 Well good morning or good afternoon depending on where you are in the US or perhaps even globally and welcome to the fourth of a five-part webinar series on accelerating learning. This is being co-hosted by ASA, the Superintendent's Association, and the Learning Policy Institute. As you know, there's a lot of conversation around the term learning loss. I'm sure you guys hear it all the time. Well, the term learning loss is used in many of the studies we will reference today, and we're broadly in the public sphere and especially in the media, ASA and LPR actively trying to reframe that narrative to acknowledge the fact that due to COVID many students have experienced lost instructional time. And as a system, we need to accelerate learning, not remediate, and we need to avoid deficit based narrative about individuals and our students. We encourage participants to continue today's conversation on social media using the hashtag accelerate, not remediate. As I said, this webinar is the fourth in a five-part series on learning acceleration. Today we're going to focus on best practices for authentic and formative assessment as a strategy to accelerate student learning coming out of the pandemic. One of my favorite topics and why I get to serve as your moderator today. In our first webinar, Linda Darling Hammond, our founder and CEO, talked about how social and emotional learning is an important strategy to improving academic learning. A panel of researchers and practitioners provided evidence based and practical advice for developing high quality summer learning programs to accelerate student learning. The link is in your chat if you guys would ever like to watch the recording. The second webinar in the series focused on what we know from research about how to design high quality tutoring programs as part of a holistic strategy for accelerating learning. We heard from practitioners who have implemented these programs at all grade levels in ways that are integrated as part of the school day and through well-trained tutors. Again, the link will magically show up in the chat if you'd like to watch the recording or send that to a colleague. Our third webinar showcased expanded learning time as well as community schools as strategies for providing students with wraparound services and rethinking the traditional school day and calendar to accelerate student learning. Again, the link will be in the chat. Our final webinar will be in about three weeks on June 1 and it will be on equity centered strategies to support students. The link's in the chat and we hope you will register. So now let's move on to today. My name is Monica Martinez. I am the director of strategic initiatives at the Learning Policy Institute where I have the pleasure of working with three of our initiatives focused on the use of performance assessment. Through these initiatives we work state departments, districts and higher education institutions. My colleagues and I have had the pleasure of collaborating with ASA, specifically Dan Dominique, Mark Sherman, Valley Truesdale and the broader team at ASA who put on this webinar series. We believe the series leverages the strength of both of our organizations with ASA bringing the important voices of district leaders who are doing this work every day, and importantly share practical experiences, as well as all the nuts and bolts of how we do this. And LAPI provides support on bridging the evidence-based practices to these important topics in support of educators and students. So now we'll move on to the next slide, which is some basic housekeeping details. I'm sure all of you right now are experts in Zoom as I can see you chatting already. But before we jump in, let's just kind of, you know, remember some of the key things around the Zoom. Hi everyone, but the presenters have been muted. So we'll be taking questions through the chat feature only. You may write in your questions at any time throughout today's presentation and use the chat to engage in discussion. This is actually what makes Zoom even a little bit more fun sometimes than in person presentations. The webinar is being recorded, a video recording will be emailed to you in a few days, and the slides are currently available in the link in the chat. So you can see we use the chat a lot too. So here today is focused on best practices for authentic informative assessment as a strategy to accelerate student learning out of the pandemic. We have a great panel today. State Superintendent Molly Spearman and Deputy Superintendent John Payne will be representing the South Carolina Department Education. They'll provide us with a state level perspective on how they are supporting districts to assess students needs coming out of the pandemic. Aaron Davis also from South Carolina, he'll be providing the local district perspective on assessment. He's the superintendent of Richland School District two. And we have Heather Hough, the executive director policy analysis for California education, also called PACE. She's an expert on assessment, and she'll discuss some of the teams latest research related to assessment, as well as the broader evidence base including the importance of assessing students social and emotional learning. We also have Jorge Aguilar, superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District. He will close out with another local perspective focus on how assessment supports equity. As you hear from the system leaders, again, please drop your questions and reactions in the chat. It's a feature that makes webinars engaging, and we will also be putting resources in the chat just that we have done throughout this introduction. So let's get moving. And let's work with her. Let's talk with our first two panelists. Molly Spearman was elected as the 18th South Carolina State Superintendent of Education in 2014. For over 18 years, she has served as a classroom music teacher and assistant principal, and she served four terms in the South Carolina house or representatives champion education and children's issues. She was also on the agricultural education and ways. This is such a tricky one agriculture education and ways and means committees. She was named the legislator of the year by the American region and the Department of Health and Environmental Control. She was the deputy state superintendent for the division of federal programs accountability in school improvement in the South Carolina Department of Education. Prior to his appointment, he served five years as the director of the Office of Special Education Services at the South Carolina Department of Ed. John currently serves on the Council of Chief State School Officers National Assessment Governing Board. Molly and John, thank you for living through your bios. Thank you for joining us, most importantly, for providing us with a state level perspective on how to use assessments to determine student needs and to accelerate learning. Thank you, Monica. Good morning, everyone. We're so happy to be a part of this and a special shout out to Valerie Trusdale, who's one of our own former superintendents here in South Carolina. We're very proud of her work at WSA. In South Carolina, we focus on facilitating learning, building skills and characteristics around the profile of the South Carolina graduate and you can show the next slide. That mission articulates that a successful K-12 program must build students who upon their graduation from high school are ready to be successful in college career and citizenship. Most states have something very similar that we're all working on together. And to support student growth in our very diverse population here in South Carolina, we constantly discuss and implement tools to give teachers the most efficient and trusted assessment information that we can have. For the past several years, our staff under the leadership of Dan Rogge, who is the director of our research and data analysis, has worked with Education Analytics to analyze interim assessment data, making it even more useful to teachers and policymakers. With the pandemic and the inability to give our summative assessments last spring and really questionable on whether it would be done well this spring. This interim assessment data catapulted as a tremendous tool for us to know where our students were at the beginning of the school year, how they've grown, and what interventions they need immediately to accelerate their learning. Dr. John Payne, our Deputy Superintendent, is going to give you a little more detail. John. Thank you, Molly. Next slide. Okay, perfect. So in South Carolina, as I'm sure is true for many of you, we have a number of assessments and measures that we administer to provide educators with more robust information about children's readiness and academic needs. Last summer was in the context of COVID-19, our South Carolina legislature and governor passed Act 142, which required that all students in kindergarten through grade nine be assessed during the first two weeks of the 2021 school year in reading and mathematics to identify students needing accelerated support. These same students were required to be assessed prior to the end of the 2020 calendar year to measure the impact that they fall interventions provided. The district results of these pre and post assessment were submitted to us so that we could evaluate the pandemic's impact on student learning and the impact of the interventions on student learning. As we looked at this, we vetted a variety of solutions, researching which interim assessments were currently being used by our school districts here in South Carolina. And for the purposes of the legislation, approved the following reading and mathematics measures map growth star from Renaissance, I ready reading inventory and math inventory and case benchmark. These familiar solutions provided districts with both historical data perspectives, as well as a continuum of data to reference and compare the status of student learning pre-pandemic to what is currently taking place in every classroom today. These measures were also chosen because each one has the capability to offer a virtual platform for administration, yield valid reliable data and accurately track progress and identify challenges for all students. Moreover, districts and schools were able to maximize the time needed to comply with the law in an efficient manner because of their familiarity with these measures and of the results that they yield. And so as a result, no additional training is needed for our teachers. The results from these pre and post measures have helped to paint a portrait of what students know and understand, as well as showcase topics that students need accelerated learning. Most districts are administering these assessments again this spring to provide another benchmark data point that will assess how students are learning and measure the growth in progress today. Leveraging data to drive change and boost student achievement is the guiding purpose of every South Carolina school and more importantly every South Carolina teacher. The results from the administration of these pre and post assessments have helped schools intervene with students who need it and help teachers improve the instruction they provide to all students, which is ultimately going to leave the need along educational outcomes. In addition to South Carolina students participate in other assessments that you'll note on the slide, we have 4K and 5K readiness measures which were adopted several years ago to provide teachers with data to inform and provide more personalized instruction for each students. We also have free college and college readiness assessments that are offered to interested students and paid for by the state. Next slide please. These data points serve as a checkup in the learning process and the information gleaned from it helped shape instructional practices and determine future content needed to minimize the obstacles in students' paths. Teachers get a major assist from interim assessment data in three key areas, illuminating learning gaps, personalizing instruction to each students where they are, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Tools such as our profile of the graduate competencies each with a seven level continuum are helping build capacity in the field as teachers shift towards performance based assessments and continue to deepen their assessment literacy. Teachers are also analyzing the results from these assessments and then aligning their results to the newly created priority standards developed by the department in English language arts and mathematics to identify learning gaps and provide targeted personalized instruction. Next slide please. So in terms of how students are doing, interim assessments are instrumental in maximizing student achievement and help teachers deliver well informed differentiated instruction for students. Quality and timely interim assessment practices will always yield more helpful student data, thus supporting teachers and giving students the best possible chance of mastering content. Our teachers have high stakes decisions to make and these assessments help our teachers answer questions such as are my students learning, which students have gaps in need acceleration, which students are ready for enrichment or more advanced material, and how can I customize my instruction best to meet students individual need. Especially during this 2020-21 school year we have been examining more closely data elements from every available source so as to best attend to the impact that COVID-19 has had and continues to have on South Carolina students, particularly the most vulnerable groups of students and those students that have been disproportionately impacted by. Next slide please. To make these data reviews more digestible and actionable it was critically important that we create for teachers an interactive platform that provides up to date information. So as Superintendent Spearman said we partnered with Education Analytics to create the rally platform, which is a series of interactive tools that provide timely and comprehensive information about students needs. The platform takes all historical summative and interim assessment data and creates data displays for teachers. The data can be accessed on a student level, classroom level, school level, and district level. These data sets are linked to our state standards so teachers have specific information about the standards and domains where students are doing well and the ones for which they need more reinforcement. Finally, we are linking this platform to state supported curricular resources in our growing learning object repository that we have launched for our school districts and paid for using some of the SR Emergency Funds. Next slide please. So using the equi percentile method we linked our interim assessments to our summative assessments to also give predictions on where students might score on summative assessments within the context of COVID-19. You'll note that we take historic data by standard and identify whether the standard was met, nearly met, or not met on historical assessments. We then create predictions on where we anticipate the student might score on summative assessments if they were administered that same day. As more assessments and these are interim as well as summative assessments are completed, those data are added to the system which changes those predictability estimates for students. So we believe through all of this, we are working diligently to provide, again, our teachers with robust information that's timely, that's accessible, that's digestible so that they can use this information to accelerate student learning and meet students' needs, again, particularly those that have been most impacted by this COVID-19. Molly and John, thank you so much for joining us and taking this time, but particularly for providing us with the information about how State Department can provide teachers with tools and the support of assessment practices you're engaged in to help your teachers identify learning gas and most of all accelerate learning. John, I can't really thank you enough for this and I hope folks will ask questions here around the state role and the impact on districts in the chat box. Meanwhile, it's my pleasure to introduce another South Carolina, and that is Dr. Baron Davis. Dr. Baron Davis, if you can come on screen and we'll transition Molly and John out. Dr. Baron Davis is Richland School District 2 superintendent in South Carolina and the first African American to hold this position in the district 90 years plus history. Congratulations, Dr. Baron. I mean, Dr. Davis. Dr. Davis has been an educator for more than 20 years and he has made increasing recruitment and retention of male teachers of color a priority by launching a program called the Premier 100. Dr. Davis's inclusionary practices led Richland 2 to becoming one of the only three districts in South Carolina and 255 nationwide to be placed on the 10th annual AP district honor roll by the college board. Dr. Davis, thank you for joining us and sharing with us how Richland School District Number 2 is handling assessments. Monica, thank you for the opportunity and to AAASA as well and hello to all of the panelists that are on this call and to all that are viewing. Shout out to our state superintendent, Molly Spearman for being on the call as well with her increasingly busy schedule as well as John Payne for representing our wonderful state of South Carolina. I'm Karen Davis and I have the awesome privilege and pleasure being the superintendent of Richland School District 2, which is located in Columbia, South Carolina northeast section of Richland County. We have roughly 28,000 students in our wonderful school district. And we are mostly a suburban school district area with a little bit of urban and rural sprinkle here and there. I want to first thing AAASA for shaping the narrative and resetting the table. We have a lot of ground on this idea of lost, of lost learning. And so AAASA has helped school superintendents and teachers and educators alike across the country to kind of reset the stage and reset the table and really start addressing the fact that, as a result of what we truly had was the loss of instructional time. And so with, of course with instruction being and time I'm sorry, being a variable. Too often we use time as a constant and and we don't see it as a variable in education that can be modified, adjusted, added, subtracted, whatever it is we can do we it has multi functions and so COVID has allowed us to or illuminate that this does exist. And so that's what school systems are doing now. We are looking at time as a variable to bring back or increase our instructional time for our students. One of the ways that we're doing it in our school district is going to be number one priority is going to be our SOAR program and you can see that displayed on the screen and SOAR for us is our summer opportunities for academic readiness. We are focusing on accelerating not remediation in our school district. And through this process, we're using time as that variable to accelerate learning for our students. And so our program is going to have a four weeks of extended learning time will be offered to all of our students. And currently we have roughly about 5000 of our students who are registered for this opportunity this summer. This is going to include providing them with meals and transportation because in our school district we are equity centers so we want to make sure that we remove any type of barriers that would not allow a student to participate if he or she desires a course alone with the support of their parents. And so we're excited about the opportunity to do this we've actually committed to having this for two summers. And so because we have no idea what the impact of the loss instructional time is going to look like for our students over the course of the long haul and so over several years so we are preparing to offer this for a minimum of two summers and possibly possibly three summers in order to make sure that our students make sure that we have provided enough instructional time to allow our students to kind of reset themselves and put themselves in a better position to excel in whatever chosen pathways that they have next slide. So whether SOAR looks like the SOAR program is going to take place of course at all of our grade levels on the SOAR program is going to be part of our elementary schools. And at our elementary schools in the SOAR program we're going to focus on intervention curriculum to reinforce key math concepts and also to build math fluency. At our middle school level we're going to preview the first nine weeks of ELA and mathematics content. Of course this is because of the transitions and then at our high school level our students are going to have the options to preview two courses of their choices focusing either on math, English, science history. We'll also do some work with AVID which we are at AVID school district and as well as SAT and ACT prep. This is of course also to ensure that we are in line with our state's department goal and making sure that our students are college and career ready. Next slide please. Our elementary summer camp we also in addition to our SOAR program we are still running our elementary or our summer programs as well so there'll be a kind of a simultaneous approach to increase in instructional times for our students and accelerating learning for our students. Along with SOAR we're going to continue to run our reading summer camps and in our reading summer camps at the elementary level we're going to focus on literacy. This is going to be from grades two to five. It's going to be for a five week period. Again we're going to provide transportation as well as meals for our students and we're going to be using formative assessments as a result of measuring what our students are learning and how they're performing academically through math and reading A through Z. And we also will have what we call our primary or I'm sorry our premier academy. In our premier academy the focus is going to be on grades K and one and we're also going to continue to have a literacy focus there but this will only be about three weeks. Again we're going to provide meals for our students and we're going to have formative assessments map along with easy CB at the secondary level. In addition to so we're going to be offering math nation and math nation is going to be online platform for our six to 12 grade students are roughly about 10 to 12 hours week and it's going to be in preparation for whatever upcoming mathematics course that our students may have. As a result of losing some of the instructional time that they have we want to continue to kind of build those math skills and if you have ever taught math or view like me and a student who needed additional math support. Math is one of those subjects that you need to practice almost every day in order to continue to build those fluency and build those mathematics skills so we're going to focus on mathematics. We're going to continue to focus on mathematics for those students grades 6 to 12, which is in preparation for the of whatever upcoming mathematics class they may have. We're going to also continue our focus on literacy and reading at the secondary level with a variety of genres based on a school wide theme for our middle school students. We're also going to be offering some celebrations will be for English students at the high school level, and we'll offer, offer some celebrations at the end of August or the beginning of August for all of our schools, and both math and in in literacy and reading. Next slide. Thank you. Just to kind of some previews of some things that we're in the finalization of. Our special education students because again as I stated earlier we want to continue our school districts to be equity focused for our students. And so we're going to have an extended year program for a standard year camp program for our special education students, also helping to meet some of the compensatory services that are needed when I have speech camps in conjunction with USC with the University of South Carolina speech in terms, and we're also using the orton gilliam gilliam training for elementary and secondary resource teachers which will be district wide. We're going to we're going to focus on looking beyond disabilities focusing on capabilities and expanding possibilities for the students in our school district. And then assessments, of course, will continue with the district's formative assessments. Formative assessment systems during pandemic we during the pandemic we've continued with our benchmark assessments. We've continued utilizing edge annuity at home and at school to accelerate student learning, as well as we're in the process we've been working through a grading task force now to address some disparities that clearly existed prior to covert but covert truly exposed some grading disparities that have become so evident and so we want to continue we want to we created a task force to address a grading disparities in our school district. And then we have assessments that are on the way that are not linked to standard space these assessments are things that are going to help us with MTSS. These are these assessments are going to help us with understanding the social emotional wellness of our students. We began focusing not know so so much on social motion learning but also on creating spaces that are socially emotionally healthy for our students and for our faculty and staff. And then of course the last thing I'll lead us with is is with equity which is something that we constantly focus on as I've said multiple times we're going to create this grading task force is going to help us do that. We're going to expand our one to one on device program down to K through 12, which we've already expanded that one to one program down to K through 12. Our students are connected we have hotspots for our families that are in need and the access so if there are students who need them we can provide those for them at this time. And students will keep their district use district issue devices throughout the summer we did that last summer, and we'll continue to allow them to keep those devices at home as they are using them to also extend their learning opportunities while at home and eliminated any barriers of access as well as the hotspots as well. So I'll leave you with this quote challenges of what makes life interesting overcoming them is what makes life meaningful. Thank you so much Dr Davis. Thank you for sharing how you're addressing time to accelerate learning through sore but most of all your passion, and your focus on access and building on assets. As a reminder if you have questions for Dr Davis or other panelists, you know, place them in chat we are going to answer questions at the conclusion of this webinar. We're going to move on to our next speaker, which is on Heather huff. She is the executive director of the policy analysts for California education pace. Prior to this role she led a partnership between pace and the core districts, which are a group of districts in California that have a shared data system for public accountability, using multiple academic and non academic indicators. And those recent work is focused on research to strengthen state structures supporting continuous improvement in advancing policies that support the whole child. Dr huff has worked in a variety of capacities to support policy and practice and education, including as an improvement advisor at the Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching. Thank you Heather for joining us today and we look forward to hearing your research perspectives on assessments and the critical role they play in understanding in meeting students diverse needs and accelerating learning. Thank you so much for having me and thanks to the speakers in South Carolina so great to hear about the fantastic work that you're doing. A lot of what I'll be sharing today I think really in for reinforces and provide some of the evidence based behind a lot of what you're doing. Next slide. So, we are at an incredible crossroads in education I think that this is the backdrop of all of this work. We know that students and educators have an incredible need. So, this team has really affected students and families, and while I strongly believe as do the other speakers that this is not lost learning or a foregone conclusion students are behind and communities have been harmed in many ways by the pandemic and so there is an incredible opportunity to address what students are what students need, and also to make sure that we act aggressively so that that doesn't become a long term loss. We also have an incredible opportunity, because the pandemic really has led to disruption experimentation, innovation and forestry starts a lot of the big transitions that we've been wanting to make an education around technology and investment at scale for formative or entering purposes have not necessarily been been possible on the type of accelerated timeline that we've had. And of course we have a lot of funding now that we never had before the level of federal investment in public education is like nothing we've ever seen in the United States, and in many states, including California where I'm from. We have a lot of funding, additional investments in public education. And this is both to address students critical needs now, but also to lay the groundwork for a longer term transformation and so I'm going to talk about how assessment fits into this vision. We worked at pace with coalition of organizations all across the state ranging from students and families to educators to state level policymakers to try to build consensus around what we want education to look like in the fall when students are back in person instruction. And that group together, which overall has over 40 organizations that signed on to this consensus vision, including the state teachers Association, the administrators Association, and the parent teacher Association, came up with these five categories. And I'm seeing some. My slides aren't on the screen right now. So, what those five categories are our first starting with relationships with so with education being so disrupted over the past year and in a lot of places. There is a strong strength between different groups parents educators school board members superintendent. We need to center the relationships between all of the people in the system and make sure that families are really feeling connected with school and that school is meeting their needs. The third piece is that we have to address every child's need and whole child needs, and I'll dig into this in a little bit. But the purpose of that is to understand in every school and in every district, what students need in order to thrive. And then this is the third piece strengthen staffing and partnerships to make sure that students get what the need. And it is making sure that we address teaching and learning in every single classroom, so that we make teaching and learning relevant and rigorous. There's a lot that has been difficult over the past year. And part of what will be great is to bring students back, giving them opportunities to collaborate, giving them opportunities for authentic feedback, and leveraging part of what's happened during the pandemic, which is that students have found so many new things. I know my own children have experienced a boredom this year like they never did before and that's good for kids development helps them find new things that they love and might be interested in pursuing so leveraging that. And then finally empowering teams to rebuild and reimagine systems the work of system transformation cannot happen without a very deliberate focus on that. And a little bit of time specifically talking about this, this area of the framework number two assessing full child needs next slide. So, what we're thinking about and talking about when we're focusing on assessing student needs full child needs in order to then make sure students get what they need. The first thing is that in the first weeks of school, we really need a comprehensive set of assessments of data of information in order to identify what students need moving forward. The first here is conducting regular student wellness screenings. This is important for understanding students mental health needs, their social emotional needs, and also just their overall general well being. We also need to make sure that students have our administered interim or diagnostic assessments when they start back to school and throughout the school year to determine current learning needs. Understanding every child's needs at a real point in time. It needs to be critical for both getting them the supports but then also monitoring the extent to which they are experiencing learning recovery over the year. In every school, a team of educators and school leaders also needs to be reviewing prior years data. This past year was disrupted in so many ways that that doesn't mean we don't know something about how students were engaging so were they coming to classes whether that was online hybrid or in person. How were they engaged in instruction? What kinds of grades were they receiving? And then also discussing with families and students their needs and assets. So using them at the center of this process, not just reviewing data about them but engaging them. What do you need? What types of things are you really excited about and can we build from as we think about comprehensive supports for every child? But then thinking about this in a school wide context and using something like the multi-tiered systems of support where a large group of students will do fine with an expanded set of tier one supports that includes after school time, expanded learning time and lots more focus in school on things like play and relationships and wellness and collaboration. But then as students needs intensify, the school should be prepared to offer increasingly intense supports to those students. So some important considerations in thinking about how we use assessments in schools. The first is that schools and districts should only collect data that they're actually going to use. And this is very important because there is a cost to administration. I mean there's a monetary cost, there's a time cost. But also, especially when we're asking students sensitive questions like, do you have an adult who cares about you in your school? What's a student a question like that if you're not going to do something about it? Because it can reinforce for that student. If they say no, nobody cares about me in this school and then nobody responds to that, it can reinforce something that might be traumatic for them or hurtful. So that's a really important consideration. But teachers, school leaders and district administrators use different kinds of data and that might mean that different kinds of data are being implemented to support decision making at different levels. So at a classroom level, a teacher is constantly assessing his or her students' needs through reviewing student work, through observing student behavior. And that kind of information can be critical if used well to inform instruction on a minute by minute basis. But at the school level, that school leadership team might need different information because they're thinking about these tiers. Which students need supplemental supports? Which classrooms need instructional aids or volunteers or tutors? And then, finally, at the district level, that's an even higher level of information because at the district level, administrators are thinking about how to allocate resources, how to support schools that maybe aren't as effective at utilizing new resources to accelerate students' needs. And then, finally, staff may need training and support in reviewing and acting upon data and maintaining that improvement mindset, not letting data reinforce negative stereotypes or bias. Next slide. And just one note, our team has been utilizing the 4Ts as a framework for thinking about how we invest in these different areas. So when we think about investing in assessment, we need to build in time. We need to make sure that teams at the district and school level can analyze data. They can build the capacity for acting on assessment data. We need to make sure that we have the talent of people in schools to really build from what they're learning. So this includes data leads, family engagement leads. We need to make sure people have training and then, finally, administering assessments requires technology to make sure that students can take those assessments. So I'll stop there and hand it back to you. Thank you so much, Heather. Thanks for sharing the five key equity actions, but also the deep focus you did on assessing whole child needs, and particularly the reminder that data should only be collected if it's going to be used. Thank you so much, Heather. It's now my pleasure to introduce our final panelist Jorge Aguilar. Well, he speaks. Again, feel free to drop in some questions. Jorge Aguilar is the superintendent of the Sacramento City Unified School District, the 13th largest school district in California. Aguilar has more than 20 years of K-12 and higher education experience with a strong focus and background on issues of equity and student achievement. And dedication to equity have already resulted in improved outcomes in Sacramento City Unified. Prior to serving as superintendent, Mr. Aguilar was the associate superintendent for equity and access at the Fresno Unified School District. Jorge, thank you for joining us and we look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much and good morning, everyone. First of all, let me just say thank you to the Learning Policy Institute and AASA. I wanted to just very quickly share a little bit of information about Sac City Unified School District. I'm in my fourth year, finishing up my fourth year. I started in 2017. We'll be starting my fifth year. Sac City Unified, we are serving over 40,000 students, about 72% of whom are low income. They're foster homeless. They're English learners. So I would describe it at this time as a high poverty, low achieving school district. Certainly looking forward to piercing through the challenges that we all confront in urban districts like Sac City Unified and transforming it into a high poverty, high achieving school district. I too want to just congratulate and commend folks for focusing not on remediation but acceleration and the knowledge that has to be regained among our students, particularly our most vulnerable students. So I do want to just mention my own concern about the fact that we of course have struggled through a generational achievement gap and the fact is that in communities like Sacramento, where we still see a great degree of gentrification, Sacramento, and California just as an FYI is in the top two kind of destinations, cities of folks that are coming into our city from other parts of the state and nation, particularly from the Bay Area. This has resulted in my view as superintendent in even more gentrification in our community. And that means that we have many schools that are very well resourced and many schools that are not well resourced at all. We have many plus schools in our district, some of them are very specialized career pathway oriented, but for the most part, the same challenges that urban districts face in communities where we have this kind of gentrification. I just want to just also mention that for us today is a very special day in that it's the first day of collapsing our cohorts to four days per week. And I see that as superintendent as an equity matter we, like most school districts started with a hybrid concurrent instruction model two days per week, where students were in person with their peers. And really for only two days a week three hours per day and starting today we have collapsed every single classroom that allows us to bring both students so that they are in person four days per week and so we celebrate that today. I can't believe that, you know, we shuttered our schools on March 13 we started this model on April 13 and today of course we are collapsing them. Really I appreciate the invitation I can say a superintendent of an urban school district that I have had a lot of time to reflect over the past year particularly now that we have brought our students back to in person instruction about the sort of academic pandemic that I think we suffered through before long before the pandemic. And certainly we we see the need for academic assessments we are actually launching our last set of academic assessments district wide, which is something that we're looking forward to we're using I ready illuminate we also will be using the math diagnostic testing program the MDTP through the University of California. And we're of course all very interested and intrigued in accessing the data and seeing the academic standing of our students but I would say that even more than that. As you can see in my lapel pin. Of course, we know that may is mental health awareness month. And we have always in Sac City felt that it's important to treat data with utmost respect in light of the fact that I always remind our team that every numerator and denominator represents the life of a child. It represents the experiences, the hardships of an entire family and so we must commit to looking at data from that lens, and make sure that we reminded that it represents the name of one student. The needs of that one individual student and it manifests the inequities that each individual student is facing in Sac City unified. I want to very quickly just share my screen and share with all of you, our core value statement here in Sac City unified. And you can see that it is a very bold core value statement in that we recognize that our system is designed to produce the results that it's getting right now and that in fact it is designed to be inequitable, and that we have to confront and interrupt the inequities that exist to level the playing field for all of our students. And I also like to remind our staff that part of that disruption means disrupting. This is one of my favorite bloggers who reminds us of the reality of the actual drivers versus attributed drivers of success quote unquote. I resist and will continue to fight for the possibilities that providing additional supports to our students particularly on the social and emotional front still has a place for us and that we are responsible for making sure that we are providing those supports to our students. Heather talked about this idea of a restorative restart and we of course have taken that very seriously and I've said that we're not going to wait until the fall to engage in that restart so our summer program that we are planning right now will have a very, very high degree of focus on the social and emotional needs of our students we are partnering with community based organizations across the city to focus on personal development, social and emotional needs mental health needs as well we're hiring our own youth to work over the course of the summer with their peers, we are going to be doing peer mental health support and paying our students as well for some of that. We've notified our Board of Education in our community our intention to invest more resources in closing equity gaps that we have seen from a human resources perspective. Some of our schools have these whole child wrap around hubs that we call student support centers and other cases are principles are leveraging limited resources to purchase point to FTE or point to FTE point to five FTE so that a social worker can be at their school site once a week for school we are planning to use a lot of our COVID relief dollars to address those equity gaps again from that whole child perspective. We are going to be placing much more focus on social and emotional surveys kind of rapid surveys we've done daily surveys for students to better assess what their needs are on a daily basis. This is being done as an integrated approach to an implementation of a robust MTSS program we in Sac City have tried to implement a robust MTSS program we've not been successful and so we are working with some state entities and partnering with them to make sure that we are on a rapid right and we're excited about that so certainly lots to consider at this time but today you know we celebrate this this this small milestone of returning back to some level of normalcy in terms of engagement in terms of creating or recreating the safe haven that we've been for so many of our students especially in communities like Sacramento and then treating assessments both academic and social emotional as as not what we used to do and use it the way that we used to do it as Heather was saying but to really lean in and do something different so again that's sort of our experience here in Sac City on the ground and again I just want to appreciate the invitation to participate in this panel. Great. Thank you so much Dr. Aguilar and giving us the broader context about what our schools mean on multiple levels to our students and our families. I want to invite all the panelists to come back on camera and thank you, all of you for your individual perspectives that really added a collective impact for all of us in terms of the joint information. We do have a question that we received through the chat and Q&A function that I want to put out there for the panel. Those who in particular are using summer learning programs so Dr. Dr Davis this is targeted towards you but or hey if you have something as well so Dr. Davis says you shared an overview of the summer learning programs for you or the other students what does out of school time time do for assessment in supporting accelerated learning and social emotional development. Dr. Davis you want to kick us off and unmute me. I'm not really quite sure how to answer what does out of school time look like I think I may need some clarification on out of school time is that time away from. I'm really referring to the summer program sores that you talked about and what the implications have for assessment and supporting accelerated learning and social emotional development. We'll start with the social emotional develop social emotional development and and again, we want to create spaces that are social emotional that support social emotional well being. In our district we value the social emotional learning curriculum that is taught and the tennis of social emotional learning but it's far it goes far beyond that it goes far it goes into modeling what is a social emotional healthy environment and creating a space where students are firm supported and given an opportunity and given opportunities to be the best version of themselves and whatever and whatever facet it is required. So that's what we want to focus on so part of that for us is of course assessing where they are as far as their well being I think ever made a great point it's not enough just to get this data did not do anything with it. So once you retrieve this data now what is what programs do you have in place to support this type of this type of information. As far as assessments concern the assessment is in preparation for really is feedback back to our teachers. The summer opportunities will give us an idea where our students will stand prior to entering the next grade level of the school year which then allows us to differentiate instruction that that information is then shared with not only the teachers and administration but is also shared with the students and their families but it gives us an opportunity to now identify where gaps may exist based on what they should know going into this grade level and what they currently know going into the grade level and then build a plan from there. So this summer reset allows us to do that. And that's why it's important for us to not only have it. This summer, but next summer, and also extending the day during the school year this upcoming school year, how do we then maximize the time after school in the upcoming school year the 21 22 school year, based off of the information we gather this summer. And that's resets the baseline for us because I don't anticipate will be able to get them everything they need this summer and I think it is a mistake to believe that that is possible because of how much loss instruction we have. We have to remember that the loss instruction didn't begin in August, the loss instruction began in March of 29 March of 2020. The loss instruction began, and then the fact that we couldn't have summer programs and a real summer programs in the in a summer of 2020 with direct instruction for our students because remember achievement, three things that we're looking for when we're talking about alignment, teaching and time. And so we lost the teaching side of the model of the equation for achievement. And that's what we're trying to recoup is the instructor direct instruction of achievement for treatment. So much. And Jorge, I have a separate question for you but would you like to add that, would you like to add to this conversation around out of school time as well. Just very quickly what I would say and echo Dr. Davis's comments. I'd also encourage just because I have to do it myself. I work very closely with Heather Hoff and Heather will tell you that our initial summer programming effort was going to have a very heavy focus on academics and so this is a time for us. And those of us who really believe in equity access social justice issues that we have to temper ourselves because, in fact, what Dr. Davis is saying is right we may not be able to do everything and the reality is we wouldn't be able to do everything to bring back everything that we lost over the course of a month or two months through a summer program. And so, you know, the idea for us is that academics will play a part in our summer programming will do some high dosage tutoring based on Annenberg's work and some professional development that we do but the latter part of the day is going to be really, you know, based on, you know, I mean, focused on personal development leadership development physical engagement arts dance. Those kinds of things that I think are really important and to his point I mean we're seeing our summer program as really the foundation for our students to be able to be ready for fall learning and for us to get a better sense of again what are the social and emotional needs of our students before and about the academic ones and I think the summer program is going to give us that ability. I just felt that it wasn't appropriate for us to think about about a restorative start until the fall and give up on the opportunity to do something during the summer. Great. Thank you. I want to add to this. Well, if I may and I'm glad that Jorge mentioned that and Baron as well the importance of very out of the box using all the partners we can think of to help us with our summer programs and our after school programs for the next few years. So as a state agency, we are using our federal funding or will be using American rescue plan money but also our Esther funding to work with other state agencies, like the South Carolina Arts Commission, who has a very robust program of artists and residents to go into communities with students. And so as a former music teacher, I'd remind everyone that school needs, we need to meet the needs of all students and that can be done through many different content areas, not just real, not just students sitting down with a teacher for reading instruction but actually through the arts and through other physical activities that students need to do this summer and particularly after school. Thank you so much. So we just have three more minutes and I have a couple of questions that are really kind of about funding. And so, Jorge, you mentioned that that you were, you were supporting students through funding paying students and Dr. You also mentioned hiring USC speech interns to run a summer speech program. The audience would like to hear a little bit more about how these innovative staffing approaches are being supported financially is it through the federal funds is it through local funds Jorge specifically for California, the local control funds. And we just do have a couple minutes I'd love to hear from both of you so it might be rapid fire. Yeah, just very quickly I mean we are looking at COVID relief dollars as a funding mechanism for us. I'm not going to say that we're going to, you know, do it great this summer. The reality is we are looking for our secondary students to support elementary students, probably not where we wanted to be next summer tied to career pathways those kinds of things just because June is just right around the corner but we do intend to hire youth and support them. Yeah, I'll just say very quickly, one of my concerns is that as we think about coming back in the fall. We have to pay attention to the fact that for many of our students and communities like Sacramento they had to get a job. And so the last thing that I want is for students to not consider coming back because they need to keep those jobs. So at a minimum, I want to align some of their, the need for them to have employment with activities that that that I think will help them pursue and think about dreaming for a college education and coming back and staying in this community so if they need a job then then I'd rather fill fill in the gap and have them interacting with with their peers. And just real quickly our funding is a combination of multiple, multiple sources of funding also cares act funds as their money for us as well. Some local money we've always had an internship summer program for our students here in the school district as well we have students who are doing apprenticeship programs through partnerships that are being funded from other sources and so, and then our source program is going to be we're using primarily cares funding for our source, our source program to recruit our teachers, our teachers to teach our students to summer and we, you know, we want to make it as competitive as we could possibly do to bring in some high quality teachers to to to give their skill set for our students. So you both did a great job of rapid fire. And unfortunately we're getting close to the top of the hour and so we'll have to wrap up so, at first of all, I want to give all my thanks to the panelists who joined us who has had so many more ideas and answers that I'm sure they would like to provide for today. And many of you asked there were a few questions that we didn't get to but we will do our best to follow up with all of you. And, and then most of all I want to thank you guys for joining us all the participants for engaging in this and being part of this. As you think about the strategies that you will deploy either as an education leader in the system as a district or state or at the school level. So I can't thank you guys enough for joining us. The presenters also offered a wonderful resources that we placed into the chat and we're happy to get that back out to you all. Again recording this webinar and the resources we share will be sent out to everyone via email. We do encourage you to sign up for a final webinar and equity centered strategies to support students which is scheduled for June 1. And I just love how essentially all of the strategies here address not only accelerated learning but also addressing our students who have been most affected by losing instructional time throughout this crisis so with that I want to thank all of you for joining us all of those at AASA and LPI who helped us come together and thank our education leaders. Everyone have a really great day, whether it's beginning or ending or right in the middle of it. Thanks so much.