 Good afternoon everybody thanks for coming. So my name is Trevor Vance-Arron, I'm the principal of Lakedale School. With Wataskan Regional Public Schools, my school is a K-6 school. We have about 117 students who are really small. We've got a kindergarten, a one, two, a two, three, a four, five, and a five, six. And my team is made up of myself as a principal, I've got a full-time learning support teacher, Musco Chizuokoro and Liaison that we share half-time. As well as our admin assistants, some EAs, about seven teaching staff in total. Okay so that's talking about something that we brought in this year but it's been a long time coming. We have a smudging room that we actually officially opened. Kids, students started smudging November 1st and we really wanted to take it slow, be purposeful. So to prepare for this we spent most of last year we brought in another school from our district, their student smudging leaders taught our students smudging leaders. We had multiple teachings from our elders and our Musco Chizuokoro Liaison, Dawn, she guides the students but it's actually the students themselves that are leading the smudging every day. So it's been very popular and it's critical that we have students smudging leaders because they are owning what's happening in our school. There we go, little time delay. So these slides are not very fascinating but what this shows is I was asked to speak here today because of the eliminating the achievement gap and that's something we've had some success with at Lake Del and one of the things that has led to that is we monitor student progress. So I meet with the teachers, since we're as I shared, we're a small staff, I meet with the teachers, I rotate every Wednesday morning, I meet with a different teacher and then every Friday morning the teacher meets with our learning support teacher and we talk about student needs. What do we talk about? Well this is exactly it right up here. We talk about students that are below, students that are at, students that are excellent, we focus on what are their challenge areas and what interventions are we doing. You can see in green, I mean this wasn't a document meant for a presentation, this is shared with our classroom teacher, our learning support teacher, our Musco Chizuokoro Liaison, myself and so we use this to figure out what our interventions are going to be through our flex box and we make changes. The most exciting thing for me is as you can see down here, we've got September, October, so it works out through the month. When I can move a student, when the teacher tells me because it's teacher professional judgment, when they tell me that a kid has moved up from below up to at, that's just awesome like just to see that, that grow. So we don't have any surprises at the end of the year when it comes to our provincial achievement test in particular for grade six because well we know where they've been at all year long. We know what we've been doing and we know why they're successful or maybe what they're having challenges with. Second thing we do is we also monitor student attendance. Now this document, Brian hasn't actually seen either. This is actually new this year that we added in and what it is is we've grayed out obviously the student names. So very time consuming but again small school. At the end of each month I go through and I run through our attendance. I print it all off. I look for patterns. I look for family names and then each month I track the rates and then this part right here, this is actually the most important part. This is where teachers have to do a small amount of work. The document is shared with them via Google. They go in and they just insert comments because the teachers aren't waiting for me to contact the parents. They're just giving me the information. They're saying, yeah, actually I checked with that kid. We talked to them last Tuesday. They're sick or mom and dad separated or whatever is going on in the students' lives. They put that in so that we understand what's going on. It's color coded by family so that each, so this is shared amongst all the teachers so that teachers don't have to make extra phone calls. They can talk amongst themselves with each other just to track. So it's really, I mean it's just a spreadsheet but that's what we're doing and the families are really appreciating the fact that the teachers are reaching out to them, contacting them. That relationship is strengthened. They know that we care about them. Collaborative culture. So Lakedale School works very closely with our friend Fallen School down the road. We've also added in Pipestone School and what I shared here is just again just a simple document but this is actually this key message here. This is what we're working on at the three schools. Provide time for collaboration on formative assessment best practices. This could possibly mean RTI tier one instruction, connecting to prioritized learner outcomes, subject specific topics such as writer instruction, daily five, daily three. So the teachers are getting together again because we're a small school. It's pretty lonely talking to yourself. So and then this document here again looks very boring. This is a big success for our schools. What this represents, this is like the back end of Maplewood on the database side. And what these are is these are the bins right here. And what we've actually established, whoops, if I don't trip, is for language arts, these are common grade book categories all across my school, all across Pipestone School and all across Fallen School. I didn't create these. The teachers all got together and they agreed that these are what we're reporting on so that on a small scale, yeah, we have a common report card, but where we're moving forward, we've got a common grade book, we've got a grade book strategy so that we can use that to drive student instruction. Okay, same thing for math. And this is actually going to be different next year, because at our last collaborative PD day, we tweaked it, we changed it, it's updated. So the teachers own this. So the teachers have very high expectations for themselves. They're collaborating with each other. And that's what we've been doing to focus on eliminating our achievement gap, Lakedale School. So I'll turn it over to Brian Tai. He's our associate superintendent instruction. Thanks, Trevor. So this slide is titled 400 years. The work that Lakedale School is doing hasn't been done without some challenges. And one of the biggest challenges is people have questions about what are we doing and why are we doing it? And those questions are coming from not just indigenous but non indigenous peoples. So we had an opportunity to meet with elders and respected leaders in the musketeers community. And we asked them what they thought. And and in a very respectful way, they laughed at us. They said, we've been dealing with the challenges that you're presenting to us for 400 years. You're not going to make a quick impact. You need to be in this for the long haul and keep your eye moving forward. So what do we take away from that? We're not going to get things right in a hurry. We need to learn together. People need information. We need to assume the best but be prepared for the challenges. We need to and the school is addressing a sense of belonging. It's addressing how to have high quality teaching. And it's emphasizing a school wide approach. We have a collective responsibility for our kids. And you can see in the presentation the way that we're operationalizing that indigenous knowledge is valuable. There's no qualifiers on that. We can learn from our kids. Schools have to be places of learning that has to be the focus, everything that we do need to connect back to that. The gap that we're impacting is the gap between good intentions and actual work. We used to talk a good story, but we're actually working hard now. And Lake Dale School is really finding a way to be focused and responsive. So thanks.