disparities. So we've been working on that. We've done a lot of other climate and culture efforts, affinity group clubs, the formation of things like the BSU, something called Inclusion Day, which we've now done for four years, except for this year that it got canceled because of COVID. But it's a host of different conferences around equity issues. We've had Voices United student training around interrupting bias, bullying, harassment, and degrading language. We've had field trips with the BSU. I could go on for a really long time. All of those things are happening. But specifically, I tire people out a little bit by talking about collaborative problem solving. But what we've been doing over the last three years, and I'll be showing you my three years of data, because three years ago is when we first began piloting collaborative problem solving. And immediately we began to see a reduction in challenging behavior and improvement in relationships with students. We piloted it particularly in our sub-separate programs in special education, and we found that the challenging behaviors and the disciplinary incidents in most programs dropped significantly so that many of the disciplinary incidents you're seeing are not represented by some of our students in our most challenging or most restrictive environments. And that allows us to keep more students successful in Arlington. The disciplinary philosophy of collaborative problem solving is kids succeed if they can. And all through this, what we're talking about is right now everything that we're talking about, detention, suspension, in-school suspension, is what they call Plan A. Do this or else, where you have a disciplinary consequence that experiences being sort of punitive that you get for not behaving or not meeting expectations. But the expectation in collaborative problem solving is that kids have a reason for their behavior that it's created by the situation in which they find themselves and that they succeed if they can. And so then the goal, instead of Plan A, do this or else, make them want to behave, is to develop skills to help them to understand how to be able to deal in the situation, but also on our part to examine what it is it's creating, the situations that are creating the challenging behavior. So one of the situations that creates challenging behavior is implicit bias, is structural racism, is microaggressions. And so one of the things that happens as a result of these sorts of conversations is we start examining our practices and our biases. And so I will ask for everybody's, I apologize for a minute, but I'm just going to read you a statement from an article from CPS around issues of bias. CPS offers a potential solution to the problem of implicit racial bias as it relates to school discipline. First, CPS replaces teachers' assumptions about the cause of a challenging behavior from one about motivation to one about neurocognitive impacts of chronic stress. Second, teachers learn that the beginning step in collaborative problem solving is to avoid assumptions and ask open-ended questions like, I noticed that getting to class seems to be a struggle lately, can you tell me what's been going on? Through this type of inquiry, implicit assumptions are overridden by the individual students true and specific concerns, which the teacher can then help address rather than responding in traditional punitive ways. Helping teachers understand challenging behaviors accurately through the lens of a lag in skill development, not a lack of will, holds great promise to reduce the massive human and societal costs of disproportionate discipline. So, now I'm going to go quickly through the basic story, which is we are seeing reductions in challenging behavior, but not getting disproportionality. And then when I get to the end of that, I'll talk a little bit about next steps and what we think that means. So, you can go now to the next chart. So, that's a chart of all disciplinary incidents, anything that's got a punitive component to it. And you'll see consistently over the last three years, it's been declining. Each dip is the summer vacation. You can skip to the next slide. This is just a quick overview of plan A, just to help people understand the basic idea in collaborative problem solving is there are three ways you can deal with challenging behavior. Do this or else? Make them. Plan B, collaboratively problem solve, understand their perspective, share common concerns, and then work together to come to a common solution. Or plan C, drop the expectation because you don't want to be disruptive. And obviously, we use all of those at different times depending on what our goals are. But the focus of collaborative problem solving is much more to move towards plan B, building skills, building relationships, and effectively solving problems. We'll go to the next slide. So, this is just a quick chart of out-of-school suspensions. And as you can see, they've been dropping over the last three years. Actually, in previous years, they generally averaged just around 50 or above. So they actually started dropping as soon as we started piloting collaborative problem solving. The numbers then are in the next three charts. I'm going to go through them very quickly. Next chart. If you look at student population by race, this is what you should hope to see. But if you toggle quickly to the next, next, you see our out-of-school suspensions broken out by race. But you went too fast. So that's a quick visual, one to the other. And as you can see, we continue to have the same kind of disproportionality. The bottom line in black is white students. African-American students are just above that. And so the result of that is, as you go through, I'm going to look at my own version of the slides and you can keep up with me here. So in 2017-18, we had a disproportionality in the top right corner of six times, following year 3.6 times, the following year 5.6 times. You can go back and look at those numbers more closely to see a slightly lower, but similar disproportionalities amongst Hispanic students, and slightly lower disproportionalities among multi-race non-Hispanic students. Which, again, you'll see the same consistent pattern. If you also go now to out-of-school, in-school suspensions. Sorry, I just lost my page. So are we at in-school suspensions now? You got to go down. One, two, three, four. You got to keep going. So this is in-school suspensions. The pattern there is a little bit different. Actually, part of why I think we've had an uptick in in-school suspensions is because we've been trying as much as possible using collaborative problem solving, using restorative justice to move the students a little bit to the left on the severity of the thing. We've actually used more in-school suspensions in the last year. Net in-school suspensions and out-of-school suspensions remains lower. And then you'll see, again, going fairly quickly through the next things, the same issues with disparity. There's our population by race, and here's our population by race when you look at in-school suspensions. And so then if you toggle quickly through the next three slides, you'll see the disparity. One and a half times. Next. Three and a half times, approximately. And the next six times. And so, again, small numbers, they bounce around a fair amount, but you see disparities of anywhere from three to six times. So the next slide is just detention data. And again, it's good to see this, because detention is something that, although we've been working really hard on it, we haven't been tracking it carefully because the data is a little bit harder to follow. Detentions are 90% that the high school used for attendance. That would be tardies, class cuts, or students who leave school without permission. And as you can see, we've been pushing pretty hard on attendance. And if you go to our state data, you'll see that our attendance numbers have actually improved over this three-year period. And at the same time, our detention, which we're using to address it, has also improved, which tells us that the conversations that the staff are having along the way, the interventions that are happening that don't show up in that data, are being effective in terms of being able to get kids into class and making us able to do it without having to resort to plan that. So quickly going through the detention. Can we just skip to the next slide? Detention is assigned by the deans. And these are numbers of incidents, not numbers of students. Often you'll have a number of students who have many, many, many detentions. Detention, although we think of it as something punitive, and it sounds like the kids in the elementary schools are afraid about it, is not a particularly punitive experience. It's supervised by our deans. It gives them an opportunity to have conversations with the students. And then it's a supervised study hall. They can get their computer, they choose the day upon which they do it, and they can actually go and work with teachers. So it's really a time for most of the students to make up work that was missed by not being in class. One of the things about detention data is it's like parking tickets. It's a result of the deans paying attention to and reaching out to students who have been tardy from classes. So to some extent, if we are putting an attention to attendance, detention data goes up. The good news is that when detention data goes up, apparently tardies and attendance gets better. So it's having a desired effect. Nonetheless, it shows some more disproportionality to our other discipline data. And that's a big issue for us, because again, why are students not attending class? All these issues of culture and comfort and relationships then kick into play. So you can just toggle quickly through the detention data. So again, by race, I'm sorry, everybody by race, and then detentions by race. And then you can go through that. The next three slides, you can see three times, two and a half times, four and a quarter times disproportionality. So the next slide now. So what do we want to do about it? One of the things we want to do in terms of just data is get a better handle. We've done a very good job in in-school suspension and particularly in out-of-school suspension because the numbers are small of reviewing every single case and seeing what the causes are and whether or not they can change. One of the examples I'll give of that, which I think is particularly positive from our perspective, is if you go back three, four years ago, you would see three or four incidents of students who were suspended for conflict with a teacher. And looking at those cases, almost all of those were students of color and all of those were incidents which had resulted from an escalation from an initial behavior. And so what does that tell us? It tells us that our capacity to de-escalate those incidents in order to make it so that they do not lead to a suspendable offense was not as good as we'd like it to be. That number has now dropped to zero. We've had no incidents of students being suspended for conflict with teachers for this year or last year. And that's a huge gain. We want to be able to look back at the detention data for the same kind of detail because I remember I said 90% are for attendance, 10% are not for attendance. They're for throwing something down the hall, kicking over a desk, doing something that was significantly disruptive that there was a disciplinary response but not such a major infraction that it required something like an in-school. Or not a school of suspension. And looking more closely at those is really important because discipline is based on a teacher-student interaction. Next thing we want to look at is whether or not those things are based on teacher-student interaction because the incidents that are based on teacher-student interaction are the ones that are about relationship and they're the ones where we're concerned that there may be incidents and issues around implicit bias. We want to move away from detention because like we said, it's based on a will not skill. And then last, we know that the behavior is an interaction between not just the kid and the teacher, but the kid and school. And so understanding those incidents, the situations in which challenging behavior occurs, that's what we define as a problem. How do we reduce those situations and how do we help the students build the skills? Next slide. So some things that we're doing. This past year, we developed a centralized attendance office so that we would have a better handle on attendance so that that data would be better and we could keep on working on reaching out to kids because students who are not attending class is a canary in the coal mine. And what we want to be doing is reaching out to have a conversation to build a relationship with those students so that they start choosing to go to class and being able to go to class. What we don't want it to be doing is focusing more and more on detention. This last year, starting this spring, back in March, we were able to connect to IT and we have a consultant from Mass General Hospital who is helping us to do a more complicated analysis of the predictors of behavior and the processes and interventions that are most effective. And so one of the things that we're doing this summer is setting up a process so that we can code student behavior, code our response to student behavior and link that up better to outcomes by student in order to see whether or not we have effective practices. We'd like to set metrics for behavior outcomes and interventions, which are the things that we can follow and how do we follow them. And we want to target this proportionality as well as overall rates. There's an enormous amount of activity being done, not just on the disciplinary field, but around anti-racist efforts in the school. There were things that were already in place that I already talked about at the beginning. At the moment, we've created an anti-racism working group, which is joined by students from the BSU, as well as other interested students. It's about half students and half staff. And we're working on a whole lot of different issues around culture and climate, staff, communication to students, anti-bias training for staff and students and really trying to get student voices heard and engaged in that process. The partnership with Think Kids is going to continue on. And they have already given us a pretty detailed disciplinary report, which was too complicated and not focused on what this is about. But their long-term evaluation plan, I think, is going to help us really get at more predictive things in terms of what's going on. I know there was a question about special education, so I just wanted to note that quickly. Talking about special education in general is a little bit challenging because, again, the numbers are small and the reasons for behavioral differences from program to program become very specific and very basic to kids. But what we see, again, with special education is, again, a similar sort of disproportionality. In the last couple of years, special education students have been two or three times more likely to have a disciplinary incident. This year, we don't have the numbers yet, but for last year, they were two times more likely to be out of school suspended and one and a quarter times more likely to be in schools out of school suspended. So we see those disproportionalities there. And, again, one of the really positive things we are seeing is that we are able to contain to support students who in the past might have gone out of district or in the past might have really struggled. What we see is not necessarily that the numbers go down, but if you look freshman, sophomore, junior, senior across the high school, you'll see very rapidly a decline in the challenging behavior. Some of that is us, some of that is time. We are not the middle school. Our ninth grade students come to us as big middle schoolers and they leave us in their senior year as young adults. And so a lot of that game is on them, not on us, but we do feel like we're effectively able to support the students who have been growing up through the four years there at the high school. Thank you for your time. Oh, I had one more one. So what did I forget? Oh, yeah. So we've talked about two things. One, we'll continue collaborative problem solving. We're going to train all new staff and continue to train more advanced staff and develop training in the school. We're going to train the students so they understand what it is we're doing. We weren't good at it enough yet to tell them that they could expect it. We have the Anti-Racism Working Group, which I talked about a little bit. Those are the names of the different committees. Everyday Anti-Racism Curriculum, Staffing, Professional Development, Data and Resources for BIPOC. We've also been working on interventions versus attentions to move away from Planet A for other things. We've said in other forums that while our numbers have gone down, the numbers of drug offenses have gone up. Good news, we've reduced conflict, which is part of the goal initially of collaborative problem solving on these cultural issues. Bad news is drugs have gone up. Just before we left, we had developed a treatment model for drug offenses. It's called ABCD. It's connected to EDCO, where in the coming year, we'll be able to set up a situation where rather than having to resort to you're out, which makes it clear that drugs are not allowed, we've always pushed students towards treatment. We've always contracted with parents. We've always worked for wraparound services. One of the concerns we have is that students don't have equal access to effective drug treatment and that getting into drug treatment can be a slow process, so we wanted to support them and effectively, and we wanted to get them back in school as quickly as possible. Anyway, thanks very much for your time. Great. Thank you, everyone. That was a lot of information. So, some of the questions that we have received are kind of somewhat revisited a lot of the information that has been shared with us and from there, we'll be able to go a little bit deeper into some of those topics. So, a couple of the questions that were submitted beforehand, we're going to touch upon those before we get into some that have come through throughout the discussion tonight. So, one of the first ones is there are a couple around questions of restorative justice, and so instead of disciplinary action including suspensions and or detentions, is it an option to try a restorative approach like the Justice Circle as recommended by the book Touching Spirit Bear? And if so, how are you going to integrate these practices into real life and not just have them be in a learning moment in the classroom? And yeah, do you want to take that one, Dr. Jenger? So, we do make use of circles where appropriate and necessary. We tend to do it where it's been more of a community impact rather than sort of individual things. We tend to use circle or circle-like conversations with conflicts like fights. They work, I mean, circles and collaborative problem solving have very similar approach, which is to understand what the students perspectives are, understand the perspectives of everybody involved, share the perspectives of the community and then work to come to something that's mutually agreeable. So, depending on the situation, we've had a lot of experience in sort of justice as well. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with Dr. Jenger. There are times in which it can be used and used well. I think it depends on the circumstances. A lot of times it isn't when it's conflict between two students, but if it's something that someone has done to the larger community, I think it can be very effective. I think especially, you've seen that at the high school and I think that's a pattern to follow. We would always like kids to learn and when they make a mistake to hopefully repair the damage that they've done. Overall, I think it's a great philosophy. There are times to use it and there are times, unfortunately, I don't think it's appropriate. Okay. I'll jump in quickly at the elementary level. I would say that bringing students back together after any type of conflict has been something that we've made a core practice at our school and often that's going to happen with multiple adults depending on the severity of the encounter. The idea that and I agree with actually what I think is embedded in that question is this opportunity to develop a sense of empathy for I think both people or multiple people involved so that everybody has an opportunity to talk about the feelings that they're experienced when things started, resulted after these acts. Ultimately, when we are feeling our best moving forward after an incident is when we know that our students feel safe and the more that we keep kids apart or that adults are the only people involved in managing the problem, oftentimes in elementary schools with young kids, kids don't feel safe or they feel scared or things feel unresolved. I actually agree and I think that's been one of our core practices since we've brought, particularly since we've brought social workers into our building. And I just know that at the Gibbs we do the problem solving conferences with students when students are ready to meet with each other and when they when students have done something to the community that would be our break it fix it. Great. Those are really helpful responses to hear from all the different levels. Another question that had come through beforehand was around going back to issues of discipline in regards to children with special education needs. So specific examples meaning depending on if a child, for example, say they have ADHD, you might have an executive functioning or impulse control issue would act inappropriately but that behavior couldn't be a facet to their disability. So if there's something that's triggering for a child that might make them behave a certain way, is that taken into account if they're still breaking the rules or anything like that? Jillian, I would love to talk about that one. All right. At the elementary level because certainly the short answer to that question is yes, absolutely. Because we need to make sure that we understand everything about a particular person and their makeup and as well as other pieces of them, their identity before we think about how we can move through something that might not be working out the way we expect it to. We know full well as I mentioned before that these kinds of moments when things aren't going as expected are certainly a communication of some kind of need. And I think often we see that even more from children who have specific disability types and we need to know those things and have people trained in ways that we can help them. But still even having said that, we know that this continues to be an area of growth. And so the training is so very critically important as well as that ability to create that safe space and to really think and problem solve through those moments so that we can make sure that we're being better, that we're doing better, that we're meeting those needs so that those moments happen less often. And then did anyone else, yeah? One of the other thing I would add to this is that part of the responsive classroom is to really create relationship among the children in the classroom environment. And so when we have a child who has a certain extra needs than other children, part of what a teacher does is to create an environment where every child understands we're not all going to behave the same way and so they're giving some space and understanding to that child. It doesn't mean that we will not do anything to prevent that child to be less disruptive but if the behavior is part of what we call it's a manifestation of what the kids need so we will have all the staff really being aware what step they can put in place to really minimize that need of the child. And often these behavioral manifestation has a cause. There's a good cause. So it's really trying to understand what is it that we need to do better, that everyone is informed but also the other children in the classroom environment they know certain things for example that really that child does not like. It may be something normal for another child but for that particular child that thing that seems to be quite innocent may set them off so it's really making sure that everyone has the space they need in the classroom to have the best day possible every day. So these are some of the things we build on with responsive classroom creating those interaction and this relationship where every child regardless of their needs is able to have a good day in the classroom. Jillian, can I chime in as well? Absolutely. Excellent. I think one of the things that you have really at the seventh and eighth grade level is you have kids really understanding like differences, reflecting on them, identifying themselves and I think it's frustrating for some of our special education students who are realizing that they're learning differently, that things might be a little bit more difficult and I think sometimes that manifests itself in doing things that they shouldn't be doing. I do think it's an area that we need to improve upon by certain skills and understanding kids. I do understand when kids act out and when they are frustrated because things aren't as easy for them in a particular class or they might learn differently. So I think it is something we need to look at and understand the perspective of many of our special education students because I can definitely understand that they are sometimes frustrated that things are a little bit different because of their disability of how to acquire knowledge and that can lead to frustration and I think that needs to be a greater understanding of all of us administrators, staff, etc. But I do know like I look at my numbers at the Autism Middle School and 17 out of 34, 19 out of 25, our special education students are getting suspended at a higher rate. I do also look at some other causes, it's interesting that if you look at the special education population of middle schoolers, 70% are males and 30% are females. We tend to have males or boys being more trouble than girls and I think that's probably our reflection of that as well. Can I go on one too? Just because you gave me a chance. So I think the simple answer is yes. When you think about the focus of collaborative problem solving, the basic idea is that the reason why you have challenging behaviors is because students are in a situation that their thinking skills aren't able to address and those thinking skills would be language and communication skills, attention and working memory, motion and self-regulation, cognitive flexibility and social thinking. So those are things you are likely to see that students in special education have more challenges with and then the goal actually is to create a behavioral intervention plan where you are thinking about and sometimes it's short term, sometimes it's long term. What behavior is you can't do it, it's within the kids control even if it's hard, that's going to get a consequence. What behavior you are working on, that's going to be collaboratively problem solved and there's plan C which is what behaviors are we going to let go for now. In our sub separate programs you'll sometimes see a student and a teacher sitting and working and the kid is very regulated and the kid is saying things which in an English class across the hall would probably get them sent to the dean and the teacher is working on de-escalating because they understand that that's the student's response to this challenging situation that they are in. So we are looking at the lagging skills and the unsolved problems and the unsolved problems are us. We set the situation in which the students cognitive skills are not able to deal with it and so that's the biggest piece for us which is getting rid of the unsolved problems because those are the things that trigger a student to not be able to regulate themselves and to exhibit challenging behavior. Thank you. So we've had a couple questions that are centered around school administrators and teachers and questions around what percentage of them are minorities and if someone could speak to if they're looking to be including more diversity and hiring for teachers and school administrators. Hi. Sorry. I'll take that question. Yeah. We have been dedicated and challenged by to increase the diversity of our staff ever since I've actually been a superintendent and I'm sure before that as well. Right now our professional staff which include teachers, administrators and IT is 11% that are of professional staff of color for all of our staff it's around 10%. One of the things that we have done annually and couldn't do it this year is that when we go to job fairs we get applications for applicants of color and we personally invite them to an annual coffee in which administrators and superintendent's diversity committee actually helps organize and meets actually school committee members so they get a sense of what the culture of the school system is like and we try to match up the applicants with our administrators. Sometimes it's not a match in what we're looking for but it's still an outreach. It varies things that we can do to increase our applicant pool as well as make sure that when we do have applicants of color that we, if they are qualified for the position that we interview them. I think all school districts right now are very challenged by this because the number of people of color are not necessarily going into education and then we as a society, as a state we need to look into some of the root causes of that and what are some of the interventions that we can do. In fact, today at a meeting the commissioner was talking about the role the Department of Education can play in increasing the number of the number of people who will be interested in going into education. So this is this is something that we as a district have been dedicated to and I don't think the results actually show the level of dedication to this that we would like. Thank you. A few of the other questions that were asked were going back to the collaborative problem solving and if there are plans at the K through 8 level to introduce that are there any plans for that? Yeah. Michael go ahead. Oh, thanks Brian. Michael Hanna principal of Stratton school. Yes, actually we have had professional development, limited professional development I should say in some schools around CPS. I think that it would be worthwhile. I know that Wendy had mentioned that the collaborative problem solving conferences something very similar from the responsive classroom approach. So I'd encourage anyone who's interested to see the alignment between collaborative problem solving and the RC approach just to take a look on their site on responsive classrooms website to see how it is that the problem solving conference aligns with CPS having said that the different types that are discussed in CPS are something that we could stand to maybe get into the vocabulary of the children maybe in their later grades only because they'd be anticipating that like any other vertical alignment we do we try to anticipate what they'll be learning about later so we can definitely make that bridge I think a little bit more deliberate. So early in August Dr. I had me to meet with the people who are doing collaborative problem solving I am taking him up on and exploring whether and how it would be a fit at the middle school. So it is something we're looking at because obviously from this discussion it's very RC up through sixth grade and collaborative problem solving at the high school and what I really need to do is take hopefully the best of both with the staff so I need to make sure as I go forward that the staff is going to be along you know with whatever system we're going to go along and the first thing I need to do is I need to make sure that I'm going and that it's something that is going to be a fit for the Odyssey and we'll move from there so it is something we're moving forward on and we're hoping to get to this summer Dr. Jenger also extended the invitation to me to take a look at CPS what it looks like although Gibbs is just finished its second full year and next year the staff is ready to embark in another year and we've started a responsive classroom so I think we owe it to the staff to really make sure it's truly established and that we're doing with fidelity and we're not jumping from one thing to another that said at the essence of CPS the piece that I think we can look at at Gibbs is truly giving children a chance to resolve their issues together we do have to school counselor and a social worker so those same practices or practice we can definitely get our students accustomed to and I believe when Ms. Salvatore presented the data she did speak to that the children have a significant part in coming up with some of the rules that they live by in the school and that they do understand the counselor use the time with the students to make sure that they acknowledge each other when they do something that's inappropriate so I think we will have some of those practice because Mr. Merringer and I are talking about more collaboration between Gibbs and Audison so when our sixth graders transition to the seven and a grade building they already are in sync and there's a bridge and there's a collaboration they're not entering to a completely new land so some of those language will be the same some of the vocabulary but I think for the moment we're committed to really making sure the responsive classroom is something we're doing with fidelity because it does deal with a big piece of the social emotional learning for the children helping them to manage their emotion and another big part it's truly their connection to the adults and also to their peers so we're committed to really staying the course with that and I just want to give a pitch that I think responsive classroom and collaborative problem solving are in the same they have the same basic sort of understanding of what they're trying to do what we lack frankly at the high school is a good high school version of some a lot of what responsive classroom does around community building and specifically teaching to the community to the group as a whole social pragmatics and you know general problem solving as a group and so collaborative problem solving kind of comes at the more at the other end of that and justice is also in the mix so I sort of feel like they need to go like this unfortunately a responsive classroom doesn't really go beyond eighth grade in terms of their curriculum and it sort of peters out there so we've been looking for ways to develop that piece as well great so there's a few questions that I'm going to kind of put together because they're related so some of the questions are around more I would say the culture of the school atmosphere and that pertains to how microaggressions are addressed specifically if all teachers and staff in the district are trained in unconscious bias and do they go through any anti-racism training and how that also relates to changes in the curriculum as well there's going to be shifts to make students of color feel more comfortable or feel more relatable hi so I just got on board with the district as everyone has heard and already today I started a course with it's called ideas and it stands for initiative for developing equity and achievement for students and and I think I was very much attracted to come to Arlington because I think while they're not perfect because we have so much work to do in that area of inclusion and equity but I do think we are on the right track and another thing that I think specifically that gives looking at the schools of values and core values and looking at understanding and unifying our students and making them unstoppable in their goal to really be excellent and to reach their potential that is one of the things creating an environment where we are truly learning about equity accepting each other and really doing the hard work that it takes having those difficult conversations so as a district I'm sure Dr. Bodie and Dr. McGill have specific plans for us I just got here so I don't have all the details yet but I know I'd give specifically with everything that's happening in our society not just in Arlington but across the United States I think everyone is clear that we have to find a way to start having this conversation to really be more accepting and to address the things that we know that when we pretend they don't exist and we don't go at them straight forward they just fester so I think it's really about us learning together how to take these steps and I think that ideas of course that the district is offering in small group to different members of the Arlington Public School definitely is putting us on the right track to find the words, the common vocabularies and the resources to really start that work and I want to add to that also over the past three years since I've been in the district and a person who is responsible for providing and structuring our professional development program we have offered one day of training in which all staff are trained at the same time and you probably know this day in November where we bring all staff together we don't have school that day for students and we bring in speakers and facilitators and we have various workshops ideas have worked closely with us to provide us facilitated for those workshops and this year I think was a particular day because we also had staff who also partnered with the facilitation of those workshops so we were sharing best practice and things that individual teachers have done within their classrooms in order to diversify the curriculum that they're providing for instruction we had a lot of positive feedback from staff and in order to plan for that day I also convened a cohort of staff who wanted to help with the planning of it so through that mechanism of having that day through providing the ideas instruction and I also mentioned about us contracting an outside consultant to come in and do an equity audit of our curriculum I feel like we're on the right track and moving towards providing or constructing an environment in which all kids feel safe and feel that they belong and I also want to add to that in my first year as the assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction we worked to change colonial day which was a culmination of a social studies unit on colonialism and that time in history we worked to change that day so it didn't reflect one perspective and so that was something that I think is evidence of us trying to make sure that we're looking at the curriculum and making sure that all voices are heard so I just want to offer that as some examples and evidence of the direction that we're moving I do think that it's going to take some work and it's going to take some time resources that we use for instruction are transformed to where we want it to be but I I applaud the efforts of our educators our curriculum directors Dr. Bode of us and we're all working together to move in the right direction and I just want to jump on that too to make sure that in addition to what Dr. McGill just shared that amplification of student voice is so important in this conversation too and that we have those conversations especially when we're looking at creating these strong school cultures and I can give an example at Hardy in which what we heard from our students through vocal data which was a survey that the students filled out at the end of taking the MCAS this was for our fifth grade students that what that data showed was that while they felt empowered to make decisions and while they felt connected to their classroom spaces at the elementary level what we were seeing was a trend that they didn't feel that they had that empowerment to make decisions and be a part of decision making at the school level and so then that was something that we needed to respond to immediately and start to think about how that student voice could be a stronger piece of what we were doing within the Hardy school and so those are things that we're taking active steps to work on to help to connect the kids to that decision making process so that they can feel empowered moving forward and being connected to their community in a really positive way I also like to add to that it is actually a district goal that all staff participate in eight hours of anti-bias, anti-racism cultural proficiency training so that is something that we've written into our goals and the building administrators also contract outside facilitators to come in and provide additional training for their individual staff and we have many different staff members who have taken an initiative on their own to create book groups where they do a book study and they provide that as a foundation to discuss various issues dealing with race and I think that the one thing that we want to do and our goal for providing the professional development is to increase the confidence of staff members because we do have staff members who understand the importance of this but at the same time they may not feel confident to address certain issues because they feel like they may say the wrong thing and say something that is offensive and that is something that we're working to do and that's one thing, a goal of the professional development is to build that capacity, build that confidence within our staff members so they feel that they can address any situation that comes up that may come up within the classroom or something that they observe outside the classroom and they can address it with confidence and feel that they're going to effectively resolve that issue. I was listening to the question so there are some questions in the margin which I think may relate to this so I talked a little bit at the beginning about the long term efforts in terms of the culture and climate of the school those started with focus groups years ago about incidents of harassment, bullying, bias and degrading language it moved on to voices united training which was leadership training with students. The development of a student council whose mission was to support the mission of the school and an inclusive community which was about four or five years ago. The development of different student leadership groups which include the BSU, the young feminists, the GSA and a number of other groups that are around affinity and inclusive practices and most recently since the beginning of July we've been having these conversations about race which have now partnered with the BSU and that anti-racism working group is a partnership where we're looking with our BSU students at the demands that they presented which surface a lot of issues that they didn't feel were being addressed even if we may have done efforts around them they weren't being effective or they weren't being felt and so the students have actually organized their demands under a number of different umbrellas in terms of working groups and they've titled those Everyday Anti-Racism which is looking at programming and advisory, morning announcements throughout the school to give anti-bias training issues, African American history different cultural presence in the school they want to involve themselves in this curriculum review that Dr. McNeil and the curriculum leaders have been working on they're interested in working with our Human Resources department to understand issues around staffing and recruiting and retaining staff of color they're interested in participating in hearing and understanding what's going on with our professional development they're going to sit down with me and look at the data and they've talked about a lot of really interesting ways of getting students of color to have more input on what resources are provided and that includes things like process for reporting microaggressions understanding what's going to happen with those sorts of things a lot of this is about communication and it's really exciting for me to have student counterparts because at the high school we don't have the elementary parents who read all the packets who come home, we work a lot more with the students and if they don't hear it or they don't receive the messages we're trying to give it's not affected anyway and they have a lot of really great ideas so that's a big piece of what we're working on great that's awesome this has been really informative and really helpful and we are a little bit over time so I'm just going to have Dr. Bodey and Dr. McNeil say a few closing words and then we'll wrap up this session I think a lot has been said and I first of all want to thank you Ms. Harvey for moderating this and thank you to all of the people who have been participating this evening those were great questions and hopefully you felt that the answers met what you were looking to find out I want to also say to our administrators, thank you for all of your work tonight and presenting your data and your perspectives about your schools and I hope that one of the takeaways that people are listening tonight is that we have school leadership that are very dedicated to creating environments where all of our students can succeed this is challenging work but we are committed to it and will continue to be committed to it so I want to thank all of them and again thank ACMI for hosting this evening it's been very helpful and all the people behind the scenes in the last couple days to also help organize this I know we're over time so I just want to keep my remarks very brief thank you again and so I would like to just add to what Dr. Bodie was saying how we are committed to this work and I also want to just respond to some of the accusations that were made at Boston Globe article I mean for me it's a personal and a professional mission in order to work on the equity within this district and I would not be here and work for someone who was not dedicated to that as well to that same type of mission and I'm proud to say that I work with the teachers administrators within this district and at no time have I come across a situation where anyone has walked away from a challenging conversation or not owned up to the fact that we have work to do as it relates to equity and involving our students and making sure that they feel welcome we've had some very in-depth conversations and ones that I've been a part of where we've challenged each other to do better and I'm proud to say that we understand the work that's ahead of us we understand the challenge but I want everyone out there to say that we need to work as a community if we're going to resolve the structural and systemic racism that exists in society it's not just incumbent upon us as educators to do that but we need the community to work with us and if you feel like there's something that's going on within your environment, your learning environment or your students or your children come home and say that something's happened in school I encourage everyone out there to please call your building administrator and share that experience with your building administrator so that you will give them the chance to address that issue I'm also here for anyone to contact and I avail myself to support that work and so I just want everybody to know that there are sometimes things are said and you need to know from the inside that we are working feverishly to address the issues that we know are a problem and so I just wish that we could work together as a community to dispel and resolve and get rid of the systemic racism that happens in society because it's not one segment of the population that can do that if we're going to do that in Arlington we have to do it together and we have to work in concert so I appreciate the questions and I appreciate the attendance from all the community members that came out to listen to our talk and I hope that we can extend this conversation for future dates so thank you very much for everybody's support and your questions and I also thank all the panelists to be here and I think that shows a commitment to what we have to do great thank you so much this was really wonderful and those closing remarks I think really hammered home that we're all in this to make Arlington a better place but that being said I want to again thank all of the panelists this has been wonderful again this session is being recorded so if you missed any you can watch it it'll be posted and it's going to be replaying on ACMI as well and this is again these conversations are starting to happen they're difficult but it's not the last one so this is just the beginning and I know there's a few more that are going to be happening within the schools districts so look out for that for more information coming out within the next couple weeks about what those next sessions will be and when they'll be taking place all of the questions that have been submitted they will be added to essentially a master list for feedback so somewhat like an FAQ will be provided that it will speak to a lot of the questions they'll be by topic but like Dr. McNeil said if you have questions always reach out and with that I want to say thank you and we'll see you for another community conversation soon have a great night