 It looks like we have a crowd, which is good. We like to see people. So again, public comment is a way to provide public opportunity to give comment to the board. We do not respond in real time, but it's a very important part of our listening process. Because probably a lot of you are here, talk louder. Because if you can't hear me, you probably can't hear anyone else. It's in the kitchen. OK. Thanks, Scott. Can you hear me better now? Yeah, can you cut the fan, Tom? Thank you. People want to scoot as close as you can as well. Tom's going to cut it off. OK, so public comment is where the board, we listen. We do not give feedback. It's a very important part of our decision-making process. And I know sometimes it can feel a little awkward for you to speak and for us not to answer, but that's the point of public comment is not back and forth. Wish we had mics, because if we all have to talk this way, no one's going to say anything. Not for us teachers. I'm sure a lot of you here on the budget, we do have new information on the budget that will be shared next meeting or this meeting? This meeting. This meeting. My understanding is the information is good and we probably do not have to make any huge decisions this year. So I just want to put that out there, which is good, because we don't like to make huge decisions in a rushed manner. How many people here want to speak, because we have a certain number I'm going to put a time. OK, I'm going to give each person one minute to speak. I'm going to use a timer. I'm going to give you a two signal for 10 seconds and a one signal for five. When you see the 10, please go to your conclusion. So that way, any points you want to wrap up with, that's your signal to get there. So I know one minute isn't a ton of time. Again, I think ways to avoid that if someone said something you want, you can just agree with them. You don't have to repeat it. But one minute is generally enough. And I won't cut you off right at one minute, but I will let you finish the sentence or two. We just encourage folks to, if you're not done with your message, you'll have more to add that you could address the board at large via email. Which is schoolboard.npsbt.org. If you can't get it all out in one minute or so. Yeah. Yes. You don't think this is too controversial? I think the time limit us, I mean closing the school, is that what we're talking about here? Yes or no? Well, as I just said, we do not have to make any major decisions this year. This is going to be a long conversation. We don't have to have it tonight. So I think if everyone gets a minute, we can make our point. But we, at the time, before I make any huge decisions like that to have time to speak, as Kristen said, we all receive email. Let's put it this way. There is absolutely no live proposal right now to close any of our four schools, none, zero. A lot of things are, oh, that's great. As we go through the budgeting process, there are a lot of things that are going to be considered. None of them have been put on the table right now. So if that were put on the table, we would get as much input about that decision as possible. There is, again, no proposal to close any of our schools right now. What is this leading? Hey, David, I would be happy to meet with you. If an email is not a medium that's going to work for you, Rhett and or I would be happy to sit down and update you. Yeah, just to say, I want people of town to hear live now. I've got a page and a half and written double space. It's not going to take more than a couple of minutes. But to put time frames on is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. We don't have 100 people here. You're worried about getting home real early or what? People have the right to have their say. And you're going to have your say. If it not, it's a public meeting. But the public meetings have rules, as do other venues. And just to build off of that, the purpose of today's meeting is to hear presentation on the data of academic and social-emotional learning in our schools. We want to make sure we have plenty of time for that in the agenda because there's good information there and good questions for the board to be asking and the public to be asking. Yeah, so on this somewhere, is this a regular school board meeting? It's a regular school meeting. There's nothing to do with closing the school. Correct. Why was that put out? Why do all these people believe that this was a meeting about closing the school? Because of a new law, we are going to receive less money from the state than we've received previously, which means that over the next few years, we may face some cuts. That's why the possibility of closing Roxbury has been put out into the public conversation. Again, there is no live proposal to do it. The board is not actively considering it right now. And by all accounts given the numbers we have, this is not a decision we would have to make this year. Is it a possibility in future years? Yes. Was it a possibility in future years two years ago? Yes. So again, this is not a meeting about closing the Roxbury School. This is a regular school board meeting. This is part of our budget process. Obviously, I think we've been able to grow our budget with very little tax implications. We're not in that position now. So I think there's understandable nervousness about the public about what that means and what that's going to mean going forward. I think that's why there is the concern that we see in the room. But do we have an active proposal to close Roxbury? Absolutely not. No. No. We will hear a comment on it. And this will be part of our process. But all we will discuss tonight are the data presentations. We will get some update on budget numbers. And let me just preface this. This is something we are taking very seriously. Nobody wants to close RVS. It is not a desire of anyone on the board. Again, it's not something we're actively considering. But we are going to be in a budget situation where we are going to have to consider likely cuts over the next four to five years. And is that a possibility? Yes. It's a lot of other programs or possibilities, too. So a lot of tough decisions. And obviously, we want to get initial thoughts. The reason I'm living it to a minute is because we don't have a lot of proposal. There's going to be a lot of opportunity for input. We would like to get some initial impressions about what the Roxbury community feels in general about whatever you want to talk about. It doesn't have to be closing Roxbury. It can be any concern. But I'm living it to a minute because we have staff here that has put together a presentation. We need time for that presentation. That presentation is a very important part of our budgeting process. And our process in general, we're going to see how we're doing academically. And we also want to give time for public comment. Part of the rules of public meeting is to balance that. And a minute for what I saw was about 10 to 15 people speaking seems to be fair with the idea that there will probably be some people who are going to go 10, 15 seconds over. I'm not going to. There's not a hatch in the bottom of the floor that's going to open up if you go to 61 seconds. You still don't get it. You don't get it. It's not American to limit speech. Where the hell is your brain? Well, seriously, think about it. Why would you want to limit anybody's speech? It's a free country. You people come into these meetings, and they select them and do the same damn thing. Try to pinhole time slots for people to make them forget what they're saying, to make them not be able to fully express themselves. That's crap. Do you know it? Well, I also know that the House of Representatives gives our limited representatives five minutes. Exactly. It's a limited time. Five minutes. It's not a minute. Well, great. Well, here tonight, we're doing a minute. Don't even look at me. I don't even want to hear it. Great. I'm not talking to you. Would someone talk to Lydia? Jim, can you mind if I just say one thing? Yeah, please do. I want to remind people on Zoom too that if they're interested in public comment that they should probably raise their hand sooner rather than later, so that we can also gauge how many people are online that want to speak. I just want to validate people from Roxbury's knee-jerk reaction to the information that was provided, the very limited information that was provided up to this point. And driving in tonight, I was like, I bet there will be a lot of people there tonight wanting to hear about whether Roxbury Village School is being considered as in part of the budget cuts. So based on what was discussed at last meeting and based on what was sort of signaled by various people in the community, including board members, I'm not surprised that there are rumors circulating in the Roxbury community, especially about the potential closure of the school. So to me, it's not surprising that you're here. I want to hear from people in Roxbury. I want to know what people are thinking in this community around this issue. So I just want to validate your feeling that maybe this meeting was a little bit about that in a roundabout way. And I would urge you to watch two weeks ago that meeting, because in that meeting, a lot of the information was sort of clarified. And basically, it was said publicly that there won't be a closure of Roxbury in this upcoming budget, most likely. And then the data that's going to be presented, the numbers later tonight, basically are so different from what was presented last time that it's no longer a concern to cut the budget by the amount of money that we were talking about last time. But I think the last time we did, and I don't want to take too much time on this, but I think the last time that we did convene. We actually, that was the possibility of us throwing out. Yes, Libby was advised to go ahead, the next time that we would come back, one of the budget models that we would see would be looking at what would the cost savings be of sending RBS students to UES. So it is a current issue. Tonight's meeting, the primary focus is a academic, social-emotional, behavioral, absenteeism. So Dave, I will be happy to follow up with you, but this may be different than how select four meetings. I don't want to talk to her. Okay, so we can do that outside of this, but it's not, we receive public comment. Everybody receives there, in tonight's case, because we have a great number of people here, which is fabulous. It's one minute allocated per person. Yeah, I'll give you my one minute right now. I don't do the computer, okay? I don't have a phone that my kids do. I don't do that. I got the information secondhand, they were gonna close the school, and this was a meeting about it, okay? That's all I know. I was just gonna say, I think what part of the problem is. Can we just, do you wanna just start the public comment? Or go ahead, go ahead. No, I was just gonna tell you, at the last select board meeting, I was under the impression that Roxbury and Stowe were definitely being closed, and that's where I think some of this confusion came from. Yeah, I understand the confusion. I understand that, you know, I've got to kind of validate Emma's point. You know, budget numbers are scary. It definitely was floated at the last minute meeting, given the numbers we were seeing at the last meeting, which have changed favorably. And one of the things is that those numbers held, which they haven't, that this might be a possibility we would want to look at, along with some other possibilities that would involve some other program. We are- We knew when the red happened that this was a possibility. What was that? We knew when the red started, you know, when the consolidation started, that it was a possibility that school would close. So it looms over our head, like the sort of damn it leaves. You get it? I absolutely get it, and I understand how much this school means to the community, and I was part of the merger committee. No one wants to close this school. Yeah, it's, and I understand the angst, and we want to hear about the angst, but we do not have to, we are very fortunate in that we almost certainly do not have to make that decision this year. But let's, you know, but we want to cure the conversation. And I think honestly, the more time we have to have a conversation, the more input the board gets from Roxbury about the concerns and the considerations, the more intelligent a decision we're going to make for the district and for both communities. So with that, I would really like, do we have folks online? Looks like- They have folks, but I don't see any raised hands. Yeah, I don't see any raised hands. Oh wait, yep, Lucinda Sullivan. Is either waving at us or raising her hand. Okay. So do you want people to come to the table for microphone purposes? Yeah, and I think it would be- So when you do make public comment, come to the table? Yeah, so please, yeah, self-select. You know, please just, you can either form a line now or just come up one after the other, which is the easiest. Yeah, and I'll, again, I will do the timer in the warning. I'm not going to be a total stickler about it, but just to be fair to people and to make sure everyone gets heard that the people in the presentation we have- Yeah, the folks can be sure to state your name so that the warning is taken. My name is Jane Pintas. I've lived in Roxbury for over 50 years. My children went up through the system up into Northfield through eighth grade year. I just want to say, I really appreciate that we have, we're having a discussion about all this. I want to say that for all of these years, whether my kids have gone to school or not, the school has been like one of the heart beats of our town, and we really, really want to keep it going. We'll do anything I can to do what's necessary to help keep the school going and becoming and being a vivid part of the town's life. This is a town that needs a lot of heart beats in it, and the school is incredibly important. I've also been a teacher for one year in this school. I taught art, so I talk with it, and I am a teacher. So I speak as a former teacher. We've had some wonderful things happen in the school, and the school has offered a tremendous amount to the community and still does and still can. And it really deserves your attention, your care, our care, and community support as much as possible. And I really appreciate the kinds of clarifications that you made tonight about what you're doing. So anyway, I thank you. And I hope this is going to be a continuing discussion between all of us. So thank you. Yeah, thank you very much. Thanks, Jim. My name's Christy. I live over in East Roxbury. I've always been curious why you merged with Montpelier since we're like a mile over the Roxbury line, so it's way closer for us to go to Norfield. I was always going to concern of mine. Now that I have kids. What's your last name, sir? Safford. Safford? Safford. Safford. Thank you. Safford, is that a final? Oh, I'm her mother. And she went through Roxbury to sixth grade and then to Norfield. To me, it makes more sense to let the people choose. I don't see any reason why I needed to ship the kids a half an hour to Montpelier. Because right now, her daughters at Williamstown, she didn't have a preschool. I don't see why we shouldn't have a choice not to send them to Montpelier. It's too long in a bus ride, expected little kid to ride all the way over there. Andrea? Andrea Safford? Andrea Urno. Urno, E-R-U-N-L. Just for the notes. Anything else? You've got a couple of seconds. And my other question is, if you wouldn't let us go to Norfield or Williamstown, how do you find out how much tuition would be to send them there instead of having them go to Montpelier? I can't hear you. I'm sorry. You can email her. I can tell you that. Okay, I can't hear you. Yeah, even if she will take an answer with an email, her email is livybyb.npsbt.org. You hear that? Yeah. Thank you. It's on the website too. Andrea, are your children in school now? Here. What she said? No, I'm her kid and I went here way back when we were merged with Norfield. Okay. So my kid's gonna come here next year. Okay, thank you. And we wanna go to Norfield. We don't wanna shift all the way to Montpelier. I don't see the point of that. We live like one mile over the line. I don't know. Crazy. Thank you. Great, thank you. Christy, I wrote her email down for you. Thank you so much. Thank you. You're welcome. There you go. Please state your name for the camera. I'll answer the question. Hi, my name is Olga Sinkova and I attended fourth grade at the Roxbury Village School. That school year 2020-2021 was at the beginning of the pandemic. I just moved to Vermont and everything was very new and scary. Roxbury Village School was really important to me during that year. It was a school that taught me not only math and English, but also taught me the history of where I am now living. We went outdoors all the time and learned how to observe the nature around us. As the season changed, I really felt a new connection to Roxbury. It's people in the natural world around us. I still notice and remember the early spring flowers that we learned about and the tracks in the snow like the ones we identified on our rocks with our teacher. Having that connection to the place where you live is really important. I think that connection happens when you're a kid. It gave them a sense of community and belonging. Roxbury Village School is down the mountain in the village where the streets, from the streets where I live. It is close by and accessible. The school is the heart of Roxbury and it's a really important part of this community. Great, thanks so much. Thank you. You're welcome. It's a pleasure to meet you. Hi, my name is Wayne Holt and I live in East Roxbury. I have four pages. I'll try to get this down to a minute here. I don't think we have so much money problems. We have an allocation problem. And with you people on the budget, the things that I see is we've got too many social programs and stuff that we do that siphons off the money and there's not enough money left for education. And for example, I know that the state has given away free lockable storage bags to people to bring home to store their pot in so the kids can't get to it. And to the tune of $20,000. I called today to see what that cost. To me, that's a bad use of money. And it's funny that the backs say healthy at home on them. And most of these people that have drug-addicted parents, they're not healthy. The other thing is the money that we spend on Narcan and giving away free syringes and things like that, the drug addicts, I think that's a waste of money because these people make a decision for that lifestyle. It's not up for us taxpayers to have to deal with that. And so if you're a diabetic, you've got to pay for your syringes. And if you're a drug addict, you get it for free. The other thing is that we've spent $455 million in the last six years on the homeless problem. And that money can be well allocated to the educational system. Instead of taking it away from y'all, they should give you some of that. There's the numbers of people go up every year. There's 10,275 people that have taken advantage of the homeless stuff over the last six years. If you divide that $455 million out, that's $44,000 a piece. And I think that money can be used in the educational system. So that's, I guess my minute is up, but a few people are on the budget committee. Y'all should try to fight for some of that money and just say we need the money because we're watching out for our children. And we don't think you ought to be going for things like that. Yeah, excellent. Yeah, if you want to send your barks either by email or if you don't have that email, you can leave it with us or they can send it now. Mr. DeSaule, do you have a line? Is there anyone else in the room? Yes. I thought I saw one of them. This is Ross's sinkhole. And I attended the Rock City Village School. What I remember the most is planting kale, chard, carrots, and other vegetables. We dug up soil in the beds, made rolls, and planted the seeds. The garden was part of our playground. Every time we went outside for recess, I would see how everything was growing. The seeds turned into little sprouts. The sprouts turned into small plants and then they grew and grew. At the end of our school year, each kid received a box with vegetables that we grew and their recipe for soup. I brought my box home and helped my parents make a soup. The soup was really tasty. Watching vegetables grow and then making food with those vegetables was really new to me. It also made me wonder if I could grow something as well. Rock City Village School taught me that farming is not something that happens in California. It can happen here in New York City as well. This year, I helped my parents build a greenhouse. Despite the rainy summer, I grew lots of cucumbers and tomatoes. Great, thank you very much. My name is Ben Pankis and I'm a proud graduate of Rocksbury Village School. If I had more than one minute, I quote my third grade Christmas pageant line, which I remember from 1978. So you can ask me afterwards with that line. But I just wanna say that the school's really important. We didn't, we took our children out of the school a number of years ago or rather my older son campaign to be taken out. So that's a part of another story that I really like to share with you guys if and when there's a brainstorming session that comes up with regards to just thoughts and ideas and revitalizing, making RBS a special place. I wanna thank all of you guys for, I know having to grapple with really hard issues. So thank you. I know it's been a struggle. And I just wanna say I go back far enough with the school when it was a two room schoolhouse and with Miss Hannah, Hannah Morvan for what, first two third grades and then Mr. Smith, Rich Smith for the following grades. And I wanna really emphasize, especially for young children, for elementary school children, how wonderful a rural Vermont education is in a small school. And to lose that would be a terrible loss to history or history of New England, our legacy as a rural state. And I just wanna say that'd be a terrible tragedy and it would be a real loss to this community where I think the school has really been the center. And even being in this room is giving me flashbacks to that Christmas pageant for my single life. So just wanted to thank you all for your work. And I also am curious to know if, are there other schools like us in smaller villages that I've hooked on as part of the merger and are in really similar situations? That just would be one question I have for all of you guys to find out if there's other similar situations like that. Thank you. Yes, thank you. Hello, I'm Dottie Guifre, and I was a teacher here in the school for eight years. So I had very fun feelings about the school and what it accomplishes in our community. But I wanted to put down in writing something that's short and gives you an idea of what it would mean if the school were not here, just to put into your planning and thinking. Without our school, no happy sounds of kids on the playground, no parents chatting as they drop off their kids in the morning, only parents who work outside Roxbury rushing home to meet the bus in time because there's no after school, no rhythm of learning in Roxbury for all to feel each day, no pride in community that will disappear without our school. Preschoolers no longer imagine themselves old enough to go to preschool next year. There's no preschool for them when no early childhood teacher was hired for the little ones. And the school is abandoned as a place of learning. How sad for all the little ones who lost their chance to learn here because of a dispute over dollars and cents in a budget. How short-sighted to say, put them on the bus, they can learn in another town. How ignorant to think that disrupting every family with school-aged children each day will be okay. This is not the answer to leave Roxbury Village without this symbol of learning and pride. To thoughtlessly deny the damage it will do to our effort to revitalize Roxbury. No responsible adult would make this choice for our community by reducing possibilities for our future and by ignoring the pride we have in our village's history. And who will plant and tend the raised gardens that students built and tended when the village school is ended? Please do not leave us without our school. Thank you. My name is James Ray. I'm a father of two boys at Montpelier High School. I just want to put out to, it's relate to the folks behind me. And all the citizens, I think to join me in doing the research, there's, I'll put it this way, there's ample research out there in the world connecting the health of a school system to the health of a town. The economic health, I mean. And I raise that because the people who aren't in this room, people out in the community who need to be convinced to keep the schools here, this school and the three buildings in Montpelier healthy and vital in the coming years, despite budget pressures. There is ample evidence out there in the world, even just a curse research on my part has turned up study after study connecting the health of a school of building like this and Roxbury buildings like those in Montpelier to the economic vitality of the towns that they are in. My point being that there's a tendency, especially the folks who don't have a direct stake in a school to see them as a money sink when in fact, I think the research shows that they are actually quite the opposite. And I would encourage everyone to join me in my Google searches for those studies, arm ourselves with that knowledge because I think it's gonna be really important for our fellow community members who don't have a direct stake in the school to know that they actually do have a direct economic stake in healthy and vital schools in our towns. Thank you. Anyone else in the room or? Miscommunication, I came here to think about closing the school. However, I'm not happy with this situation. And why I'm not happy with it is because this rotten idea of a red eliminated what Ben think is needed desperately in school, which is school choice. He got to go to U32 as did most of our students that went somewhere else. Nobody, only one person that I know have ever went to Montpelier. She became a music teacher, her mother and father are lawyers. They live here some part time. Nobody ever went to Montpelier. It turns out that we were not allowed to go to U32 because Montpelier needed enough students to make up a red. Ain't that great? Why didn't they get students from around neck of Montpelier? Because it's too high a tax town, none of them towns wanted to be with Montpelier. We got stuck with it. Thank you very much for listening. The red is a bad idea. That's why certain towns have got rid of it. And by the way, Barnard, a fairly well town, just picked theirs a year or so ago. They didn't let the state bulldoze them in 2014 or whenever it was, you know? You don't push around a money town but you push around a little town, just a town like Roxbury, just lovely. Thank you very much for listening. Things need to be said. Hello, thank you for being here. My name is Arthur Smith. For 15 years, I was an education law attorney and I represented kids from the ages of three to 21. And primarily what I was focusing on would be out of district placements. The most expensive items typically in the budget, ranging around 300,000 a year per student. So, really tracking down what brings a student to a situation where they feel so alienated and so unable to benefit from their school, local school. And typically what I found, it was a long process of not being able to connect with peers, not being able to be a part of the community. And why I'm mentioning all of this now, as I was talking with my niece, she is finishing her doctorate at Stanford. I said, it's really curious the situation we're in. It's really difficult for our school to be able to find the individuals they need to staff it. And it's hard to bring a specialist in. But somehow the disconnect seems to be ever present that we're losing out. And she said, there's a body of literature that you probably should look at. It's called mattering. And it's really the idea of self-concept. And I don't know this literature, but I started reading it and thinking about it tonight. And really what it had to do with was self-concept. It doesn't have to do with self-esteem or social support. It has to do with how you feel in relationship to others. That's what our school is. Our school is the relationships that are built and thrived and the sense of being someone that matters. And I guess that's a concern that I would have. And I think that's why she put me on to this. When students go from a small study to a larger study, that may be what we're losing, the sense that I matter. And so I guess in pondering the testing scores and maybe that's true. In fact, I had a discussion with someone today who posed these questions to me. Thank you, Jason. Well, maybe the test scores would go up. And I guess that's the real balancing act. Now, what do you lose? Maybe the test scores go up, but that self-concept, that feeling of matter, where does that fit in? And I guess when I think about those $300,000 placements, that's a real budget item. And so when you start tracking down how to, how can you prevent that? How can you keep people in the community? I think it starts with very fundamental issues. How do we instill a sense of belonging? Thank you so much. Thank you. What else to the room with one person on? I think, I'm not sure it's still happening, but I think Grandville and Hancock closed their schools and I think everybody goes to Rochester or someone, I'm not sure. But I think maybe you'll want to just see how it goes down there as a piece of information before you even think about closing the school. Thank you. Lucinda here, our chance. Hi, I'm unmuted. Oh, you're unmuted, we can hear you. Okay, good. First of all, thank you for all your hard work. I'm Lucinda Sullivan. I've lived in the community for over 40 years. My four kids have gone through Roxbury and had saw it as one of their best parts of their education because it's a small school and you end up mattering. And I was on the school board for quite a while. So I do have a heart for this school and I think the community has a heart and it's the hub of Roxbury and it's the heart of Roxbury. And I think we need to pay attention to that. I am troubled by sending kids all the way to Montpelier. I understand why, but in thinking about what we're gonna do with the school in the future, I think that's a very important thing to think about. With little children on the bus being taken out of their community when they need to create community here. I agree with all the things that people have said this evening and I'm not gonna repeat them. I look forward to lots of discussions, hopefully community discussions about how we go forward or how this district goes forward with all of its schools, but for our interest, this school in particular, I would like the board to consider looking at alternative uses for the school. I think that could be a very outside of the box way of looking at education. There's certainly a lot of ways of doing education. And I think kids need to have that opportunity. I especially appreciate James' raised comments. Thank you for that because I think Roxbury's on the edge of making some changes and I think the school is an important part of that. But thank you all for doing all the work you're doing and I appreciate the extra time we have to consider this. Anyone else online? No, thanks everyone. The comment was very helpful and this is a conversation I think we're gonna have more robustly and I liked Lucinda's comment about seeing if we can find other ways to use this building to maybe ensure the long-term viability of it because I definitely agree with Jamie that these are the type of institutions that make a community and make a town. I think everyone on the board knows that. So, next on the item is our consent agenda. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? Do I hear yes? I move we approve the consent agenda. Okay, do I have a second? Second. Any discussion or questions? I just have a couple of questions. Libby, in your superintendent report, you mentioned you're anticipating something at the legislative level around literacy. Could you say a couple more sentences about that or is it still? I'm anticipating the people who are actively working to ensure a certain type of reading or a certain type of instruction to be in all schools legislated will come back. Okay, that's what I mean. And then there was the district's local assessment plan is linked in the, I know this is not from the consent agenda but it's a request that seems to fit better here, linked in the fall data report and I'm just curious to know where folks could find the local assessment plan on our website because I didn't know where it was. Okay, great. I guess that makes sense. Thank you. Under Mike's department curriculum. The curriculum department and then assessment. Curriculum and then assessment. Okay, thank you. All is a favor. Aye. Aye, you opposed? We have student presentation on. Jim, can we just, I just feel like sometimes at board meetings when lots of people come who don't regularly attend board meetings that it might be worth explaining sort of what the trajectory of the meeting is and they can make a decision of whether they wanna stay for the rest of the meeting or not. You know what I mean? Sometimes there's like sort of an awkward moment where it's like, when do we leave? Is there anything gonna be discussed? That sort of thing. We are largely discussing the data on academic performance for the remainder of the evening. Libby will I think say a few words updating the budget which I think you caught the gist of which is we've gotten different numbers from the state which means that we do not have to make cuts that we anticipated making this year. It does not mean that we are out of the bag for the next four or five years but this year we do not have to make any drastic or decronion cuts and we can pretty much I think have a level budget and delay harder choices till next year when we have a good year to have conversations about where those choices might be made and some of those choices might be we just all live with much higher taxes. So if you are interested in the data presentation please stick around. If you wanna see how the board meeting goes please stick around. If you wanna do other things either evening this is probably a good time to leave if you're so inclined but everyone is welcome to stay. So there will be a budget, an Act 127 update but it's not substantial. I mean that's pretty much the gist of it is that we are able to use numbers that keep us within. I wanna be respectful to everybody's time because we have a lot of staff people that are here that don't live in this community and have long drives home and then we have people that came to be a part of the community or part of the meeting. So I just wonder if it makes sense to like, I mean you basically just did that flip flop. The agenda looks like most bad. Thank you all for coming out. Thank you for being here. Do you mean the 227 data? Yeah. Ahead of the data. Okay, Libby wants to do the staff. I think we gave everyone the gist of what they need today. All right, thank you for being patient. I know that was. Alara is the first of the students. Is she on Zoom? I was wondering where the students were. Okay, Alara, yes. Alara, do you have a presentation, my friend? Yes, thank you. Yeah, it's kind of a short one. Miriam and I have been putting our heads together and we're coming up with a plan to have TAs come together because we held like a budget listening session a few weeks ago and we kind of met after that and talked about our next steps and we made a plan to send like a small script to TAs and have each student kind of individually write out their thoughts and then we'll collect them and we'll put them together and we'll be able to present that here. Other than that, we're nearing break. Things are kind of winding down. We're doing some like grateful grams at our school where students and teachers can send like personalized notes and treats to each other to show that we're thankful for each other in the community. And yeah, so just we're all very grateful for each other lately. Thanks, Alara. Thank you, Alara. Yeah, and sorry, I almost said I wasn't seeing you in the room, so. Excellent, so now thank you everyone for being patient. I think we're actually technically on time, so. Slide some chairs over, guys. Slide some chairs over and yeah, I'm excited to see this presentation, the amount of data in the packet is impressive and obviously some questions to ask but very, very thorough. Jim, I see that they might have missed public comment or maybe it's an accidental hand. Guys have a question. Yeah, I mean, because they had a problem coming up, we usually don't have an open meeting once we get past public comment but I'll go ahead because I know that you're an expert in it. Do you normally have the chat turned off the entire time or is it because you don't have an administrator doing the chats? We normally have it turned off. Thank you. Got it. I do want to say that email is a way to deliver messages to us. So please do that, but they'll be, I think we have the chat turned off. But thank you for the question. Go ahead, do we have, we don't have a projector here, right? We don't, but Shannon gave out copies. Okay, got it. Let me just pull it up, guys. Since you made color copies. Thanks, Shannon. So we have Nick Connor, our community liaison, Peggy Souvenostran, our director of special services, Mike Berry, our director of teaching and technical, I'm sorry, curriculum and technology, I changed your title, and Jess Murray, the director of social emotional learning and wellness up. They, in the board packet, you got a much deeper dive into data that has new stuff in it, new data in it. So the team here is going to explain a few bits of it and the PowerPoint is more of a high overview of the packet that the board received. So Mike, I believe you're starting us off. My new title and everything. So just to thank you for having us, to walk through the report that you received, that first page has a lot of demographic information current to a couple of weeks ago. The big thing I'd point out there is to look at the free and reduced lunch information. That process has changed this year significantly and our numbers look way different than they have in the past. There's a link to a spot on our website that explains the new process for free and reduced lunch considerations. It's just an interesting dynamic. Nick and I are tracking that on a weekly basis now. So, yeah, it increased it pretty significantly. And then into the academics, some of this you have seen before, just to walk through what we have in here, we have, BT cap is currently embargoed until the AOE releases those results formally. We've heard estimates of December. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a little bit later than that. That's what we know right now. And then we have some information about Renaissance Star that you can see in there. And I'm sure we'll have time for some questions about those considerations. What I really wanted to share was some of the new information in here. What we wanted to do for the board and the community tonight was be able to show some of the diagnostic level assessments that we use to really tailor instruction, intervention and supports for students. And so you can see a lot of those things that are new to our district this year and really implementing with fidelity. One of those being a running record assessment that really tells us about students' word recognition, fluency and comprehension. And we're working on understanding where our students are at in their reading progressions and what levels they are at. It's really great information for us. There's a really fancy chart that I'm quite proud of for the Words their Way spelling inventory. And just to give a little context, the names at the top of that chart, letter name, within word pattern, syllables and affixes, derivational relations, that's a progression of learning for students from beginning to end in terms of spelling. And the highlighted sections are the end of year expected results. So you get a sense of what we saw this fall. The really great thing with this assessment for teachers is that it gives them a really immediate sense of where their students are at and how to tailor instruction and supports. And that's really the power of these diagnostic assessments is that we get really great information about our students very quickly and we're able to act on it immediately. So it's pretty exciting. And then you see some math foundational skills assessments. We currently give these to grades five through nine, although we're working on some ideas for elementary as well. Each one of these skills that you see is representative of one question on a skills quiz. So this isn't a super deep, this is how our math programming is going. This is another tool that our teachers use to get a quick dipstick into how the course class is and how individual students are showing up. And so we use this for our planning. We use this for SST groups at the middle school. We use it for intervention planning. And it's just a great way for us to use diagnostic information to really serve and support students. So we're very excited about that. But this is one of the things back to the presentation that was big for us. We have a new local assessment plan that's really connected and vertically aligned. And we put it into motion this fall and we learned a lot from that process. We're gonna change things up in the winter administration to make things a little bit smoother. But it was a great move for us as a district to be able to align across the schools and across the grade levels and to really start to have those supportive conversations with classroom teachers and students around what are the needs and how can we support students in their learning? So it's very exciting. And we wanna continue to improve upon that. Each time we do it, we learn a little bit more about how to be more efficient about the data, how to gather the data, how to share the data. So we wanna continue to iterate upon that. We also really want to find another math diagnostic in K through 12. For math, we have Renaissance Star, the screener that gives us screening information about students and then we have the skills assessment which gives us a quick look at students' mathematical skills. We need something in the middle a little bit with a little bit more depth. So we're looking into some assessments that we can do K through 12 that give us that more understanding of a mathematical thinker for our students. So that's a big focus for us this year in terms of our local assessment plan. Okay, this has a presentation which I think gave us a question. I'm also wondering how you want us to keep questions. You want us to have questions to go on or do you want us to kind of wait for little times when you kind of... I think for me, if I can just go through kind of the updates on the slide and then questions for me and then we can move to... I know you probably have hundreds of questions for Nick so I wanna make sure I get one. Yeah, okay, that's perfect, we'll do that. Okay, another big thing for us this year was the implementation of Panorama across all schools which has been really amazing in so many ways. And that impacts all of us in all of our roles. So we've been working with classroom teachers, we've been working with principals and we've all been learning from Panorama but the immediate thing that we see right away is just this incredible access to our students' information for our teachers. So it's been pretty incredible. One of the other things in areas of growth that we're looking at, I don't mean to use growth there but we wanna find data to accurately measure growth and the impact of the work that we're doing. On the slide, there's an example of a new feature in Renaissance Star and just to be clear, the reason that I put this on here was to show that there's a new feature in Renaissance Star and that we are actively looking for ways to measure growth. This one, we don't know enough about to be able to say this is the best measure of growth in terms of using this. However, Julie Conrad, the middle school principal, also has a little bit of a math brain just in case you didn't know. And she's been looking at different ways to measure growth as well. So we're working as an administrative team to understand how can we look at growth and measure growth in an efficient way and an accessible way. So that's a big focus for us this year as well. And then a big win for us at the end of last year was we updated our reporting measures and proficiency scales and literacy in mathematics, K through 12, that's all on our website as well. That was significant work and that lends to our ability to respond to student needs, to report out to parents and families and students on their learning to continue to align our curriculum K through 12. It was a big thing, it was a big geeky thing in my world that we're quite happy with and continue to grow from there. That's my list, I'm good. Great, thanks. My question is basically how are you using this data? Like when I see user tests that are given to get these results, like I think how does this compare to other school districts? I think about how does this compare to our school district in prior years? Is that how you guys are using this stuff too or is it some, is this not how you are using it? I think there are certain assessments to speak to that so BT CAP would be an example where we get comparative data to other districts in the state, we just can't talk about it yet because it's super secret. And so when that comes out we do get some good information about how we're comparing and sometimes even nationally, like with SBAC we were able to look nationally and see certain trends and things like that. Renaissance start has some components of comparative data that we can do with state and national benchmarks. It has not been super helpful for us to do that yet. And I think now that the state has changed up the tests that we're using. So Renaissance start used SBAC as a flame frame of reference for our national comparison. And however that's not the assessment we're using now. So I don't know how that tool is going to work to help us really understand anything within Renaissance start in terms of national comparison. But locally the way that we use these is as part of our collaborative team structure and our guiding coalitions and our PLCs. So teachers administer an assessment and then in teaching teams sit and review and discuss what our student needs and how are we gonna support that. And that extends to intervention supports, it extends to all of us in some way and our roles and be able to do that. And we're doing that on a regular cycle and basis. So that's how we're using the data. And super quick follow up. Like around in grade five the proficiency is 76% which and it's a highlighted skill that's currently the focus of the small group of class but converting between fractions and decimals proficiency is 7%. So who decides like do we focus on rounding or do we focus on fractions to decimals? Yeah so one of the things that we need to figure out a way to report better is that some of these skills haven't been introduced yet. This was the first week of school when this was administered. So fractions may not be introduced until the middle of the school year and it's perfectly appropriate for 7% to be the number. The other thing to remember is that this is one question on a 24 question quiz. So there's one fractions question. So this is just a quick check in with students. This is not a comprehensive kind of deep mathematical three hour test. So this is just a quick, where do I need to go with my students? What do we do with our groups? It's just a formative beginning here. That's right. Got it. Yep. And just kind of a follow up. In the testing has shifted up a little bit from kneecap to SBAE, blah, blah, blah. And also, as the administration of the latest test was statewide not as smooth as it could have been. I mean, how does that impact the ability, like the usefulness of the data? Honestly, it seems that you're shifting. It makes longitudinal comparisons difficult. It might make year-to-year comparisons difficult if you've got hiccups in the administration of the test that are influencing results. Yeah. So I can speak to my opinion of things and then some information that we have. The rollout of the Cognitive Assessment in our district was extremely difficult and at times very unsuccessful. I've met, yeah, I've met with families who are concerned about the results and I've been very honest about that to say, I can't prove or disprove that your students' results were or were not impacted by this. But I know we had more tears than I've ever seen in an administration of a National Assessment or State Assessment from staff and students. I don't think that students in it also. It was very, very unsmooth. From implementation to rollout, I think I was at a full day training one week before we were administering this. It was awful. Everything that you could do wrong was done. So they are doing a study to see the comparative alignment between SBAC and Cognia. I don't know what that will give us. I think that the sense is like, are the scores in Cognia aligned with what we're used to in SBAC and that will help us understand it more. We still don't have released tasks from the state which is basically a way for us to look at what the assessment looks at, to see what the questions are, see what the types of questions are, to see which questions students got wrong. We don't have access to that. So it's hard for us to know how to interpret the data from this particular assessment. My opinion is that it's gonna take many years before we feel like we have a handle on it and it's consistent. Added to it, ninth grade wasn't even complete at the time of administration. So all the other grade levels were adaptive which means that the assessment changed according to how the students were responding. Ninth grade was not because they hadn't finished designing it until the week that we gave it. None of that's very confidence inspiring, frankly. So we tried to take what we could from it. Looking at trends or general trends, here were pockets of domains that looked a little lower than others. Can we look at that and compare it to our local data and see if we see any alignment? That's about the usefulness of it for us now. It was really challenging. It was quite bad. Julie, so all the principals are here. So Julie texted me and said, do you wanna speak to, was it Jake's question, Jules? I can't see you. Oh, okay, keep going. Okay. Yeah, it was challenging. So this is time for questions for Mike. Yeah, yes. All right, I'm ready. And before I do that, I just wanted to make a clarification that for the folks who are following along at home and then also apologies to folks in the room. We don't have paper copies of the full 16 page report. I mean, maybe we could get them if you wanted to see them. But that is some of what Mike was just referencing in his presentation, not just the slide. And then that's also a lot of what I have questions about. So it might be a little hard to follow along. I, overall, I noticed that we don't have a lot very much in here of an overall for academics. We don't have a lot in here that's like year to year comparisons. Is that just because this, some of this data is so new? And will we begin to see year to year comparisons and trends? Yeah, most of it is because all of this is new. Yeah, okay. So these are the various aspects of these, but this was the first administration where we were consistent K through 12 in administering these local assessments. Right. So this is our base. Except for Renaissance Star. Except for Renaissance Star. Okay. And not everybody here knows where the board just recently named indicators regarding year to year growth in our priority areas. And one of those is closing the academic gaps and including to be able to see disaggregated data. And I don't see much disaggregated data in here either for academics. Is that also something we could look forward to seeing? We could. We just have to pay attention to end size, which is a factor particularly at the elementary level. Right, okay. It prevents us from reporting off quite a bit. Okay. More than you would think. The other question that we would have for the board is there's lots of assessments here. So which ones would you like us to disaggregate? Okay, statewide testing is probably easiest. Okay. To do, not if it's embargo though. Not once it's not embargo, yes. Is it because of triggers you were in says? Yeah, and it's an appropriate measure for the board. It's a general programmatic measure. So that's an appropriate measure for the board to see. Okay. And then this might be needed to be state, it's the state testing as well, but maybe it could also be in Renstar. I don't know. The way that we articulated the indicators was for literacy to see a 5% growth year to year, and then for math to see a 10% growth year to year. Is that something that you could, when in future presentations show, all right, for this year so far, we've seen a 3% growth, but not yet a 5% growth. I'm just trying to match up what we're saying, our goals are with what we're seeing as far as what our current reality is. That's a tricky one for me, and that's what I was mentioning, that we're actively trying to figure out how to do that. Okay. But it is tricky, what defines growth? You know, how do we identify growth? Is it cohort to cohort comparison? Is it on Renaissance star? Or is it on the BT cap? Or is it a combo of the two in which we have to create some sort of formula to figure that out? Okay. That's where I need Julie's beautiful mind to help figure out where we can do that. And also, to be honest, to do it in a way that's efficient for us to be able to provide it. Right. You know, like for example, providing, you know, one of the things that Libby spoke to is the state assessment might be easier one to show by demographic. Part of that is because the data comes back to us already sorted that way. Whereas with local assessments, we'd have to do that by hand and create some sort of structure to be able to do that. So I think we need a little bit more time. The goal is to be able to do that for sure. We just need a little bit more time figuring out how to do that well and sustainably and accurately. Yeah. Yeah. And I also wanna remind the bar for Renaissance star the analogy or metaphor I've been using lately is that it's like the, when the school nurse gives the eye exam at school, right, the eye screener, that she doesn't immediately, if Jake fails it, give him glasses. She sends him to a doctor to get more diagnostics, right? So that's the level of the Renaissance star. It's way big and broad. And so that number is why, that idea of what a screener is meant for is not to show anything, what doesn't compare it between cohorts and all that kind of stuff, because it's so big and broad. It's meant to say, hey, this kid needs more, we need to look at this kid closer through other diagnostics. Yeah. Okay. I remember the screening for lice. I'll stick with that. I think I, yeah, I think I did. I think she's gonna do this for you. Oh really? So, and then I have, I'm curious about a few of the specific things. There, and then numbers at Roxbury Village School on Proficiency for Reading and Math, and maybe this is because it's so big and broad, are not great. Can you speak to why? Can you tell me which part you're looking at? Let me, I think I am looking at Run Star. Is it the early order of the assessment, or the other? No, the reading, yeah. So I think, you know, there's a couple things here. One is that the population is significantly less, so one student's score makes a bigger percentage swing on this assessment for this. Keeping in mind that for Kindergarten in first grade didn't take it in the fall, first grade took the early literacy, so they're not counted in the reading assessment. So it's really second, third, fourth, and that's very few students that we're talking about. So I think that that's a contributing factor. But I know that Shannon and her team have been really working on, focus on literacy, along with all the work that we're doing as a district to be able to work on that. So we're doing, we're doing the work. And also the, sorry, in the financial, I mean I saw a lot of like kind of abysmal scores that you might have answered this, are where it's broken down into skills. And is that cause for alarm, or is that just the, you know, averages were not taught in fifth grade by the time that it does this thing? Yeah, so we reviewed these, and Julie can pop in here too I think, but we reviewed these with Amy Kimball who is one of our amazing instructional coaches. And there weren't any real surprises to us in terms of this, but what did come out, you know, I think an actionable thing that we saw from this were some vertical alignment components that we want to consider a little bit more. So this was the first year that we did the ninth grade foundational skills assessment because we wanted to see that transition from eighth to ninth grade and see what was happening there. So we immediately saw some things in there about prime factorization that I can't tell you anything about. But that there was this disconnect that we need to really go back and take a look at what are we doing in eighth grade and to ninth grade to be able to do that. And we were able to see that from this quick assessment. But there was nothing on here that didn't really align with our order of introduction of skills or strategies. It was all kind of where we expected to see students. The real power in the foundational skills assessment is that when a classroom teacher gets the list of all their students, they can look across at an individual student and see which skills that student is lower in or higher in and be able to really programmatically think about how to support that student or a group of students. And then they can also look down the skill column and see where their class as a whole is in that experience. And so we do have some teachers that give foundational skills a couple of times like just to get that constant check-in about where their kids are and be able to respond to that. At a minimum, we're doing it three times a year to be able to do that. So we're coming up on our winter administration in about two weeks after the break. And we're really excited to see where students have come from this fall, the data that you're seeing right now to the winter, we're expecting some big bumps. So the kids will take the same assessment in winter. So this really is a pretest for the year. Okay. So in some ways, we'd be thinking about this data not as, oh my God, 7% of our people don't know something they should know, but this is the opposite. 7% of our people know something they haven't been taught yet. Exactly, know something they haven't been taught yet. And it also gives an indication to the teachers like where individuals are in terms of their work. So Julie's on her phone and she texted me. We have created SST groups so that students support team groups to provide interventions for skills we would expect them to already have like multiplication and grade seven and pre-teaching for the upcoming units. So where something is particularly low, the teachers can use it to pre-teach in a small group setting to be more prepared for the unit that comes ahead, which is another way you can intervene in our GSS model. All right, that is helpful. Right? I just had a couple more questions on the academics. The spring 2023 and fall 2023 on early literacy had a big difference. Is that simply because in fall 2023 those are different students than they were in spring 2023? So the early literacy assessment is kind of a tricky thing. I think when people think of the word early, they think young. It's early in their literacy development. So we use that assessment across K through 12 for certain students, depending on where they are in their literacy experience. So it's a tricky one to report out on for that reason. Largely kindergarten and first grade do take that assessment, but we have approximately 12 to 15 students all the way up to 12th grade that take this assessment. And so it's never the same students from year to year. It's not quite the same thing. Should we be alarmed that it went from 64% to 45%? I think that that shows that we've got some kids that have some needs this year in the early end. However, it's not unusual for us to see a lower score in the early literacy in the fall and then jump right up, particularly for those kindergarten students and those first graders. That is not unusual. That would make sense to me. But if you think about it, I have a five-year-old. Right, that's what I was thinking. I just, I appreciate the clarification. It's a tricky one to use as a reporting measure. And then I just have one more which I'm guessing is along these same lines, which was the kindergarten interpretation. It was on math. Sorry, I need to find it in the actual, here we go, I don't know. Oh, kindergarten, kindergarten forward counting to 100, I think. Where the mean got 0.67 rather than what we've looked for was somewhere between seven and eight, is that? Because it's early, these are incoming kindergartners, they just don't know it yet. We're gonna start teaching it, yeah. You haven't seen anything like assessing kindergarten in the first week of school. It's really magical. But we have our K team, K teams are amazing and our interventionists that support those teams are incredible and they're feeling extremely confident already with the progress in students in kindergarten. Okay, well thank you very much for sharing all this data and for also walking me through understanding it. Appreciate it. I'm looking through the, did you guys look at the ES? Yeah, sorry, yeah, Brett's been in line for a while. Oh, sorry, I didn't. So. Over the two years that I've been on the board, the most consistent piece of data that I've seen is the gap between RBS and UES. I'm wondering if you feel like there's any gains being made there? If not, why not? It's complicated. If it's complicated, why, how? And following that, when we're talking about statistics and numbers and one score bring down a larger group, what happens when these kids get to MSMS? Does it just get dissolved or is it tracked? Does it continue to be sort of tracked? Or, you know, because I wonder about Roxbury kids that express an achievement gap from union kids when they were at the elementary school level, then they get to the middle school level. And is there a way to sort of see whether or not there's essentially a statistical jump because I don't know, there's more resources, there's more teachers, there's more specialists, there's more, you know, the idea that union has more would mean greater success for elementary school kids from Roxbury is floated regularly. And is there data to support that from the middle school? I can say that if a student, it doesn't matter which elementary school they come from. If a student enters Main Street Middle School and their assessments show that there's needs that need to be met, then they go straight into our remediation in our intervention, that's the model we have, right? I think Shannon can speak to what's happening now at RBS because there are definitive needs here that are pretty large and there's no getting around that. So Shannon, do you want to speak to this, though? Sure, yeah. Hi, I'm Shannon Miller, I'm the teaching principal here at Roxbury. So I do administrative work, but I also teach math and literacy three times a day across all five grade levels. So I've met all the kids and I've taught at Union for four years and I can confirm that the kids are the same. So it's no big split between RBS and UES as far as kids' academic capabilities, their competence, anything like that. It is also, I would say, not the case that UES has more innocence per child. They absolutely have more interventionists that they have four for 400, we have one for 40. So actually we have more access. When kids demonstrate a need to be in that kind of service, they're in it really quickly here. I absolutely think that there have been some concerns in terms of consistency and curriculum here. That's my passion, that's why I applied for this job and I'm super psyched to be working on it with everybody all the time. So we are all hands on deck for 30 minutes a day in our SST or WING groups. I assess most kids every three to four weeks to find out how they're progressing. They know what their goals are, they get immediate feedback and they move into new goals. Our focus is literacy right now because if you have weak literacy skills, that impacts your ability to access every other part of the curriculum, right? So that's our goal right now. Kids are making awesome progress. We've also done some work in breaking apart those multi-age classrooms. For example, I teach fourth grade math now, so third and fourth aren't together, so all grade levels are getting a full 60 minutes of instruction. Same thing in our one-two classroom, our interventionist is able to help with their first grade group. Our first and second grade teacher can teach second grade, kindergarten has its own time. So there's been a lot of places where there've been some quick improvements that have had a big impact right away. So I am really looking forward to seeing this winter data too, just to see how much has changed and I just love seeing the cultural shifts around too, especially with how much kids are reading, talking about reading and asking me for flashcards off the bus for multiplication facts. So I think it's been all great changes right away and these are great kids and they're showing a lot of progress and a lot of energy around their own improvement. You guys sleep. Um, I do sleep. I don't know if I do much else right now but I work and I sleep, yes, I do. Thank you. Yeah. What? I'm looking at the Renaissance Star Early Literacy Assessment and I'm wondering why the not tested percentages are so high, what's going on with that? Because that's the percentage of the total population. Of the school, not the group that gets tested. Yep, yep. So only 29% of the school took the early, in the spring, took the early, okay, God, or something. And why is that? It's designed for students that are at a lower literacy level. So if you're above a certain point and you take the regular reading assessment. And that data is below in the Renaissance Star Reading Assessment. That's right. I have a similar experience. Actually, first of all, I want to go back and just say I love the assessment page. I really appreciate the assessment page and I feel like you told us last year that you were going to kind of make this information available to families and kind of clear and digestible way to some of us more like education nerd types. But it's super appreciated and it's a great resource to be able to share with folks and you're like, is your kid doing what they should be doing at this point in their education? So I feel like it's just, I really am grateful for that. I had a similar experience to Nia in that some of the RBS data when it comes to the Renaissance Star Assessment is pretty glaring and it feels, whoa, 78% not being proficient. And I think if you look at spring to fall, it's like, bless, I think once we hit more than half are proficient in one particular area. So it's, it's alarming, it's glaring. It's also just Ren Star, which what I'm hearing, like that's one snapshot, it's one tool. However, when I see things like 78% not proficient and then I see things like we've had a really significant increase in the RFL percentages. I'm thinking about like title one funding, like does that kind of bump us up to get any, no, any additional kind of federal funding to do that, being a little bit familiar with title one and that we can get more tutoring and there's kind of more family outreach. Mike has given me a heart-shaking note. No. Okay, so that's kind of what I was curious if any of those numbers kind of in combination could kick in some more funding to put those supports in place. This isn't a people problem. This isn't a throw more people at the problem. This is get better at what we do. That's what we need to do. Yeah. Staff intervention is, yeah, systems, yeah, okay, thank you. Just to see that title one thing, that was I think everybody's understanding of how title one works. It's actually not as connected to free and reduced lunch as even I thought until recently that the ALE has kind of educated us on how that actually works. And our title one funds are based on census information, not free and reduced lunch. But it's how the free and reduced lunch connection is that that's a demographic that they want to have it back on. Yeah. If you'd asked me that last year, we'd say, oh yeah, FRL, it runs our title one. That's how it's new learning for me. Yeah, okay. But it doesn't come with any additional funding or anything like that. But the other thing I would say is just to highlight the work that we are doing. So we have Shannon who's an instructional leader out here doing that work. The Roxbury staff and the UES staff is engaged in year one of letters training which is very intensive around literacy instruction. We have new resources for literacy instruction across the district. We have all of these things that are happening across both schools and it's the work that needs to be done. And so like when our teachers are in these teacher training programs like does that mean they're implementing this year or is they're kind of getting their chops, you know, developed and they'll bring it in at the end of this year or next year is like it's all kind of happening at once. It's all kind of happening at once. Planning, building, flying, playing. Yeah, okay, okay. I was in kindergarten classroom a couple weeks ago with Katie and we were watching a masterful kindergarten teacher work with new learning from the letters training and she's taught. She's like, okay, I'm figuring this out too. Like she's just playing around with the ideas and working through a different way of teaching the kids. And she was very upfront with them about like I'm learning how to do this. So let's do it together. It was awesome. Who's gonna talk for me? Well, thank you. Yeah. I would ask that too that these are curriculums that we already did the district had bought and they're in place and people are using them as far as foundations and Hegerty letters is sort of the background on how to implement that well. So it's like a backup. I can extend now, I can explain this better but it's not like a brand new thing I'm gonna take to my class tomorrow. We're already teaching it. This is just how to teach it better and with more background knowledge. Great. My other question was how are we leveraging our teaching principle position? I'm hearing that so thank you. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate this data presentation Mike and I know that I've sat through. This is the third one now I think that I've sat through and they're getting better every year and stronger every year. And I was wondering if just for the audience's sake if you might be able to you or maybe Libby just give like maybe like a one minute or two minutes sort of overview of from year to year like since you've started as superintendent how has this improved? Cause I've seen it. I don't know if I can like speak articulately about it tonight. Just wondering if you can sort of take your own. So when Mike and I started there were assessments that were given, nothing was formalized. So nothing was written on paper to say this is the window you're gonna do it now. The scores were kept in random Google Docs. So only certain people had access to it. Mike and I were not those people. So we couldn't easily put our fingers on data in how we were doing. We had no social emotional editing data. We didn't know our special education data. We certainly didn't know our chronic absenteeism data. Now I could look at Petra and tell you I could pull her up on panorama tell you the day she was absent. So the day she was absent she's not absent very much I looked. So the day she was absent I would tell you a red star scores. I would tell you your cognitive start all in one page. I can see that about a student at the tip of my fingers now. And when we started more importantly I think is that our teachers weren't using the data as a group, as a collaborative group. So there wasn't a conversation around this is what our group of second graders are doing right now. And we need to get them here. Like we didn't have any kind of priority standard for all kids to do that. We didn't have our universal skills named. So Jim was the loudest teacher or the bunch to say Jess needs work. Then Jess got work whether or not she had we had data to show that enough. And now our interventionists are working really in a remedial capacity based on universal skills. So it's night and day from what we used to be doing and this year is the first year I think our flywheel is starting to turn a little faster in some areas. And we just we're trying to celebrate the Jesus out of our teachers because it's significant paradigm change for our teachers in some areas. So they're working hard at it. And that kind of change is very hard on a professional. So we're really impressed with the work that's happening right now. And like Mike and I were talking when we went to a conference last week and we were talking that we're super excited. The conference is really reassuring and our team learned a lot about what are our next steps. So we're excited to see where we go. Well I can see that growth because I've been on the floor down for three and a half years and I can see it and it's palpable and it feels great to see this version of a data presentation versus what we were seeing. We couldn't give you one when I first saw it. And even last year's was rocky. But I just want to kind of like raise the roof for you guys and thank you so much for improving the systems and the data so much over the last three years. It's really impressive. And I think we're all still like in the way Mike is talking about the data. We're all still admitting that this is not what you're seeing tonight isn't perfect still. And there's a room for a lot of improvement still but I think you've been swimming upstream to like basically create new systems for managing data. And then also on top of a global pandemic and a huge flood in our community. So there's been a lot of factors at play. Remind people again when Mike was like the principal of Main Street Middle School I think because he could not do the work that he was hired to do. So it's just incredible the strides that have happened and I just want to give a shout out for that. I have some questions that I wanted you to speak to the percentages of kids. So kind of like Lynn's but to the other ones. So not the early literacy one but like when I'm looking at the Renaissance Star reading and the Renaissance Star Math I'm seeing a pretty broad spectrum of like sometimes it's 96% of kids are tested and sometimes it's only 46. Can you just speak to that? Sure. So it's the same with the early literacy. So the students that take the early literacy don't take the reading. So especially in those elementary that the percentage that's represented and not tested is likely students that took the early literacy our kindergarten students don't take Renaissance Star in the fall so that percentage includes them of not testing and the reading in the math. They take it for the first time in the winter. So that's why I like the elementary level is lower than like the middle school level is very high. Shout out to Julia. Extremely high yeah they yes. And to point out our participation at the high school increased significantly from last year to this year as well. So Jason's put in a lot of systems to encourage students to engage in that assessment in a pretty serious way. So we still have a few Steve artists. We do. We do. Yeah so like high school the NHS participation was one of the ones that I highlighted. So it went from 46% in spring 2023 to 86% in the fall. Yeah. Remember that one Jason do you want to speak to that? Just remember that as a student ages through and they get to that proficiency level we don't require them to continue to take it. So wouldn't it be flipped then where you would have more people taking it in spring? No, spring. In spring 2023. Oh I see. I had that same thing when I got there too. I'm doing the switching up there. Those are listed first also then. Okay gotcha. Thank you. I'm wondering so is Star only taken two times a year? No three times. Three times a year. And what you said in the first week of school and then is it just sort of broken up from there? The first assessment period is in mid-September. The second the winter is December 6th through the 21st. And then the spring, maybe the spring is. And is there any reason why it's like not given more often? Like is more data better or not in this, for this specific test? Renaissance Star? Yeah. I don't think it's designed to be given any more often than that intentionally. We certainly, I don't feel like we need Renaissance Star more than three times a year. And that's partly because we're doing such a good job with the diagnostic assessments that we really know the targeted skills that students need. I think the diagnostics, the common formative and common summatives at grade levels are much more important and we're doing those often. And that's what's informing instruction and learning. And then the Renaissance Star really either confirms information for us or gives us a little flag that we need to look closer at some other areas. So three times a year seems to work really well. And for the common formative and common summative assessments just for people who may not know that language, it's like every kid in sixth grade is gonna get a similar or maybe the exact same, let's say, multiplication formative assessment, like a little quiz or something in class. Based on our priority standards. Okay. Okay, and in terms of like Mia's question about disaggregating data or recording out based on the values that the board has put forward and the goals, would there be able to be like just a district wide report on the achievement gap that isn't broken down by school? Would that be possible? Probably, it would depend on how we define that. How we define what? The achievement gap. Okay. So one of the things that we're wrestling with with that goal is what assessment are we judging this on? Right? And that's a question we have, right? So it makes most sense from our team's perspective and as we've talked about it quite a bit that the VCAP when we get it is the board level because it's large, it's problematic, it's all state kind of wide. That's what we should be looking at as like our achievement gap score. Because we can't necessarily do that for the other assessments. They're not meant to be to do that. It also sounds like these ones are in their infancy and maybe not that reliable. Well, the math is a teacher-grown one which may have some reliability, but the words their way in the Rand Star are national assessments. I've been given words the way since I started teaching a long time ago. So those, but those are more for teachers to immediately use in their practice not to judge program, right? So the question for the board around achievement gap is are programs working to achieve the level we want to achieve? Across the board, regardless of the demographic. And the assessment for that is the state assessment. And like star assessment would literally probably be going by student by student and sort of like pulling them out and putting them into disaggregated categories. Because the data isn't attached to the star, right? Or is it attached in, I'm forgetting the software that you said you could- Panorama. Panorama. We could probably do it in Panorama, Nick and Mike are my panorama guys. But just keep in mind what the star tells us. The star tells us you need more diagnostics, right? The star tells us that you've got some bluries in your eyes from the eye test. It doesn't tell us what it is, right? It doesn't point exactly to immediately say, Jake needs to work on this piece of word recognition, right? That's a bit of a diagnostic. And do you feel like the BT cap does that? It breaks it down into concepts and themes. And it still might only be one question for- No, I think it's more of a- There are many more than that. And the Renaissance Star does break things into concepts and themes. They just may or may not be tied to our statewide standards, right? The VCAP is written on our statewide standards, right? So there's several- Which is what we've based our priority standards on, right? Exactly. So there are several connections there that- I think it makes total sense too. I'm just nervous about the whole embargo, like secretive data. That's the problem. That's the problem. And so like if we can't ever see it, then can we in the meantime, come up with another way of at least, sort of in the way that we're doing here where it's imperfect, but we're getting a few different data sets and we're able to at least get some thing to report out on. So it might, I don't know what your estimate is on when we would, when the general population would have access to- It's not my estimate, it's AOEs. I have nothing to do with it. It's totally the agency of education. They promised us when we first started the VCAP that we'd have it in two weeks after assessment. Right. So like we do not have it two weeks after the assessment. Like that. And even now we sent home individual scores. Y'all got one if you have a third grader through a ninth grader. And on that has our district scores. And so we can't- And I didn't get any cover letter saying I could not speak about that. Right. Which I will say, the district's doing really good compared to- Right. It didn't compare to the, it was only compared to the rest of the state. Yeah. But we were doing really good. Just a quick add on to the VCAP speaking to Jim's question about the validity of the assessment. I think it's okay to, we put this on our website too as an update. We got the results. We were told print up the reports and send them home. We printed up all the reports. And just before we put them in the mail, they said, don't, the data's wrong. So, so we had to wait another week and a half, do it again. And those are the types of experiences that make us really question. So this is what I'm talking about swimming upstream and just appreciating the efforts that are being made. And then just wondering, like for the sake of, you know, being practical about it, if there's any way that we can like provide something in the interim. Libby, you spoke a little bit about, like it sounds like you might have school level data teams. I just wanted to hear a little bit more about that. Can I just do just a quick, we're at 8.10, Mike's gone. Three more presentations. I don't want to short kind of discussion about data, but I do want to make sure that we get to all the presentations while we still have the energy to ask and all the questions. I'm going to touch on that in a little bit. And then we can do a bigger presentation about our collaborative teams and something we're super proud of too. So. I do think just for future reference, like this data presentation is always like a huge time commitment in our meetings. And I do always feel a little rushed through it. And I think, so I just think maybe we break it up into like and have people come in on different nights for the future. And I don't want to, I just want, because it's easy to just keep asking the question. It's fun to grill Mike too. So let's all put that out there. Thank you. I'll be, thank you too, go for it. Okay. So I just, I have one slide, just kind of the overview. One of the things that we are still trying to figure out because all of our programming is so individualized is how do we measure growth of special education programs as a whole? And so that is something we're still working on. Looking at the trends, as you can see, we have had an increase in the number of students that are being found eligible for special education. So last year on November 1st, we were at 125, K to 12 and this year at 156. So that's pretty significant. Thank goodness we filled all our special educator positions this year, because that would be really challenging if we were still down three like we were last year. Our percentages of disabilities are, there's not really any significant change. So there's not one particular area of disability that we've seen any spike in or decrease in. So that's stayed pretty much the same. Our evaluations or referrals for initial evaluations for special education are about the same at this time as they were last year. It is a growth from two years ago when on November 1st, there had only been seven requests for new evaluations. And last year and this year we are at 21. So there is definitely an increase in concerns. Most of those requests are coming from families, not through the school systems, I think because we have so many great systems in place that we're supporting students, but that is we are doing a lot of evaluations. And some of those are from students that have moved in from out of state, which we are required to do a Vermont evaluation if you move in from out of state with an IEP. But that is, thank goodness we have our new school psychologist, she's amazing. And we are keeping her busy. Thinking about, oh, one of the things that I added this year just to have you have an awareness around is the number of students that we have placed by IEP teams and alternative settings. So last year on November 1st that number was 11. This year it's 14, so that is increasing. And that is the first thing that I put on the work that we're continuing to do is really working on our capacity to meet the needs of all students within our schools. So really trying to, you know, justice on the ton of work this year, which we'll talk about around the social-emotional supports for students since that tends to be the primary reason that we end up, teams end up needing to look for alternative placements. So hoping that this trend will start to go the other way. But we do have a significant number of needs for students which anyone who's done any reading knows what the mental health stuff that's happening for students we're seeing that in the school. So that's not surprising but important information. And doing a lot of work with data as there's been a lot to talk about and really helping IEP teams use data in their decision making. There has been significant changes in the way evaluations happen for special education. Over the last couple of years the regulations were changed in Vermont and there is significant increase in focusing on data as opposed to tests. Oops, my computer just shut off, that was a good time. As opposed to test scores, so all of the work that we're doing throughout our systems is contributing right into us having more impactful evaluations. Looking to continue to grow our knowledge about the impact of disability on students and how it impacts their access to their education which is what special education is about. And continuing to work to build consistent experiences for families across the district. One of the things I did this summer was create a caregiver's handbook around special education because one of the things that I've heard from a number of families is I've been doing this for years and I still don't understand what happens in any of these meetings. So there's a handbook on the website that I ask people to keep electronically because we're adding stuff as questions come in and families are saying things like hey can you help me understand this or whatnot but hoping that that's a resource that is breaking it down or at least giving families a place to look if they have questions or if something isn't making sense. And then just our multilingual learners have stayed pretty consistent as far as the percent of the population that we have in the school. So there, no questions? Go on to the next. No, just kidding. Just kidding. Right. Do am I correct that students can essentially graduate from their 504 plan when they no longer need that level of support? Is that sort of a thing? So 504 and IEP are two different things. Right. So 504 is about access and it's about removing barriers. So for it to be protected under 504 you have a disability that is significantly impacting a major life function. For most students in school that major life function is learning. And so 504 plans are plans of protection to make sure that essentially someone's not discriminated against because of their disability. So those are plans that depending on the setting that you're in could go into a, it was actually a workplace law to start with. And so section 504 is something that also applies to adults in the workplace. Special education is around students with disabilities that are significantly impacting that access. And then they need some kind of specialized instruction that isn't available to all students. So part of what happens is as we continue to build better or not better, we have amazing systems. But as we build our systems there are more systems that are going to be available to all students. But to answer your question, yes. The goal would be, yes, that a student would get to a place where they would no longer need specialized instruction. They still might need accommodations and things like that, but they're not looking at needing modified academics. And so they can actually become no longer eligible under special education. In some cases, then they move to protection under section 504. And in some cases, they are at a place where they don't need any kind of plan. So, because I've learned the law introduction from November of last year to this year indicates some sort of success. Oh, and the final fours? Yeah. Tour of like... My guess, my guess is more around graduation rates than, yeah, they're actually, I mean, it actually was surprising to me that our number went down because it feels like there's a lot, mostly at the high school, tends to be where, and some at the middle school, but the high school for sure. And a lot of those are around the mental health stuff that students are experiencing. Yeah. Any questions? I got a question. Can I ask you? We usually do not take questions with the audience because we've got a couple of comments over here, but you can certainly email a question to... I don't need your mail. Yeah, you do get to write down a piece of paper and... It's just simple. Is there a program for high school to stop the absenteeism? You know, they need to know, we're trying to improve your life, stay in school. It's outrageous. It's about the only thing I can understand in this statement. I'd like to have somebody sometime go over it with me so I can understand it all. Yeah. All the acronyms and stuff. And the next one. So I think you already mentioned this, the how possible it is to be able to show us some trends of numbers percentages, sort of like Olivia was saying on our academic data, we'd love to be able to see at the board level, are our programs working? What is the thing that indicates to us, are our programs working, or is there more we need to do with our programs to get them to work better? That's a good question. One of the things that we're trying to figure out now that we have panorama, is there a way for us to be able to pull data that will show us progress for students with IEPs without having someone have to go through and hand write that kind of stuff. So that's some of the stuff that we're still trying to figure out because it really is, it's hard to look at things like exit rates because sometimes kids just move or like there's so many. So it is something that we're still trying to figure out how to do beyond an individual basis. And it actually is something that we had, we sent a number of special educators to conferences recently around Solution Tree and that's part of what we're trying to engage them into is like thinking about how do we think about our system of special education and how do we know that what we're doing is effective. So still trying to figure that out. Thank you. Yeah. Greg, is family satisfactory, satisfaction with the services provided in that interest in that year? So last, yes. So last year, one of the changes that was made with the state regulations for special education is that there is now a family input form that is at the end of an IEP. And so last year what we did is we sent out, actually we created that form also for students with Section 504 plans and asked families to send that in so we could try to get that. We didn't get a ton of response to that. So it really wasn't a high enough number to really give us that. The other way that it comes out is the AOE sends out surveys every year to any family of a student with a disability and then they send the districts the reports and the response rate on that is pretty low as well. And so, and that's across the state. I mean, I will admit as a parent of someone in Essex I was like, oh, I should probably fill this out. But it's just like one more, one more survey, right? And sometimes people get survey weary. So, yes, there are measures for that but the response rate has been pretty low. Hi. I feel like one of the last times we heard from you, I think it was like our special ed 101 training was that, and I think this was a priority within the new special education law but just how kind of special ed strategies were working their way into like tier one instruction? Did I dream that? Was that a goal that you guys were kind of moving in that direction? It's not that special ed strategies are moving into tier one instruction. It's that in order to qualify for a specific learning disability, a collaborative team around a child has to show all the different interventions and remediation strategies that they've tried prior to identification. So it's just, it's not taking special education, specialized services and putting them into tier one. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Okay, it may be less relevant then but I guess I was curious like, how's that going? But you might, you know, if it's specific teachers for specific kids, you may not have an update. So, what I can say is that one of the things that the special education teachers are focusing on is really trying to, the collaboration that is going so well with the general ed teachers and trying to figure out how to then make sure that that special ed and accessibility lens is put into those conversations too because we do need all students accessing that first level of instruction. And so, you know, that collaboration is really one of the key components to making sure that all students are getting what they need for that, you know, that instruction that we want all students to have. Right, because a student who's receiving special ed services is with maybe their special educated or a certain percentage of the day and for the rest of the day they're in their general ed classrooms. So, they should never be pulled out of their tier one instruction for special education services, supplemental, it is not, and when possible, we try to have the special educator go in and work with the teacher and get those services actually in the classroom so they're not getting pulled out at all. There are some services that do happen outside of the classroom and so teams are really thoughtful about when to do that so that they're not missing that tier one instruction because then we're just continuing to get by not giving them that access. That's super helpful to paint that picture of what it looks like. Thank you. Yeah. Can you speak to the increase and then leveling out of the referrals? No, because I wasn't here before. I don't, I mean, I'm not really sure. It's felt like a lot of referrals in the last couple of years and I don't know if that's coming out of COVID and parents like spending time with their kids and like, oh, I wonder if this is a thing, you know, because only about, we did 57, I think it was 57 initial evaluations last year and only about half of them were eligible. So there were a number of evaluations that parents requested and that we completed that the student either didn't have a disability or for whatever reason was not found eligible. So I think there's some work, like it's a work, when people are worried or think there might be something off with their child, which makes sense, right? So you want all the information you can and so I think that that's where a lot of the referrals are coming from. Do you know if the eligibility number has remained more consistent or if there was a same, a jump like that for eligibility? Well, there was a jump between last year and this year for sure of the number of students and I think that we will see an upward trend because of the way that the regulations were changed. So it used to be prior to July one, there's three gates and the second gate is that the disability has to have an adverse effect is what it's called and it used to be that you had to show that a student was in the lowest 15th percentile rank in a basic skill area and you had to show that at least three different ways and now they've taken away that 15th percentile cutoff and so there's more flexibility, I would say, for teams to talk about impact and they added functional skills as a basic skill area to look at. So a lot of the social emotional stuff that Jess is gonna talk about previously wasn't necessarily a basic skill area unless it could be an area of need but if it was the only area of need then you wouldn't qualify for special education and now a student could qualify for special education only with functional skill needs without even if their academics are all right on track. So I think that we're going to continue to see an increase in the number of students eligible. And do you ever compare, is there a way to or do you compare your data district wide to other schools or the state, is there a way to compare? So I was actually showing that to Mike a couple of weeks ago so we do get state information but it's usually a couple of years behind our current stuff so it makes it tricky to compare because it's not, I think it's hard to look at stuff COVID and before and COVID after and compare those, I'm not sure they're apples to apples but yeah, the federal office of special ed programs will put out state information and the state does too but it's a couple of years behind. All right, thanks. Yeah. Are there residents for pregnancy? Jess is up. I'm next. Yeah, sorry, I was giving you the appropriate amount of wait time with her, I'll just do it. So I have two sides and I'll mostly refer to them. So my first slide is really around some of the metrics and data that you all are familiar with from last year and then the second slide really has to do with the Panorama Survey which as Mike has referred to has really been a game changer in a lot of ways especially in the SEL world because instead of just having a bunch of data around how kids are struggling or doing all the things they're not supposed to do for the first time, we have real data that can universally track how students are doing in social-emotional learning skills and how they really report how they're experiencing school in general so I'm very excited about that data and the ways that we've been using it. But to get us started, our HHB investigations are hazing, harassment, and bullying. Investigations are down when we compare the beginning of the year to this point last year to right now, they're down 30%. I think a lot of that has to do with some of the direct teaching that especially our assistant principals have engaged students in. And we have been really better able because we have really strong data, now better data around tracking students' SEL skills. We can better predict who will need extra supports in order to proactively prevent and support students with those logging skills and hopefully prevent a lot of those incidents from happening. I think our next step in the HHB world is really thinking about how to more proactively really explicitly and directly teach around things like learner differences, race, gender, gender identity, and the classroom across schools so that we can really start building a common language around how we support students and learning that and connecting with others across difference. Our rates of incidents are down across the district from last year specifically at UES and RVS. We're seeing a decrease in the rate of physical aggression when compared to the same time last year. And at MHS, our phone usage is down by 57%. They have a new cell phone policy that has really been successful and while that maybe doesn't seem particularly notable when we think about the impact that technology and things like social media have on students and student learning, that's huge. We're continuing to see some disproportionate data amongst students who identify as male, students who are experiencing or who are qualified for free and reduced lunch at UES and at MHS, and then students who have a disability are more likely to have a reported behavioral incident at MSNS. I think, again, for the first time, we have more specific data around who is accessing tiered SEL instruction because we have gotten to the point where we're now tracking that in progress monitoring students who are receiving tier two and tier three intervention in the SEL world. So I can confidently talk about the numbers and the students who are getting that intervention and we have an hour framework for how we're gonna track progress for those students over a time. One of the ways sort of our next step in that is really shifting our tier two and tier three teams to the community of SEL providers who supplied that tier instruction and really shifting those meetings to be not just about matching students based on their need with the most expert SEL professional to provide that instruction, but also now thinking about how do we share practice? How do we look at data as a collaborative team really learn together to make sure that we know when students are progressing and we can take the next step when students are progressing in a way that we would hope. Additionally, our suspension rate is down 85%, which I am very, very excited about this huge, huge change from last year just to give folks a framework at the beginning of last year from August to early November. We were on average to spending students twice a week and now it is on average once every two months. I think some of that is around the decreases in behavioral incidents that we're seeing enough. I also think it is, we've gotten a lot better at having alternative restorative and therapeutic responses specifically to HHB investigations. As far as some of the panorama data, again really exciting tool for the first time we three times a year can track SEL skills based on our SEL prioritized standards so we have a way now to screen all of the students who come to that school at MRPS and can identify students who are struggling in really specific SEL areas. Again, they're directly linked to our SEL priority standards and we have students who are now self-reporting how they experience belonging, relationships, and safety in our buildings. So I feel really, really excited to have this. This is really like our first time using this so this is very much baseline data. I'm really excited about what that growth trajectory will look like because again we're doing it three times a year so as Mike said, we're about to do our December assessment and so I'm really looking at the delta and how it's gonna shift and really thinking about that. Some of the work Nick and I have done a lot of work specifically around belonging and supporting teams of teachers and analyzing it so we've been to every single team of teachers or have done some full group presentations around what this sense of belonging means, how students are reporting it. I also just yesterday was lucky enough to sit in for a few hours with the MSMS up for learning crew and look at some of the status specifically around MSMS and break it down by question to really work with students and so what are we gonna do about that data now that we haven't? Just as the up for learning crew, she needs kids. She needs kids, math adults, talking about the data. Yeah, yeah, thank you. One of the other things that we have been able to do really well this year is really embedding restorative practices across the tier. You know, I have examples of a high school teacher who's been able to stop class in order to help re-regulate and check in with students in ways that hasn't been happening in the past. We had an example after an HHB incident actually of one of our SEL providers who pushed into a class to do really intentional work in a circle around neurodiversity and folks on the spectrum and how the support that they need and just how to interact again with people across learning differences. Sorry, just make sure I'm getting all the things. I think another sort of win this year is all of our teacher teams have designated time to look at this data, analyze it on a very regular basis and think about what are the next steps so they kind of really targeted next steps for whole class and also can use this data for those tiered instructions with small group and one-on-one. And we also have started to really intentionally create training opportunities for instructional assistance based on disability learner differences, behavior, equity, so that's been work that I've been really, really excited about. And as instructional assistants they are very much a primary person and a lot of young people's lives, particularly young people's who are often the most vulnerable. So I've been really excited about the work that we've done for instructional assistance. Sorry, I feel like I rattled that off for you all, so. I was just going back to end this question around like six years ago. There was nothing, nothing in place like this. So I guess just watch this and we'll adjust. Yeah. Question. Yeah, that was, that was excellent. And now that you've absolutely right the increase, the increase in data we've had over the last several years has been astounding and it keeps getting better and more comprehensive than what we're doing. I just want to observe that I hope that you don't succeed yourself out of our needing you. I don't think that's possible. Good, yeah, yeah. I think young people have a lot to learn. So that's what all people do. Joe. I just have a real quick question. Looking at the MHS incidents, when Emma and I were talking with the students, vaping came up a lot and I've heard that sort of anecdotally at the career center and at the high school and it's not listed as one of the more common incidents. Is it getting better? Like cell phone use is getting better or is it categorized differently maybe? Maybe it's underclass cut or you want to give Jason a shout at that? Yeah, I mean we would show up when I make the girl data and that would be like a substance use thing. And I have an anecdotally from that, let's tell him. Yeah, I think what's really hard about vaping maybe versus cell phones is that you have to be physically present, Joe, right? To be in the bathroom, so to speak, because that's where it's going to happen most. And so while we have adults going in and out of the bathrooms, that's the place it's going to happen and we need to catch people. And it's kind of hard, it's not as easy as it sounds. We prefer not to automatically suspend, right? It's a substance issue, right? Versus a behavioral issue as well. But you know, there's some really nice vape detectors. That's what the student was advocating for, right? Did you see him looking at me when he was looking at me? This is so much of the party money. Yeah, it's too early for the dual settlement. Oh, I'm still waiting for this. I'm still waiting. Thank you, Jason. I wanted to also offer another piece of historical context. Emma and I served on the subcommittee a few years ago of the school safety subcommittee. And one of the things that was a really big focus that came up out of the different surveys that we did and the work that we did was the need for more restorative practices. And I can remember when we were having those conversations with different folks in the schools, there was sort of like, well, we're just sort of like getting started. And I can see from, that's almost three years ago now, the progress that you've made, it's even clear in the data that fewer suspensions is a positive, a direct result of a greater holistic approach around restorative practices, both on the proactive end to build those relationships in the first place and then pushing in to do our restorative circle when we see. So I just wanted to highlight that and just really celebrate it, because it's a shift. It's a shift that was intended three years ago and that we've continued to put in the work. And that is huge. It's huge. Yeah, thank you, Jake. Do we know if the restorative practices are correcting the behavior? Like, are they just swapping out suspensions or are they actually serving the purpose? I mean, we're seeing, yeah, that was a question that I looked into too. But we're seeing a decrease in the amount of HHP investigations and also the amount of physical aggression, which is really where we did a lot of restorative work last year. A lot of my life last year as Libby knows was responding to incidents instead of being able to be as proactive as I would have liked to have been. So I'm excited I'm getting into that realm very much this year. But I would say that the data suggests that we're seeing a decrease. And I would personally link that based on my experience and doing this work all day every day is related to restorative practices and also our ability to use data and leverage it in a way we haven't before to meet kids and really hone in on what is the SEL skill that's walking here that's leading to either the HHP violation or the physical aggression or whatever other behavior is happening. So I think it's probably both. And saying that also feels a little hard and inauthentic just because the act of engaging in our restorative circle is working on SEL skills as well so that in and of itself can be an SEL intervention. I would just also add a third component in that we've added significant staff to our social emotional learnings group. So Main Street and UES have SEL coach, Main Street and UES coach comes out here to Roxbury too. And we have the SEL teacher to really target specialized skill instruction for students who have IAP goals that are on mental health and SEL. Our social workers are working more targetedly in the remediation world. Our counselors are working more in the tier one, tier two. So roles are being defined and the people that the board and the community have added through our budgetary process they're doing the work, right? Like the system is now able to change in a smooth way in addition to our IA is switching to the categories that we did last year and giving them more professional development in this world is like all of these things are working so beautifully together. It's like a different world this year than last year. Yeah, I would say IA training and this category has been helpful in that I've been able to really target the crew of humans that are the behavioral techs, the people who are working specifically with students of higher behavioral needs to provide a regular ongoing training with myself, with other SEL professionals and with our behavioral specialists in ways that just wasn't happening. And yeah, I think we've done a really, that the role shift I think has been hard and will continue to be hard and is working, right? I was able to sit with the UES tier three team and we talked through a student who's on an IP who comes with a lot of stuff to her school every day and we were able to really skillfully see like, oh yeah. A question, like clearly COVID was very disruptive. I mean, one of the things we've noticed was disruptive to behavior. Kids just were not with each other the way they were used to it at a time when a lot of social learning takes place. We know that there was kind of a lot of acting out and just kind of behavioral social skills that were not learned. I mean, there's a lot of great work going on but is some of this great work also being complimented by those skills are starting to come in place? Kids are getting more used to each other being together and you're giving them kind of the tools to reintegrate. Are we starting to see some of the deficits socially and kind of emotionally that happened during COVID? Maybe be made up? Is there any of that in that? Our principals take on that. Jason and Shannon since you two are the two in the room. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think both socially, emotionally and academically we're seeing that, right? So as students are going through their K through 12 years we're getting more and more intervention whether it's in how to learn, how to behave and progress, right? And at the same time we've learned through COVID the intervention measures that were dedicated to to keep as Lily used the flywheel, is that what you called it, Lily? And then it's spinning faster now and so we've caught up to those pieces. And I think it's naturally supposed to even out, right? And then should get smaller and smaller as time goes by. I think so. And I think at the elementary level it's been really interesting to see because we're the first ones to see the bubble pass, right? With kids that didn't experience that and you would think some things would go away but they haven't in terms of who needs help understanding how to play games together, what social boundaries look like. So even at the earliest of educational settings I think we're seeing that some things were missed that we really have to pick up the slack on the elementary school. Are there still academic concerns? Yeah, but I think at this point it's so integrated into our work that it's not an extra thing anymore. It just is the work. A couple of questions. Looking at the second slide of yours there's a pretty big difference in the sense of belonging for the third and fourth grade level between RBS and UES. Do you have thoughts on that? Yeah, I'd be curious to have Shannon's perspective on this too. I think some of what Shannon's work has done is she's been able to embed some, it's not just a behavioral response but PBIS positive behavior intervention supports which is really the mantra around that and the philosophy around that is we have a common language for how we talk about behavior, how we talk about being community and how we specifically teach young people how to be in community with one another. And I think that that is work that has been really, really well developed historically at UES. Quite frankly, I like inherited a lot of that work. Linda Bopri has been running that for a long time and that's not work that has historically had the Singh Foundation at Roxbury. And Shannon's working on that and I don't know if Shannon your perspective on that as well. Yeah, I was just, so for us this is one classroom and I would also, one thing we talked about when we looked at this data was that these kids have a brand new teacher that they've never met. This was taken in the first two weeks of school, a brand new principal, a brand new music teacher. So there was a lot of brand new year, brand new people that certainly went into this but it's something that we said, hey, we wanna keep a close eye on this when we come back in December, we shouldn't feel so new anymore, so that really shouldn't be a question. So if those numbers still looked the same, I would have more questions but I think at that time it made sense that we were looking at a total of 17 children with brand new teachers in principle. My one other question is that, and you spoke to this Jess, that there are some discrepancies based on demographics in the behavior column. Now I'm looking more at the report. Largely, kids who qualify for free and reduced lunch and kids on IEPs and kids, and I think male students. And I'm curious to know what your analysis is about that difference between the percentages of those kids who are identified with behavior issues and compared to the population overall. Yeah, I mean I have done a lot of thinking around this just because my copy is saying about this. And what's notable to me is it shifts based on school and doesn't always match sort of what we would expect given like national or even Vermont trends. So again, this is just sort of me using my expert brain here. I think when we think about students who identify as male versus students who identify or we perceive as female, there's a lot in our society that really talks and trains women from a very young age to be compliant and act a certain way. And there is more pressure on people who are identifying or perceived as young men to hide in emotions and they tend to be a little bit more of externalizers. So they tend to be a little bit more outwardly obvious behaviors rather than the internalizers as women or people who are perceived as women or identify as women grow. I don't know if that sort of starts to answer your question. As far as free and reduced lunch, I think there are a lot of stressors on students who qualify for free and reduced lunch that makes it really hard for them to always be able to prioritize school and can then make it really hard to feel a strong sense of community and belonging at school, which may result in behavior. Nick, if you wanna add anything. Yeah, I mean, I think it's reflected in attendance as well, but young people facing certain barriers outside of school is obviously gonna have an impact on their ability to be present, ready for school when they're worried about, for some people, where they're gonna sleep tonight. That's gonna take priority then, emotional regulation in a certain moment. Yeah, and then as far as disability, I sort of see it as like three different reasons. One, they have an identified disability around a particular lying skill, so that would make sense that they would be overly identified. I also think that it is, and probably across these spectrums, another sign to us that we continue to have work to do around making our systems fully inclusive and accessible to all students because we're not yet seeing them able to access in the same way, which is then resulting in behavior. And I think for students with disabilities, there's also a tendency to be hyper-vigilant at times. These are students who may be assigned an extra adult who have an extra adult either right beside them or in their classroom. So we tend to notice behaviors that maybe go under the radar a little bit more for other students or who wouldn't be reported for other students because a particular student has a disability that's resulting in behaviors. We're taking very, very regular, like 15-minute incremental behavioral data at some person's students. So we sometimes just have more data for students with higher behavioral needs. So the survey that was used for the belonging, is that on your website somewhere that we, like a viewable version of it that we could see? It's not. Is that something that could be, is there any reason? No, we'd have to talk about that because what we wouldn't want is to have Kristin go home and drill her cave of your answer in this way. You know, so. We're going to up from that 57% and you're going to feel like you won't have that. Yeah, so we'd have to think about that. Okay, I'd just be curious. We could certainly put sample questions out, perhaps. Yeah, how many questions are on the survey? Um, it's, I don't know off the top of my head. I'll be honest with you. Okay. I think it was in between like 15 and 17 at the three, four level. Yeah. I was going to say around 20. Yeah. Okay, yeah, I'd be curious to see it if it's possible to see it. And then just wondering, like, I know that there's probably a plan in place and when you look at the data, you start, you real start spinning to be like, okay, how can we address this? And I don't think it's a question for tonight, but just sort of in general, I really look forward to seeing how you and the rest of the admin team and the principals of the different buildings start to work on that sense of belonging and like the downward slope of the graph as kids age. And it just feels kind of sad. Like I can see that based on the national percentiles, it's not as dire, but it's pretty bad in the six through eight, you know, middle school level. And so it just... What did the one kid say to you yesterday? I mean, it's just, well, obviously, yeah, it's like the one kid said to you at the middle school yesterday, well, of course they don't belong. I'm like, I'm 12 or something like that. Yeah, yeah, so part of my middle school experience yesterday, which was great. I was like to hang out with students, right? That's why we're here, was just really naming for her specifically. It wasn't particularly important for her to feel like a sense of belonging and for me, I was like, but I care, I'm concerned. And so it was just really interesting to have a little bit more qualitative data and also I think doing the work of showing students that you can feel a sense of belonging, right? It almost felt like she wasn't, and again, I don't want to put words in this young person's mouth with my adult brain filtering it, but it almost felt like she has learned over time that school's not a place where you need to feel a sense of belonging or like you matter, so why would I expect that from my school? So I think that has to do with a lot of the work that we have to do around reframing what belonging and feeling a sense of belonging and value really looks like at school and can look like at school. You are able to compare this data to national data, so it's like some similar survey questions that you're using that you can then use to compare against national data. It's a very good result for us. Nice, Hannah and Emma. I know, yeah, it's amazing to be able to compare. But the fact that we're in the 30th percentile, it would be so interesting to know like what middle schools across this nation are in the 90th percentile and what are they doing? You know, what can we learn from them? Yeah, and that was part of our conversation yesterday with the students. Yeah, now it is like over, I think it's over two million students across the nation have taken this survey, so it's just really exciting to be able to compare this data. And of course, even if we're in the 90th percentile that our sense of belonging is still 50%, like still work to do. Yeah, thank you. Very good, an important appreciation. I just want to pass on to you, Jess, I recently met with a parent and they were appreciating the kind of connecting and programming you did around introducing RBS and UES students, or I guess, NSMS students and just kind of really bridging that experience for them, like the parents really, I mean the parent knew about it and they knew quite a bit about it and were able to just communicate that they felt like it was, it was just intentional, it wasn't just like gestural, but they really felt like there was like real thought and time put into it. So I just wanted to pass that on to you. And then also, I had met up with another parent who was also saying that like, sometimes the kids know a little bit more than the parents, but also for the parents, there's a lot of not knowing and mystery about like heading into the middle school that this parent was talking about, like, hey, wouldn't it be great if I made myself or we kind of did some more networking in terms between parents, you know, Roxbury students who are moving from RBS to MSMS, just like, hey, gosh, what is that like? And all the things. So it was just a parent, so like, I feel like we're kind of into this merger now five years and, you know, now there's some like institutional knowledge that, you know, caregivers have and that they could share it between each other and that would probably be really valuable. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so thank you very much, though, for the programming that's starting to happen here. Yeah, thank you. It's well received. We just had our first planning meeting for the retreat, I think, this week, so. Great. Well, looking at the planning calendar, it says winter assessments, February 7th. Are we expecting to sort of see these, the data in this format comparing fall to winter somewhere in there? Awesome. Will it also include spring? Or I don't know if that kind of along, if there's room for it or. We don't have the, a lot of these assessments are needed to take them in the spring or we could give them in the spring. Just the stars. Yeah. Okay. Excellent. Nick is up. Nick is up. Chronic absenteeism. Could I ask a question on this first? Just a quick one. The 57% of being as opposed to 78% of belonging. Is that a big school, small school thing? You know, is that like a standard? Shannon addressed that question. I missed it. I'm sorry. Yeah, she's talking it up to those kids having a new teacher, a new principal, new staff in the school. They took it the first two weeks of school. So there's a lot of newness in their lives. Nick, you're up. Thanks. So. I just wondered whether it was a standard thing throughout the state. So I get to talk about chronic absenteeism. And I will give a very brief refresher on what that is. Chronic absenteeism is missing 10% or more of the school year. It doesn't matter if we're talking about excused absences or unexcused absences. We're looking at the amount of time a young person is in our building. All of these things are amazing that we just heard and none of it happens if they're not in the building. And so I get to spend a lot of time with our students that are maybe not feeling that sense of belonging or struggling academically. And using that a little bit and not coming to school. And so when I talk about chronic absenteeism, at this point in the school year, this data is pulled from October 27th. So there were 40 school days so far. So it's missing four days of school. It's all we're talking about here. It's missing four days of school. So our numbers right now in our district, 23.5% of young people are chronically absent as of October 27th. So that's 258 students. This time last year, as a district, we were at about 25%. So it's coming down a little bit. An important indicator to look at as well is young people who may qualify for free or reduced lunch. That tends to be one of the higher rates of absenteeism that we see. This is paralleled with most other districts and across the country as well. That's sitting at 35%. So 35% of young people who may qualify for free or reduced lunch are chronically absent and students who may have an IEP are chronically absent at a 30% rate. So just wanted to kind of give these numbers, put them in front of you, talk a little bit about what that means. We're really talking about, again, the young person who may be missing four days, but chronic absenteeism even early in the school year is a primary indicator that we need to address it quickly. If we're waiting till they're hitting 10, 20 days to respond to absenteeism, we've missed the mark already. One of the things I mention a lot is over the course of a year, to miss 18 school days is to be chronically absent. There's about 18 school days in the month of October. So to be chronically absent in the school year is to miss an entire month of school and that's a month without breaks or anything like that. So this is a really big factor when we look at the metrics of young people who are chronically absent and we look at academic performance. There's a huge gap there when we're talking about academic performance for students that are not chronically absent versus students that are. We're looking at behavior data. Our students that are chronically absent are more likely to show up in our behavior data. We're looking at belonging data. It's hard to have a sense of belonging when you're not in school. So we feel like it's really important to center this metric as we look at how can we best support our students and families. In the report, there's also across the board for each of our schools and I'll run through those just real quick. At Roxbury Village School, 19% of students are chronically absent. It was 47% this time last year. That could be a swing here of four or five students just based on the size. At UES, 16% of students are chronically absent. Last year that was at 22%. At Main Street Middle School, it's 21% right now. Last year it was at 23%. And Montpelier High School is at 33% last year about the same. The way that we look at attendance at the high school is different because we track attendance by class period. And so what we're looking at at the high school is a little bit different than what we would see at the middle school or elementary school. When we take attendance at the middle school or elementary school, you're present or you're not. It's a one-time daily attendance. At the high school, we have five, six classes and you can be absent three times out of six. So we're looking at lost instructional time. So there's more opportunity for us to take a look at how the students are engaging in every individual class. So we tend to see higher rates here in our high school because of how we're looking at the data. Few quick trends. We have seen a slight decrease and it's continuing to hold, which I'm really happy about. We also are seeing more absences this year marked as absent excused versus absent unexcused. So absent unexcused is going down in our district. Absent excused is going up a little bit. I think that part of that is about just health and wellness and the other part of it is like families just communicating differently at the elementary school, for example. Folks are using a parent portal or pickup patrol, I think is what it's called. All right. Pickup patrol. Thank you. So there's more vehicles for a family to communicate why their student may be out. So even with that, so even though we're seeing absent unexcused go down, it's still really concerning because we're talking about a mindset issue. We're talking about access to healthcare. We're talking about coming out of a pandemic when a young person may be not feeling well. It's a really different conversation we have in 2023 than we had in 2018 with what it means to go to school. And we really gotta start thinking about that mindset to ensure that our students are coming to school, while still at the same time really being mindful of what our nurses are telling us. So I would encourage folks to reach out to our school nurses, check the website for what is the guidance around being in school. That lost instructional time is really having an impact on our students for sure. The last thing I'll note is supporting and working alongside our families who may be experiencing homelessness or who may be facing food insecurity. That seems to be on the rise as well. And so we do certainly have families that are in need of a lot of support when it comes to having access to food, access to housing. All of these pieces are having a really big impact on our students' ability to be present and ready for school. So that's the snapshot of chronic absenteeism in this moment. If you would like, you can ask Mike more questions. Your question is for that. I'm wondering what strategies you're using to alleviate that problem. Yeah, it's a lot. And a big part of working with our families is meeting them where they're at and that being more than a tagline. It's about being at their doorstep. It's about building relationship with the family to understand what are the barriers that you're facing. When I first started, Libby was very clear with me and said, you need to tell us where we suck. And I was like, all right. I literally said that. Yeah. And so being able to bring back and lift up the voices of our families who are maybe not connecting with the school in the same way as some other families who are maybe facing barriers that we aren't thinking about because they aren't necessarily the loudest voice in the room, that's a huge strategy. Just from the start, we start with how are you and how can we support? We don't start with why are you not in school, right? Like that's a big shift. The other shift in the mentality and why we talk about chronic absenteeism, it's different than the traditional model of truancy. Truancy, which we still follow. It's written in law and we still have to move forward with truancy. But it's about criminalizing absenteeism, essentially. And that's only talking about unexcused absences. What is excused versus what is unexcused for different families, for different people that take that call. As much as we try to standardize that, there's still some bias that creeps in there. And so we wanna respond to any time a young person's not in school, right? If they're out 20 days for a stomach ache, I'm still gonna call and have a conversation and say, what's going on? Do you have access to healthcare? Is that something we can help you with? Is this maybe more anxiety-based than the stomach ache is symptomatic of that? So the biggest strategy is centering the voices of our families and understanding what's happening. If I'm recalling correctly, we're seeing progress in the right direction, right? There is less of it, less chronic absenteeism than there was when you first started. But it's still feeling like this problem is a lot bigger than that wonderful, beautiful hands-on really deep work that you're doing. And I'm wondering if there are other things that we can be doing that complement the deep work that are more broad-based? Like are there broad education things? Like I'm thinking like somehow in the middle, in the high school, they dropped cell phone usage by 57% through a policy. I'm not saying we do a policy on chronic absenteeism, but is there something that could be broad-based education of our community to help with the understanding of the importance of being in school for parents who are maybe not quite at the level of needing and families maybe needing the same kind of hands-on in-depth relationship building that you're doing, but still need that maybe some understanding, I don't know. Yeah, absolutely. I think what I'm hearing you mean too is also just giving information to the community around what it means to miss two days in a month of school, and that has this impact. The overall communication and how we reach out and connect with our families, whatever we're putting on the website, all of these pieces are factors. There's also an MTSS system around absenteeism too, which is like at the tier one level, like do we greet students by their name at the door? Do we look at belonging data? What is it telling us and how are we developing strategies? A young person who has a strong sense of belonging tends to not be the person that has anxiety and doesn't want to come to school, right? So we can boost that belonging, hopefully we can decrease those feelings of anxiety and not wanting to be in school. So I think there's systematic strategies that are being built in through the work of Jess and the rest of the team to really understand that. And if we are making systematic changes, we really need to listen to our students and families first and foremost, those closest to the issue are the ones who can solve that issue. And so when we're really listening to their voice and centering that, that gets embedded into the systems that these three folks up here are putting in play as well, which I think chips away at it from that systematic level. So I think you answered my question, that the numbers on this slide are inclusive of excused absences. Absolutely. Also, and I forget what percentage of them are excused. I don't have that percentage off topic and I can get that for you. It might be interesting to just see it broken down in that way just because there does feel like there's a difference for a kid going on a college tour or no, that's not excused. A doctor's visit versus a college tour or a family vacation, that there's a difference there. It might be interesting to see. Yes, and I would add on to that. When we do start to look at that and start to say excused, and this isn't what you're saying necessarily, but why I don't always just separate the two, we have this historical knowledge and institutional knowledge of what it means to have an excused absence and a non-excused absence. And if we put the E on it, it's okay. But it's the same academic impact. It's the same behavioral impact. And so when we do that, I also want to just be mindful not to elevate what those mean and assign meaning to AVE or ABU because one student's reason to miss school is really appropriate for that family maybe because they need to work and earn a living wage. Yeah, totally. But it's ABU. So, yeah. And then, I think we've asked this before or I've asked it before, but you don't have any way to compare this to like national data or state data. Yeah, so there's no state data in Vermont on chronic absenteeism. We are, I think the only state that doesn't publish chronic absenteeism data as a state in the country. There are 36 states in the country that have it as part of their ESSA plan. And so Vermont is a state. It's not something that has been built into our federal plan as an option of what we're accountable to. So it's not centered in our state. But I can say chronic absenteeism across the country when we talk about the pandemic, pre-pandemic, post-pandemic has doubled. And what we saw in the 22, 23 data across the country is that it came down like one percentage. So we are not seeing the recovery in absenteeism that we would have expected to see after the pandemic. Like it's sticking. And how do our percentages compare, can you say? Yeah, it's kind of all over the map, honestly. So it's generally what we would see is 20s, 25, 30 across the country. But it really depends on, if we were looking at school systems with similar demographics as ours and things like that, which is hard to say nationally. But yeah, I think our numbers can and should be lower for sure and we can do a much better job. I also think strategies of working with like local pediatricians and things like that are kind of on the list for me for sure of like, do our pediatricians, for example, check in about how students are engaging in school? Is that question even asked? That's a national thread that's being woven in throughout a lot of the work happening around absenteeism and I think locally, that's definitely something we could tackle as well. Okay, and you don't have time in your day to call all of these 258 families. So how do you prioritize like? Well, I don't call every day to all these families, but what we should do, and if we've done our jobs well, a great example is this summer, we had Vermont Emergency Eats working with us, so we could actually be delivering meals to families. So we were taking 175 meals out every week, starting in the summer. And what we were doing in that time is also connecting with families and saying, how are you feeling about the school year? My name's Nick, what do you need for the school year? So that when I do respond on September 20th, they already know me. So these relationships, for many of our families, I will get a text before I can text them. So a big part of it is relationships. Obviously with 300 plus young people that are gonna chronically absent, I don't have that. And so it is a part of leveraging who's in our building that does have those relationships, how are we working with our registrars and attendance clerks and how they communicate what's being elevated to me or what's being elevated to the SEL team. I also get to go to all of our resiliency team meetings as well and communicate with those teams and give up attendance updates. Hey, is anybody checking in on this student? I'm noticing attendance is starting to drop. Let me know if you want me in or you've got it. So it is a tiered approach in that way as well. Usually about 10 minutes ago. All right, well, thank you very much. One other quick, I would love to see that graph that you were talking about a correlation between just this data and your data with the belonging and the absentee reason. I'll pull it. I wanna pull that from Panorama. I love it. Panorama's great. I, real quick, I'm wondering if it, I'm assuming transportation is probably one of those barriers, right? It's a financial barrier, it's a physical barrier and we don't, we seem to have higher absenteeism at the high school. I'm wondering if we, if there is enough need at the high school that if we were actually to like bus high school students, like is there enough demand and need that that could actually help improve things? I don't know, I'm the last thing I know. But I have to say, I'm saying this as a parent of a former field hockey champion who doesn't play field hockey. You know, we find school buses for sports, right? The school buses are lined up to take kids to sports and yet if we have 33% of our high school students who are chronically absent and even if a portion of those could be more able to access school if they had a bus, I have no idea if that's true. It's just coming up to me now as we're talking about this, but I'm just wondering if that's one of the big factors at MHS is transportation and if maybe there's something else we can do. I don't know. Yeah, I think that's a good question. I wouldn't necessarily say a reason at MHS is high as the lack of transportation. We nationally will see much higher rates at the high school level than we see. It's actually like, usually it's kindergarten and 12th grade are the highest and then it kind of does this. And I will say it's been proven nationally having access to a bus does increase attendance. That's just the reality. And our students who leave early for sports is that an excused or an unexcused? If they are leaving early for sports, the amount that that happens is so low, it's typically not hitting any kind of threshold. It's excused because it's a school function. And typically it might be like a last period. So if it's at the high school, maybe they missed one block but we've got attendance throughout the whole day. So actually they're quite a bit. Students who are deemed chronically absent, there's a minimum bar that puts them in that category. And I'm wondering what percentage of those kids have a much higher level of absenteeism and are there special interventions for those kids? So what you're referring to is what I would refer to as students that is 20% or more of school, which is severely chronically absent. There is a chunk of students certainly in that window. And really when we're looking at missing that much school, it's external intervention that has to happen. It's making sure they're connected to local community organizations that are experts in the work that can dig in in ways that the schools cannot. And frankly, we're doing that at even 10%. That's a tier three intervention that we're putting in that is about collaborating with external organizations. We'll have meetings where we host elevated youth services and Washington Mental Health and Family Center and Capstone all at the table because it's gonna take all of that to really work with that family and help them find the stability that's gonna help them get to school. Half percent in the district doesn't seem like much, but the numbers at the elementary school are pretty great. I mean, really great. Both schools, especially RBS. But does that translate to better habits and different mindsets as people move through? Because I mean, if there's a great deal of change essentially at the early grades, is that gonna translate to greater attendance throughout? 100%, right? When you think about if a young person is coming to school consistently, if any of us are doing anything consistently, it's habit forming, right? And so when we talk about a young person coming to school with some kind of frequency, they're much more likely to develop friendships with their peers, develop relationships with their teachers, and develop positive academic habits, right? Those are three of the best things we can do to improve chronic absenteeism is to build that in our students. So when we see it at the younger ages and we're seeing that chronic absenteeism drop a little bit and students are engaging more, absolutely that's gonna have an impact on their sense of belonging throughout their academic career. Yeah, I see this as a lot of success. So thank you. Any more questions for that? I'm actually gonna suggest to the board that we table the overview of the MTSS model based on the time and then we come back to it at a different time. Simply so we can all stay awake. I will just say also, if you look at the slide show, we highlighted UES this time around with success stories of the MTSS model. So make sure you, those are from our interventionist. Straight from the words of their mouth. So take a second to read through those as well. Before we get into act 127 update, which might be, let's do the act 127 update and then talk about schedule. What I do, I think the executive session, we probably want to kick to another evening. Maybe, I don't think we're looking at very many short board meetings coming up in the near future, so. Well, I want to kick into it. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Awesome, thank you. Thank you. Awesome, awesome work. Thank you so much. I want to have time for this discussion and I think we're going to rush it. Either rush it or it's just going to drag on because we're in a circle. What we do is we have two extra ones. I don't think we're going to need all that for budget. What I'm thinking is maybe on the 29th, we just do an executive session and just take a half hour by Zoom and do the evaluation. So we, at the last meeting, just to get everybody on the same page here with what I think you're saying. The last meeting, we scheduled two extra board meetings. One on November 29th and one on December 13th. 13th. And now what I hear you saying is what for the November 29th? Well, I think, I don't think we're going to need both of those for the budget. We might, I think we might want to keep the 13th for the budget because we're getting the full budget presentation on the 6th, right? No, we're, you're giving us the direction on the 6th. So we're getting the budget presentation on the 29th? 29th. No, not the 29th. Oh, we're getting direction on the 6th and then we're getting, when are we getting the presentation on the 29th? The way we had it set was the 29th of November. The board was going to discuss direction, which I think you're still going to need to do. Agreed. And then the 6th would be the direction given, the time to have the direction given. Unless you want to give a direction on the 29th and then we can try to have something ready on the 6th. The 13th was going to be the first presentation of the budget. And the 20th was what? And the 20th was for what? The second presentation of the budget. Got it. Got it. So we're thinking, so essentially you could think of November 29th and December 6th as like part one and part two of the same conversation. Yeah, I. Which I do think we're going to need. Although we don't have the rough budget choices that we had before. I think we can do the executive section on one of those two nights. What are the, sorry, what were the two additional meetings that we scheduled at the last meeting? 29th and the 13th. November 29th and December 13th. Thank you. Jim's point is we might not need both of those extra meetings anymore. Because I think the Libby's Act 21 is we can, we may be able to effectively level fund. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I think you're. But how about this? It will be, I think the neighborhood we're talking about is level funding to minor cuts rather than a series of major cuts, which I think is a much less complicated discussion at least for this year. Pressurer. Sure. So as the board knows, I asked for clarity around how do we count our pupils from FY 24? So school districts across the state were doing it two different ways. And we were told by the agency to do it one way before last board meeting, and we've been told to do it a different way for this board meeting, which is good news. So what they've told us to do for right now, what they've told the whole state to do for right now is to take our fiscal year 24 number as if Act 127 was in effect for the budget we're currently in, for FY 24. And so by doing that, that increases the number of pupils we have. It increases everybody's number of pupils because there's more weights. And so that allows for more money to be spent before we reach the 10% capacity for increases across two years. Are you meaning to share that on Zoom? Those lines of note. Yeah. Did that make sense to people? I mean, so essentially we're able to build this coming year's budget against a different per pupil weight. A different per, I'm just gonna say it. A fictionalized budget for this year that acts as if we have the same weighting system so that way we're comparing more apples to apples. And with the comparison of apples to apples, that budget presentation that Libby gave involving kind of what we're committed to and the two million dollars, it gets us much closer to 10% than it did before. Perhaps, I think she's still playing with some numbers, but it's within a small range of 10. It might be a little under, it might be a slight bit over, but it's not that 15 to 16% range we were in before. Right. Does that make sense? So that's the good news. The staffing numbers are becoming more solid as we know more salaries. We're getting column movements for our teaching staff. So when they've taken classes, they can move a column and get paid more money as well as we know that the health benefit increased to 16.5%, which is no different from the last time I presented. So those numbers are getting more solid and unfortunately it's not a two million dollar figure anymore, it's more like 2.8 million dollars. So with these new assumptions still, in order to stay below the 10% increase in the pupils, it looks as if we can spend about 2.4 million, we can add about 2.4 million to our general budget. Okay, so last time I met with you, it was 800,000, but with this different way to count the pupils, it's about 2.4 million. So that will not cover the salaries and benefits, but we're much closer now. We're much closer to that. So at 2.4 million, that gets us to, and per pupil increase between FY24 and 25 as 9.997%. So it's as close as we can get to that number. So it's more money we can spend for this year's budget. It still means that we will have to do some cutting within our budget and probably within the FTE category in order to accomplish that. However, it's a much easier way to, I can see, it's a much easier avenue to get there than it was before. So some other things that we're thinking about is that this doesn't change the long-term five-year projection. That still remains, that there's going to be a cliff that people are starting to call it, which I'm not great, I'm not wonderful about that term, but there's a cliff in FY30. And I'll give you an example. So Christina ran the numbers of if Act 127 was fully in effect last year for FY24 when we were doing our budget, in order to have the same tax rate that Roxbury and Montpelier citizens paid for FY24, our budget would need to be $2 million less. So if you think about it, I've been trying to figure out how to explain the five-year piece. If you think about it starting from that $2 million hole and then we're gonna add another $2 million this year to that, that's gonna keep increasing over time, even if we add less in the next four years. So there's still this five-year gap and there's some other uncertainties that if the school board members who saw the webinar yesterday heard in the webinar, there's still uncertainties. So there's the 5% cap, the edification fund's going to pay for the difference between what we need to run our school system in that 5% cap. There's uncertainty of where that money's gonna, how the ed fund is going to continue to be solvent. And the answer that was given yesterday by Brad James of the Agency of Education, if you heard it was, that's a legislative decision and he's not sure how they're going to do it yet. So that's still up in the air. And then how this influences the dollar yield over time, which of course influences our overall tax rate, is also still in the air. Although everybody who's understanding about this is pretty confident that dollar yield is going to decrease. But that is one factor the legislature can play with or the tax commissioner can play with in order to make the ed fund solvent, is my understanding. So our actual enrollment, kids' rear ends and seats has dropped about 40 students. So we're not talking about weighted students, we're talking actual kids has dropped about 40 students. In one year? Yeah. So that will decrease our LTW ADM from what it was last year from FY24 slightly. I don't know how much it was because it depends on the weights, right? And so the question that still I'm really trying to grapple with is how do we forecast this five years from now so that the school board and the administration can thoughtfully plan what needs to happen in order to come in with a responsible budget for FY30. So this continues to not be a one-year problem or a two-year problem, but it's a five-year challenge that we have to face. I do also want to say that there is a website now on our, there's a budget page on our website, sorry, that has any question that's been asked to us about 127 answered and also facts about 127 on there. So people can access that. Yeah, which is super helpful. Thank you to Anna and you for putting it together. Are we using the same number from FY24? Like as an estimate? No, so that's a good question. So Christina and I were thinking like if we're down 40 actual kids, like we just put an estimate and so the long-term weighted average for 24, we know that was 18.03 and so we put in 17.80. We just dropped it slightly. All right, well I noticed on here earlier presentation we lost three English language learners this year, 53 to 50 and those count as like three students each learn more than that. Right, yeah. So it's hard to ask, you know, like we need the actual numbers because Christina's been working on it. Nicole Lee sent, who's at the Agency of Education, she sent a spreadsheet to figure it out, but it's complicated math so we're still working on that. On the solvency thing, I could share some theories with you but it's probably too late at night for that. Yeah, it's the question that everybody in education right now is asking, is how do we do that? We don't work well with, we'll figure it out. Like that's not an answer that educators work well with. Nobody likes that. Yeah. Emma. It raised my hand but you just know. Oh, it was itchy, it was itchy. It was about to go on. I feel like there needs to be some sort of apology to the community and I'll give it just from my personal perspective that I'm sorry that at the last meeting for really factors that are kind of outside of anybody's control, except for the fact that we did decide to present numbers, that there were numbers that were presented that were really startling and upsetting like Montpelier taxes going up by 108%. Like these numbers being thrown around are so shocking and it starts to make people's head spin around really dramatic ways to come up with that difference. And I'm just sorry that we had to put everybody through that mental exercise when really two weeks later now we're saying, okay, well, maybe we could actually level fund or add a little bit to the budget. Well, this isn't a level funded budget. This is not a level funded budget. Adding $2.4 million is not a level funded budget. And I also want to kind of, yeah. But it's not 108% increase. It's not 100% increase. And it's not a $1.2 million budget cut. No. So it's quite different in a pretty dramatically more positive way. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I know there was shock value and the shock value came from an honest accounting of what we thought the numbers were, the numbers were 15. I mean, I think there is an overall grand narrative of we are gonna have five years that are gonna be very different from the five years we've had. And there are gonna likely be some choices that we have not had to confront as a board for a while. And I think we've got more time to make those choices and make those intelligently and make those thoughtfully and make those with the type of input we want. But this is not like get out of jail information. I mean, we are still in a budget situation. I think part of the difficulty of the budget situation is how much uncertainty there is and there are just a lot of looming questions. But yeah, no, the shock from last week was unfortunate, but it was a very honest accounting. And I think, Cam, we value transparency and we were being transparent with what we had. This is much better news, but it's not, it buys us time to, I think, have a more thoughtful conversation and also a little more time to figure out what this five year decrease in funding from the state is gonna mean for us. Mia. I wanted to offer a slight reframe to what Emma just said, not that I disagree with how unfortunate it was, but also that I think there's a silver lining to this of the amount of community engagement we saw because people care so much. And I just wanna keep encouraging people that even as the information changes and even as we maybe even like mess up along the way, it's sort of like that kindergarten teacher. We're learning together and let's all go, let's all figure this out together, I think is another way for us to look at this and I just wanna keep encouraging people to keep coming to these meetings and keep trying to wrap their heads around this the same way we are and that as the information changes, stick with us so that we can figure this out together. We were using numbers that we were told to use. Exactly. From the state. And then the other piece is that there's some and Bill was on the webinar yesterday up at Maple Run who said, I'm not sharing numbers. I don't feel like that's right. Bill and I actually debated that. Should we share numbers? Should we not share numbers? And I think that when we're talking about the position that Montpelier Roxbury will be in for the next five years, to not share numbers is to not be transparent. Even if they're assumptions. And I think that that is the way to go with our community. It's certainly what our community has asked for over and over and over. We can't have a conversation if we don't know what we're up against. Yeah, yeah, and I'm also kind of like just one thing. Just adding on that, like, I mean, I am so glad all of you came out tonight because I think we need to have a conversation that got started about what is this decrease gonna look like? I'm not sure if we had these numbers in the first place. It would have been different. Yeah, I think Roxbury is now gonna be very engaged in this conversation and be willing to work for the next year to really think thoughtfully about what the future of RBS is gonna look like in a budget constrained world. And I think that's what has to happen. And I'm not sure that would have happened if we didn't get kind of a starker look at what some of the more draconian dances are doing. So I think you're right, the silver lining is a lot of people are engaged and hopefully will continue to be engaged for the next year because this is a problem that if we all work together thoughtfully and as two communities and really put our brains together, we're gonna come out with the best solutions. If we get into the situation where we thought we were, but holy crap, we've got six weeks to make major, major decisions, that's when stupid things happen. I think like Libby, your whole tenure here has been about crisis upon crisis upon crisis. And your instinct has been to be as transparent as you can possibly be as quickly as you can possibly be. And I really appreciate that and that's where you were coming from here. I mean, I think it was a hard thing, it was an emotional thing. I think that I personally referred to some decisions as irresponsible and I feel sorry for that because I don't think that any decisions were irresponsible, I think it's an emotional thing. But I think that instinct to be transparent and put up a red flag and say, whoa, we've got a major problem is better than other pathways. I think it's safer for you. I think that in my line of work, when there's a concern, you call in everybody, you call everybody and then everybody gets together and tries to make the best choice that they can and you don't make a choice yourself without bringing in as many resources as you possibly can. And so I appreciate that this is the way it's gone as uncomfortable and difficult as it is and as it will probably continue to be. That's your call. I would like to say that the state has not done well the past 30 years with education, finance and explaining how it works. It's really problematic. You cannot have local control without local comprehension and local comprehension is at a very dangerously bad failing percentage. So in this case, major education funding reform and the guidance has not been good, not been clear, everyone has been lost. So I mean, I think that's super unfortunate and I'm sorry for that. I think that as we navigate the next few years, we can do a good job explaining how all the taxpayers, including those who get income-based credits are gonna be impacted. I'm willing to help with that. And I wanna correct misconceptions before they really get out there because I've already heard quite a few. So I wanna make sure we do that. Yeah, yeah, excellent. Those are the things that we can put on our FAQ. Two, so we can for sure talk about that. When can we expect to see a revised version of this presentation? This presentation's not on your budget website. The one from last week. I will, we can't revise it because it's a public record, right? So we won't be changing it. A new one that reflects the new math that you're gonna do. So you have a new, there's four slides that I was talking about, so that's this. It's like, yeah. So we'll be able to compare sort of like Apple's topics from what we were told two weeks ago to what is on the slides now. Okay, thank you. Sorry, I thought you meant like revise that actual slide show. No, it's our last item on the agenda. Oh, it was our last item on the agenda. I didn't know if that was our last question. We got a second, I heard it. Okay, did we miss anything? Okay. We did post both of these. I just wanted to make sure there wasn't anything squeezing. We're adjourned, so go ahead. Well, how was it? Everyone in favor of adjourning? Yes. Okay, great.