 Is this yours, Jason? Sure. All right. Great. Good sure. Okay. Pass. Yeah, I can put it. Just smack me when you want me to turn the slide. I don't know everybody. So I'm just going to introduce myself. Hi. I'm Jason Amor, Director of the Randolph Technical Career Center. Nice to meet you all. Senior data for this year. In September, we did senior data for last year. So I had the data for this year. So I'm going to use this year's numbers. One thing I wanted to point out that we'll be serving instead of seven. Seven schools next year. We had work down to four. So Northfield and Wayne's Town are becoming one district. So that's two. Randolph is three. And Whitcomb's South World is joined. That's four. Chelsea Rochester closed and their school choice. So if a student lives in that area, they're still able to come to us based upon the statute. So even if they go to Sharon Academy, based upon where they live, they're still really enrolled in our tech sector. So we're down. We had 20. You can see the numbers of the total seniors we had this year. Right now we're around 135 total students for next year, which is great. It's a little more than this year. That's about our six year average. 18 students. Female that are non-traditional programs. That might be digital film, building trades, diesel, auto, forestry and agriculture. 21 of our seniors are on the economically disadvantaged spectrum. 30% of our senior class is on an IT or five report plan. 25 out of the total are going on to post-secondary education, including these schools. What's great is that five of our students in health careers are going into the nursing program at Norwich University. So that's really great. And one is accepted to Norwich, just not in the nursing program yet. So six out of 15. This year, I think we have one who's in the process of applying now to the Coast Guard, but unusual for us. We don't have a lot of students applying to the military. 18 are working in their field, and 14 out of the total are going to be working. So that's almost close to 100%. We have, actually, this year, we have 311 industry-recognized certificates for our center. And so out of that 311, all of those are approved by the agency of education. As a center, though, we have over 600 industry-recognized certificates. So some sometimes aren't registered by the AOE, which is great. So like in our diesel program, we have one student who got over 125 Peter-Built and Freightliner certificates. Those just aren't registered by the AOE. But for the industry, you can go to Waukes. You can go to Peter-Built. You can go to another diesel place and you can really get a lot of jobs. So that's great for us. We've increased our dual enrollment. 30, 16 years in dual enrollment college credits. When I first started, I think we were down around 12, 14%. And this year, we're much higher than that. About 30, some 100%. So we've almost tripled that in the last three years. And students can get up to 12 college credits with us versus high school. They can get six. So that's really great. We're pretty proud of that. 36 out of 65 were based learning. 15 seniors on National Technical Honors Society and 1500 on Technical Arts. I tried to give you some discipline data. So one behavioral contract. One report of the seniors now just for bullying. But four in the five of harassment and kind of disciplinary racial language. We did four out of school suspensions, two in school. Not a lot of theft this year. From the seniors, which is great. No smoking and breaking. Yay. So that was good. A couple juniors. A couple, I put physical because we didn't have really like what we consider fighting, but it's an inappropriate touching. No safety violations, which is great. And two for improper technology and internet, which would also go back up to harassment and bullying and being included. And this is the second year we started tracking discipline data. I didn't do that my first year. And then just some outcomes that we're working on for next year. We're really working hard on this 100% student placement. The Agency of Education really wants us as a center to bulk our students who are going on to post-secondary education or training up to 40%. And so we're about 12% shy of that. So that's something that we're going to work towards next year. And in this area, as you know, there's a lot of poverty and a little trauma. So that's really going to be a challenge for us both in there. Our college and career labs have been great this year. Every Friday, we've had a guest speaker in one program or the other. And so we're going to continue that pattern and build that up. This year, last year, we read as a school bridges out of poverty. This year, we're going to read disrupting poverty. And we'll continue to find ways to offset that and figure out how we can connect students to college and training pathways for our core jobs. We're going to continue our mentoring process. And we're working on an update for our technical project. We'll run that by Elijah and Lane. But we're going to move towards more of a digital portfolio process with a platform called Protein. It's through the Montaren Institute at a UVM. And it's going to connect what they do by setting goals. And that way, a student will walk away with their digital platform. And then we'll still do an open house. So we're still kind of fine with that. That's what I had for that question. Jason, anything missing that you'd like to see next time? Anything you're interested in? Yes, Elijah. Jason, was this a focus on this year's graduate school, last year's graduate school? This year's going to graduate seniors. I had that data, so I just, that's what I wanted to get. Trying to think of an intelligent question. No, it could be any kind of a project. Anything you're curious about? I'm just wondering if there's anything that you're concerned or worried about. As you look at this data, do you see holes and say, really, this is what we should be doing? What am I looking to think about? So we're hiring a full-time math teacher for next year. The Agency of Education, this is what we talked about on our board, is that they're moving, as they review all tech centers, the Agency of Education, let's see if I can back this up. We're graded on a scope of different things. We used literacy and math data from SBACs for the past five, six years. And now that SBACs have moved to ninth grade, they're still haven't told us what they're going to measure us on in literacy and math. So we don't know what we're going to be evaluated on for the 2018-19 school year. So there's a hole in that, in that we don't know for sure what tool we're going to be measured by. So, yeah, it's kind of weird. That sounds pretty typical, actually, right? I think for us, we would know, because there's only 17 of us, right, tech centers. I'm just thinking over the course of, you know, 10, 15 years, the way students are evaluated by the state and national change is so many times. But for us, we're so small, we're easy to deal with. So in anticipation of that, we've hired a math teacher. We know we need to work with our math scores. As a center, we know our students come in week. So that's something we want to improve on. So in anticipation of that, I think we're going to look towards, most likely, it's called work keys. And it's a tool that students use through the ACT to do literacy and math skills, and they can get a certificate out. And I think that's the way the AOE is going to go. And so anticipation of next year, that's something that we'll have pre and post data I'm hoping for for a whole school year, and then we'll be able to see what we do with that. And I think we're not going to have one direct route, you know, using SBAC scores or eCAP science as a way to measure students. So we know there's a hole in math literacy, keep working towards it. And we also know that this is an obstacle for students to learn. And so we're hoping if we can address this as well, it all tends to balance out over time. I was actually surprised at your poverty data that it was only 30%. I would have guessed more. I would guess more, and that's all free and reduced lunch, and that's only for this senior class. And so not including junior data. I think as a school we're in the 40% tile. Except for Brookfield, which is 30. Everybody else is trying 40. But that also doesn't include students who don't fill out the forms. Right. And I think what would be difficult, not difficult, but would be a good challenge is if the agency of education wants us to hit this 40% mark with students who go to college or other training, that's a big leap. And I think at the same time, we promote a lot of opportunities for students to get training and great paying jobs without having to go to college. So if we look at the GW or GE aviation plan where they pay $25 an hour and pay for you to go to school, I think that's just as valuable as trying to make a 40% mandate that may not be reasonable. Yeah. Yeah. Either way, the math was the key. I think the math is the key. What we find is the student is going to need the math to take their Accuplacer, ACT SAT skills for college, or they're going to need the math to pass that Algebra 2 test to get into GW. So either way, we know we need to improve our math. That's okay. You know exactly what I was going to say. Do you have an update on the advanced manufacturing? What kind of update? So we have our teacher. Do you have a teacher? Do you have students? We have seven students, and we're getting more every day. You are. In the sense of we keep getting more questions, more applications. So I feel good about that. Seven hard students have been accepted. Okay. I can't tell you if they're going to show up day one. Yeah. All right. And last year I learned, you know, I keep this data. It was better than one. Sure. It was the other program. Yeah, one more. Yeah, last couple years. But in here, I did give you the data on how many students did not show this year day one, which was 10. Right. So that was in your packet. So 10 students who were accepted, but day one never stepped through the door. Right. And so that's a hard thing for us. But we're also higher numbers this year than we were at this point last year. Okay. So we have seven students accepted to advanced manufacturing. We just got approval last Thursday, right? Last week for a program innovation grant for $75,000 for one year for that program, which will help offset some nice equipment costs. Yeah. Cool. And so we have our teacher. He's ready. We have our syllabus program to study seven students in certificates. They've worked at DW, LED, ready to go. Perfect. Yeah. I feel good about it. I think we've hired, I know we've hired the right person. Good. That's absolutely. Wonderful. I'm excited for that. And I think as of Monday, they're supposed to start demolition in the room. Oh, wow. Cool. That's what I know. Plumbing and walls on Monday. They wanted to start tomorrow. But I said, no. I wanted the students out. Any other kinds of questions? Have a great night. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. See you. And Elijah. How are your chats? Can I sit here then? Yeah. Thanks for the opportunity to reflect with you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And just to continue to reflect with you on actually last year's senior class, we focused one year back because for our current seniors, at least at this point in the year, we don't have all of the data compiled that we have compiled for the past grade. So we can revisit the timeline for this presentation if we want to bump it into the fall when we'll have SAT data and AP scores and other statistics that might be of interest. So I'll just quickly talk you through the packet that we have here. This is a grid where we keep some of the longitudinal information about our graduating classes and I chose to highlight a couple of the trends in the handout here. So I'm going to flip from the top page into the next page, which has some of the data and a graph about our four-year graduation rate. And then I can wait until all of the paper gets in the ground. That's okay. Are you ready? So I'm looking at this page right here. I already sent them back that way actually. So you can see from the graph plots the Randolph Union four-year graduation rate and the Vermont four-year graduation rate average. Randolph Union's in blue, Vermont is in red. And you can see that starting with the graduating class of 2016, our graduation rate takes a jump up into 95% in surpassing the state average. And that trend of surpassing the state average has continued for the last three years and we think it will continue for this year's graduating class as well. The way I understand that and the way I tell that story is by trying to see where in the last five years or so we've undertaken some major reforms. And I traced that jump in the graduation rate to some of our advisory reforms and to some of our reforms in terms of community engagement and relevance in the curriculum. So our relationship reforms and our relevance reforms, which I would argue have not been undertaken to the detriment of the rigor of the academic program, given the kinds of schools that our students are still getting into. That said, some of the other pages that we'll look at suggest we have work to do in that area as well. The class of 2016, when they were freshmen, that's when we first started some of our substantial advisory reforms, adding additional time, asking the cohorts to stay with the same advisor over multiple years, infusing student-led conferences and portfolios into the advisory work. That wasn't when we carved out, it wasn't the schedule reform of the last two years, but it was the start of that advisory focus. And then when that class of 2016 were when they were sophomores, that's when we started the PBL lab and Ken first started his first class with GW plastics. And across the school, there was more of an effort to push the curriculum in the direction of community engagement and real-world relevance. Also over that period of time, Dave and I and our colleagues have worked to hire the best possible teachers that we can attract from across the country and across Vermont, and even though our hiring pool is typically small, we've learned how to attract strong candidates and keep them interested in work all through the hiring process and ultimately to bring some of them, like Josh and others, to our school. So I'm proud of those reforms and what I see as a jump in the graduation rate because students, I think, feel more engaged in the learning, that's the relevance and feel cared for and understood and that's the relationships and the faculty also through those relationships go the extra mile to work with the children and the families who in past years would have been, would have dropped out or might have been pushed out. It's not happening anymore. I did have an odd question. Why is the state average so stable? That just doesn't look... Well, that's the average over the course of those years, so I didn't... Okay, I just, it looked kind of flat and just my brain was like, that's odd. Not calling it into question from you, but from this different... So is this an average over a time frame or was it 87% every single year from... I don't remember. I calculated it last year, so I have to go back on it. But I'm sure the actual state, you're right to point that out. The actual state averages for every individual year wouldn't be 87% every year. That's why I was just thinking, you know, in relation to the year to year, that would make more of a valid comparison, wouldn't it? Yeah, I can definitely take a fresh look at that. I'm not criticizing at all. That's just my... And just for comparison, national averages for graduation rates in the United States tend to be around 60%, but it would take a little bit of me. Yeah, Vermont's higher. Thank you for pointing that out. If we flip, we'll look at some of the SAT data from the last couple of years. It's broken out by reading, writing, and math, the Randolph Union average scores for the senior class, the Vermont average scores for the SAT, and the national average scores. In terms of reading, Randolph Union, the senior classes over the past three years have been consistently at or above the state and national averages in reading. If you want the specific numbers there to the left. In terms of writing, two of the last three years we've been above the state and national averages in writing. And in terms of math, two of the three years we were at or above the national average. Two of the three years we were below the state average and SAT math. And being below the state average in some of our standardized test scores in math is something, of course, that we see in the SBAC data as well from year to year. We can return to any of these pages. I'll just quickly walk us through them. The next page is the AP exams. I've given you the percentage of students who took an exam in a given year. So this actually is a mix of juniors and seniors in any given year. But I still think it's it's worth talking about in terms of our senior profile, our upper grades. I'll give you the percentage getting three, four or five and the percentage of the class that took the exam, because I think that's interesting to note. We can note that over the last eight years, more students have been taking AP exams. So even while our school population is declining a bit, the number of students taking AP exams is increasing. We also in the past two or three years have have decided to pay for the exam for students who we think will struggle to pay for it and to require students to take the exam if they're in the class. In the above data, you'll note that the highest pass rate on the exams was achieved in the year that the smallest percentage of the class took the exams. So perhaps a more self-selecting group. In terms of improvements this year, because we we have plenty of improvements to make in our AP exam scores. We created Dave in particular working with the AP teachers, created a calendar of callback time. That's that's an extra one to two hours a week, depending on how it's used for AP classes, so that the AP classes rotated through the year and got dedicated extra time with students. We also made a made a different teaching assignment for AP Calc based on what based on the strong interest of the teacher and also based on the strong qualifications. And in terms of challenges, challenges for this year, we don't have our AP scores yet, but it's been a challenge having one of our one of our AP teachers happens to be out on maternity leave and so a long term sub in place of the AP teacher just creates a can create a different classroom atmosphere for the last quarter of the year in that in that particular class. In general, to answer the question that that to respond to the question that Laura asked Jason, I see plenty of room, of course, for improvement in terms of these standardized measures of student achievement in terms of the AP tests and in terms of the SATs and and as back as well, although although seniors and upper grades aren't aren't taking those tests. Some of the things that I think the school needs to do better in order to address that is to better ensure that that that people feel responsible for those domains. And so part of the reason why I've decided with collaboration with the leadership team with Lane to hire an associate principal of curriculum and instruction is it's important that there be someone in a leadership role who's built who feels very responsible for academic achievement for alignment from one year to the next and for the scaffolding up of rigor throughout the years to ensure that there's no gap that junior year kids don't have a lack of writing, for instance, that that that the bar keeps getting raised as the students go get older and older. So the AP is in part appointed to feel some responsibility for this at a whole school level with me. We've also in terms of tier two supports, meaning classes that are that are designed to support students who need extra time or support to achieve proficiency. Those tier two supports can include the program that we call Project Achieve for students who need help with organization and just staying on task and being productive. It can include math labs and literacy labs where students need more time to to to to learn material either pre teaching before they approach the material in a classroom or after it's been taught to remediate in some degree. The tier two supports because they include math labs, literacy labs and Project Achieve, they touch upon lots of different teams in the school. You might have a seventh grade team making recommendations for students who would move into tier two support classes. You might have an eighth grade team and a ninth grade team and a tenth grade team. So that's at least four team leaders right there. And then you've got a math department and you've got a and you've got a humanities department and then you've got the special education because you've got at least seven or eight people who in different ways feel responsible for tier two supports, but nobody who's looking at all of them together. And so we've moved responsibility for all of those tier two supports into the special education department next year where we have a department chair. Janet West is actually returning to the role who is, who understands the seventh through, who understands the seventh and eighth grade work and the ninth grade work very, very well, who understands the needs of special education teachers and who also has experience interfacing with grade teams. So I think the APF curriculum and instruction in terms of the universal work of the core curriculum, the moving the tier two supports under the purview of the special education department chair. And then the other thing I would add is that we haven't made this official yet, but I would like to have co-chairs in the humanities department as opposed to just one because that's one person responsible for the oversight of a lot of stuff. And I think we would benefit from having someone there with the English teacher hat and English department hat on looking at that scope and sequence and someone at the social studies hat and collaborating of course, but with some separate responsibilities for those different curriculum strands. So those are some of the things that we'll be doing next year that I think will improve the degree to which people in leadership positions feel responsible for working with teachers and students to achieve better results in these areas as well as in our SBAC scores. And I'd also say that our AP of curriculum instruction will work more closely than Dave or I has with Lane and the curriculum coaches at the OSSD level because that will be specifically part of her domain. And I know that Lane from things that you've said, Lane is looking forward to working with her in that regard. So one can anticipate increased alignment from the elementary schools up into the middle schools as those leadership positions work more closely together. And I'm happy to talk in detail about any of this to flip back to any of the pages or to just have an open conversation with you. Whatever your time permits. Ask about the chart on the AP exams. The senior class, so as the seniors were taking AP, their scores were not reported? Well, Brooke, that's a good point. I was borrowing from my spreadsheet and I was trying to get the percentage of the kids in the senior class who took the exam, but that's probably the percentage of the kids in two classes. I think either way, the point still holds that when fewer students were taking the exam, we had our highest results. And as we've broadened the number of students who are taking the exam, as we've invited more students to take it and said, we'll pay for you to take it, our exam scores have gone down. And some of our rationale for doing that is as we've shrunk as a school and shrunk in our personnel and teaching faculty, it makes sense to open up as many courses as we can to as many students as we can so that they have choice when they're in their upper grades. But so, good point there. I think there's some errors actually in that, but I think the general point would still hold in terms of the selectivity of students who are taking the test. And what, in terms of the raw number of how many kids are taking the exam, what's the size smallest, the year versus the largest? I mean, I'm curious as to what kind of increase there was when we took the cost issue away. I'm jumping back to this, to mind Dave's spreadsheet here. A number of seniors who took an RU AP class on the first page, you can see those raw numbers. So those actually are the seniors and not, it doesn't include juniors, as far as I know. So 24 to 17 to 15 to 11 to 21. Oh, I see that. 23, 33, 30, 21. So from the teens and 20s to the 20s and 30s, I guess, in terms of raw numbers of kids. That's pretty significant in a class. We have class sizes we have, I think, and double it. Yeah. I'd like to add to this grid as best we can do in terms of post-secondary tracking of college and career placement. The tech centers are required to do it and therefore they are funded and staffed to do it. We are not required to do it and we are funded and staffed generally to work with the kids that we've got. So to ask the guidance department to track down 80 at another class, 100, you know. So how many hundreds of students who are not in the school can we devote our time to tracking is a question. You can rely on the clearinghouse data, but there's so much air in that it's hard to say. So I'd love to have some more post-secondary data in here in terms of college going and college retention. It's just hard to devote the resources to tracking all that information down once kids leave you. I would like, it would be easy to add our senior project rubric scores that we can see who's exceeding proficiency on the paper, who's exceeding proficiency on the presentations and so we can break that out. Katie has that, so I'd like to add that in here for the past couple of years. And also add the percentage of the senior class that's engaged in offsite early college and other dual enrollment opportunities, because that is changing also in the last couple of years. And the audience, they still have it. They have an add-on module for alumni tracking, but you kind of depend on the students to go in and add their own data after they graduated. A year from now, are you still at the same college that you applied to? Are you still in the same field? I think it goes up two years. We tried it at one of the districts and they had it, you know, graduating class of 300, you know, we probably had 80 or 90 students that, you know, did up to a year. Up to a year, so. So, Pash, I want to ask you another question about our SAT data. Now that Khan Academy has SAT prep that I guess electronically can feed from your PSAT scores, for example, and help you identify and study the areas that you need to improve in. Is that anything that either our advisories or our guidance office is facilitating in any way to, you know, yes, it's available, but maybe to train the kids or to, you know, check in with them about are you preparing properly? Or do we have any other kind of prep, test prep before they suppress ATEs? It's a good idea. We don't have any universal test prep across the school. At this point for the PSATs or for the SATs. So it's worth considering. It's possible there's an elective, some of the schools that I've been at who have a SAT English prep with the English department offering an SAT math prep, usually a semester, a semester, a few weeks. Are you gonna get the advisers to nag a little bit? Yeah, I can't be extra critical. Some advisories do it. Like my daughters did it every day. Yeah. That's not a bad idea, is it? You know, five minutes, though. Good, it's a good thing. Very good thing. That's what grade level one she was doing there. I know she did it last year. Last year in a level. Yeah. I don't know if she did it this year. What else strikes you that you'd like to discuss or note or suggestions or ideas get whatever your time allows? I see you're tracking the ECT and SAT. Are there other standardized tests that you would rather track that you think are more, I don't know, more in line with what the outcomes we're looking for or that you're looking for with students that maybe SATs and SATs aren't really concentrating on? Nothing comes to mind in terms of a different standardized test that I would, but my colleagues might have something. The state is requiring now on one of the new accountability measures is that every graduating senior will have participated in and met certain benchmarks in a menu of assessments, post-secondary and career-oriented assessments. And for two reasons we're considering asking all of our students to sit for the ACT. One, way to just check off that participation expectation. All the students took that one exam. It also opens up for them different areas of the country in terms of what colleges are looking for or what colleges are used to. And from what I understand from the guidance department, it's a test that can be particularly useful for students who are interested in science and engineering post-secondary pursuits, which might dovetail nicely with many of the students at the Tech Center. So we're considering adopting that as like we have all of our sophomores take the PSAT, we might also have all of a particular cohort take the ACT. And if we're doing that, it behooves us to think of things like Brooke was just talking about, how can we make sure they're ready for that particular format? And balance the readiness needs for the other standardized tests that you wanna do well on too, that have their own particular ways of being taken, the SBAC and the science exam also, which is new this year. How is the SAT administered now? Is it still filling the blocks? Or am I showing my age? I don't know actually. Does it read their minds? I don't think so. Maybe you have some short answer responses. It's not computer-based, is it? Actually it is in a lot of cases, but you can still. But it's interesting that prior to two years ago, it was a bad exam to try to tell performance of the school front because it was a reasoning test, it was an IQ test. And so technically the way that it was done was it shouldn't matter whether you had a PhD or whether you had a college degree or whether you were a high school student, your score should have always been about the same amount. With the last two years and the big change that happened, they switched over to more of a subject-based test to more along the lines of the ACT. It was their big competitor who's been coming along. ACT is always a great test because it's subject-based, right? It's testing you and your math skills up through geometry. It's testing you and your science skills up through biology. It's testing you and your ELA, and it gives some feedback about the content that the students have learned about the curriculum that was delivered over the course of their careers. The problem is there weren't a lot of students in our area that took it because SAT is typically on the coasts, right? Those are the schools that go across. If SAT is Midwest, the middle stage typically will look for the ACT, so it wasn't as valuable a test for the kids necessarily. They often took it if they were afraid of the SAT just because of the content base, so that is of course their reasoning. So, a lot of info, but good questions, thoughts? Well, I should. Good. Thank you. Thank you so much. My pleasure. I think to, I guess give us a PowerPoint on district performance. Yeah, and I wanna talk a little bit too kind of about what Elijah touched on. In the data, if you take a look up there, we're looking at 2016-17, policy governance, we're always looking backwards. But of a lot of the data that we're starting to take a look at that might be valuable as we reinterpret the ends and what's a good measure to tell if we're achieving them is the standardized test that we have available. And a lot of that data does not come out until mid-summer. And then at times it'll be embargoed for a little while and it's usually not fully available for the previous year. In our case that would be 17-18 right now until August or September that we can put it out publicly. So we talked a little bit at the pre-meeting about maybe we can shift when that big ends report is due to the time so that you're looking at the data from the previous year as opposed to two years ago. That was one of the ideas. Currently as it stands, we do have some of the SBAC data in mathematics and in ELA but it's actually embargoed until the 15th. What happens is they go through and they start scoring the tests and so every day you can go into the portal and you can say, oh yeah, the 60 kids that we had take the math ELA in this grade, 42 of them have been scored already and that's shown in this composite score. So in the early grades we probably got about 80% of the kids that have been scored already. The high school level and middle school level for some reason in the seventh grade there's not a lot that are showing up in there but the others are probably about 40% done. So there is data that we can't share the current data quite yet. So kind of going forward is maybe looking at an August or September date for the monitoring report. And this way the other thing too is maybe break up the presentations that go along so the report can be all done in one shot but break up the presentations kind of like we do for the limitations reports, you know, do one or two here of those ends. For the purpose of this idea that everything that goes on in this district whether it's the faculty, whether it's the programs that we put in place, the equipment that we buy, it's all really geared towards making sure that we're meeting those ends. And so it seems like we should be spending a little bit more time on it, examining and analyzing it together as a group than just one big day once a year. We usually have several this type of presentation here. I can't remember how many and I don't have a lot. I think it's definitely worth moving both, all of these really, I guess Jason's was ready but the rest of the data to it later either August or September date. Yeah, there's the in-house data which we can get at any time but sometimes when we're depending on the standardized testing, you've got to wait until the scoring's done and then they take the embargoes off to be able to share it. But a lot of today is about looking at two of the ends as best we can and that's the mathematics and the ELA. We have been talking a little bit, I started off at the last cabinet meeting about what are some other more academic ways, some more academic based tools that we can find to actually assess our performance on these ends. Reading in mathematics was an easy one because we've got the SBAC that's readily available but more important in terms of that actual test, it's actually used for our accountability with the federal government and it's used for our accountability with the state government. It's also what people look to but it's easy, the data is easy to find if they're deciding to move into Randolph for its educational system and it's also what people are looking to as they make decisions about school choice considering the number of school closings that we've had in and around us over the course of this past year. So I think it's well worth our time to take a focus on this. In fact, a lot of the title funding decisions are based upon our performance in terms of SBAC. So useful data. So as we're having the discussions with the cabinet about ways to kind of reinterpret the ends and what is useful data to look at to see how well we're meeting them, a couple of the criteria here that we're examining is this idea that it must be valid, right? It's actually gotta be measuring what it is that you want it to measure. If I'm using SBAC to test students in the math curriculum but the math curriculum isn't aligned to the SBAC and its requirements, then the question becomes this is not a valid tool, right? Because what is it that it's actually telling me I don't know. So it doesn't become valid. So that's part of the reason for some of the curriculum work that we've discussed over the course of the year. It must be reliable. In other words, it doesn't matter whether I give that assessment tool to the students or you give the assessment tool to the students, everything being the same, their scores should be about the same. And a lot of the tools that have been used previously, they are some very good tools but they're not really calibrated. And the kids that were complaining about that this year, especially with the rubrics like with habits of heart and habits of mind, they need to be calibrated because if I go into your class, I'm here, if I go into your class, I'm here. So how do we reconcile that? How do we make sure that everything is kind of connected together? And then again, the idea, the ends of all things is making sure that we're constantly keeping our minds on what we're producing. Because everything that we've got in this district should be geared towards meeting those ends in one way, shape, or form, or number. Throw this up here and then talk about the pieces before we kind of jump into it. The math composite score, remembering that the data has changed over the course of time, it used to be an e-cap. And about two years ago, they switched over to the smarter balanced assessment, the SBAC. So that's the reason that there are two years of dates up here. I did do a three year look at e-cap scores in mathematics and the trend is the same. And so let me talk a little bit about what this is showing you. Up until this year, right, they took the exam, the SBAC exam in mathematics and English in grades three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and eleven. Right, so you had a pretty good stretch here where they're getting tested every year. And then you have a couple of year gap before they get their final testing and that's their final assessment in the 11th grade. What this is, is telling you the number percentage that met the proficiency threshold. So for third graders who took the math SBAC in 2016, so that would be 2015, 2016, 16, 7% of them met that threshold or above that proficiency. Before we get to the graph, because they're not showing you the same data, we're looking at it in kind of different terms, we can talk about the chart. I like the chart because what the chart allows you to do at least a little bit, is it allows you to follow what happens to kids at least over the course of a year, right? We started out here, this is our score, a year later, this is where we were. So my third graders in 2016 were here. My third graders in 2017 are now fourth graders, they were here. And what happened between the two administrations of that SBAC math exam, 14% fewer of them met that threshold. My fourth graders here, my fifth graders here, they're the same kids across two years, 33% fewer, 9% fewer. And then there's something interesting that happens between sixth and seventh grade. What happens physically to the kids between sixth and seventh grade? Where do they go? They're off at the high school, middle school, high school. And then all of a sudden, you start to see a little bit of a turnaround, right? 15% more past it between this administration, this administration, a little bit of a loss here, but statistically insignificant. Typically a three point change is statistically significant for these exams. And then you've got a little bit of a gain here. So what I tried to do to put just some kind of rough number on these values that had some meaning that people could carry with you is here. If it's red, it means it's negative. If it's black, it means it's positive. On average in the elementary school, as you go from test to test, on average every year, 19% fewer students are meeting the proficiency threshold across the three years and then. On average at the high school level across the years that they're tested, right? They're getting a 6% increase, right? 6% increase from seventh to eighth and then there's a couple of years in here, but then again on the next administration of the test, there's another 6% increase here on average. So it's giving us some data to kind of take a look at about the health of the students. Now, this chart over here is a little bit different. While this you're able to see the same students at least across two years, what this is doing is this is just looking at the most recent year. So in 2016, 17, the students that took the S back, this is where my third graders were, this is where those fourth graders were, right? That's six. Remember, these are all different classes of students, but you see the trend here. As they're going up through the years, the trend is the same, whether you look at it here or whether you look at it here. For the most part, the overall trend is negative. So we've got some work to do, academic. And again, I can't share with you the current data yet, but hopefully, maybe the next time we meet, I can throw that up there because of our... Let's see if the work that we did this year. So before we start flipping through some of these charts, do all the basic pieces of these make a little bit of sense? Questions on what is here at this point in time? Just one. For the 2016, the eighth graders, in 2017, they wouldn't still be the same cohort you're looking at. They'd be in ninth grade then, not 11th. So would those be two different cohorts, the seven and the 10th? Yeah, so maybe I'm gonna go back and let me double check that one. So scratch that one, that's a good point. I'm not thinking about it. You get your head wrapped into these. So it's okay. Look at that number, I get it. That's a good point. So do we have enough kids for many of us to be statistically significant? Statistical analysis. So this is a math composite. This is, when we're looking at this in terms of third grade, this is all the third graders in the different, all the fourth graders in the district. So it's across the three-in-law interest. All the students in eighth grade, all the students in eighth grade. Which is, what, how many kids? We usually, right now, on average, class is probably 60 to 70 kids total. So if you took all the third graders across the district, you'd probably somewhere around that range over the 60 range. So it's a composite. It's all the third graders together across the three schools. I do have it broken out. But that one was a little bit more difficult because of just the low numbers of some of the schools in some of the grades. So I've changed that data a little bit to take that into account. So questions on the math? Yeah, these numbers, how do they really mean what they do? Well, yeah, they kind of do. But you can see that the percentages change quite a bit from year to year. The important thing is the overall magnitude of the number, 19. 19 is bigger than a red, red 15, right? So you know that they're losing out a little bit more if you see a 19 and if you see a 15 or a 14. So the magnitude has meaning. Students with disabilities. So this is our one kind of important subgroup here. And it's our one subgroup that's growing. Our students with disability added close to half a million dollars to the budget this part here. That was one of the discussions that we had earlier on. And so what are we dealing with that extra money that we're putting towards these students? If you take a look, we have three years of data for these guys, which is interesting. I think that they probably put the test out a little early to do some preliminary research on it. But if you take a look, my pattern's the same. In this case, at least things were a little bit stable. Drop it. Now the problem with the zeros and I've been doing a little bit of look into those zeros is, if proficiency is here, right? You don't show up on this chart with a number unless you're above that proficiency threshold. The problem with the zeros is, yeah, there was some change that happened. Did they go from here to here if they were under the proficiency threshold or did they go from here to here? When I took a look at those zeros, typically what happened is they dropped unless they were already very, very low. In that case, you saw a little bit of a gain. But in most cases, if they were at a, 10% of them were in level two, they would drop. If it was less than 10% of that level two, they might stay the same. It might be a little bit of a gain. But again, not good. And the other piece, if you compare the two charts, I actually threw the slopes up there because they have a little bit of meaning to me anyway. The slope on this one is negative 5.2. That means when you're looking at the data in this way, between each successive taking of the exam, the 5.2% fewer are actually hitting proficiency. Problem is, and this is one of the things that no child left behind was all about, is that if you look at our subgroup here, our students with disability subgroup, it's negative 7.4. So yeah, they're both decreasing, which isn't good, but the subgroup is actually decreasing faster than the general population. Which at this point in time, had no child left behind not changed, had they not reinvented it as ESSA? We'd be in a lot of trouble right now. They could have actually come in and taken over the school if that had been going on for long enough. What are the core sizes for, do you know what the core sizes were for the students with disabilities? Students with disabilities for the most part, I would guesstimate probably 20 to 30-ish. So when they're given our percentage of students with disabilities in the district. So some of this wouldn't be a result of one or two kids leaving and drops significantly. So it's a lot to be large. I'm gonna talk a little bit about possible solutions and what I think the problems are. Now, I wanna stop and take an aside for a second here. This isn't because people aren't doing their work. You have a dedicated faculty, dedicated staff that are coming in and they're working their tails off every day with these kids. They're working their tails off in an environment where the trauma-based behaviors have taken hold, which is probably a good part of the impact here. It's more, because we're looking at a standardized test, it's more about the alignment. That's the first piece. Is it aligned? Are we actually teaching them what we're expected to be teaching them? You know, we're teaching them something and we're teaching them some good things because I've seen some darn good skills, especially with the seniors. But the question that becomes, is it aligned with what we're supposed to be? So that's the first thing. And then the second question that becomes is okay. If we're teaching what we're supposed to be, if we're teaching it and the kids aren't getting it, what do we have to do differently to make sure that they do? So that's kind of what the state is going to be used to do in examination. Are the students with disabilities included in the original, in like the whole, so then that slope would actually be shallower? If you took them out, the general population would actually be shallower. So the overall impact means that usually what happens in a district, you've got your subgroup students, in this case the students with disabilities you've got your general population. You put initiatives in place to make things improve. Typically they both go up, then of course under the old, little child up behind laws, that's not good enough because you're not closing the gap, right? You want this one to be doing that. But what we've got going on here is that, yeah. They're both going down and the students with disabilities are losing ground pretty fast. And how do we know how much the gen, the non-disability population, if you can isolate that, like you did the disability students that would really give us a fair picture of what's going on in the ordinary classroom. Yeah, and that's something I'm gonna attempt to do the next time. Breaking out, one of the problems, you're hitting on one of the problems with the SBAC and the way the testing is reported, it's not a bad exam for testing overall value added, right? Whether or not they're learning math or whether or not they've got the right ELA skills. Where it's a crappy test is that the way they present it, it's hard to break the data out. It's hard to pull out the students with disabilities from the general population or the low income students. You can do it, they're there, but you kind of have to pull the data from the individual students and then compile it yourself. So that's difficult. The second, well, we're a small district, it's not impossible if we're talking 400 kids or four classes, there's no way. But the other problem with the SBAC, and there's some workarounds that we'll talk about is that if the kids are scoring low in math, is it because they're scoring low in every concept in math? They're probably scoring low in two or three important concepts in their math class over the course of the year. The trick is figuring out which of those areas those are. And the SBAC doesn't give you resolution, it doesn't give you details to be able to weed out. Okay, yeah, these 60 standards they were supposed to learn, it's these five. So that's part of where we're gonna have to create some of our own kind of homegrown assessments to figure that out. The one nice thing that SBAC has done is they've added what are called these interim assessments that you can give, you know, you teach these couple of standards, you give this interim assessment, you see how the kids are doing. But that data is very useful because that points directly at a standard. Whereas the overall general score is down. So you can tell there's something wrong a little bit in terms of the health of our students in math, but with the SBAC as it stands, it's very hard to point in and say, okay, the problem of everything that they're learning is here, this is where we gotta work. So that's what we're gonna be working on next year is figuring out how to get that resolution throughout those details. So questions on the math and Paul, awesome pick up on that 11th. I get my head so wrapped into the, fine, you kill sometimes, I miss the forest trees, right? ELA composite, typically, to be honest, what you see is that ELA across the nation is typically a little bit higher. A lot of that has to do with elementary preparation, elementary teachers or generalists. They tend to be much more comfortable with ELA and social studies than they are with science and math. Not that they don't have a background in it, but in terms of the pedagogy and the teaching of it, they tend to be just more comfortable with ELA and social studies so they tend to teach it more. They tend to spend a little bit more time on it. But a fairly similar pattern, but not quite as pronounced, right? As you're going through the scores, right? A little bit of a drop here, a little bit bigger drop here. Oop, a bit of a drop here, right? A little bit of a gain here. So something interesting, oh, you know, we just crossed the threshold in high school again. Right, oop, bit of a gain here, bit of a gain here. Now, one of the reasons that the high school is performing a little bit better than the elementary schools, even though the elementary schools are providing the foundation is because of what? And Elijah actually talked about it. He talked about what the five or six or seven different support systems they have in for students and they can do that because of their studies. So they've got all those support systems. And not only do they have all those support systems that are in place, they need to be revamped a little bit to deliver the services a little bit more effectively. But they've also got some services in place that started this year, a little continuum next year that's gonna help the students with the emotional component, which is gonna be key to some of this. But you see, it's the slope on this one when we're looking at, you know, from grade to grade, again, the grades being different kids in that specific year. The slope's 0.5, it's pretty much flat. You know, they're not gaining anything but they're not really losing anything either, which is good. And the scores are relatively reasonable. It'd be nice, you know, if I had an overall goal for the resources that we have, 70% would be where I'd like to see every one of those numbers. To get higher than that here, we'd have to change a few things, but I think 70% is certainly doable. We're not changing too much. We'll talk a little bit about what that may be. Students with disabilities, kind of same pattern again, right, you had 0.5, you actually had a little bit of the game on the slope of the other line. This is negative, you know, 1.4. So again, students with disabilities, right, the gap's increasing. We're not closing that gap, we're not getting them so that they're meeting the same standards as the general population. Okay, now the big one. And again, before I throw this up here, populations are small. So how meaningful it is, is anybody's question. So these are just those red numbers, right? I call it the average loss per year. So in terms of math, when you break it out for Randolph elementary, you're looking at negative 18. You're looking at negative nine for ELA, Brookfield negative 18, negative 21. And then brain tree is black in both cases. So those folks are sitting down and talking a little bit about what's different. And there are different structures of brain tree than there are of the other two schools. And the most pronounced one is what they're doing to provide services for struggling learners. We'll talk a little bit about that. Brookfield, you know, we'll talk a little bit when we get to the financials. I would argue it's mostly size. We've got to get more students in there to be able to provide more staff and more resources. And we may have the opportunity to do that, which we'll talk a little bit about when some things came up in terms of enrollments. Enrollments have gone up there and we need another teacher. And the first and second year. Brain tree is at a nice size. It's mid-80s issue. It's got small classes, this is for the most part, but it's got good resources and it's got a very good structure for special education. Randolph elementary issue isn't primarily academic. They have a tremendous number of services that support some place for students academically. Its issues are coming primarily from the emotional disabilities and the surge that it's seeing year after year. They seem to be the ones that are getting hit the hardest. So questions. Again, those aren't meant to be taken as hard and fast numbers, but they're meant to be giving you an idea of the magnitude. Negative 18 is bigger than negative 12. So three things that work. And some of this has started to be provided this time. And I want you to grill me and ask me questions about it. 15 years in administration, trying various initiatives across different schools, probably to the tune of 12 or 15 of them. There are only three that I have seen that have actually provided reliable increases in academic performance across all of those schools. First one, providing appropriate time and I'll go into a little bit more detail about what that means. It's making sure that you're right timing the schedule. The students are getting enough time on learning to be productive, but not so much. There is a diminishing return point. Not so much that they're getting bored and pulling their hair out because they're sitting in a class for two hours at a pot. The other one is making sure in terms of time that the faculty have what they need to get together to communicate with each other, to take a look at the testing data that you have. Some of the tools we're gonna need to develop so that they have that data and then to effectively plan what they're gonna do differently when they teach their classes the next time around with the kids if what they're currently doing isn't getting them to make the grade. A lot of that, that PLC work, getting the staff together, a lot of those discussions that they have really is about this. It's about improving teacher expertise and curriculum design. Teachers, especially at the elementary levels, they're users of curriculum. Elementary teachers are generalists so they typically, they buy a curriculum, they buy a program that they use because you can't plan for six separate disciplines each day, so they're users of curriculum but what they lose is they lose this developmental mindset that plays into how you deliver what you're teaching. And when you lose that mindset sometimes it's really hard to tie things in directly to what they can see. A little bit easier on the high school teachers because a lot of the high school teachers develop their own curriculum, their content specialists in one area. And then restructuring the support for struggling learners which is some of the discussions we've been having having with the cabinet meeting. Effective, so right timing. It's time on learning for the students that's typically controlled by a master schedule. When we did our research about 10 years ago we looked at the top performing schools in the nation and 141 is the magic number at the secondary level. In other words, if you want your students to perform optimally in mathematics class they need 141 hours of instruction in mathematics over the course of the year. At the elementary level, the magic number is 176. So 176 hours in your core content in mathematics and ELA each year to be able to make sure that they're hitting the grade. So this is about four hours a week in a class. This is about five hours a week in this class. It sounds like a lot, but it's really not a lot of time an hour a day. And I give Eric, I give the team a lot of credit. They're shooting for changing the delivery of the math at the elementary level that they're probably doing in 70 minutes next year. Seeing what the impact is. PLC time, right? Those teachers have to have time to get together and actually discuss what they're seeing in terms of the students and how the students are responding to the curriculum that they're delivering. If they don't get a time chance to sit down and take a look at their testing results or just what they see in the classroom, there's so much that can come out from the teachers in terms of informal observation and share their expertise with each other about what they can do better, you're gonna fail. That's what's gonna happen. And I don't think they've had that time. High school a little bit more than the elementary's. But that was one of the reasons for building in the half days. And then the other thing in the building of the master schedule that the high school is seeing if we can build in common planning time so that they also have time during the actual school they are connecting to each other at the department level. We've got some work done. Hey, just a quick try. Probably about 10 more minutes and then let you move on. But I think it's important. Time on learning impact. So this is a swamp scott. All right. So A and P advanced and proficient. So this is kind of like the charts that you just saw. In other words what it's looking at is the students that are above the proficiency threshold. And what we did at this school was this was just changing time on learning. This was just changing the master schedule. There were no other initiatives that were involved with us. So any changes in this data has to do with changing the master schedule. Swamp scott had too much. They had 94 minute blocks. So they ended up having too much. At secondary level you're looking at around the 60 minute time range for the classes. So what you'll see is they kind of went up and down. But on average they were getting about 87% of the kids. We're hitting the proficiency threshold on average. When we put the schedule change in and you can see it was consistent, they're up around 97%. So one year after the right time their schedule you had almost a 10% gain right in student distortion. Just because the teachers had an effective amount of time to work with the kids. Again, minimal impact. What are you doing? You're changing the schedule. That's easy enough to do. Is that the same cohort group from one year to the other? So this is looking at the students that took the exam that year. So they're not the same students. But you can see you kind of have it coming up around that. I do have the average from those years. It's around 87. And then immediately after the two years following the things went into place it's 97, 98. And again, just. I'm just a little skeptical of statistics like this that, okay, so this is what it means it had to be that one thing when you're dealing with different cohort groups. Cause our experience in this district is, and the reason why we decided to develop longitudinal data is because we have such small cohort groups that there was a significant cohort effect on occasion. And you get some kids that come in that just have tremendous skills, parents that were doing all the right things. Yeah, but part of what you're gonna see though is that I could throw the science and the social studies and everything else up here too. The patterns the same across all classes which adds validity to the data supporting what it's supposed to store. So that was like, this is math, right? These guys hovering in here, you know, 82, 83 for the most part. They had a teacher change this first year. But it still went up a little bit. And then second year again, this was just due to the schedule change, you know, they're up here touching close to 95% for the first time in our life. Just the schedule change. The PLC time at Marblehead, this one was a little bit more interesting. So we did not change their schedule. All we did was we gave them time. It was structured time. They had some things that they worked through was facilitated. But we made sure that they had the common planning time, they had a 15 minutes, three times a week. We gave them the three full PD days a year, similar to what we have here. They got their nine half days. So where'd you find all this extra time? We created it. So were they staying in school longer or were we taking it away from something else? So what we did with these guys, and this was kind of interesting, because this is just managing when the teachers have their free periods, making sure that if you're in the science department all of you have the same free period free, period one, everybody in science is free period two. And the master schedule builder can jiggle stuff around to make that happen in most cases. The three full PD days per year, they had two. We added a third and then we added the nine half days. Where this came from is they had five minutes of passing time between classes. We whittled it down to four. And if you add up the number of minutes of that time, it adds up to the additional time for professional development. So there are creative ways of finding it. In our case, we already had the time available under state law, but this is part of the jiggling around. This thing didn't work well, we had trouble with it. Yeah, we already played this game a few times. Under state law, right? We had to re-contract for 179 days with the teachers, but we only have to supply 175 days of instruction. So it's jiggling a little bit of the time that way. But anyway, we'll go through it really quick so I don't bore you too much longer. Now in their case, Marvel had, they were already super performers, right? They were already on average. They were hovering right around here before the change went into effect. They started talking about it this year. This is the year that they were actually doing the change, not much of an increase, but they were already scoring around 96% or higher for their proficiency rates most of the time. So we put the PLC time into place. It's getting them up to 98%, which they had been at consistently. But the biggest thing was right here. So you don't see much here because they didn't have a hell of a lot of growth to be able to provide. The closer you get to 100%, the harder it is to squeak out another percent. But in that one year, the year following, putting this into place, you had a 15% jump in the percentage of students that were scoring at the highest level on the exam. All right, everybody was already over the bar, but then what it did was it took 15% of the kids and booted them up into the next category. Similar profile with math, change took place here. All of a sudden, they had a pretty good increase for them considering they were already scoring pretty high, but again, that percentage of the students were not at any advanced year after year. I've been able to follow them and talk with them. I still get emails from the school board each time the tests come out. But again, facilitated professional learning community time. We developed this simple little tool that they used. They'd sit down at the beginning of the year. They'd go through the local and the state assessment data. They'd identify which standards the kids were performing poorly on. That's the piece the SBAC is missing, right? We gotta be able to get into what specific concepts in the class they're not getting. Aren't they already doing this with the data wall things? Yes and no. The data wall only touches on which subject? Or did they ever tell you? Oh yeah. It's only ELA. And the data wall does incorporate a little bit of this idea, but it's not drilling down to the level of this is what the student needs in terms of the content. It's more looking at emotional behavioral issues and whether or not that's improving allowing the student to access the curriculum. What they did build in this year, which is gonna help them get to this data, is they've got those common form of assessments. So now they're giving them an exam after they've taught something, seeing how the kids did, and then they can analyze that content that they just taught to see if the kids got it or not, and if they need to go back and adjust something. So that just started going into place as part of the work that they were doing this year. So hopefully, hopefully we see at least a little bit of improvements when stuff comes out. They identified the cause for the student performance, usually because either they just didn't teach it, which is an easy fix, or they thought that the students didn't get it. And then that's where the PLC took over is they had a facilitated discussion about, okay, what are the classroom level changes going to be when we teach these concepts this year? They would actually write that out as a lesson plan at the beginning of the year so that when those concepts came up, the lessons were right there. They had agreed to it as a department, they'd pull it up, they'd use it, and then they'd have a form of the assessment that they created with it at the same time to test it to see if it worked. They did, they go back to the PLC, they figure they talk about it again, try something new until the students got it before they move on. Just some interesting stuff. Last piece here is restructuring the supports for struggling learners. What's interesting is this is in line with what the state is recommending after their DMG report. So implementing a co-teaching slash learning center model. Learning center is the tier two intervention. So there's tier one, tier two, tier three. Tier one is best practice in the classrooms. All the teachers should be doing it. Tier two is small group instruction. It's a teacher with five or six kids. Tier three is one-on-one. You're so severe that even that small group can be a little distracting, we need to have you one-on-one. So what the learning center did was it provided a couple of things and we kind of changed around what they typically do. The student would go to the learning center. It was an additional class worked into their schedule and the teachers had a curriculum that they actually taught and the curriculum was the actual accommodations the students are supposed to be learning to be able to access the curriculum. The IEPs weren't written there as okay, the English teacher, you will use the sequential graphics organizer when the student writes a paper. Instead it was written okay student, the student will use the graphics sequential order organizer when you do a paper. And so the teacher would teach the students how to use those strategies. The co-teacher that was in the classroom was there for guided practice, okay? And in the class you're learning how to use it. When you go to your regular education class what ends up happening is you practice using those skills and you've got somebody there to nudge it if you're not doing it quite right and make sure that you get it. And then once you get it and you're independent they step away. When the student comes back to the learning center that teacher will take a look at the work they did, okay, you did a paper in English. These were your three choices for graphic organizers. Which one did you choose to use and why? Yep, you used it, you did what you were supposed to. It looked like you used it well, here's the grade and here's the credit that you get. Now this one was my baby. I love this one. So this school actually did two things at once. Changed the master schedule and it put in the restructure on plan for struggling students. So yeah, they were kind of going up a little bit, ups and downs, ups and downs, nice little wave. So this is where the change in schedule went in. So you see going from about 47% to 60% in one year. Oh my God, the year after they put in the restructuring how we delivered our special education services 10, 20, 30, almost 40 point job. Governor's accommodation for that work. Similar in mathematics, right? Had a tough year here because they had a struggling teacher but here's the year that the, for SPED, here's the year that the structural change happened with the master schedule. Here's the year that the restructuring for the struggling learners went up over 90%. So again, kind of the goal that they've been working towards over the course of the year whether they realize it or not is they are trying to write time to master schedules. That's already happening at the elementary schools. Like I said, I give Erica a lot of credit when they were planning to shoot for 70 minutes from math. Math is the place for struggle in the most. So that's going to be the primary focus this first year around. Making sure that the PLC time is there. That's already there we built it in this year. Unfortunately, not all the schools have the full structure to be able to use it effectively. Elementary schools have fully developed curriculums that they can use to analyze and the testing now from the common formative assessments to be able to do this work. The high school in some cases they do in some cases they don't. So the first work that they need to be doing in this time is making sure those curriculums are up to speed. Part of this leads to this, right? The two go hand in hand and then restructuring the service delivery to struggling learners is something that we've been talking about all year. The problem that we've got is a lot of our struggling learners. It isn't so much about the academics. There's not things that are, there's not organic things that are getting in their way of learning. It's the emotional behavioral piece of this. And so the big thing that we're gonna be working on and hear me talk about more and more is getting a therapeutic school within a school here at the elementary school at Randolph Elementary. We're trying to get the space cleared up. It's a two year plan. Next year is envisioning it. We've got the right person coming in and then in year two is getting that therapeutic school here because what's going on right now and why the costs are so much with special education is they're managing the problem, not fixing it. They keep pulling in another para. We got a student with severe behavioral problems who can't manage themselves in the classroom. We need to set somebody with them so that they're not violent. So yeah, the behavioral interventionist, that para that comes in can do that job but the problem is that when that para walks away at the end of the day, that student has no more skill in controlling themselves than they did at the start of the day and that's a problem. So the purpose of the therapeutic program is to start to give those students those skills so that they can self-regulate. So we've got a lot of work to do. There's a lot of good here. There's a lot of very invested people. The teachers are doing an incredible amount of work but there's some alignment and I think the two or three things that are gonna have the biggest impact, what's nice about them is they're simple. They're small. High school is in a difficult position right now because they're also under the mandate of having to do the graduation, right? Graduation proficiency, standard based report cards. That's getting in the way of doing the curriculum work that needs to be done. Can't do it all at once. That one's the law, that one's the mandate for 2020 and so I'm pushing on Elijah to hopefully get that done over the course of the next year so we can really focus on the ground forward for a few days. So questions on all the stuff I just threw at you. Part of the problems with the ENDS, social studies, some of the foundational ones is we do not have good tools to measure them in academic terms. It's gonna take a little bit of time because we're gonna have to develop our own homegrown tools. There's nothing wrong with that. There's not a standardized test out there that's gonna measure it for you which in some cases there are, if we decide as a cabinet we wanna use them, like foreign language is great because you get the national Spanish exam, you've got the national French exam that you can use as an end tool. But in some cases, when that doesn't exist we have to create our own and that's gonna be some of the work that's happening next year. So as we go through these I'll talk about how we're kind of reinterpreting these and the tools that we plan on using to measure them over time to see if we can use. The review draft of an annual agenda report which has this tiny print in the packet. One thing we did talk about was moving some of these, some of these reports from Malaysia and laying into a better timeframe so that we would move those perhaps into the fall when we could use just this most recent data. That seems to make sense to me. Otherwise, everything else has been, right Linda just sort of put back where it generally has been. We did talk about moving the auditor's report to earlier. Yeah, except for you're gonna run into tax time. That's always an issue for them. Yeah. In last year she said she was done in January or February. I know, but then it's not just us, it's all over, you know. So Robin might have an idea on that and we tried to do it this year. Yeah. Yeah. So that's, yeah, Angelo always did that for me. Okay. Alrighty. And next the annual review draft of annual agenda report. Is it not in then, I didn't have one. I didn't put last year's in, I don't have a new one. Okay. It's what I assumed that we would have. I couldn't find it either, I was just sitting here and I overlooked it, but okay. I don't know. I didn't put last year's in, you guys got last year's at the beginning of the year. Right. So that's the last, that's the year at a glance. It's not the new one. It's, it's not the new one. Right. Right. Yeah, that looks good. Yeah. From here it seems perfect. Should we run copies for everyone then? Well, you guys all got last year's last year. I mean you can run copies, sure. But I mean I don't know if it's going to help you if you're going to switch things around a bit. Okay. So we really should put this into another. It needs to be redone, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. See ya. I know, I can't believe it. That wasn't anything I ever did. I took Angelo. I don't know, we'll make an opinion on this. So I'm just going to go with that. That's okay. You're still in the first thing. All right. Paul was going to talk about a little bit about the annual review of the ends policy and you want to put this to some time? Yeah. I think so too. I mean we can do it now, but it's kind of a problem. Yeah. We've got plenty to do and we probably should print out the board goals again for everyone so that we can review them. Okay. So let's table that for now as well. All right. Yale monitoring, we've got the facilities plans update. Lane, that's you again. Yeah. So that's this paper here. So what we did is we, to try to get it a little bit more in common with what Mark was doing is we've got the overview of what's different between last month and this month on top. And then inside we're beginning to be able to kind of flesh things out a little bit more in terms of the work that's happening, how it's prioritized, what the estimates are and what the cost is, whether the work is in progress completed or is it out to bid at this point in time. So if there's any questions or parts and pieces around this we can talk about. The hope is is that we'll keep this updated over the course of a year, fiscal year. And then when a new fiscal year comes up, we'll move the stuff over that has not been completed or in progress to that and then just continue to add to it. So that at the end of each fiscal year you've got this running report of what have we been working on, what's done, what's still happening. Okay. Like we used to. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So try to get back. So we're still getting there but it's getting closer. We did look, there was some additional reporting that Mark had had and I have copies of that if folks want to see it. The additional reporting was kind of reporting out how he was spending the reserve funds that the board had granted to him. We have not received any reserve funds or spent any reserve funds. So those parts are not part of this report this year. The beginning of what you were saying. So Mark had some other paperwork with his reports that he submitted but most of the paperwork it was about the monies that he would receive from the reserve fund that the board had approved and just how he was spending it. And so the reason that you don't have copies of those forms from us is because this year we haven't touched the reserves at all. There's no spending from it. So that's the one piece that's missing if it looks different than what he presented. And in terms of Raven at this point. So Raven as we're going through the learning process that piece should be in there a little bit. The permitting process to get the work done is tremendous. Even the bed it doesn't have to go it doesn't go out for a standard bed it has to go out for a 90 day bed. So what we've done is we talked with a couple of the other districts and they recommended a group that works with schools that does the project managing piece. So in other words they go out they do the permitting and everything for you. Cost is they are estimating between 10 and 14,000. And so we're working with them to get that up and running. So Raven is gonna be a good probably year long process. In the interim I've talked with Mark and Wes and Robin about making sure that if we have to use that building again that we follow through on the engineer's recommendations we do have some money left over at the end of the year. The big recommendation was air filtration systems. There were a couple of air purifiers that they recommended that we can put in. And then the other alternative that I've already spoken with Jim about we gotta figure out which is the most conducive is potentially having them either in a space at the tech center or at the high school. One of the reasons Jim is amendable to that but one of the reasons not to do that is just because it can destroy the therapeutic environment for the students. Things are very busy if there's lots of noise it can be very distracting to the work that they're trying to do. And you have about 14 students? 14 I asked him what the maximum was that he said it's been up to 18 at times but he doesn't like to push it that hard unless he has to. We did talk about the possibility that especially given the need that with a new building structured the way that it looks like it's gonna be structured about expanding that program and that is a possibility. The gentleman that works with him is on their part time is probably be getting pretty close to retirement. And that would give us an opportunity if that happens to kind of restructure at least the staffing piece to be able to bring in more kids. So Jim is open to that. So if we are building a building do we have to take down when would we have to take down the current Raven? So that becomes the big crux. Early on we kind of talked about the building itself. If we built on a separate site on our own grounds we'd still have this building that we with the problems that we had to deal with. So the bidding that's going out is for removal. You know depending upon how long this process takes it's possible that if we get the process done in the five to six months it takes all the permitting and the going out to bid that at that point in time it might be easier just to say okay you know start the construction next June. And that way it's done all at once over the summer. Building it in that span of time doesn't seem to be the issue. It's just you gotta get all the steps out of the way. So I take part of the blame for that as I figured it was a shorter process to get it out to bid than it was. But when we started to really take a look when people seemed agreeable to moving forward with it it's a much more involved. Evermont's got a lot of little quirky lines. Yes, it sure does. So I'm a little astonished by the numbers that I'm looking at maybe I just haven't focused on this lately. Yep. But we're talking about over $700,000 now. Yep. I'm correct me if I was wrong but when you originally came to us where you had suggested that we needed new roof and to remove some wet insulation and there might be some issues, some asbestos. No asbestos. No asbestos, okay. But there was wet insulation and then there was air clogs. Mold problems, the structure in the ceiling, the spacing was off, it was too wide for the snowstorms that we get. The foundation was cracking it. There was a whole 60-page engineering list on it. So that original, it was gonna be $300,000 just to fix the crisis stuff not really to get the building up to speed. So $300,000 just to fix the stuff that was like immediate. And so my question at that point was, my gosh, that's a huge amount of money just to put a couple of band-aids on the building. How much is this property assessed for? What is it worth? What would it be worth if we dumped $300,000 into it? And so that's, I think, then you looked at other options and then Robin suggested me to the building like behind us this D because it goes in very easily. It's like, you know. Easy to build, perfectly suited. Very inexpensive. I know the costs have gone up but I was kind of of the impression we'd be spending somewhere around the same amount of money on the band-aid approach versus like just putting up a new building and now it's like more than twice at this point. So what I thought we were talking about. So $694 is what we've talked about at the board the last two times. The information has been out there. We also did the cost analysis in terms of Raven. Raven's a little difficult to tell what it's costing because it's money we don't have to pay because the students are here for the most part, right? It's money that we're not paying out. I did an analysis that I gave to the board a few months back looking at on average how many of the OSSD students we serve given their type of disability that they had, how much it would cost to send them out. So even at the 700,000 that building would be paid for pay for itself within six to seven years. And that was just on the cost of tuitioning those students out that didn't include the probably 40 to 50,000 a year transportation costs in addition to it. So if taking all that into account, you're probably talking a four to five year timeframe for it to pay for itself. But again, it's money that we don't spend. Okay, but my father-in-law had an expression. He used to say, I don't trust any statistics that I don't manipulate myself. Which was sort of what I was. So here's the thing. Okay, I get you're comparing it to, because we save money creating Raven, taking tuition and having a lower cost for our own students. So I get the idea of pay for itself. My husband says that all the time about a ski pass because by the six to five that he goes the ski pass has paid for itself. And I get that and I understand it. But my question still remains. We're putting $700,000 into a piece of property now. Our investment in that piece of property is what versus what the value of that piece of property is. Because I think there's a huge difference between it'll pay for itself versus, so we're making $700,000 profit in five to six years. That's two different things because we're not making that amount of profit from this program. You're just saying we're saving and it's paying for itself. I'm just trying to figure out what the point of the discussion is right now. So I'm trying to understand, have we ever figured out what the property is worth? What it will be worth when we sink $700,000 into it? Is it a property that I'm trying to figure out in terms of the assets of the district? If we're spending money, what is now our capital investment going to actually be worth? That's just the piece that I've been trying to figure out. It would be the value of the building that sits on the property. Separating it out because it is the property that the high school and the tech center sits on. I mean, it's on the same land, might be a little bit difficult, but I'm happy to have a real estate agent come out and take a look, give an idea or even the bank, but I don't think they'd be able to give a credible estimate until the thing was actually built and they could look at it. So I'm happy to talk with a real estate person. But again, I think the issue is that value, I mean, we're not a financial organization, we're an organization that educates kids. And so the value in terms of an asset that this is is the educational value it provides to the kids that it serves. And those kids have been living in a substandard building for over 16 years and they are not being served well because of that. So a lot of this work is about equity, making sure that they are getting the same services and having the same access to our curriculum that everybody else in the district gets. And that's my primary concern. But I'm happy to talk with... Well, as is our mission statement, but our mission statement also has within the reasonable allocation of resources. So it's our job as a board. And I thought that we were still comparing options, but I still had never gotten an answer to that piece of information because I totally agree with you. And if this building, I don't know why it has been substandard for some time period, it certainly does need to be improved so that our children can be educated properly. However, we need to also ask those important questions because that doesn't mean you just throw money at a problem to try to say now everyone is equal because we throw a lot of money at it. I wanna make sure that what we're doing is accomplishing the goal that you're talking about in the most reasonable economic, you know. And what I was asked to do was compare it to other equitable properties that were out there and we did that, but I'm happy to move forward on this new question. So are you suggesting that we rethink the design of this new building? Or we already, because they did look at other properties to see whether, we found that it was gonna be more reasonable to raise the current building and build there. So are you asking whether we should, you know, consider a different design or what do you? No, I think I was just looking for more solid financial information about, okay, we're going to spend 700. This is what we'll end up with for our 700,000 dollars. So maybe it will be something worth 300, I don't know. But I thought that was an important piece of information to have before going forward with, you know, okay, now it's another 15 gram for permitting and all these other things. Now, if that's the course that's identified, that's wonderful, but 700,000 dollars is a lot of money. And while I know there's money in that the Building Maintenance Fund, it just, I thought it was important to get all of the financial information and valuation I think is important to understand what we're buying for that amount of money. So usually the board would vote just to say, you know, to put me to the task of collecting this data, I'm happy to do it. Well, that's not on the agenda, so we can't do that. Anyway, it's just a question, and if we could get that information, I'm not suggesting we spend money hiring appraisers, but if we had the ability to. Again, generally the board would vote before putting me to a task. So do we want to wait and do this, and I wouldn't worry about it then? Well, can you value a property without just thinking of like order of things? How can you assess the value added to the property until we know the type of building that's going to be there, and how do we know that unless we do an RFP to hear from the different companies what they can do for what dollar amount? You know, I, No, all I was saying was that if ultimately what you're, you're throwing 700, or who knows what the cost over it, so it'll be eight or nine, or a million. Right, it's a nice amount. All I was looking for is, are we gonna end up with something that's worth like half of what the money that we're spending on it is, and maybe fixing up what was there, which was the original idea would be a better idea. I don't know. I mean, I thought that the superintendent was in the request for proposal stages to figure out, okay, we've identified there aren't any other turnkey operations around that we can just slip into because there's a laundry list of requirements. But I think as, you know, the fiscal gatekeepers, we should put lane's feet to the fire to make sure that we're not, if we could create the same thing by improving what is there, even if it has a cracked foundation, even if it has insulation that needs to be removed, maybe spending twice that much and ending up with something that is equivalent in quality and value, it just doesn't make sense to me to throw money away. That's all. But if the board is not inclined to put on the agenda next time, don't worry about it. Concerned. So. You know, my only concern is we've had this discussion for six months, we're in the pipeline, and now we're getting thrown a curve ball straight up. Yeah. I mean, I do think that numbers were there last month. And we're not, no final project would be done. I mean, it would have to go out for the, you know, the request for proposal and whatnot to get more solid numbers because that was just a general kind of wholesale to get us in the ballpark. So these RFPs, are we gonna get several different sort of options for size and space and things like that? Or they? The discussion is with Jim in trying to mimic what is there. So there is a set amount of classroom space as opposed to space for the machine shop as opposed to the place that they need for their kitchen and that sort of stuff. So there is kind of a set. Layout and what have you. Yep. Yeah. So obviously we have requirements for how many kids and all the other required amenities for a school. So where did this 694? So that was a Chase and the Eglick who came in. They are the ones that built the original warehouse building. The OSSD building. Yeah, where they were gonna do the centralized warehouse. Right, the new burn. Yeah. Yes, yeah. So they came in and gave us kind of a magnitude of scale estimate. That's the 694. Okay. It was much lower than that, the original estimate we got. And then we said, well, wait a minute, does this include removal of the old building because we don't wanna have to deal with that as well. Because if we build something new, then we also then have to pay to remove the other one, not just have them all do it in one shot. And see if they can save a little bit of money by repairing and reusing the foundation that's there. And so that's what they looked at when they did that proposal. So this is gonna share the exact same footprint more or less. Yeah, we're pretty close to. Yep. So, board, how do we wanna proceed here? If we were asked, I believe that we were asked to release surplus funds, the long discussion about how that couldn't happen. That's for the long-sustainable, long-sustainable. That's for the long-sustainable. I feel like that said anyway. It says 300,000. 694. It says, estimates at the time placed, the cost of remediating the basic issues at the current remand building, 300,000. And so, 300,000 to remediate the existing building and then 684 is from Nickel and Chase, is that what you said? Yeah, so that's removal of the building and then rebuilding in place. And then the 300,000, again, the reason that I wrote it as basic is because it's just to address the, like I said, the mold, all the stuff that just has to be happened to make it a functional building, not upgrading it, not giving them anything in parity with what the other students have, but just the basic, you know, critical mass issue items. So I guess I go both ways because this is an estimate until we put it out for bid, yeah. So, I mean, we got a guesstimate from one company. It's hard to decide what to assess until we know what the actual cost would be. Or what they're proposing. Yeah, we're working with a guesstimate now. It almost seems like we should have complete data on what renovating the building we have up to standard would be. So the same standard as? To the same standard as a new, not patching it to the absolute bare minimum. I mean making it acceptable because it's not acceptable if it's not good enough for all of our students. So how much would it cost to do the same thing that you would want with the new construction for renovation? To the same standard. Because I think that that would be the way to compare apples and apples. I can get that. The engineering report said it would be cheaper to replace. I remember that conversation. Yes. Yeah, so they didn't give it, but they did not give us numbers. They just said, given what we gotta do to just to do the remediation, it would be cheaper to... I think it's hard to compare numbers to numbers when there are no numbers. Well, and our goal is to have a good facility. Right, we don't so much care how we get there so much as to do it with the best use of our resources. We have a target for when we want this to be completed because... Last year. More time. It's like the more time we... Yeah, we don't wanna... We're talking about it, but the less useful it is for the students. Mm-hmm. I can probably, you know, if the Board of Board desires, I can probably try to get at least a magnitude bid on full renovation up to what we would expect in our other buildings versus... Right, because... Because I think that makes sense. Because you mentioned it, it says the cost to remediate the remaining issues quickly pushes the total price tag to or beyond the cost of building it, but it doesn't say that we'll get the number. Yeah, because the... The 300,000 for the... Basics. Basics. The band aid, that's what that is. Right. Unless you have numbers, we just don't... I just don't feel like we can... Restoration. So I can get a rest... I'll try to get a restoration number. Let's make it... Thank you. Do you think you can hit a curve ball? Well... Okay. Actually, what I'll try to do is... Let's see if I get Nyagli and Chase to come back out. They were pretty quick to respond. Okay. Next is the DL 2.7 report. That's Paul and Jen. Yes. Apologies that I get it this morning. Man, it's just crazy. Just copies. Did you guys... Yes. Yeah. What's going to get this one? You guys want to say anything about what you found? So, personally, this one is really cut and dry. It's one of the policies where either they're doing it and we have the evidence or we're not doing it and we have the evidence. Good. And so there was supporting documentation and then there's also a sign-off on from the business manager verifying that the different policies were met. So, in my opinion, it's reasonable interpretation and there's sufficient evidence. So, do I have a motion to accept the DL 2.7 report? Emotional? I think so. I'll make the motion. Sure. And the second? One second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Legislative update, Lane? Yeah, the two big things. I put my little rant in the report there on the H897. That was the changes to the special education law in terms of funding. And so what they did is they're moving away from, they were signed into law on the 25th. They're moving away from a reimbursement model where every student that we get, about 55% is reimbursed and then if it's above a certain amount, they give us even more, kind of as a circuit breaker, to basically what amounts to a block grant where they look at the number of students that we have and the district as a whole, not special education students, but district as a whole and they use that to determine a set chunk of money that you get for the year. They do have what I call a circuit breaker provision in there which is if you get an exceptional need student that has to go to out of placement, then once you hit $60,000, they'll do some reimbursement but not at the rates that it was. So I did an analysis that was close to a situation that we had last year if we have three students move into district that need to be sent out with emotional disabilities that are such high needs. We can't handle them here. Those students typically run around $100,000 a piece. Under the old way, the reimbursement system, what we would get for those students amounted to mid-70s in terms of reimbursement. We'd have to pay it upfront but we get the money back. Under the new system, it's about 35,000. We get back per student. And then the problem becomes is because the other money comes in the form of a block grant. We can take the money from the block grant to pay that funds for it but if we get too many students, the block grant runs out and then how do we fund spend for the rest of the district. Now what's interesting about the plan from an educational perspective is that if this we're dealing with students with academic needs, it's a beautiful plan because the schools do need to restructure how they're supplying those services for students under special education but the problem is this isn't for academic needs. These high expense students have emotional disabilities. And the types of plans putting into your one interventions into your two are not gonna work for these kids. So you're not gonna see the efficiencies that they're predicting are needed to make this all work. So I have a great fear about that. The plan is set to work into place over the course of five years. So hopefully there'll be some changes between now and the time it comes to full fruition. In terms of the overall budget, I'm sure folks have been following the news. The last piece of legislation that they put forward was H-13. It was intended just to keep things running until they could work out the more contentious issues around education funding. That is expected to also get vetoed by the governor. He's already vetoed two proposals that came forward. So your guess is as good as any. What will happen? I did talk with local representative last week and was not positive. In other words, I asked, is there a light at the end of the tunnel yet? Can you see things working out and no light at the end of the tunnel at this point in time when I spoke with them last week? So things are still completely up in the air with no clear focus on how they're gonna come to some sort of conclusion or resolution. Also in terms of, oh, actually that's a little different but I had, that was the legislative piece. Kind of a slow phase one, two, three to slowly transition it over. I gotta read a little bit more into the details on what it composes. But again, like I said, the big worry for me looking at it is if these are academic issues, beautiful. We're already doing that work anyway on the academic side but it's the behavioral piece. I did talk both with the superintendent's group and with local rep about two pieces of legislation to potentially put up one of them that may help with this. The second one that I spoke of was the idea with the students in DCF, Department of Children and Families. If we have a student that comes in that has broken bones or has obvious bruises, we can call up DCF. They take a look at the student, they're gonna investigate it because they figure the student's gonna be at risk of immediate harm and they may pull the student out of the home and get him into a safer environment. But we have students that come in every day that are aggressive, that bite, that kick, that close down classrooms because it's what it takes to get them back into control whose behaviors clearly come from abuse. And trying to get something on the books that forces them to treat students that behave that way in the same manner they would as a student with a broken bone because if we get those early interventions, maybe we won't be seeing the number of students with the trauma based behaviors on the other end that we've got. So hopefully you see if that has some fruit because I feel they're looking at this problem backwards. You're looking at a problem with behaviors with students in schools as a financial problem as opposed to an educational one. So, just my thoughts. All right, next is the consent agenda. We've got to approve the minutes from our last meeting which is imposed in the agenda packet. And we've got to approve an administrative contract for the associate principal. All this stuff's in there. Staff contracts from the teachers. Jeans are about any of those. Can you tell us who the administrative contract is with? Yeah, they actually, they decided on Katie Sutton who has been in district for six years now as the PBL coordinator. It was interesting. We had a pretty good group for the committee. They started off with six kind of semifinalists that they interviewed and after that first round of interviews they whittled it down to three. They had to meet three or four times because the three were so close. Kind of different, little bit different flavor each one. But they ended up pretty unanimously going with Katie. I mean, she'd been in the position. She'd been serving it in David's absence for a while. And I think the big piece that stood out for her was she had the curriculum background which a lot of them had. But she also had the student background especially working on students in terms of discipline issues and then dealing with the parents with some of the tougher parents and had done a very good job. So that's who they're recommending and I support that recommendation. I'm not serious, I've got your questions. Are we ready to approve the consent agenda? I have a motion. Motion. Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? All right. So we have the superintendent's report which we pretty much covered just now. Are there any other things you wanna add, William? Questions from anyone? We talked about the Azid a lot of it. We touched on the only piece that we didn't was the drinking water issues. So what's happening right now is we've got an engineer who is coming out. They are pumping out the well. They're dropping a camera down there because they feel that there are actually two aquifers. There's a higher level one and a lower level one and they're separated by a nice little capstone. And so the concern is that what's happening is the water from the upper aquifer which is the contaminated water is actually dripping down the well casing into the lower. So the visual inspection is gonna help them determine if that's really going on. If it is, then it may just be a matter of putting in a section of pipe about 150 feet long and packing it off with clay to seal it up just to keep that water from going down into the lower aquifer. So that's what they're trying to determine there. If that comes out positive on the investigation they may just be able to reclaim the well. If not, then we're gonna have to look at drilling. Minimum cost, if everything went perfect is probably in the $30,000 range. And then depending upon how deep the well is can go up quickly from there. Seems like bottled water would probably be cheaper. Over the course of time it adds up, but yeah, you're right. But it'd be nice to see that they can reclaim that. That would be an easy fix. So hopefully that work is ongoing. Hopefully the next time we meet, we'll have an answer. So that is the goal. So August. On July. We've got our retreat, so. We've got our retreat, right. Probably won't have a one meeting now. Right. All right, directors and principals reports were closed, our national report. Do you have anything that you should notice? Our attention. I had thrown out the status of the, just because we hadn't been doing that, where the reserve accounts are. I put that on a separate sheet. Had a couple of comments. We haven't spent anything out of those accounts this year, but we did check on something. I felt that given the potential changes in the special education law, where we get stuck with a set amount of money for the entire year and you don't know who's moving in or moving out, to check to see if it were possible if there's funds left at the end of the year to create a reserve account for special education. And yes it is. And I've included the opinion of Paul Giuliani there. That's included on the back. So if they're assuming there's money left over at the end of the year and we get to that March meeting about talking about the reserve accounts and voting on some money, I'll probably be asking the board to set that aside for special education. And again. Can I jump in and just say I would be vehemently opposed to that? Yeah. And I've discussed some of the reasons for reading, but I think that operating expense, first of all there's no history of this district ever being able to, not being able to cover our expenses. I understand there may be changes in the future in terms of funding formulas and all of that. There are decisions made by all sorts of people about who gets put here for a DCF as a matter of fact in terms and if there are placements made where they think that school districts can absorb significant costs. So if there's some big reserve fund that may be perceived as an invitation that would put us in a position of having to accommodate more situations than the already shoulder which on occasion can be very significant. The other thing is I think it compromises our ability to pass budgets and certainly to get voter approval for putting money into reserve funds for building maintenance, et cetera. If we start creating other surplus money funds that people will perceive will be setting aside for someone other than the school as a whole. So if this is something that you wanna pursue to try to convince the board of, at least I would need to see some pretty convincing information from a pretty global perspective that this would be a good idea. Our auditors have continually for a number of years discussed with us their dislike of surplus funds and the fact that they prefer to see bonding with her building of facilities and that kind of thing. So I would just, so there are no curve balls later on this year, I would expect to see some pretty significant analysis of pros and cons of those issues before I would be willing to be convinced that it would be a good idea to start creating even more of these surplus accounts. They were important for specific reasons and I think keeping them to the ones that we have is what our community wants and expects and just giving you my position on it. I appreciate it. I'm happy, I'll also make sure that I'm talking widely with the community about it during the open forum. So I'll be able to provide the community's feedback as well, so good points. All right, anything else on the financial report? A board evaluation? All that's here, the 835. All right, so we've focused on all the evaluation. You haven't ended on time but we had to remove a section that probably will last a week. So the agenda was well focused, all that stuff, but we just got to work on better starting the lotting, excuse me, time. Everybody was prepared, everybody was listened to other key points and treated each other with respect and courtesy, work was accomplished and atmosphere, trust and openness, all that's good. All right, thanks, do we need an executive session? Okay. Now we potentially had a student issue but which were the requests, the person did? Okay. So the next thing we have is a board training exercise that Jenny will have to perform tomorrow. So when I was thinking about how to do this, I actually came up with some questions of preference for the group, because I can see three different ways we can do this where we could just all together work like a board discussion to kind of answer the questions I found, lots of rehearsals, some practices and the answers which was very helpful, just saying. So we could do it like just having a conversation for 20 minutes at the board meeting, which I'm willing to do what the group wants to do. I was also thinking that we could do like tonight I was planning to do like a small groups thinking even like two or three people, it's a little bit easier to have conversation and kind of scroll through the policies together instead of everybody trying to do it. Sure. Or the other possibility number three was sending these out like two weeks ahead of time. So everybody has a chance to really look at your policies and like for me, I would prefer that way because I can really look at them, think about them and it gives me time to kind of go through the policies. I also know that not everybody has the time and then you would bring whatever you had to the meeting where we're gonna discuss it and then we can have a group discussion because there's been some prep work ahead of time. So my first question would be how folks wanted to do that going forward because I can, we can make it work anyway. What everything's best. I know what I want, that's not necessarily what's best. So you would prefer to do it with, have the scenario and prepare for it on our own. I would prefer to do it with a small group or asking people if they have time to prepare. Cause we could, So would you present it tonight? So for example, I have the answers and I had basically the direction of where to look for them in the policies. And even that took me a little bit of time to find the language. Of course. So it's just a matter of if people want homework or want to try to do it in 20 minutes. And I think we can have a pretty good conversation and kind of come up with the solution for the exercise. Yeah, so I mean, for this time, why don't we? For this time, yeah. Try it. Yeah, try it. Yeah, and then you can give us homework next time. Next time. Also, I went online and I think there's a book that maybe the board might want to consider. It's like a practice book, which is probably where these came from. I have two pages. I apologize, so there's two pages. Okay. That would be fun. I think that would be interesting to go through the book. It's like a three dollar book. So that sounds worth it, yeah. We've got money for a lot for board training, so. So I'll find the link and I'll just send it to you in the fall. Sure. But I think it's basically what it is. And also, I've made two copies of the governance policies but I'm interested in what everybody would have done and it's hard to view what are the policies in front of you. I do have the book here, too, if you need it. You just need to get the book right here. That doesn't have the policy book. This is the policy book. Okay, you got it. I've got policy books on the side. Oh yeah, oh yeah, we do have 2.7. So do we want to do a policy group because it's a fairly small. Sure. There's the other side of us, all right. And does anybody need? And then you can do the policies. Yeah. Do you have one given those yet? Is that giving us on the first day? Probably. You should have. I don't know. I have them on my phone. Well, it's a matter of, if you're choosing to have them in front of you. Seriously, I download them from the website. I don't learn from the OSSU website. So I started with one that's relatively easy. Should she stay or should she? You don't need to stay. You don't have to stay. Here, look at the reactions. You'll let me know the time and get done. Yeah, sure. Actually, if you take the big bag, it'll be my hair out because I've got to drag this back too. You're here right now? So Lane, could you bring back these two since we haven't signed them? Yep, yep. I don't know, I mean, I have them. Yeah, oh, not a problem. Not everyone has signed them as well. Thank you. No, thank you. And then don't forget your diplomas for Hallmark. Thanks. Hey, at least you'd have a graduating class like 450. That's tough. She'd be like delegating some of those to... No, no. She'd be just standing in front of you. Ah. Or an auto, whatever they're calling. No, she'd say like board, it would say board chair or other board member. She'd hand them around the room. So there's a scenario that folks should read or we can write it loud. One is about, so the scenario is revealing an executive limitations monitoring report received in the mail. A board member questions whether the CBO's interpretation is in fact reasonable. How should she address her concern? So the first thing that asks is what has the board already said in this relevant policies? And then it gives you the four sections, which would be ends, executive limitations, board management, delegation, or governance process. Okay. So like this. This is where, yeah. So we... This scenario's all the top. So would we start out with like each policy and go through each of them like policy 2.0? Well, this is where, so we're talking about reasonable interpretation. Would that be in the ends? In other words, did you guys list out what to do in this case and your policies and which policy would it be under? So do we have any policies in the executive limitations defining reasonable interpretation or how we would handle reasonable interpretation? So the executive limitations is what the superintendent can or cannot do. Right. And so you'd guess that that's where we would find. Right. Well, I would argue governance. Governance process, right? Right. I didn't know. I think you guys know this better than I do. I've been reading up on it. Sorry about that. No, that's okay. It's Mack me. So the question is, how should the board member address her concern? Is there an executive limitation that tells the board member how to address? No. Okay. So that leads board management delegation and governance process. So if you wanna look at the, start with the board management delegation, those policies, it's policies, the threes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Would you like me to read those out loud for the other folks in the room who don't have them? All three policies? I can read them. Yeah. I think we don't. I don't think. Okay. You either have to read them all or not and reading them all would be painful. Thank you. Thank you. It doesn't seem painful to me, but that's fine. It would be for the hearers. I hear that. So why don't we start with, if you as a board member had a question about whether the superintendent's interpretation is reasonable, what would you do? Well, I would ask him. And I would review the, all the documenting evidence that he was presenting to me to back up whatever his decision was. And then, I guess I would, if I still did not think his interpretation was reasonable, I think I would go a little, dig a little deeper in his evidence, maybe ask if Robin had even, depends what it was, whether it was a financial thing that I would ask other people who were, perhaps responsible in part for him coming to this conclusion. I think also that we would, as a board, need to, I would present my finding or my understanding to the board and then we would have to discuss it. So if you look into, we're talking about the governance process. This is where this is hard to do in a short time. So in the governance process, the four, we talk about how board members act in ways that they can interact with those, it's hard to do this without giving the answers. So, well, I mean, this is my first time, there it is. I prepped, but it's, they call it a contest, more in comfort. Well, also 4.1, it seems like, we'll cultivate a sense of group responsibility, right? Yeah. And we'll not use the expertise of individual members to substitute for the judgment of the board. So further in, there's also, it talks about CEO monitoring and it talks, sorry, superintendent, I'm so sorry. That's okay. We're fine. We use both language. Interchangeable. We have time. We followed you. You're working with some bright people here. So, if you did all those things and you asked for the evidence and you still had a question about whether, you still didn't feel like it was a reasonable interpretation. Per our policies, you could ask the superintendent for additional information. Per our policies, if the superintendent felt like you were asking for an undue amount of work or whatever, he would probably say no and then request that it be brought to the board for discussion, which makes lots of sense. You also, as a board member, can ask for things to be put on the agenda. So per our policies, which is, 4.3.3, a board member may request an item for board discussion to be put on the agenda. So what they're saying is that if you have a question about this, you can bring it to the board, especially when you think you'd be doing it when that particular monitoring report is being presented. And then you can bring it to the, ask to be on the agenda. And then at the board meeting, the board would discuss whether it was reasonable or not. We also state in our policies that the board is the final arbiter of reasonableness and it's based on, I checked the language because I found this rather interesting because the reasonable person test has to be what your average person would consider reasonable. So even if we all were in agreement that we didn't feel it was reasonable, we would have to back that up by showing like... Most people. Most people would be saying that. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Most reasonable people would be saying that. Not crazy people. Right, so which goes back to the board members being the voice of the people and not being able to bring their own agenda. Personal biases. So, do you want me to just tell you where we go? Well, so for the governance process, it is collective decisions which is 4.1 point E. Well, it's 4.1 and then there's like an E. Oh yeah, up top there. We're the ones responsible for making sure that the superintendent is achieving the ends and staying in compliance with the executive limitations. So this is all within our job. We have the ability to request for something to be added to the agenda by talking to the chair. And then we have a CEO monitoring on our schedule. Makes sense? So for governance process, if you guys want to go back and like look at them later, we're talking about 4.1 E, 4.3 point three and 4.3 point five are the policies that define our governance process for this issue. 4.3 point five. Yeah, it's super monitoring. We'll be included in the agenda according to the board's schedule. I have a different old version. Sorry, I'm down. This is fresh from the website. Yeah, mine's the PDF downloaded from the website this afternoon. Oh, eight. No wonder. I'm struggling here. Adam, board chair, that is not good. Gosh, I'm 10 years. Yeah. Okay, and I think so under the board management delegation, those are the policies 3.1 on. We talked about a lot of these things. 3.4 would say, yes, we can look at things like implementation policies and shift them if necessary. Right, and that's the next thing. We need to talk about that. Right, and so if the board decides that the superintendent's interpretation is reasonable, we have to support him in that. If we decide that, if the board decides that the superintendent's interpretation is reasonable, but we've found, if some reason, like we strongly disagree, we can always change the policy. Like narrow the bowl. So that it's more specific or more limiting, which would limit, would then limit, or yeah, limit the superintendent's interpretation. Which would cause the interpretation to be more in line with our expectation. It would narrow the interpretation, the ability of the superintendent to have an interpretation. So that's like the whole long-drawn out process of what it could be depending on. Without stalling, without getting into means, without telling them, right, dude, this way. Right, right. All right, we want to narrow this down a little bit more. And what's nice about it is it makes sure that it's a collective effort. It's coming from the board, not from, which is good. So all of that is in the board management delegation. So we covered 3.1, which is only the decisions of the board on the superintendent, 3.3, which is allowing the superintendent to use reasonable interpretations. Then monitoring where the judge of the reasonableness, which is 3.4.3, and I can send this out too. And then the board is the final arbiter is 3.4.4. Makes sense. Does, yeah. This is where I think even if people have time to lead the head to kind of scroll through it. I think you're right. I think it's hard to do in 20 minutes to. Look through each one. Do you want me to add a whole job? It would bring up lots of points for discussion. So the next question is according to our policies, does this scenario refer to anything that has been delegated to the CEO? Because we're setting the limitations and so we can't delegate what we're saying. Exactly. Yep, yep. So does this scenario suggest that the CEO is in compliance with a reasonable interpretation of the board's ends and executive limitations policy? That's if yes. So I said not applicable because we're not, yeah. We don't know if they are or not. We just know that a board member feels like it's unreasonable interpretation. And then so if now does this scenario reflect behavior consistent with the board's governance process and board management delegation processes? We seem like if we're having all these discussions then yes. Yep, and it says each board member must decide if the monitoring report it receives demonstrates a reasonable interpretation of board policy. So it's just whenever those, his monitoring reports come up with his interpretation, he wants to read it and make sure that when he goes to approve it he said that it's reasonable. It's a reasonable interpretation and it's supported back there. Yep. So what action of any shape, board or board would take to tell? We already talked about that. Right. And so what the, my fancy answer sheet says is the board member has the right to ask the superintendent for information and should consider doing so. What they don't put in here is that the superintendent does have the power to say you're asking me for a lot of stuff, it feels unreasonable and then we go back to the board. Hopefully we would not do that. The board member will be aware that the board will review the monitoring report at each board meeting and the decision about the reasonableness of the superintendent interpretation will be decided by the board as a whole. And the board member should contact the chair to inform them that they want to discuss it in more detail if they're next board meeting. And the final question is if the action you propose involves a possible board policy change, what amendments or additions do you suggest or what further information do you need before deciding on this change? And we kind of talked about that where it all depends. Right. I mean, we would have to be able to back up our interpretation, I'm not seeing it right. If we feel like it's unreasonable, if we feel like the superintendent's interpretation was reasonable, but we still don't, we still want to adjust policy, we would have to do that. We would have to change the policy in our role. Right, right. If we feel like it is reasonable and the board as a whole agrees that it's reasonable, we just move forward to the next thing. And if we feel like he has an unreasonable interpretation, then we say. Well, that's different. That's where, if the board as a whole says it's an unreasonable interpretation, it would be a discussion at the meeting. I didn't think through that different from the other side of it. If we say it's unreasonable when we'd submit it, like ask the superintendent to. To do it again and make it reasonable. Revise with some guidance. Based upon the policy. Yeah, yeah, return to the policy, I think. We certainly wouldn't approve his model. Certainly right. We might just table it after talking to the superintendent about the different pieces that we'd be looking for. And making sure we're on the same page. Right, yeah. And by he also has the power to say, this is reasonable and it's just a matter of who can back up which for what steps we can take it after, right? Well, I mean, I think having ongoing practice and having really good ideas. Yeah, to figure out what. Having to think through the policies is such a good idea. Yes, I just really think that otherwise, I mean, we don't do it. And so, I propose that you continue to put you in charge every four, three. I think we said three times a year. 24 scenarios that I found. Yeah, you can. You don't mind doing this. Oh, I found them. All I should do is make sure the policies come out, yeah. Could probably go out with the Monday, you know how we have the Monday meeting and then by the Thursday, the materials go out? Yeah. Maybe if we're gonna do them, they go out with the materials, that way people have a couple of things. That would be helpful. That would be really helpful. Yeah, and then we'd become prepared and. And if you don't do one, you don't do one, you can still participate in the discussion. Mm-hmm. It's not the end of the world because you know it's going to be more crazy busy than others. I don't think it's an unreasonable expectation. Not at all. You know, for us to be doing. I enjoy it, so I'm biased. It was fun reading through the policies and finding. Thank you. Yeah. So, Paul, when we look and redo the annual agenda, let's, yeah, let's add those in in a periodic fashion. Okay. To what happens. Thanks, John. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. Now, I do believe. No further business. It is nine o'clock exactly. All right. Perfect. All right.