 of the Montpelier-Roxbury Board of School Directors at 6.39. So first we're going to business public comment. Any public comment? Yep. Great. Consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve of the consent agenda? So I'll take a second. Can we pull the minutes off, please? I can amend the motion to approve consent agenda minus the minutes. Need a second to amend it until I 24th? I'll second the amend. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. We're going to talk about it. I did. We didn't have Jerry anywhere on the minutes. She was there as an audience member. And she did get invited into that session later. Yeah, she was soon a part of that meeting, so felt like she should have been listed as an audience member slash appointee at some point. That was all. Everything else was on here. She's on there as a board member. Well, she wasn't sworn in. Was she? Yeah. Your name spelled wrong. Yeah. Sorry. Here, it was listed. Yes, and that's correct, that, too. I think it's been sworn in. What's that about this? Oh, I went in this. The Tammy wasn't there, and the other person didn't know what he was talking about, so I'll have to go back. OK. So you won't be able to vote on anything, right? So it's still? Yeah. OK, I don't have to kick our clerk appointment down the road then, too. Can we have a forum, then? Yes. One, two, three, four, five. We need five. We need five, yeah. We don't have to go drag Michelle out of the circle, so. Oh, but she just didn't say anything. Should we be there? Michelle. If the show must go on. If the show must go on. OK, so we will. So to be clear, the amendment to the minutes is to move Jerry from being president of the board member and president of the board. Yes. And reflected as invited into the executive session. Yep. Thanks for catching that. All right. So we need now a motion to approve the minutes as amended. And the amendments are to move Gary Hock, Jerry Hock from a board member to, I think just remember, as a board member, and then note that she was invited as a pending board member into the executive session. OK. And to spell her name right. Yes. Throughout. I'll make a motion with those amendments. Second. I'll be there. All right. New pose. Good. Good for you. So learning focus and have Ryan Herady, US principal, and Maryland Dean, the director of student services. She's talking about co-teaching within a multi-tiered system of support model. Come on, I'm so happy. Yeah. Come on. Ready for it? We're ready for you. Great. I think I'm just going to put them on. Although, it looks like Ryan doesn't have a name tag. I don't believe you. If you could, I know I just introduced you, but if you could reintroduce yourselves for the, for our large viewing audience at home. Yes. Yes, at home. I don't really have a way to click through this. Ryan, there's standing here. Is there one in the bag in the tech thing that you just got? Clicker? No, that's a, that's a, I must be somewhere else, sorry. It's not in there. That's all right. You can just stand and look good clicking away with your finger. Okay. Hi, Yora. Is everyone okay with me being up here? Absolutely. All right. So I guess, thank you very much for having us here tonight. We have been thinking a lot about this over the past year. And my name is Ryan Herod. I'm the principal of Union Elementary School. And Mary London, our director of student services is here. And so this year we're taking on an action research project around code teaching. And when we started talking with Olivia about this and, you know, kind of getting her blessing on everything and talking about what that was going to look like for our school this year, she thought it would be great if we could come to the board and just share with you what's happening in school so you can get an idea of what's happening and just kind of find out, you know, what we're doing. So this is about sharing that information with you. Great. So why code teaching? And I'm not going to PowerPoint you to death. I can't stand when people do that to me. So I'm just going to kind of use this as a talking guide. But really, I want to tell you a quick story. So we were, I was in a classroom at the beginning of the year and I was watching this teacher and the teacher was doing just an incredible job. She had about 17 students in her class and the students were completely engaged. It was a reading lesson and the students were just eating out of the palm of her hand and she was just, it was just one of those moments that you said, wow, this is just really terrific instruction. And then all of a sudden there was a knock on the door and the special educator came in the room and the special educator took a student out of the classroom. That student left the room for 30 minutes and then re-entered the classroom again. That student was so engaged in the lesson and so invested in the learning, yet she was pulled out of the classroom to get the instruction that was a part of her IEP. And so when we saw that happen, we saw two major issues with that. One is, you know, you have a student that is taken out of the classroom, that is, you know, taken away from her peers and you also are taking away this terrific momentum that she has with her learning. And then when she re-entered the classroom, she had a hard time trying to find out what everybody else was doing and to get back on track. And so at that moment, you know, we can do better than this for our kids and this doesn't really align with our values around inclusion or around supporting all of our students and making sure that they have access to really high quality instruction throughout their entire day. And so I had a lot of discussions with the special educators in the building. I met with them every Monday this year and one of the first things that they communicated to me was that they felt that the effectiveness of the current special education model really could be improved and they felt like they wanted to spend more time in classrooms. They loved to be in classrooms and that was something that they just kept telling me over and over and I said, well you're on the same page with me because that has been my experience as an administrator is always pushing for a really inclusive environment. I have a lot of experience with co-teaching. This is my jam. This is really what I want to do with our special education model in the school. So we started having those conversations over the course of the year and as I got to know the general ed teachers, I started having some of those conversations with them and they were saying, we would really love for the special educators to be in our classroom more often. We would love to have co-teaching. We would love to be teaching together and not having our students pulled from the classroom. So my question was, why hasn't this happened? They said, well, we've never really been able to align this and make it work. I said, well, let me talk to Mary about it and see if we can start dipping our toes in the water and seeing if it's a good fit. So really, we were looking for teacher support to really start this process because without the teacher support and the teacher saying, hey, this is something we really want to do, then we knew it wouldn't be a success. So we were looking at a situation where we had overwhelming teaching support to start co-teaching and start really looking at our special ed model. So that's what we did. So what does co-teaching offer? It offers more opportunities for one-to-one interactions, access to grade level standards for our students, opportunities for specialized instruction. All students benefit from additional supports that we have in the building, increased independence, stronger, more creative lessons. Really, there's so many benefits to a co-top model. So currently, who's going to be involved at our school? When we first started having this discussion, it was maybe one or two grades. I didn't want to push the teachers too hard on it. We didn't want to just go forward without having their support and we had overwhelming support. kindergarten, first, second, and third grade was all really excited about doing it. The fourth grade was also excited about doing it, but the teacher that was the most excited is going to be on a sabbatical this year. So it was kind of a situation where we said, you know what, let's start with key to three. We had that momentum, and so that's what we're doing. University of Vermont, we met with them at the end of the year. Mary and I met with them and wanted to find out what support they could provide us. And so we started having discussions with them around the partnership this year. So they're going to be working with us. That was one of the biggest things teachers asked. What support are we going to get if we do this? And so we wanted to make sure that it wasn't just Mary and I providing professional development for them. It was someone that they felt, wow, this is something that we wouldn't otherwise have access to unless we decided to make the shift in our practice and really try something new. And so that UBM partnership is going to be really exciting. And then just our support as well. So what work has been done around this? So we visited a school, the out of Quichy school, in Quichy and I sent out, there's a listserv where you can basically send out a question to any principal in the state. And so I sent out a question and I said, has anybody had success with the co-teaching model where I could talk with you? And I had a couple principals right back to me. One of them was the out of Quichy school and the principal was super nice and she said, yep, I'd love to talk with you about it. We've had great success and so we started having discussions with her and then we took a team of teachers down there. So we took a teacher from each grade, a special educator from each grade and went down there and visited and spent the entire day talking with teachers, visiting classrooms, observing classrooms, speaking with the principal, debriefing with everyone afterwards and kind of learning from that experience. And then we've had a lot of curriculum development that's been happening in our building as you have probably heard about. There's been a lot of work around math this year and the summer there's been a lot of work around literacy so we're finally in a really good place starting to be in a good place around having curriculum documents and having a verbally aligned progression for our students. And then also we have a pre-approved plan by the AOE which is something that you need and something that Mary has done in the past. So support, I already talked about that a little bit. We have monthly training sessions with UVM. We have our support in coaching and our experience in this area. We have the curriculum documents that we're working on and also new math resources. And one of the biggest things that we're really excited about is, aside from our math resources, is our work with Christian Kordemannsch this year, who's our math consultant and he's going to be working with us on the second in-service day and he's going to be working with each grade level throughout the entire year. And it really isn't a better time to launch a co-teaching model because the special educators and the general ed teachers are going to be receiving high quality at the same time talking about what is really great instruction for math. So that's something that we're excited about. So how are we going to find out at the end of the year if this was a success for our students? And that comes down to data. So we're going to have literacy and math assessment data this year. In the district, we're implementing the STAR assessment, which you'll probably hear about more as we go through the year but that's an adaptive assessment. Students take a computer-based assessment. It basically will increase in rigor if the students get questions right and it will go down and become easier if the students get questions wrong and basically it gives you a kind of a screening tool to tell you where the students start the year and it's a good just basic measure and so we're going to use that as a basic measure for us as we go through the year in addition to our RS back scores and benchmark assessments that we're going to be doing throughout the year. And if that's all jargon, any of that's jargon that you don't understand, I'm happy to kind of repeat and break it down because it's stuff we just talk about all the time and sometimes we just assume everybody knows what a benchmark assessment is or something like that. So feel free to ask clarification on that. Brian, could you explain a little bit more the difference between the STAR that you just described and the Fonteson Penelogy that was already in use? Yeah, so the STAR assessment is a screener and it's a computer based assessment. So all grades and you know we're a little leery on how kindergarten and first grade are going to do on a computer based assessment but for students in second, third and fourth we should be able to get a pretty quick gauge on where they're at when they enter the school year and the Fonteson Penel assessment is a much more comprehensive assessment that has a lot more data measurement points that our teachers use for literacy only and so this gives us a math gauge for all grade levels and that's going to be a nice future for us. A screener like STAR gives us a quick idea, it's a screener it gives us a quick idea about where a kid is reading and performing in math and can give us a quick idea about potential holes they might have or gaps and potential places where they can excel but not a whole lot of depth you can't teach right off of it so if there's Fonteson Penel a teacher could give that with a kid and immediately have a week's worth of many lessons for that kid planned off of that one assessment so it's a much more diagnostic measure and gives you more specific data about where a kid is reading it's not math so it's just reading and the STAR also has there was a study done between STAR and SBAC to see if there was a correlation between that and there was a really strong correlation between how students perform on STAR that's our state measurement tool and one of our public data points and it's important for us to know how our students are doing before we take an assessment that's basically an autopsy it's after the fact after we've had by the time we get the results back it's basically an entire year of learning that's already done so with this tool we can get a really good gauge right at the beginning of the year starting earlier as opposed to only third and fourth grade also teacher and parent feedback is going to be really important this year and so we're going to be making sure that we talk with families about what their experience has been being in a co-op classroom and talking with our students and also student work samples are going to be really important and our time studies which I don't know if Mary you want to kind of explain the time study piece so what a time study is is to look at the amount of time a special educator is spending on special education either services or responsibilities around paperwork in some way our current funding system works so what you do is you pick two weeks during the year so typically we have to do it in October and so everyone who is paid with special ed funds has to keep track of what they are doing from the time they come to school until the time they leave and then we do that again for a week in February and what we have to do is we look at those time studies and then we have to match them to student IDPs to service pages and look is this person said they were working with this child from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock on literacy is it in that child's IDP if it's not then it's disallowed it's just the way the funding formula works right now and you've probably heard about 173 that's coming and it's been delayed until July 2021 that law 173 is going to provide us with more flexibility so that hopefully we're not going to have to do these time studies anymore really we will be able to use a special ed resource to support all struggling learners whether it's an English language learner a student who just is a little behind and needs that extra support so that will provide us with flexibility so it should hopefully fingers crossed no more time studies but when Ryan and I were looking at them just for UES and you know looking at what the special educators were doing it wasn't an effective use of a resource they were just kind of scattered all throughout the day in and out of classrooms and instead we really thought with the co-teaching they're going to be able to reach more kids so that's the goal can you talk to how the time study affects kids not on an IEP that might or might not be in the group so there is under special ed finance you can do what's called the small group rule sorry the small group rule is what that means is that you can use a special educator or an instructional assistant that's paid with special ed money and as long as the majority of the group are kids who have IEPs you can pull other kids in but the thing is they have to be on a plan so they would have to have either a 504 plan or an EST plan and I know this is lots of acronyms and jargon and I'm sorry about that but the bottom line is they would have to have some sort of plan with 173 that's not going to be the case anymore you don't have to have a plan so if you're someone that really needs some extra help there's that flexibility now with the new law that you can use a special educator the other thing that will be nice is you can use a reading specialist for a child who's on an IEP it doesn't have to be a special educator delivering your reading service so those are the things that we're really thinking about I just want to point out you can't just because the child needs this instruction right here and the special educators doing it you can't just put them in that group for now and that's frustrating for a lot of teachers but it's disallowed if we're not following the rule so with regard to this in terms of the write up it mentioned that these resources will be able to reach students who have no need that don't have an IEP does that mean that they then have to have another type of plan to be in corporate in these groups not with the co-teaching what I was describing to you would have been more if the special educator was just pushing into a classroom for a specific group or pulling a group of kids out so what co-teaching team he's the general educator and I'm the special educator and so we're looking at a phonics lesson so Ryan really knows the grade level standards and he knows what what the objectives are for that lesson what I'm going to do as the special educators really think about all kids and some kids may learn thoroughly instead of visually some kids might need more scaffolds put in place and so together we're going to have that conversation and talk about all the kids in the class and the supports that would be necessary for everybody to be able to access that lesson and then we may do station teaching where kids are actually rotating through and they get time with both of us for pieces of the lesson and then we're again looking like Ryan said we would be looking at the data together we would be having conversations so what it's doing is it's pairing a general ed teacher and a special educator the general ed teacher has the content knowledge the special educator really understands learning differences and so the two together should be able to reach all learners the Act 173 taking effect under the co-teaching model will we be able to use those special education dollars more flexibly no yes and no so because we have an approved plan that I wrote and so the agency has approved that we're allowed to put co-teaching in IEPs and they will allow that now if we didn't have a pre-approved plan we would not be allowed to co-teach but because of that ALE plan yeah so we would be okay as long as we're still making sure that the needs of the child is outlined in the IEP are still being met so in the co-teaching model if you did a time study can it be by either the regular ed teacher or the special ed teacher so the time study I don't do on regular ed it would just be on the special educator so what their time study would show is that they if we're using again just kindergarten it'll show the blocks of time that Andrea is in that class and what we would put on the time study are the initials of kids that do have IEPs or plans so that they could see that all of those kids would have been serviced but in addition kids without plans also benefit yeah it's just and you've probably heard about all of the memos and the rules and everything coming at it's complicated so just one question on kind of the inclusion on kids who aren't on IEPs in some of these groups how are you going to be sure one that that's done relatively equitably from team to team and you have kind of variances in how various teams might work together and second is there any any concern that that might actually draw from the kids on IEPs because you've got kids who aren't on IEPs who maybe need the help but also might be more receptive to the help so you know are they maybe perhaps some kids are pushing ahead further and they might end up at the expense of kids who who might need more individualized attention but aren't getting it because now they're in a bigger group with kids who maybe are you know more facile learning yeah I think both of those come down to training and so that was one of the big reasons that we wanted to go to the Quiche school because we had an opportunity to go in and see a lot of different classrooms some of those classrooms that wasn't the model that we want the special educator in the room was acting more as a paraprofessional and wasn't really involved in the instruction wasn't you wouldn't be able to in a really strong co-teaching classroom you should walk in and not know who the special ed teacher is and who the general ed teacher is you should just walk in and say there's two teachers in this room both doing a great job with kids and that wasn't the case in some of those rooms and when we debriefed with our teachers afterwards we said hey would you think about the different classrooms and what did you see how our teachers were able to identify that and say well some of the classrooms weren't really co-teaching they were acting more as an assistant in the classroom so I think we're fortunate that we have really great teachers that understand that and that's one of our biggest strengths so we have to I think that's you know we're starting in a really good place and then it comes down to that training around showing what really high quality instruction looks like and looking at the data so saying you know monitoring the progress not just once at the end of the year but monitoring it you know at the end of October and saying hey how are our students doing you know are there students that aren't making progress here and how are we changing our instruction to meet their needs and so that piece we're excited about good so is that the same idea that each grade will have one co-talk classroom in the grade that's the plan so all of the students on IEP will be in that classroom you know so that was and that's strategic because that was one of the biggest misconceptions that teachers had around the model as they said okay well our classroom is going to be we're going to have this imbalance of student needs within our classroom and they were concerned about that and when we explain that it was no it's going to be the right fit so it's going to be the students that are going to do well and thrive in a co-talk classroom this year with the training and the resources that we have with the eventual goal to have all of our students in a co-talk classroom so next year is just one classroom for grade not all of them we don't have the students with IEP numbers another reason why this model works so well as a pilot for next year is because of the numbers of kids we have in each grade level and the types of disabilities that we see and it's all kind of the perfect puzzle to do a pilot like this so right and the other thing that we talked about is really starting with kids who had mild to moderate disabilities being in the co-talk classroom and the kids with more significant disabilities would not be in that classroom because one of the things that we really want to work with UVM around is helping teachers to really understand how to work with students, classroom teachers how to work with students who have significant learning challenges so there's still a lot of work there about what does it mean for a student with a significant disability to be included and it means more than just being physically present so that's part of the work that we'll be doing with UVM and it comes down to a training piece as well as the work that we're doing as a district around the belief that all students will learn so I think it all fits nicely together Ryan real quick you've had the list of metrics behind you for how you're going to measure success but what's the time frame like six months in we've been able to declare without things working you need two academic years what kind of frame frame do you think realistically it's a multi-year you know to really look at data over time and see how the growth happens I think this year with our implementation of curriculum documents vertically that we haven't had before I think that by itself we're going to see a pretty I hope we're going to see a data bump from that so I think our data is probably going to reflect positively the time frame I hope but I think it's multi-year I think just one other thing about another big benefit of co-teaching is to really help kids develop independence so that they are not so reliant on an adult which usually is a paraprofessional so that's another benefit of co-teaching and you really focus on that so that's exciting too do we now have one special educator per grade at Union if you do so Union, yes and at Main Street they are assigned more to just the different teams at 7, 8 and then 5, 6 has a grade level and then at the high school they just give you a case load so a second grade class that's going to be co-taught will have that special educator for part of the day co-teaching and then that special educator will be administering instruction to other students in the other classroom majority of their day will be spent in the co-taught classroom basically we're not saying player literacy in math books but they're in the addition of morning that's basically all the information that I have do you have any other questions or good well thank you so much we really appreciate it and these presentations are very helpful to really give us context because we know what you're doing and where your needs are thank you very much so on to board business which I think is going to be pretty short and sweet, I also want to add I'll be the shortest one ever we were late we were in the light starting I want to add one more thing to the board business Bridget has a continuing conflict on third Wednesday on third Wednesdays which apparently makes it possible for her to get to the high school relatively up on to Roxbury on time so is there any objections to shifting the Roxbury which always falls on a third Wednesday to having to fall on the first Wednesday you want to switch to the fourth Wednesday instead of the third Wednesday first Wednesday no, no, I meant just that we would have this school board meeting on the first and the fourth instead of the first and the third because are you going to have trouble anyway getting on it's another conflict in town usually around six or 20 years but I can't get to Roxbury and if we switch to fourth Wednesday we'd be able to get to the city council we I see what you were saying I see what you were saying I'm thinking I'm fine people watch the bar chain real time every Roxbury meeting is the fourth board meeting and that just happens to fall on a third Wednesday because I have to have it fall on a third okay so it'll still So they'll still say every fourth meeting, but. But to the first. But, yeah, shift it. So basically, we're going to make sure we're going to launch it. Once you've switched once, you'll be in the rotation. Yeah, once you've switched once, switch once, and keep the rotation. OK. If the next rockscoring meeting is supposed to be the third Wednesday, we made it the first Wednesday. Yeah, or the first Wednesday in October. You know what, Ann and I will look at that tomorrow, and we will send everybody a revised calendar. We're going to have a hard time switching in these two months, because the next, are we going to UES on the beginning of September? And then we have our pictures on the second. I'll leave it to you. Gilbert. OK. We can do our pictures in Roxbury. We could. Yeah. You'd have a lady come there. Yeah, I'd like to take a picture at the Roxbury. We're in Roxbury, too. That digital thing that I was going to connect to the internet. We're good. So we will move back appointing, oh, except move back appointing Jerry as clerk. But since Michelle has started seeing this as a perfect time to appoint her to the language conversion committee, we already agreed and can't take her mind. Michelle is going to be on? Yeah. All right. Well, I move that we appoint Michelle from the language conversion committee. You said you wanted to be. Yeah. I already moved there. I'm a high class. Any other? When is that committee set to meet for the first time? It did meet once already. And then the final thing is the main street and public school committee charge. Between the crash and the weekend also, we're looking for a second board number. And I know that the second board member is in. So we can probably make that appointment tonight as well. That's where you approve the charge. I want to propose that one change that we discussed then to the charge as well. Yeah, if you could describe it. Do we want to appoint a person or should we start with the charge? We'll start with the charge. So town meeting day 2020 to produce a public basing report I'm concerned is going to scrunch the timeline for public participation because we can't get on the city council's agenda to even talk with them about this. Though I did talk with Ann, Mayor Watson. And we talked about some city council members that she thought would be very helpful to us on this as well as thought would be willing to assist. But we won't be able to talk with them until the second Tuesday of September. So I'm thinking that this committee might not meet for the first time until October. We might be able to do one month where we do two meetings. But if we're going to do public engagement, and then we're going to get down to exploring these issues based on that public engagement, based on Andrew LaRosa's expertise and based on our own research, I just think early March is going to be too scrunched in the timeline. I would love it if we can get it out in spring. But I think setting a date closer to the end of the school year, end of the fiscal year, would allow us to have a more meaningful public process. What do you propose the change to be? What date would you pick? We can say produce a public basing report by the end of fiscal year 20. And my hope would be that it would be done in a month or so in advance of that, because I think it would be really helpful by the time we have our retreat next year, have a more meaningful conversation about this. This isn't, whatever comes out of this, this isn't going to be something that the community and the school board act on in a very big manner. Yeah, a big manner. I think it's something that it's a discussion that's been percolating for years in this community. And what we're trying to do is really focus that discussion in a meaningful and solutions oriented way. Right? No, I think it's fine. We don't have a decision we have to make on a time frame. So I'll go with the latest one of May. So a motion to approve as amended. I'll make a motion to approve the Main Street Middle School Building Committee's charge as presented, changing the public basing report date to the end of FY 20. And I'll second that. I'll second that. All right. Any opposed? And now we might as well appoint this. Tina has expressed interest. Anyone else interested in? Did we formally appoint Andrew already? No, we should formally appoint Andrew. So he was appointing. We did. We did. It's fine. OK, so the board asked you and I to come up with a proposal. Yeah, with the idea that you would be chair. But I'm not sure we did much. I don't think we formally appointed you. The charge here has to be listed as the chair. And we could do it again anyway, so I can heard. Exactly. So we've got the board appoint Andrew Stein as the chair and Tina as the other school board member for the Main Street Middle School Building Committee. I'll second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. And then for the other, I just do your reach out. And then when you've got your oldest, just bring it to the board and have the oldest approved. And I'm definitely happy to help brainstorm with you on it. Yeah, that'd be great. Well, it would probably make sense to me with Andrew LaRose on advance as well. Maybe there'll be an Andrew. All right. I think we can have a motion to adjourn. To adjourn. Motion to adjourn. Are you moved to adjourn? I go to adjourn. I second. I'll second it. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. Did we talk about this? Did you add that to come forward? We didn't formally add that. I don't think I formally added that. Well, come back into session. Re-entering session at 7.19. Just to make sure we are a poacher. Anyone in the public comment now? No. So I think we are a smooth-passed operating machine. We could pass it separately. I'm going to approve the free teaching position. If I can send my co-curricular recommendation. I'll add it to the agenda. All those in favor? Aye. Oh, don't give me a second. I'll second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Great. Now the second motion to adjourn.