 William Roxbury's Board of School Directors to order at 6.31 on September 18th. First order of business is public comment. Public. Second order of business, the consent agenda. Do I have this motion to approve? And I just want to commend Anna on my. Oh, yes. Blue ribbon minutes. Yeah, no, I had Heather did a great job too, but these are extremely thorough and certainly. Anyone looking at them cannot claim that they do not know how to get this meeting. So thank you. So motion to approve consent agenda, yeah, okay. Second, second. All is in favor. Any opposed? Great. And so now learning focus and very excited to have. A fine looking bunch of. Yes, yes. The administrators here, some of whom we've seen before and some of whom like we're names this is the first time, so welcome. Yeah, so I will just turn it over to Libby and we're very excited to hear from all of you. All right, so we have a presentation, one presentation for all four buildings. You have to start us out. We're going to ask that if you have questions right now and move for the end so that we can move right along with these presentations and that kind of stuff. Okay, so by all means we want questions but just they move for the end. So we've been talking about the continued improvement. I've been talking a lot about our focus areas. These were the goals that were written for things like. Can I step in just for a second? Sure. Is that audio good for folks at home so I know you're a little away from. Yeah, okay. You can move this here, yeah. One other quick question. Will this presentation be posted somewhere? Sure. Thank you. We can, certainly it's not now, but we can. Great. So these were the two goals that we were working on as a leadership team. Each school will show significant student achievement growth and core content area that data dictates needs for growth. We assess our effectiveness on the basis of results rather than intentions. Each school will have an effective multi-tiered system of support that ensures learning at high levels. The concept for all students while time is a variable. So these are things this board has heard before out of my mouth and we came together as a leadership team to do that. So in the spring, I believe I told you we held a data team meeting with each of the four schools and some teacher leadership for some schools. It's our first time doing it, so it was first time growing and learning together in this way. So each school made a goal around student achievement and a goal around multi-tiered system of support. And some made more than two, some made two and that was fine. So we focused in, you've seen this before you saw the superintendent's report in these four areas, the collective responsibility of collaborative practices, formalized essential learning, timely system to enrich, intervene and remediate in high quality instruction in every classroom. And as I've shared with you before, these three areas right here, not this one yet, but these three areas right here have beginning proficiency scales based since we are a proficiency based learning environment. We do that for our leadership as well and our continuous improvement plans. So when the teams were making their goals, they use those proficiency scales and their current realities based on what the data was provided and based on what perception were to make those goals. Now, a lot of the teams chose this idea of PLC in the collaborative responsibility and collaborative practices, I'm sorry, collective responsibilities and collaborative practices as a main focus. So we want to show just really short snippets of video of what a PLC is not and what a PLC could be. Okay, so I searched a lot of hard. I actually didn't do the one that you did for the effective PLC because it's just a little long. So I did a shorter one and I got into it a little faster. So this is what an effective PLC is not. Not to say that we have this happening in our buildings right now to this extreme, but we want to stay away from this type of meeting here. To our weekly PLC meeting, our agenda was sent out, did anybody have any issues about the agenda before we get started for today? Nope. Good, okay, great. Tina's going to start us out talking about data from our last assessment. Looking at last year's order of operations assessment, as a whole, our first blocks did very well. No one scored the lowest C. But block two, we had the majority scored an A, but there were a couple of students who did fail. And the question that was most often missed by the students who were, was number 11. And that's because the students added where they subtracted the order of operations and they just need to know that it's addition or subtraction, whichever one comes first from left to right. So within our classes, our focus lessons, we need to do a lot with talking about adding and subtracting and also multiplying and finding which one comes first from left to right. And is everybody using the hopscotch instead of just please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, we talked about using, because multiplication or division, so if they look at it as a hopscotch, either one can come first depending on from left to right, so maybe using that. I think the kids coming from elementary, they're used to the please excuse my dear Aunt Sally, but then if they haven't seen the hopscotch, show them that too, to see the side by side relevance of that, so they can come first. And I think that really helps show them that there's another way, because they have been taught multiplication, then division, because it's please excuse my dear. So we really have to change that mindset. So using that hopscotch, and you'll see that come up when we do one step equations and then two step equations. So if we kind of go ahead and introduce it now, that will really help get them back into that mindset of whichever comes first. We had that written down on the assessment. Yes, we did. What else did we, besides the mostness, do we need to change anything about the assessment? I think we need to, since it's going to be calculator inactive, like you said, some of the exponents need to be smaller, okay? Would anybody be willing to change that assessment? I'll do it, yeah. And not to make sure that when we do the multiplication that we use, not the multiplication sign that we use, the bullet, the dot, anything that. So Michael, you'll update that and make sure we had talked about earlier, everybody checking what they make, so. Yeah, absolutely. And I'll put the answer sheet on Blackboard as well. Okay. All right, next agenda item. We need to talk about the mediation. So how are we going to go back, now that we've talked about the data, how are we going to go back and remediate the students who most often miss those work operations problems? And like for here, they go into talking about how they can help students who struggled on this particular common formative assessment. So in that, you saw them referencing data and where kids really struggled as a group, talking about the assessment and what could be different, how you could revise it, but it was a common assessment given, we don't know if it was formative or summative in this task. So in this situation, they were talking about how to intervene with students who are struggling. This is what we want our PLCs to be doing, perhaps not all in one meeting, but doing collaboratively. And so when we're talking about collaborative practices instructionally, this is what it might look like, what might happen. Hi, anyone here? Yep. Okay, I thought I was late. Not really. That's so much to grade. Me too. Sorry to cut it. That exhausted. I was just gonna grow a coffee in the way that I do this. Hello. Hey guys, sorry I'm late, it's not for coffee. Oh hey, sorry, I need to start for coffee. I was going to. Well, can't start morning without coffee. No, I'm sorry. What was it? Not that late. What are your kids trusting us for Halloween? Not sure yet. They're still trying to decide what they're gonna go with. Hey guys. Hi. Oh, hey. Hi. Late nights, late mornings. Oh, hello, it's all good. So how everybody do on unit three? My kids did a 78. Mine got 79. 84. 84.1. Well, that covers data. Are we supposed to analyze the data and figure out which learning target was the most misunderstood? Probably, but this thing's gonna pass. I wouldn't worry about it. I don't know about you, but during the last test, somebody asked a question about the paragraph that they were supposed to write. They didn't really seem to understand the prompt and I didn't know if that was just a test thing, if it was just that kid. Did any of you have that issue from any feedback like that from your students? No, that was all fine, but forget about asking questions. I had a kid throw up in class yesterday. All over my shoes. My kids had no problem with the directions, but I had one kid who wrote a letter form and then another kid that asked questions to answer the question and then another kid had zero support whatsoever. I don't know what I've been doing with them all semester all we're doing is using evidence to support yet absolutely nothing. So you can see what the not so effective use of time and that's not to say our educators are actually doing that right now. However, there are some. There's some of those behaviors coming in late and not necessarily prepared, that kind of thing. So we wanna get away from that. We just wanted to show like, what do we mean when we say collaborative practices? What does it look like? What's up? First up is Ryan at UES. And Ryan, we have a clicker here if you wanna use a clicker. Or you can just push away. Hi, everybody. Thanks. First, I just wanna say thank you for giving us an opportunity to share our data and just talk quickly about some of the things that are happening in our school. I guess before I show any sort of graph or chart or anything like that, there's some things that won't be measured in this presentation. It's only about eight minutes. And so it doesn't include the way that kids feel when they come into our schools, the way that parents feel about our schools. There's a lot of things that the tables and graphs and things that I'm gonna show you don't cover that are really important to us. And that's something we shared with our teachers the other day when we started to look through this data. And so the best way that you can see that and experience that is to come to our schools, spend time in our school, be a part of that community. I know most of you have done that, but just extending that invitation that it's always nice to have you in our school to really see what the learning feels like and what our community and atmosphere feels like in our school. So just wanted to share that. So our first goal is a follow-up of last year's goal. So coming in as a new administrator last year, one of the first questions that I asked was, can I see the curriculum? Can I see what does second grade do? What does first grade do? What does kindergarten do? To try to get an idea about how teachers were identifying the student learning targets and how they're measuring student learning. And what we found when we started to do that was that teachers were working really hard. Teachers were doing amazing things, but they weren't necessarily collaborating and working together as a school. They were working in different pockets and something as simple as a formatting of their curriculum documents. The way that parents could access that information, all those things were not consistent across all the grade levels. And so with Ben and Roxbury and working with Mike and Libby last year, we started to really target math. That was the first thing that we started to look at. And so we did a lot of work last year with our teachers around prioritizing standards and starting to what we call clarify the learning journey. So what do we want our students to learn at the end of each grade? What are the most important skills that they need before they leave those grades? And so this year, our first goal is after we did that clarifying of that learning journey, our first goal is about, okay, now we're gonna implement that. Now we're gonna teach together. We're gonna have a vertically aligned curriculum that we follow, that we use, and to inform our teaching. So some of the data that led us to target math first, just so you, this was not our favorite slide, but it's something that we need to just discuss is this is aspect data trends from 2015 to 2018. And it shows a pretty significant decline from our students. And as, you know, when I look at this data, the first thing and thinking about our students, the first question that we ask is curriculum. What is a curriculum? And we know the SBAC is very specifically aligned to the standards. So does our curriculum reflect that? Is our curriculum aligned to the standards? And as we started to get into that, we said, well, everyone's teaching different things and prioritizing different standards. So this data is a reflection of that. And so that's the work that we need to do to start bringing that alignment in the first piece. When you look at our data from last year, you'll see some slight growth in different areas, but we didn't really dig too deep into the implementation piece. It was more about let's start to get on the same page. This year, we have something called the STAR assessment, which is an assessment that's been used at the high school for the last two years. And the STAR is just a quick screener of proficiency data and kind of gives us just a quick snapshot into what levels of proficiency our students are at as they come into each grade level. And one thing that really jumped out to us when we looked at this data, again, I'm not gonna go into too much detail, but one big thing that we noticed was our current grade three students are significantly higher in the proficiency level than the other grades. And when we started to think about that and started to say, you know, why would that data be a little bit different, a little bit, why are those students, they're reflecting that they're learning at a higher level is we started to think about the collaboration from the second grade team and the fact that last year they jumped right on board with that standard alignment process and they started to teach really standard aligned units together. All of our other grades are doing very great work and working together and doing that process. But second grade was really the first grade that kind of jumped right in and started to get their feet wet there. And they also started doing math workshop and what we're working on this year, math menu. And so to us, we said, wow, this is right in line with the work that we're planning for this year, which is around math menu. It's around small group instruction for our students in math and providing our teachers with professional development and resources they need to do that work. So this was one good data point for us to start the year. So how are we gonna measure success on this first goal? Really it's about our assessment data, our PLC notes, so notes from teacher meetings, teacher feedback, how do teachers feel about this process, how do they feel about the curriculum, our STAR data, our ESPEC data, student work and also classroom observation data. Our second goal is really the work that we did last year in math. This year, we're gonna begin a lot of that work around prioritizing standards for ELA, integrated arts, which is our music, PE, our specials in science and social studies. So that's the work that we're starting to do this year because that's all equally important work that we wanna be focusing on. So how are we gonna measure success in that area? Really that's about having this formal curriculum as we work together with Roxbury and Libby and Mike to do that work and also about PLC notes and having a curriculum that's accessible for all. So really if a parent wants to know, hey, first grade, what is my child learning and reading and how can I quickly access that and know what the learning targets are for my child, how can I get to that information right away? And so that's the work that we're doing this year. And then our third goal is really around the social emotional learning piece. So recognizing that outside of academics, it's not all about academics, it's also about how students treat one another, how they are active citizens, how they, you know, their behavior and the way they treat one another, those are really important things. And so those are also skills that we need to teach our kids explicitly and that's work that we do. So getting consistent on that is also something that we're working on this year. So that's our third, that's our third big goal. And how will we measure it? Same thing, those aligned documents, notes, feedback, all of those consistent measures. So for our teachers, what training and resources are we gonna provide? We're gonna have our consultant, Christian Portemont who's helping to implement our math menu. We have time allocated throughout the year. We have support from our new district SEL coordinator who's awesome, who ran a group this morning with all of our social workers and guidance counselors. We have support from our curriculum director and superintendent. And so those are just some of the supports that we have right now in place. And we're feeling really good as a school about where we're headed and the work that we're doing. That's all I got. Thank you. Thank you. You're up, Ben. We support each other. It's the one cloud. Welcome everyone. Thank you for having me. My name is Ben Brownhill, the principal of Roxbury Village School. If I haven't had a chance to meet any of you. It's a couple of new faces that I haven't really had a chance to touch face with. I would say the same thing about Roxbury as Ryan said about UES is, please come out. You're welcome anytime to come out and just look at our gardens which are beautiful. We have our corn growing and our pumpkins and all kinds of things we're really proud of our farm to school program that we put so much hard work into. So you might even catch a time you come out and students had made something and we produce that and show that in the cafeteria. So just little pieces like that, I think make each school special. We're proud of that aspect for Roxbury. So a lot of the things that Ryan had mentioned is gonna be sort of the same for me. We probably could have combined our forces here and presented. So our school goal specifically for us, the student achievement piece, by June of this year, this school year, will increase aspect scores, proficiency in aspect scores from math by 10%. The MTSS focus, by June also this school year, the prioritized math standards will be identified and used. For the school goal, how do we determine that? Well, as Livia spoke this spring we had the big data dance and central administration team which was very helpful to kind of really look at where we are, what we have and where we need to go. That was helpful for me as the school building leader. Also looking at that, we looked at the math aspect scores. We realized that we're in the low 40% range for the boys and girls. So that was something we really needed to focus on, put our attention on, and we came up with a plan, hopefully, and we can make that an effective plan. So now we got to work and we started creating things over the summer. Not just things, but these math prioritized standards that we put together for the K-4. Sounds something very simple to an outsider, but for us, this was something that we didn't have. So having something that can't tell you how happy the teachers are to have something in their hand, something to look at, something to follow. So you have that vertical and horizontal alignment that Ryan had spoke about. Teachers have that same language. You can have some common assessments that are utilized. So what does this mean? If there's a third grader, for example, at Roxbury and they graduate and go to fourth grade, they may be at Montpelier, going to UES. They can move into that classroom and speak the same language and be hopefully in the same position in the same spot academically. But we weren't finished by just creating those documents. As Ryan said, we had Christian Carter-Mange come, introduced and rolled out the beginning of the school year. It really set the tone as far as our expectations were and it really kind of, I guess, formalized and put some structure for the school year to begin. So that was a nice way to begin. So he introduced something called math menu and you can, there's a link on here once you get this. You can look this up on your own. But it's really a way of differentiating and kind of the instruction and offering some student choice there. It's a really fun way to kind of bring the material together into an effective way into the classroom. There's also a plain grade level collaboration times throughout the entire school year. Next week is our first time of doing this. We're really excited about that. We have some half days. There are different grade level teams that will be collaborating and be able to really go through these pieces of these standards with Christian. So how this will help? As I said, this is really a new era for us. We have an actual document now that we can follow that the teachers are more focused. They're collaborating, they're showing those best practices and they really have a cohesive plan to follow. I don't care what you're doing, whether it's academics, whether it's watching football on Sunday. If you don't have a cohesive plan that you're all working towards, it's not going to be successful. And I think the slide that Ryan had proved that. We're changing that now. So best of all, accountability, which is a big word for us and that's for the math specialist, central admin, the principals, teachers, and most of all the students. But I would say we're accountable to the students because they're looking for a good education, they're looking for a cohesive plan, professionals that are talking and they need that and they deserve that. So how do we measure this success? Well obviously now we can have some benchmark data through the school year that we can all talk about, which is extremely important. We have some common assessments throughout the school year as well that we can have at the grade level that we can develop across the teams from UES to RBS. And also the STAR, a new online assessment tool that we're actually taking this week. We took today, we'll take tomorrow as well and finish up so we'll have some results so we can compare, which is nice. So when we get together next week, we can have that STAR data that we can sit down with the other teachers and look at it, compare apples to apples. Instead of this apples to bicycles, we're really that far apart. And also the SVAC results when you get together to the school year. So the end result, I think, that's summed up with the math equation. You have collaborating professionals plus a specific plan followed with fidelity equals success. And that's hopefully where we're heading and like I said, the students deserve that, they need that and that's what we're trying to do. Thank you. I'm gonna take my glasses on and off so I can see you pretty well. But I'm, so I'm Pam Arnold and I'm in school at the middle school. And I think you're gonna hear some common themes as the third person speaking. Some things are gonna be really similar but what I'd like to start with is sharing as maybe not biologically, maybe not chronologically but I am the oldest member of the team in many ways. And I just wanna share how nice it is and exciting it is to see that all of the schools across the district are working through a common lens. So when Libby shared that diagram in the beginning of the four elements, there's consistent language for all of us in all of our schools as well as it's really exciting for me to hear the work moving forward for curriculum that starts in pre-K and goes all the way up to grade 12 and those priority standards are aligning. We've all been working on some of that in pockets but to have it be really focused and under Libby and Mike's leadership to help push us along, I think that's really exciting. So I just wanna share that that it's nice to see the progress being made at a collective district level. So I, Ben, would you do it? Did they do that on purpose to you, Pam? You don't want, I don't trust the space farms. That's what we're working on, you're mine, I'll just go to the other side. So as Libby spoke, thanks Ryan. Good old buddy, old pal. In June, we met as a district level team to come up to analyze the data that we had and the only really large piece of data was the SBAC and so in looking at our student achievement focus, the why do we need to change is a statement that I'm using often at the middle school because change is incredibly difficult for people yet change is incredibly positive if we wanna change the results that we're having. So why do we need to change? And it's really because all of our students are not learning at high levels. They're not meeting grade level standards and or above. This was the SBAC data that we chose in June and it says by June 2020, MSMS will decrease the gap on the SBAC by at least 5% for students who receive free and reduced meals as well as between boys and girls. And so just to give you a little bit of a snapshot of why we zeroed in on that, I ultimately and I think we all do want all of our kids to be 100% proficient. And so to look at data that says some kids are, there's a core group who's 50% isn't proficient but we had two of the four grades when we looked at the data that were not even close to meeting proficiency. And in the free and reduced category in math and science, for those students not receiving free and reduced meals across all four grades, they were achieving proficiency at 50% or higher in each of the grades. For students who are receiving free and reduced meals, two of the four grades were not demonstrating proficiency across the board. And in sixth grade there was some proficiency and in eighth grade there was. So the bottom line is it's all up and down and we want to improve the scores for everybody. So by picking this particular standard, even though it's focusing on collecting the data on these two subgroups, we're hoping that it will impact all kids. So the data is also very different between boys and girls in some of the cohorts, but not in all of them. We also selected that students receiving special education services in the reading programs of System 44 and Read 180 will demonstrate expected growth that's based on the program from their September score. And we feel like that's doable. That basically means that when they take their September assessment, they are given a projected spot to end in June and we're hoping that all kids that are receiving this specialized instruction will achieve that by the end of the year. We also selected focus or more of a social emotional goal focus. And again, same message is why do we need to change? It's because what we're doing isn't working for all kids. And this one, I'll read it to you. We have not zeroed in on how we're exactly going to measure it. Our resiliency team is working on that right now, but we want to reduce the number of minutes that students are out of the general education classroom for whatever the reason might be. There, aside from academic proficiencies, there's also social and emotional learning proficiencies as well that we want all students to achieve. And you add the layers and these are not excuses, but kids in the middle school are also developmentally learning a lot more than just academics and they're trying to navigate, finding out who they are and where they want to be in the world. And so helping them to be in a place where they can access their learning by us meeting all of their needs, we're hoping that that will improve their achievement. So we're really focusing this year on structures and systems that will help to meet those goals. We are, so our in-service as I'm not sure how much Libby has told you, so I don't want to repeat too many things, but professional learning communities is the focus that we have been working on for years and it needed a reboot. So we were really grateful to have our August in service with an expert who could remind us what the true philosophy behind professional learning communities is. And it's really about teachers working collaboratively together to improve learning for all students. So what we're doing this year is intentionally rebooting our collaborative teams. Every team is working on these four areas and they're at different places in this work. Our number one priority is to identify, not to be redundant, what the priority standards are in every content area. And not only identify the priority standards, but what is that criteria and that scale that goes with that. Then the teachers are grouped by content and by grade and they're working together. They'll be developing common units of study, which then has common informative assessments where they can come back to that video clip that Libby showed you where they're having conversations. The student data is out there. They're looking at it. They're talking about instruction. They're talking about maybe in my classroom, students were struggling with a concept, but in Michelle's classroom, they were all acing it. What was Michelle doing in her classroom that I could also capitalize on to help improve my students? So it's having those conversations focused on the data that they're bringing to the table about students. And then building in additional time and support for those who need it, who haven't achieved proficiency and also talking about how we can extend. And I will tell, I will share that we've been so focused on how can we support all of those students who are not meeting proficiency that sometimes we haven't spent as much time on the extension and that's still an area we need to focus on. So professional learning communities do focus on that commitment to ensuring high levels of learning for each child at each grade level. It's a fundamental structure of teachers working together who share common student outcomes. So this is the, when you think back to Libby's visual of the flat, I'm gonna call it a flower, I'm not sure what it is. We're focusing on collaborative practices and collective responsibility. So the data analysis, this is what you've heard from some of my colleagues. What is it we're gonna look at? SBAC is one piece of the data. We intend to also use Renaissance Star. And again, as somebody shared earlier, because that's a K through 12 screener, it also does more than screen. It also provides you with some intervention and some focus areas for folks to work with kids. So it's not just a screener in September, January, June. There's a lot that is to that program that you can use in between to help support students. We've had a structured support time, which is our intervention block for years. Our specialists, math specialists and literacy specialists work with all of the teachers to help them develop which intervention groups should be facilitated by whom. And the specialists are doing remediation. The teachers are doing intervention and extension. And when we have common units of study and common assessments, that is another piece of data because the playing field is the same for everyone. So we can look at that and we can report out on that. So this is the work that professional learning community teams will do. Before I get to that, one of the systems that we've had to put in place is how do you make that work? How do you bring the teachers together so that they can have these conversations and they can move this work forward? So at the middle school, this time is built into their day and because we're intentionally focused on how those meetings operate. Again, Libby showed you sort of what we don't want them to look like and what we do want them to look like. Every one of our core content teams in fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade are being facilitated by a member of our leadership team. And so for example, I am also a facilitator and I'm facilitating the science PLCs. The focus of that is not to be someone in there monitoring their work, but it's to help them stay focused and to achieve the goals that they hope to achieve. So that's a structural support that's intended to help the teachers. And then our professional development, this is really small. I was trying to squeeze it all in the same slide, so I'll just give you the brief overview. The in-service in August with the consultant from Solution Tree was tremendously important in rebooting what the philosophy of professional learning communities are. And he also worked with the elementary schools and the middle school in the afternoon to really help set that structure. We, as I already shared, are working in collaborative teams. Our guiding coalition, which is our Ed Leader team at the middle school, is going to a conference around professional learning communities, the response to intervention this October. So that is something that we will be doing and then they will be coming back because all of the members, all but one, because we have one new member, is of the guiding coalition are facilitating these content teams. So everyone is involved in that process. The other layer, and I have a visual at the end, my last screen that I think we'll tie it all together for everybody, but we also recognize that there's a significant need around social-emotional learning for our students. And I'm really excited as well. Somebody mentioned Mary Bechtel. She's a part of our resiliency team and she worked this morning and she's also been working with us. She comes to meet with us once a week on developing what are the key priority standards. The key curriculum we want all of our kids to experience so that they are able to be best prepared to access their learning. So that's one part we have also contracted out with psychologist Joelle Van Lent and she is working with our teachers all year this year around fostering resiliency in our students. Sometimes you may hear, it's been called building a trauma-informed school. We're really focusing on resiliency for all kids because what is good for all kids is going to be good for kids who are coming from trauma, anxiety, all of those factors that are playing into the lives of kids today. We need training as adults in the classroom to help our kids be able to access learning. And then we are also devoting our faculty meeting time to helping teachers finalize the priority standards, designation, and their proficiency scales so they can begin to build common units of study. So I've tied it all together. Thank you to Mike Berry for helping me with this, but ultimately there's two layers to this work. There's the academic proficiency and then there's the social and emotional proficiency and we have multiple school teams. And right now, if I could just leave you at this, is the work we're asking our classroom teachers to do to focus on the content standards that they have determined every child must have. What is critically essential? And they're working in collaborative teams to get our kids there. On the other side, there is the folks who are working in support roles such as guidance counselor, school nurse, myself, the assistant principal, social worker, and then our consultants helping us to figure out how can we identify what the needs are when kids are not able to be accessing learning in classrooms. So kids are even learning this language now when they're coming to see us in our resiliency center, which is called the POD, which stands for Persistence, Opportunity, and Determination. The first question we are asking them is what do you need? And I'll just share one story. I had a sixth grader come in and visit the other day while I was overseeing the POD and the child walked in the room. This is a child who in fifth grade was often out of the classroom, just had this need to be moving around for whatever reason. I'm not exactly sure, but was constantly in and out. Came into the POD and said, I'm here because I just need a place so I can think for a few minutes and then I wanna go back to class. And I said, okay, pick up the timer, set it for five minutes. When the timer went off, the child came up and said, that's all I needed. Thank you for giving me the space and went back to class. That's a success story for the POD, but that is what we're trying to do. We're trying to help kids identify what is it that's getting in the way of you're being able to be in that classroom at that moment? What can we do to help provide you with skills and strategies to get you back? So that's the left side. So we've got a lot of adults in our building working together to try towards the same message, which is to provide success for all kids. So that's a really quick overview of a lot of work going on in the middle school. So I think three times. And off two. Don't get best for last. I'm sure you're working a lot, let's see. Just kidding. Look at that. It's probably Pam. I've got it. All right. Hi, hi everyone. It's so, I'm not gonna stand in front of that, but it's so nice to see you in person and not over a camera or in video. So it's been an amazing, I've been here since June 1st and it's been an amazing few months here. I'm getting adjusted to Vermont and also spending time here in the school before Mike left, Mike McCrack left, kind of transitioning and adjusting. And there's been a lot of work that's been done since starting on July 1st. And I'm really excited to share a little bit of what we've been doing just in the last few weeks together as a staff. So my name's Renee DeBoer. I am the principal at Montpelier High School. Excited to say that. And we're gonna talk about Montpelier High School and what all means, all means. So coming into this position, it was really important to me. There's a lot of different pieces that are wonderful pieces, which is why I came to Montpelier High School with personalized learning and proficiency learning and personalized learning plans and whatnot. And knowing the work that had been done at the high school prior to me coming in, I really wanted to honor that work because it's such beautiful work. But I also knew just based off my conversations with Libby that she was really looking at this high levels of learning for all students. And so how could we honor the work and make sure that the teachers felt like that wasn't being left behind, but also moving forward into looking at high levels of learning for all of our students. So I came together with kind of this theme of all means, all as a way for us to tag everything that we're doing this year to align with our theme of all means, all bridge. And I know that you were at open house and I apologize that you see this again. A couple of slides will be similar. So all means all, every student, every day. So in the past, I think we've talked a lot about like personalized learning plans and proficiency learning and whatnot. You'll see in my presentation, there hasn't been a lot of time spent particularly looking at school-wide data. And I think there's some reasons behind that. One I think is Pam spoke to. The data is a little bit limited right now for SBAC, we only have ninth grade. We did touch base. We talked about the SBAC data in June and have kind of come back to it through the summer. But you'll see it later on in my presentation. We talked about what other data do we need to collect? What systems do we need to have in place in order to collect data to give us a more well-rounded picture of where our students at and what barriers there are to them accessing learning. So our mission for the year, our student achievement focus is to identify and construct strategies to remove barriers for learning to increase learning proficiencies for all students. And then our MTSS focus is by June of 2020. We will have a defined collaborative team so clear roles, expectations and purpose. Currently just to speak to the MTSS focus, currently we have one team which is our leadership team who makes decisions really about all kinds of things that happen at this school. So it's really looking at that team and how can we revamp that team into more of an instructional leadership team that will focus primarily on what our student achievement focus is. So opening opportunities for all students while we're closing the achievement gap. So I wanted to get a little bit of a sense not knowing where our staff was at as far as looking at school-wide data. Just wanted to get some information from them and how comfortable are they with data. And I didn't put specified school-wide data or classroom data because I just wanted to get a sense of how they feel with it just in general. So you can see that almost 50% of our staff who respond, which is only 33, we have 45 who responded don't really feel that comfortable with data. And that tells me they just haven't been exposed to it. We have another 40% who say I review data fairly often and I usually understand how to use it. And then you have a small percentage of 15% who are really confident in using data. So I gave them kind of a generalized data that could be classroom, could be school-wide data. But from what I learned today and this morning and coming together with the staff is that this staff or this school has not spent a lot of time around examining data. So where is the data? So I didn't put any data up here on the screen. I can tell you just looking at our SBAC data are free and reduced. Our low SES subgroups, so low socioeconomic status and our special education groups are not growing. That again is a limited amount of data just off of SBAC. So we're trying to figure out as collectively as a group as to what kind of data can we support and begin to ask questions as to why our students aren't growing and be able to compare it to some other things that might be happening and are they not coming to school? If they're not coming to school, why are they not coming to school? Various reasons and we'll get into that. So and then also reviewing school-wide data has not been in the culture as I've already said yet. This year we're beginning to open that conversation. As I said today this morning, it's a marathon. It's not a sprint. And especially when you're working with a school and I would imagine that's the case with E.S. and Roxbury and MSMS as well. When you're working with a school who's been told that they've been doing a really good job for a really long time and you get data in front of them that says, we're not doing so hot in some areas. That's a tough pill to swallow. So it really is about nurturing the culture here and making sure that we don't blow it up. At least I don't blow it up in the first six weeks that I'm here. I'd like to be around next year. But what I've learned, and I'll speak to this, but what I've learned today is that this group, this high school staff is really eager to grow and learn and know more. As Karen McAdden, if you know our English teacher, Karen McAdden, she said, we need to look at data because we don't even know how much greater we can be. And I thought, wow, it just sent chills with such a powerful statement. Cause we know we're good. We just don't know how good or how great we can be until we have objective evidence in front of us to show us where our gaps are and where we can fill those gaps. So building a foundation of knowledge, these are some of the questions that we have been asking the staff, particularly this morning. Some of this came in our in-service days, the three days we had before school started, but some of this work we actually just did this morning. So why do we need to review data as a school? I ask that question because often in schools where they haven't reviewed data, we'll think that literacy tests and math tests just belong to English teachers and math teachers and that's not the case. In an effort to build a culture around looking at data, we need to examine, and I really wanted to come from them as to why we need to examine data as a school. What is the purpose of that? Why are social workers and guidance counselors and science teachers and PE teachers, why do we all need to be a part of that work? And they did a really great job of answering that today. How does this process fit into our all means all thing? Going back to our theme is talking about how does this process of looking at data fit into that? What kinds of data do we need to examine to see what will help support our understanding? And you'll see some examples of their work. On the types of data, they would like way more data than I probably was sitting there. I was like a little overwhelmed today when we got done. And you'll see it's just like lists of data that they would like to see that will represent and give us a representation of the whole child. And then what does access and equity look like across our academic programs? We have not gotten into that, but once we get data, we will begin to dig into that question some more. And then I think as everybody else is talking about here is what does a guaranteed and viable curriculum mean? So every student deserves the same curriculum no matter where they are or what classroom they're going into. So this is an example. I'm glad it's a little bit blown up here. I was a little worried it would be. So this is kind of what some of our teachers would say. They wanna look at gender, race, social security. They wanna look at subgroups. They wanna look at commute time. They wanna look at outside of school involvement. How engaged are students in their school? That might tell us a little bit about how they feel about school. They may be super engaged in co-curriculars, but they're not doing well in school. What does that tell us? A health of our kids, the YRSB survey. Some other things up here, level of engagement in courses, attendance, as quality of data for confidence. I thought that this was really interesting today. That 70% does not mean all. So a teacher said out loud, which was good. We needed to have that conversation. 70% of our students will go on to a university, go on to college of some sort. But there's 30%, and maybe that's not an accurate percentage, of our students who may not go on to college. So when we talk about 70% does not mean all, but it does dictate the conversation, is that we're having these conversations about going to college, going to college, but that 30%, actually when we look at that aspect data, maybe not exactly 30%, maybe 15%, 20% of those students who are not going to college are the ones who are not growing also. So I thought that that was a really significant comment that was made by a teacher. On the other side, popular requests for non, they wanted to also talk about qualitative data, not just quantitative. They wanted to get student voice involved, which is a big part of this community. How can we listen to our students and hear what they have to say? So it's not just the numbers, but it's also the conversations that we have with students that can help us understand why students are engaged or not engaged. So what evidence will support whether or not we're making growth inner goals, professional development agendas. So we're gonna use that theme to dictate everything we do this year and be very thoughtful about how we approach PD. I think in not just here, but a lot of places, there's a lot of different initiatives and programs that come down and we have to pick and choose and we don't really get into depth. It's more breadth. And so we will be spending a lot of time creating a data culture here at MHS. So we'll be doing some thoughtful planning around our PD sessions. Also communication to students and families about why we're taking this test. So when we talk about the start test, that might be great in an elementary or middle school, but when they get to high school, they're like, why? Why do I need to know this? Well, we need to start communicating why is S back important? Why is star important? Why are some of the tests that we'll be giving or the data that we'll be collecting? Why is that important? Because it tells us whether or not our students are growing. So being able to communicate that out to our families and also communicate to staff so they understand when they're giving the start assessment that they know why and that their students also know why. Creating a list plan of data to support our conversations about barriers to meeting. So staff, student surveys, I kind of spoke about this before. And then as far as the PLC, which is that leadership group I spoke to, will review and revise the purpose of the group based on our needs as a school. Some celebrations that are happening. Structures are in place to really make this a reality. I think one of the major barriers to bringing student achievement up is not having the right structures and the right schedules. And the fact that this school already has a solo block, which can be devoted to intervention time, a TA and block classes is amazing. So that's one thing we may not have to really dig into as far as that. And a faculty who really cares about the students and the works that's done to support them and a willingness to learn and grow. I did not know what I was gonna walk into today when I started to talk about data. Mike Berry and I were talking about it and it was kind of like, ah, I mean, this could go either direction. But I think the fact that we're in this together and we're in this work together and they are collectively coming up with some of the questions on their own. Today was a beautiful two hours together with the staff talking about where we need to grow and how we need to grow. And to have Mike Berry there and say, and I'm sure it'll be a part of this, we'll have a system in place where it will be easy for us to access data all in one place. And you could hear kind of a sigh like, oh yeah, that's great. So excited to do this work, excited to dig in and make some change happen. Questions? Does everybody want us to come and stand up with me? I was just thinking if you all, could you all move just the chairs forward just for the microphone purposes? Oh, we can stand if you want to stand. We're gonna like that. Or if you want to also do the table. The table. Come to the table. Linda, you wanna join them? What? You wanna join them? Yeah. This is Linda BoBry for those of you who don't know, Linda's the assistant principal at UES. So happy she's here. Mike and Mary. Pulp of chair. If I make them suffer, you suffer too. You can all sit up there, I said. I know, but you might need to add something. Come join them. Yeah, thank you very much. Super, super helpful. Great to see the great work you're doing. And we hopefully also appreciate the evening time. So I have some questions but I'm gonna throw it out to, and I thought the thought was to be right now. So I had a question about the fact that there were a couple schools with goals expressed as percentage improvements in SBAC scores, but other schools didn't. And I was interested to hear why some, for some schools that was appropriate. Seeing as the right goal and not in others. I think, yeah, I think for us, it's not having enough. We could look at SBAC but it's a snapshot in time. So trying to collect a variety of different assessment data. And also not really being familiar with what kind of data is offered to us at the high school outside of classroom data, like formative assessments and summative assessments and how that's attached to it. So at this time it was looking more on a foundational level on how we could identify the barriers that might prevent students from meeting those learning proficiencies. And then getting in and digging into accessing like what are we gonna do about that? Hopefully that increases anyway throughout the year, but. Maybe one of the SBACs stopped. 9th grade. It's not for every, 9th grade. 9th grade, so that's part of it. Yeah, and that's not, like Pam has a lot of SBAC data in the middle school because the, but Rene doesn't have a lot available to her. Yeah, and our elementary school has two years of it. I can share in that too is that we originally had SBAC scores like it has one of our data points. And then Linda and I took a team at the West Institute which is a UBM sponsored week-long program in Killington each year. And they had an MTSS focus for us and one of the workshops we went through a checklist on your effective, basically just a survey of what makes an effective MTSS and we stopped right away on formalized curriculum. And we said, before we look at anything else and start digging into our SBAC scores, we need to make sure that we're on the same page with the standards that we're teaching and the SBAC is gonna be a product of that type of work. Rodigus, Pam, you had a heavy focus on social-emotional learning and your goals. Sure, both of our elementary schools are PBIS focused schools. I was just curious across the district thinking about alignment. How is social-emotional learning aligned right now? Do we have pre-K to 12 alignment for social-emotional learning or is that something coming down the line? So that's one of the pieces that I was trying to articulate is in our work with the director. Very big. Is she the director of social-emotional learning? Coordinators is trying to identify just as we would for math what are pre-K to eight, I'll say, because that's the world I live in right now. We're also looking for identifying that comprehensive social-emotional learning curriculum through that same lens as well. So is it currently in place? It is not. A lot of the PBIS principles we also have, we don't call ourselves a PBIS school because there's some designation that goes with that, but the principles and the philosophy are very similar. So the answer to your question is not yet, but we hope, and that work was started today. Mary's doing a really pang-a-pang job. She's gotten that rolling really quickly. That was amazing hire, it was amazing job. Yeah, so I heard a lot of common themes. I also heard, you know, it's pretty quick out that there's some differences. How much is this guided by kind of a district-wide plan with district-wide at least kind of three to five-year goals? Can you be a little clearer? I'm not sure what you're asking. Is each school, is this occurring kind of in a bucket with coordination or has there been an effort to really sit down and say district-wide, here's the framework we want the entire district to work towards and then within each school, it's going to be particularized. Do you want me to speak? I can go. I don't know who you're speaking to. No, you don't. If I'm understanding what you're asking correctly, the proficiency skills that Libby was referencing connected to those components of collaborative practices, formalized essential learning, share the other two, high quality instruction and the timely systems, that's consistent. And that was the three of those were developed last year as a, for those of us that were here as a collective group, that's driving how we are identifying the goals for the school. So like this is the first year we've set goals connected to those particular elements of proficiency skills. Yeah. Anybody else want to add? That was here. And this year, Mike, talk, so I'm going to put you on the spot since you're in the spot, you're welcome. Talk a little bit about the instructional leadership and what we're doing this year as a leadership team. Yeah, so the four focus areas really rely on one common theme amongst all of us that when we say high quality instruction, we all understand what that means. And so we're taking a full year of instructional leadership meetings to unpack an instructional framework so that we can calibrate together on a high quality instruction means and better support of our teachers. And we've identified a framework to work with initially to take apart by sub dimensions that have everything to do with standards and skills of instruction and pedagogy and everything that you can think of that would fall into high quality instruction and come out of it together unified and what that means. First of all, thank you all for taking the time to come and present to us in the community. It was really, really helpful. I thought you all did a wonderful job in terms of summing up some pretty complex structures and goals and I thought it was very clear. So thank you all for that. What I'm wondering is moving forward with this. So each school, it sounds like, has their own goals that fit into this larger structure. And then you have these various metrics by which to track your success against these goals. And then to track those metrics, you have to have systems in place, right? What I'm wondering is moving forward and I realize this is preliminary. So I'm not gonna ask for any examples tonight, but I'm wondering if, you know, five, six months from now, if we might, and for some of these, it might be a year, two years from now. But I'm wondering if we could get a breakout of the goals, the metrics used to track those goals, the systems you're using, like how you're going about tracking that increase in class time, Pam, for example. And what the outcomes then look like. I mean, this is obviously for the future, but as I'm listening to you, it's very exciting. And I'm a data nerd, so when you're talking about data, I'm getting excited. But I also realize that if there aren't effective systems in place by which to track this information, then the data's not gonna be very valuable to any of us, so. We have, so we're working with, Mike's working to get PowerSchool Analytics, which is a warehouse, data warehouse system that we don't have currently, and that should be online. I was told by the end of September. Two weeks, two weeks. So that's coming into play, which will help us considerably with data collection. And the other pieces, when I mentioned the June data days, so that's gonna be June, November, March, June. June, November, March, June. So we have that, we come together. We're talking about all this as a leadership team nearly every time we come together. And we'll be talking in school-based teams with central office leadership coming three times a year as well, to really target on what's your evidence that you're working towards your goals, what's your evidence that you're reaching it, do we need to revise any plans because we're not seeing growth. And if so, what do we need to do? And, or do we need to keep on, keep on, you know, with our goals? So that will be the next conversation, so we should have some things to share. I have a couple of SBAC questions. I'm gonna put it in two parts to make it complicated. The first is there's a drop in SBACs, which to me indicates that one of two things happened over the last couple of years. I've been swamped in place and others moved forward or something that was working stopped working. So question number one is, why do we feel there was a drop in SBAC scores? And question two is, I know there's a lot of data points out there, but because the SBAC is common to grades K through nine, a lot of people look at it, it tends to be kind of a default score. And while I know it's a very useful test, I also know it has some faults, for instance, kids who come from well-functioning families who don't have any sort of learning challenges tend to do well on it, kind of regardless where they are, depending on others. I also know we have a culture in this town that maybe doesn't take the SBAC seriously, and we probably, quite honestly, if we change that culture a little bit, could get a big bump without doing much educationally. So my second question on the SBAC is, how do we not have that be the default, both in terms of really having other meaningful data points that have as much implication, and also don't get into a situation where maybe we improve the SBAC score in two to three years, pat ourselves on the back when maybe there's other things that aren't working in the denominator. I can pick number two. Okay. Number one, somebody else, though. I think, so yes, I agree with you. I think we would all agree that there are some systemic things that we can do just in administering the SBAC that would change the results. When we did some dating, there was some miscalculation in administration, there were some scores that weren't submitted, there were things like that that are very easy things to clean up. One of the things that I think we've done now is we are going to have a system that suddenly makes SBAC data more accessible. So PowerStyle Analytics, for example, we can look at SBAC scores and we can do a scatter plot analysis to see if it's correlating with other data that we're collecting. So how relevant is it? Are there outliers? And how do we identify those points? We're gonna be able to do that for the first time, which I think is gonna really help with that question. The other thing that, for the first time, we are all using the same assessment system for screening. So we're talking the same language of K through 12 and we'll be able to look at Renaissance Star and be able to see if it's predictive of the SBAC and then that increases the value of the data that we're collecting the whole way through and gives us a better way to explain it to the community. I think because we had SBAC data and it was pretty much the only data that we had, but we couldn't really access it, to do things with it, to manipulate and understand it. Now we can and I think that will help to change that culture a little bit if that's the point that we wanna change. But it will also allow us to dig deeper into those scores and understand what students are getting out of it and what they aren't. So for example, we've talked a lot about achievement levels. The first thing that people see, did they get a three, did they get a four? There's a scale score underneath that that tells a whole different story about the student's individual progress. A lot of students will get a three every year, but we can actually go in and look now and see have they made growth, have they made progress and that's probably more important to them to be able to look at that and understand it. So I think just that we'll have the access is going to be a game changer automatically towards. I think the first part of your question, being new, I can't answer that thoroughly and I think that's a huge complex question, I think. Yeah, it is, but it was so fun. I'm just making it smart. I'm just making it fun. The one thing I know though that I can tell you is that we have nine teachers in third and fourth grade total. So out of those nine teachers, we have five that have been there less than, I don't know, five years. So to me, that speaks volumes about curriculum. So when those new teachers come in, they have access to curriculum, but they have access to resources so they know exactly what they're supposed to teach, when they're supposed to teach it. Are their teams collaborating and talking about the data and collecting data? And so that's hard work and the work that, you know, the village leading and the district is leading that, getting us to all be on the same page and getting all the teachers to be on the same page. So I think that would make a huge difference. And I would add to your part one question that I think there's a lot of factors that we've, that we have said might be impacting ESPEC. I echo what Ryan said, being really clear and intentional about what the curriculum standards are that we want all kids to know and be able to do and having that consistently reviewed and talking about high quality instruction is gonna provide the kids with the knowledge base that the ESPEC is actually assessing them on. And to give my assistant principal a little bit of credit, we were debriefing this afternoon because we also took a look at data this morning in our late start. And what we were talking about and what he was saying was, if we are really doing a solid job around instruction and kids are feeling confident, when they take that ESPEC, it's gonna seem, this is the futuristic optimism, optimism camp coming out. It's gonna be like, I know this and they're gonna answer it versus oh, I have to take an assessment. So we need to boost their knowledge base and their skills and their confidence for them to be able to then demonstrate on the ESPEC. So that's where I see it going. Great. Michelle and then Brigitte. This is not a hand up, okay, yeah. We did. We did. It really looks like it is. We did a few years ago try to get the message out to parents that the ESPEC is important to us as a tool and that we would love to see good participation. I don't think we've put that message out. Maybe it has come from the principals more than from us, I think, but we participated in getting that out a couple of years ago. But do we have significant opting out? Is that a no? No, that's much improved. Great. Much improved. I think an important piece to that too is educating teachers on the importance. I mean, if there's not a data culture that's in place and you're not following up on that data and you're not discussing it and talking about how it connects to us as a school and how it connects to our classrooms, teachers are on the front lines and so if there's community members that are having conversations with teachers and they don't know they're like, I mean, yeah, we took it. So I think it's really about educating everyone. And Jim, you're right. It's not just about the ESPEC data. It's like, what other points of data can we use to support the conversations that might come with ESPEC, especially like as a ninth grader? You know, hot topic, I'll just put this out there. One of the things we've been talking about and Libby doesn't even know this either is like a PSAT doing an SAT suite for students in eighth grade so that when they come in, we also have an access, like a data point, but we can also measure of growth over time as well as opposed to just, but it's communicating why that's important and why that information is needed in order to see whether our students are growing or not. No matter what they choose to do after school, we wanna make sure that our students are growing year to year for sure. So I had a question about the middle school, so for Pam specifically, and it was three years ago now that there was a pretty deliberate conversation about the seven, eight structure and a decision to retain a team structure, which means that the primary teachers are teaching to major subjects a piece, which I'm doing my math, right? It means that you have four science teachers and four literacy teachers instead of two in those grades, which would have been a possible structure. In terms of this work around curriculum alignment and high quality first instruction, is there any thought about revisiting that? Does that structure impede those objectives because teachers are teaching two major subjects instead of one and have to be in two professional learning communities and first instruction into major subjects? Or does it not matter? They haven't articulated that. We actually surveyed kids and families and teachers at the end of last year, but that was the first cohort of kids that came through that two year program and all the data that came back has been incredibly positive. What we did recognize though is that we were asking our math teachers to do three, basically grade level standards. And so right now that's the beauty of a content collaborative team. So those four science teachers have 80 minutes a week where they come together and they're building common units of study. So they haven't articulated that I'm aware of that, oh, I would just like to teach only science and never anything else. There is a real belief behind teaming at the middle school. And so I have not heard that teachers would rather go back to what you're making me think of as like a traditional, like all kids go to. There's a seventh grade and there's an eighth grade. Yes, and that upon the science teacher, I only teach four sections of science and I'll teach. So that has not been feedback I've received. And the survey feedback was really positive in that kids who had two core teachers now, some of them have three because of math, felt like their teachers knew them well and that was supporting their learning. So I haven't had anyone share that. So if it's out there, it just hasn't come to me. So I do want to be respectful of time because I've been here until 740, it's a little past. So any other, maybe another question to the people who had them, otherwise, no, are we good? Okay, well thank you so much, this is super helpful and it's great to hear this began in the year or two. Thank you. Thank you all. Thanks. Thank you. Grant and I had what, if you've been on the board for a while, you've seen this back to me before the initial Salo and we just didn't have it ready for the board packet. So I'm just gonna. Can we also, we have that presentation and this added to something. And I'm sure that we do. Sorry, you didn't get this before, Grant. I'm gonna walk you through it anyway, so. Yeah, so next item, just opening our budget conversation, I think we should probably keep this just really high level to frame up what we should be thinking about. Let's not take the bait and go deep on any of these. But yeah, just kind of initial thinking of what's on your mind in terms of, yeah. Changes in what the state is making us do, priorities that you've already identified, needs you've identified, and maybe you're on timeline and, yeah, that'll get the board thinking about what it needs to be thinking about. Okay, and I actually was gonna save a little time by not going through the timeline itself. Everybody's got that, and then it's more just a factual document if you have a reference. Very similar to last year. Very similar to last year. Okay, perfect. And then the paper that's titled Budget Discussion, we had a document. We should probably put this timeline somewhere on the website for a little bit more. Oh, it's got it. Yeah, perfect. Sorry about that. No, that's fine. The Budget Discussion document is something we've done the past few years. It's more kind of like a landscape. Just kind of get us in that frame of mind. And so I will go through these pretty quickly. The statewide issues, a lot of those have a much larger impact in like the final tax rate at the end of this thing than adjustments we make to our budget. So I just wanted to make sure you're aware of some of those statewide issues like the statewide healthcare bargaining. I think you all have heard about that. November 15th, there probably won't be a settlement, which means it'll go to arbitration. And then I think it's within a month there's supposed to be a decision from the arbitrator. And that means either one position will be taken or the other. It's not a melding of the two. So we're very much up in the air on what statewide health is going to look like. The one thing that was jointly agreed on is that they don't want to do this in the middle of the calendar year. They want to do it at the beginning of the calendar year. So whatever happens will only impact us for half of FY21 because it'll be status quo until January 1st of 21. Quick question for you on that. Does that mean then we're gonna be negotiating with our teachers for half a year of a health insurance contract in this upcoming negotiation session? I think what would happen on, whenever it comes to collective bargaining, I think there would probably be some statement about when this becomes effective. That it would be status quo until January 1st and then there would be language on what it would look like after January 1st. I think it will be a challenge to have deep conversations about bargaining until we know the answer to this. But the one thing that we do know is kind of what healthcare costs kind of look like now. And so what I'm gonna do is for budgeting's sake, I'm gonna just assume a status quo because we have no idea what it's gonna look like come January. So for the budget, I'm gonna assume status quo for healthcare, the dollar yield, which some of you are more familiar with the tax rate calculation than others, but the dollar yield is the factor that every school district compares their spending to in order to come up with a tax rate. I have gotten no indication about what the statewide dollar yield is gonna be, what's gonna happen with it. Last year it went up about 400 bucks or so. A swing of like $100 impacts the final tax rate by about a penny and a half, so it's a big impact. To start off with the budget, I'm gonna assume it's gonna go up by like 200. My hope is that it will go up another 200 at least, but we'll see. Equalized pupil is another big factor in the tax rate calculation. We've seen fairly large jumps in the past few years, two years ago specifically. Last year it only went up by about 14 and a half kids. I think we're gonna hold pretty stable. I don't think we're gonna see a big increase, probably not even the increase that we had last year. Common level of appraisal. This is a big topic, especially for Roxbury, because you come up with your tax rate and then you divide it by this common level of appraisal for each community. And Roxbury had a big drop in their CLA last year, which meant the tax rate swing up. And so there were a lot of people in Roxbury saying, well, our taxes rates were supposed to go down. Well, if you look at the equalized rate before the CLA, they did and they will continue. But whenever you have a big drop in CLA, it swings your tax rate way up. Last year, both communities saw a fairly significant drop in CLA, which means property values are better. So it's kind of a good news, bad news. For FY21, I will probably assume about, you know, a similar kind of decrease or drop in the CLA, which will swing tax rates up a bit. Health rates last year, we were shocked a little bit by an 11.8% premium increase. That was nothing because this year it's 12.9. So huge premium increase. Hopefully that'll calm down. But I've put in parentheses here just to kind of give you an estimate, a 12.9% increase in premiums means about a $400,000 increase to the budget. So it's huge. Act 46, so this will be our third year of the merger for FY21, that means we lose another two cents in the incentive. So it goes from six cents down to four cents, which if you look at it pessimistically, it's like a two cent increase to the tax rate because it's not a six cent decrease, it's only four now. That's about a $250,000 impact if you tried to absorb that in the budget. Act 173, that's the change in the special education funding formula. That's been delayed, so we won't be dealing with that in the FY21 budget, but we do want to continue to try to build capacity so that we can align with Act 173 and then in FY22, it'll be a different funding model. Some pressures locally, salaries, we're gonna have to make an assumption on what the budget for an increase in salaries because all three bargaining unit agreements need to be renegotiated, but no matter what we put in there, even a modest percentage increase is gonna be a pretty significant increase dollar-wise like I put on here, probably at least $350,000, even if we're pretty conservative. Health, we already talked about staffing. If you remember last year, we didn't have any teacher staffing, classroom teacher staffing increases. We know we're getting kinda close. We'll have to see what the October one count is and what our enrollment projections look like to see whether there's any increase there. If so, I don't think it'd be a significant thing, maybe one classroom teacher. But we do wanna look at other areas like high school art might need a little bump. English language learners, we need to do a pretty good survey of our kiddos to figure out if we need to bump up that at all. I think we have 2.4 right now, so we'll have to look at those things. Instructional coaching, which would align with what the principals were talking about a little earlier. Behavior intervention, those kinds of things. I'm not saying we will be adding those, but those are things we have to talk about as a leadership team. Then there's other kind of more mundane type things like on the support side, like do we need to bring on a weekend custodian because we have a lot of activities here on the weekends and if we don't do this, then we're paying double time on Sundays and that kind of thing. So those are things we're gonna look at right now. There's a couple of studies that are going on right now that you already know about, but I don't think we're gonna be able to budget for them in FY21 because we don't have an outcome yet. Like language immersion, that work is not complete yet, so I don't know what we would need budget for. The middle school study that committee is beginning to do some work, but there's not gonna be any answers for that in time to do anything in the FY21 budget. Food service, we bumped them up from like a $25,000 transfer to $75,000 transfer to cover their deficit, their operating loss each year. We don't have to make that kind of an increase again, but I think it's looking like, it's probably more like $100,000 is what they really need annually to balance out. So that's a very minor increase. District-wide professional learning, this kind of ties into the Act 173 piece above. We need to build high quality first instruction, MTSS level one. So we're gonna be looking at all the things we might need, including PD. So we might be bumping up our professional development line a little bit. There might be other areas in the budget that we might be able to back off a little bit to cover that then. Opportunities, I wish there were a few more. High school tuition, this is Roxbury, grandparented high school kids that had high school choice. We were hoping that we would have big decreases every year, unfortunately last year we only had three seniors that graduated. So for this year we have three that are graduating. So we're not really gonna save a lot in tuition, but we will have some savings there. Health reimbursement arrangement. Whenever you get a final report, you already saw the draft fourth quarter report you saw that we were well under budget for the HRA. That was when we budgeted at 100% utilization. So if you have an HRA of 4,200 we were budgeting as if you were gonna spend the whole 4,200. In FY20, we only budgeted 90%. Based on having a full year under our belt I think we can even drop that again. We can probably drop that down to about 80%, which would be a $75,000 savings. Long term debt isn't really an opportunity in so much as it's something we don't have to deal with. Last year we had the $4.9 million bond. So we had a huge increase in long-term debt for FY20 that we had to absorb. We don't have that in FY21. Fund balance, going back to the fourth quarter report you saw that we had a very healthy fund balance. It appears knock wood for the auditors to finish their work. We talked at the finance committee meeting about the fact that we lose this two cent merger incentive every year. And maybe a good thing to do since we do have such a healthy fund balance would be to use some of that fund balance each year for the next three years to help absorb that two cent merger loss. So we could do like 200,000 for three years. And then whenever we don't have that merger incentive loss, then we could hold that back again. And I do think that we have sufficient fund balance that it makes sense, at least to talk about it. The other thing that we had discussed to add to that point is if you had a three-year glide path like that where you were planning on spending that money, should we encounter a recession? Should we encounter a situation where we want to spend on an initiative? We would still have some of those reserves. I mean, it's all for discussion, but that's just. If we used $200,000 each year for three years, we would still be left with probably somewhere around the order of $700,000 or $800,000. And we do want to keep, I would say, three to $400,000 easy in our fund balance, just in case something goes sideways one year. A colleague of mine just finished last year with a $700,000 deficit. Those things happen, fortunately not to us, Layla. Some things are out of grants control. Transportation aid is on here as an opportunity because that is associated with prior year actual transportation costs. And as you know, when we merged our transportation costs went up, that means we'll get more transportation aid money. Now that we've added middle school busing, we'll see that big increase, but not 21. We'll see that big increase in 22. But there will be some increase, probably maybe 12 to 20,000. I think I put 18 on here. So maybe that might be good. So those are just kind of, that's a landscape of what's going on statewide. Some of the things that we're looking at locally. I put on here the past few years kind of a proposed guidance for you to give to us as we build our budget. And that guidance you can read on here says to consider all the requirements that would improve student learning based on continuous improvement plan. And those which would improve efficiency or effectiveness of the district. That was there last year. I think that's a good thing to do. Prioritize requirements with the goal to increase education spending by only 4%. That's the goal. So I don't want you to think that we're gonna hold that and limit ourselves. If there's some really good ideas, some things that would really turn the corner for us. And it means I would have to come in here with a 5% increase, I will. But I just want you to know that our goal is to limit the increase to 4%. That's kind of what we're gonna shoot for. We're not gonna tell anybody. Nope, just can't do that because we are already at 4%. But that's what we're gonna shoot for. And the reason why we give some kind of limit like that is because we do wanna be sensitive to taxpayers. So we don't wanna just come in here with an inordinate budget increase. So we do wanna keep some kind of limits around us. And we'll try to hold true to that. But some things are gonna challenge that like 12.9% health rate increase. So we'll see how things go. But I just wanted to kind of get the ball rolling and collect any feedback that you might have. Or I don't know if you have anything to add. Let me. All right then. Let's get started. Thank you. Thank you. So next on we have executive session to talk about contract redistribution. I think we need two motions right? One that would in the district's interest to talk about this publicly and then the motion actually comes into discussion. I move that negotiating in public, sorry. I move that discussing negotiations in a public setting would place the district at a disadvantage and I therefore move to enter executive session to have those discussions. I think we have to separate them. Yeah, separate them. I was just pretending to say the handle part. All right. Yeah, which second? Previous of the handle. All right. All those in favor? Aye. All right. Now motion to go into executive session. Move to go into executive session.