 Just so, well, I'm happy to answer any budget questions if folks have them. It sounds like most people are here for the homework discussion piece. Any budget questions whatsoever. All this, just so folks do know, I did send out a copy of the annual report. The superintendent's portion of that has a really graphic description of the budget. You know, what we're planning on spending money on, what the impact on taxpayers are. There's a large discussion on the common level of appraisal this year, because everybody's property values went through the roof. And, you know, property values go up, taxes go up too. So, you know, there's a discussion about the difference between the taxes. The school has actually been asking, the district has been asking less from the community over the last two years, each of the last two years. We've been spending a little bit more, but our revenues have gone up significantly more than that. So, the brunt of the taxes that people will be paying this year is because of the change in the property. But again, all that is spelled out. I also will put out like a two-part little kind of essay before the vote, just to kind of explain things again. But if there are questions now or after the homework discussion piece, you know, feel free to ask them because I've got every detail you could possibly want, believe me. Homework, I'm gonna throw this up here. Now, just so, I think the important thing is so people don't freak out. This is a draft. So, in other words, usually, if you're starting with something that's complex and sometimes could be a little controversial, sometimes the best thing to do is kind of pull together kind of a draft that people can look at so that they're kind of grounded in the discussion. And it's an opportunity to kind of rip things apart and ask good questions about why this, why that, to provide that input. We don't like this for that reason or we'd like to see this. This would make things a little bit better. Now, one of the reasons for looking at a homework policy is to try to get the district back to a place where it's doing most of the normal things that normal schools do. There is homework and you guys, as a group could probably tell us a little bit of your experience about it. What most students that we've talked to have said so far is that, yeah, it depends on the teacher. It also depended upon which elementary school we went to. But from your experiences, what have you experienced in terms of homework? A lot, a little, none, depends. Depends on the class. And which classes are you usually? Well, AP classes offer a lot more. Math often offers more consistent homework so that you just practice it more so you can do it faster. English, sometimes you're reading the books. We'll have that for that. History really depends, it'll like, you won't have some and then you'll have to research for it. And so planning for the project and what. So if you were, and again, one of the things that we'll talk about is a little bit of this idea about time on homework. How much time do you actually spend or do you think you actually have spent on average over the course of your time, at least at the middle high school? A lot. So two hours a week, 10 hours a week. This year on homework, well, a lot of this homework I do in school, either in a free period or I stay after school to do it. And I'd say the average day, let me think about that so I'll stay like two periods. So that's like a little bit less than three hours. That's not every day though, that's just like some days. So I'd say, I mean, are you saying like a week? Yeah, over the course of a week, what do you think? Over the course of a week, maybe, I mean, I take AP physics so that's a lot of homework, right? I might have more than some people, less than others, but I'd say coming up on like six hours, and it's just how long it takes me to do it. I think I do my work slower than some of the people. What do you think? I'll be a terrible example, you wanna go? I don't know, because it really depends on my classes. Like APS history, we get like some homework. It sort of varies from week to week depending on like where we are. We had to catch up a lot because of like the missed school time. And then like with math, we usually have like a one worksheet that takes, you know, maybe like 30-ish minutes to do, it's not too bad. But I think the majority of it comes from AP classes and some of my other classes don't really give a lot of homework, but some are like less than classes. But it does really vary depending on the future and on the week. I've found that there's a lot, like when the quarter's ending, like everything will stack up very quickly, but then- Is that homework or work you didn't do that you got to complete? It's like homework or if you wanna redo work to up your grades or like preparing for tests, because you get most of your tests at the end. But like, yeah. And then right after quarter ends, you don't get a lot, because you're more like doing stuff in class and learning new stuff and going over to content before they start like hanging out with homework. But for how much homework I do, a lot of the time I work, I try and finish my stuff in class early and finish my math homework in class. But then for like AP physics, that doesn't happen. So I'd probably say like three or four hours a week, but I do a lot in callback. I stay after school sometimes. And I'd probably spend more so it wasn't as cramped, but I can't request. Gotcha. And so it's kind of helpful as we kind of approach this conversation. And so I'll talk a little bit and give a little bit of the logic. And then I wanna just have a listening session about what people are concerned about, what might be good, what might be bad, or better ideas if they exist out there. The purpose behind homework, it's a way of kind of extending learning beyond the school day, right? And there's this idea that's pretty well researched that the more time that we spend cognating, thinking about what we're learning, spending our time doing some kind of mental mediation on it, the deeper knowledge that we're gonna gain. But more importantly, what happens is when we spend time working through these thoughts and these ideas that we're learning, we start to make connections between them with the other things that we know. And so you end up in the end having a deeper knowledge than what actually was taught in the classroom once those connections are made. And I can give you kind of a perfect example kind of for my own life, kind of going through high school is I had a sociology course and we were talking about rumors and gossip and how they spread throughout a population of students. And at the same time, I was a physics and a geology major in college. And there in the physics, I don't know if you guys have hit thermodynamics, right? Everything moves from hot to cold, everything moves from areas of high concentration to low. And those are two very similar concepts, right? One in a social construct, the particles are the people and the rumors that are spreading and diffusing out across the population are very similar to the particles that are bouncing around in physics that transfer the heat. And so, and that's kind of what I'm talking about about when you spend time with information as simple as it may seem at the very beginning, if you're required to work with it in different ways and for a longer period of time, you start to see how it can connect to the rest of the rest of the world. And so, one of the things that homework can help do if it's well designed is just that. It's giving you time to think deeper about what you're learning. It's allowing you to make more mental connections so that you're actually walking away with more learning that ever happened in the classroom. And so, that's kind of one of the goals behind it. Questions, thoughts, folks that have had a chance to kind of read what the draft is and just kind of feedback. And it's not my job to defend anything or it's just to hear where people are and what they're thinking about. Go ahead. Yeah, I have quite a few questions actually, but I guess just first off is who actually wrote this and on what input? I'll be quick to the last page. Next thing I'm gonna put it up here too. So this was based upon the research of these gentlemen, some of which I actually have worked with personally. John Saffir from Research for Better Teaching and Robert Gower are quite well known across the country. Their work on best practices in classrooms is known worldwide. Patricia Wolfe, who works with the Association of Supervision and Curriculum Development, that is a research organization. She did a lot of work on brain science. Douglas Reeves, who is an interesting fellow who I didn't get to spend as much time with as I hope he actually used to be the coach for my debate team when I was at Swamp Scott, Principal at Swamp Scott. He is a well known researcher. His work has been put into multiple languages across the world. W. J. Postman was a researcher in psychology from the 1960s and he did a lot of work on memory and forgetting and what was called interference theory, how we forget and how we remember. Grant Wiggins and J. McTie, again, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, which is a research organization. So this piece is simplistic as it seems, Drew, from the work of all these folks. Okay, so it's just sort of your interpretation of the general ideas of some of these researchers based on a general body of their work, is that what you're talking about? As well as applying them to the highest performing schools in the country. Okay. I mean, was the input of any of the teachers in the district a part of this coming up with this policy? So this is, again, like I said, so this is a draft policy at this point in time. It's a starting point. So one of the reasons for having these listening sessions and these discussion sessions is to get feedback. So yes, the teachers have been involved. We've talked about it at the cabinet meetings, the principals have been talking with their staff about it. This is the third meeting this month I've had that's been open to everybody on the specific topic. I don't want to take up too much time, but you know, because one of my concerns is I've seen a fair amount of research that's sort of pushing back against homework, especially as far as equity goes and how kids from, you know, especially poor socioeconomic situations actually end up having a harder time and getting lower grades because more of their grades are based on the homework piece where they're not getting the support at home and they're not able to make up that gap while maybe some of the higher performing students might take off and maybe that brings up the school. The whole school's general numbers, but I guess that's part of my question is what is the end goal here? Is it to help students in general or is it to like try and get better numbers? The goal is for the students who leave this school to be able to choose to do whatever they want to do. All students. All students, yeah. And so the equity piece, and we can talk a little bit about this and maybe generate a little bit of ideas, that is a piece that has kind of flown through a lot of the conversations. And so some of the ideas that came up that we actually are trying to build into the budget that's coming up for the budget vote in March is the idea of having the after school activity bus. So the students that may not get the support at home have the ability to be able to stay after school, get what they need, and then we've got the bus to be able to take them home so it's not an additional burden on the parent. There may be better ideas that are out there but that's one of the pieces. The other idea that we talk a little bit about in here related to the equity is this idea that as the students are learning in the classroom, part of what makes the homework quality homework is that most of the students should be able to do it independently. That way they don't have to have that dependence on a parent that's able to help them. And we talk a lot about the ways that that can happen, right? It's based on stuff that they have learned. It's meant for reinforcement and rehearsal. It should be a little bit challenging otherwise it's boring and who wants to do it if it's boring. But yeah, so we've been trying to build pieces in so I'm glad that you brought that up. If there are good ideas that people have about other ways that we can work on the equity piece more than happy to take it down and integrate it. I mean, my first reaction to that idea is if a student has to choose to do the homework club or whatever we're gonna call this program and they can't do some of the other clubs or sports, that doesn't really feel equitable to me. I don't have any other ideas, but. No, but it's a good point. It might just mean adjusting when things happen. Sure. No, it's a really good point. I think, like, how encouraged would like standing after school be? Would that be mandatory? Would that be just an option and how? And so that's a part of the discussion with this idea that part of our work with the students is training you to be successful, right, after you leave school, which means being able to plan, being able to follow through on what you need. And if we do this right, homework isn't about how much time you're putting in each week. It's really about quality work that's gonna advance your learning and your knowledge. So there shouldn't necessarily be a lot of it, but if we're gonna wean it down to what's the most essential, then it would send a very poor message if we let students off the hook for not doing it, right? So part of the plan is to assign less homework for higher quality homework? Potentially, yeah, and could be. So and that's the piece with the homework studies that, oh, what was his name? Did all the correlation studies. John Hattie did was, you know, he did these correlation studies about, okay, if you put in these different factors into a school, here's how well it correlates to advanced performance. And what he found was there was an increase for homework at both the high school and the elementary levels. It was lower at the elementary levels, but the conclusion, and this is what most people mix up, wasn't that homework was bad. It was that the quality of the homework and the activities that the students were being asked to do was poor. And so what you need to do when you develop these homework assignments, these activities for students to do after school is you need a way of tracking what the actual impact of those assignments were on student learning, which we have assessment systems here. I track my progress. You at the high school, middle school level are probably using Star 360. So we're able to actually see what the impact was learning on its real time. And we can tell if that homework assignment or that activity was effective at doing what we wanted it to do or not. And if it's not, it means we change it, right? To make it something. I think on the Star 360 test, generally speaking, there'll be a lot of stuff in questions on those tests that people, nobody at the school has learned in the classes as soon as I design it. Yeah. Yeah, but those, they can be modified. They can be changed. There are different purposes for those tests. So typically what happens, track my progress does the same thing is let's say that these are all the standards that you were supposed to learn over the course that you're all the things you're supposed to learn and the skills you're supposed to acquire. You're tested usually three or four times throughout the year on it. The first test is testing you on all the standards, even the ones you haven't learned before. The second test is testing you on all the standards, even the ones you may not have learned yet. And the final test is testing you on all the standards. And so the hope is, is that we're seeing getting data on the growth. Are they approaching everything they're supposed to learn by the end of the class time? What have they learned? What have they not? What do they still need? But it's also giving us data on the standards that you have covered and that you have learned, did folks learn it at a high level? Did they learn it here? Did they learn it here? So there's multiple layers and there's multiple ways of setting up those assessments to give us data on kind of what's happening. Which is why it's real important for people to take them seriously when they want to take them because of the data that they put in them. So Lane, I mean, so I actually applaud this approach. I've had four kids go through this school, been in the school system at the high school levels in 2011, been attending these meetings and I've progressively seen the homework become less and less over the last several years to a point where most of my kids never came home with homework. And I can appreciate that some of you people have it here but there's so much time during the day that they had for kids to do homework and they never came home with it. So I work in a field that's very STEM focused and I kind of very much appreciate some of the studies you recite because everything we're working towards in artificial intelligence is all about relationship and repetition, right? That's how we get faster decision making in all of the AI technology that we're doing today because we're proving that new synopsis take a while to create but relational synopsis in the brain are very quick to recite and to pull up memories. You can actually store more memories that way. So I can definitely appreciate that. I think the biggest challenge I've had over the years is that I held my kids accountable to their homework whether they did it at school or if they did have it at home which is very few times they do it and then they'd come in the next day and to the point where other kids didn't do it they spent the next class helping the other kids do their homework in those classes. And while I understand the benefit to the kids who didn't do that schoolwork and even some benefit to the kids who did do their schoolwork and trying to teach it, right, there's some benefit there. That slows everybody down. And we're learning way less at a way slower pace in our school right now than we could be learning because people aren't held accountable. And regardless of the social equity or socioeconomic scale, at some point these young people are gonna be held accountable. And if they're not held accountable at a young age and if their parents aren't holding accountable at least they have some accountability in the school system now that says, hey, we have an expectation for you to meet and if not there's consequences and I'm not, I understand it's not a punishment. But there's gotta be some consequences that go along with that because when they're done here whatever step they take next whether it's a job in the trades, job at a local mart, college, whatever it is, military there's gonna be accountability that comes and sometimes that's a little too late to be able to manage it. So I definitely applaud this. As far as the amount of work I'm completely in agreement that it's gotta be quality work. But my concern is that again if the quality of work is at the level that it's everybody can do on their own how are we managing the kids that happen to excel at the learning piece? Is there any consideration of giving them more work or more challenging work? And you guys are gonna hate me for saying this but as a person who happens to be good better at solving problems with me with their mind than they are at trades or doing things with their hands how do we challenge those kids and continue to challenge those kids? So it's not just boring for them. So it's a good question. I can give you some ideas but not full answers and it's something that we need to look at and it's the idea of differentiating for the higher achievers. One of the reasons that we've been bringing in programs that's something that one of the reasons the budgets have been increasing we've got math programs in here now that we brought in. It's $30,000 a year to maintain that at the high school probably equivalent across the elementary schools so we've got a couple of English programs that we brought in. What though having those programs available allow us to do is allow the teachers to much more easily differentiate and provide kind of extended learning for the students that are ready for that at a moment in time. If they gotta create 15 different plans for 15 different kids in class all on their own that's the expectation but it's not realistically possible but if they've got the resources that make it easier to say okay based upon where you're at we can sit you down and have you work through these problems sets or these ideas or these concepts on the software systems that we purchased so that you're advancing at your own pace which is helpful. And so that's a part of the reason for the we've got the bridges and we've got the Carnegie math now here the wit and wisdom and half a dozen other programs now I can't even keep track of them all that they're working on but a lot of it is because the software packages and things come into a lot of attention. The other thing that will make it a little bit easier I think when time comes is as we get better at doing what we should be doing right now we've got this unevenness in the learning of the student body within the high school as we get better at what we're teaching and more consistent about how we're teaching it in the best ways with best practice that unevenness levels out a little bit and then that differentiation becomes a lot easier because you don't have as many students to have to do things special for that are either involved or a little bit. And so that's a goal. So those will come in time but no, it's a very, very good point. So I've got the note down that it's something that we need to continue to take a look at better ways of doing so good ideas, other thoughts, other concerns. I feel like the teacher is asking a lot for the teacher. I'm not opposed to homework and high quality homework but I think it's a little rigid to insist that it be every single night. It kind of precludes them from doing bigger projects where maybe it's gonna take them a couple days to look at it rather than have it feel like kind of busy work because it's every night we have this in the four classes in our four classes. And I find it hard to think that the teachers are gonna have time to then go through and grade every student's homework every night. And if the kids aren't getting feedback on the homework then it seems kind of fruitless. Yeah, we've started a discussion on the importance of the feedback piece. That was at the last cabinet meeting and that's gonna expand as we have these discussions. So the way that this is written, so and I probably freak folks out about it if you flip to the page on the time study. That wasn't put in there, that was hopefully with the two little dots at the bottom we're trying to say. This is not what I am prescribing. I'm not saying kindergarten, not more than 30 minutes if you're in grade seven to eight. All courses will have meaningful homework up to three hours a day. I'm not saying that. This was only put in there to show you what the top performing schools in the country have as policies. I do not believe in time that there's a certain amount of time. What we stated in here after some discussion is we've identified two areas that are probably the most critical for students to make sure that they've learned very well. And so we call them targeted standards and we call them foundational standards. So a foundational standard is, let's say you're in math class and you're in sixth grade. Of all the things that you learn in math class in sixth grade, only some of them are so important that you gotta learn them well because they're gonna be built upon next year and if you don't learn them well, you're gonna be suffering in seventh grade math. So those are foundational standards. So there's a lot of stuff you should be familiar with, but there's probably six, maybe seven learning standards that you really need to know down pat if you're gonna be successful in your later classes. And so I would argue that that is an area that there probably should be some sort of independent learning activity, a homework activity, whatever we wanna call it that goes along with it because we need to reinforce those and make sure that the students know them really well. Because if we don't, they're gonna suffer down the line because they're not gonna have the foundation they need to build upon. The other area, and this will start up a little bit, we'll start identifying what are called targeted standards next year is we have the testing systems and if the state ever releases the last round of data which isn't gonna be very good because of COVID anyway, but we have our testing data. So we know that when I taught this math class of all the standards that the students were supposed to learn these are the ones that they didn't learn too well, right? Those would be targeted standards. In other words, we've got to do a better job of making sure that the students will learn these because historically when we look at our testing data, these are areas that have always been weak. And so those are areas that it would be appropriate to assign meaningful independent work and homework to really kind of reinforce the learning that goes on there. With the targeted standards, however, it also means that the teachers need to sit down and have a discussion about why are the students not performing as well as we'd hope because we taught them, we used really what we thought were really good activities but for some reason they didn't learn it. And they have to have that rich discussion and decide what different activities that they're gonna try in the coming year to try to make sure that the students connect with that. So if I'm the one making the argument, I would argue that in those two cases, targeted standards, foundational standards, there should be independent work. Other than that, it's up to what the teacher feels is necessary or important for their class. But again, that's my opinion and this is about your opinions. Yeah, I'm fully in favor of like increasing the quality and making homework more meaningful. But I guess what I'm really apprehensive about is having a policy at the top down and I don't actually understand, like this doesn't really have any teeth at all. What is the enforcement mechanism? Is it against, like if a teacher is not, like how are you even gonna judge if teachers and students are following this policy or not? Well, one of the things that we did is we start to look at what's happening within the school for the feedback sessions. We were talking about feedback is important. We wanted to take a look at what feedback that students are currently getting. And so as administrators, we went in, we talked with the teachers, we looked in the grade books to see what they were assessing students on and whatnot. And what we found was at least in this current state right here and now, was there is a lot of assessment going on. The teachers are recording really good data, but it's not consistent. So that's piece one. There's not consistency about it. Where they're recording it is in all sorts of different places and it's not so much being used to provide meaningful feedback to the students about their performance as it is to provide feedback to the teacher about how the students are doing. And those are two completely different things. If we're not providing that feedback directly to the students, there's a lot of things that are lost. They're not gonna grow in terms of the learning that we want them to do, but it also sends a pretty strong but unintended message to a child. If you go into a math class and you studied really hard and you get a 35% on the test and the teacher gives it back and never checks in with you about it or says anything about it, I can't imagine a student would feel very good about that. You know, why if I perform so poorly, isn't somebody saying something to me? You know, is it because they don't think I can do it? Is it because so, you know, it's important to get that feedback for a variety of reasons. But if they're not giving it consistently now with a little homework that they're getting, how are we supposed to expect that they're gonna now do a better job when there's more homework than every single one? So the reason I would argue, it's an incredible question and it goes back to what you're saying. Why this? Because there is inconsistency. Policies and protocols go into place for that purpose, right? Because now we can place an expectation that, yeah, you know, the expectation, once we decide on this together, you know, at a minimum, it's when there's foundational and when there's, you know, targeted standards or whatever it is that folks collectively decide. And then at that point in time, we've all decided what the expectation is. The expectation is clear and then we can hold people accountable. It seems like with the teaching teacher shortage right now that we wouldn't, as a district, wanna be making the lives of our teachers harder. So I would rather we focus on increasing the learning that goes on in the classroom, increasing the quality of it. Like seventh grade English right now listens to an audio book. They don't read in seventh grade English and they can't take the books home because there aren't enough books to go around for the students. So that seems like something we could be prioritizing, making sure students have enough books where they're actually picking up a book and doing some reading and not listening to an audio book during English class. I'd like to say something on that. I think that I agree mostly with your points but on the top of the audio books, I have a friend who has severe dyslexia. He has never taken an English class until this year and he's an AP literature. He has listened to many, many, many audio books like Class X, Hemingway. And he is doing very well. He's excelling in AP literature. I think that an audio book is, for some students, a completely valid way. I think I agree with you. For some students, it's gonna be a valid way but there's also reading is an actual exercise that you need to practice to get good at. And I think that students in middle school and high school should be reading books. I mean, in elementary school, he read every night and now he can't bring an English book home because there aren't enough to go around. They better have them because I just paid a few hundred thousand dollars last year for them. So that would have to be a check-in on that individual teacher in that individual class but I know that Catherine Fredericks is working very closely with the teachers to make sure they're all on target and on task in terms of that work. So it's concerning to hear it's worthy of further investigation. The homework piece, the best practice piece, yes. You're right on spot and that is work that's been ongoing. But again, the homework piece is a part of just doing what normal schools do. It should not, I would argue it should not necessarily be considered an extra burden on teachers because it's what is normally expected of teachers. For some reason within this district and it's one of the things that we talk about in cabinet, there are a lot of things that this district doesn't do that normal schools historically have. And so some of it is trying to bring that up but I can speak to the heart of her question about like making- Yeah, I may have missed that. Yeah, go ahead. I really want to. Thank you. Ideally, practice work that's sent home or homework is an extension of the class that logically leads to the beginning of the next class and it's possible that many of our staff need professional development on this and I just wrote it down as make sure if we roll this out, we give them that too. So what I mean by that is it shouldn't be that when you come into the class, I collect your homework and put it in a bin for me to grade later. Rather it should be get out your homework. That's the first exercise we're going to do as a class. Like as a class, we're gonna look over your problem solving or we're gonna talk about the short story you read last night. That's the beginning. And so the feedback happens right there and it's not now busy, you know, something additional for me to do. It's become an extension of the class. Students come in ideally ready to learn the next thing. That's the first activity. It actually makes it so that you teach easier from bell to bell because you have something right at the beginning, already ready. You know what you're gonna do, right? You have time to take your attendance, do it and launch into your next thing and then at the end, your exit ticket is here's your thing to take. So if it's done well and teachers are prepared to do it well, it shouldn't feel like an extra thing but rather better use of all my instructional time. So we have to set our intention not just with building this policy but repairing teachers to do it well and building out this after school supports so that if students do need to stay after we feed them, we give them adequate support. It feels comfortable and transport them home. And hopefully it doesn't feel like a consequence. Right, but it would have consequences if they wanna do extra curriculars. I mean, a lot of times the buses are leaving shortly after the school day gets out and if you're on the basketball team, you're going to the JV game and you're going to the varsity game and you might be up in Lake Region or Linden or Lamoille and you're getting home as it is at 10 o'clock at night and then to sit down and be like, well, now I have two hours of homework and so now they're going to bed at midnight then you have to weigh kind of the pros and cons of like, yeah, they got their homework done but now they're short on sleep because they stayed up late doing their homework. So I guess my disagreement was in the thinking that it has to be done every night because in preparing them for the real world, part of that preparation is time management. And when kids get an assignment and they get it on Tuesday and they're like, it's due on Friday, they have to map out. They have to know what their work schedule is, what family commitments they might have, what sporting events they have and figure out when they're gonna get stuff done and there's value in that rather than being like, I know every single night I'm gonna have these two hours of homework. I have something to add on to that. Yeah, and I'm just writing down the notes just so we can discuss what we have and we'll be back when this goes good. Well, you keep saying that like, this is what normal high schools do but the one thing I would say to that is that we're not a normal high school. I wouldn't say we're an average high school especially considering the two teachers I have that teach the majority of my classes teach five or six classes, at least one of which is an AP class which is quite vigorous and even if you don't miss days like we did that entails like a lot of work. And so while homework is like, I think an average teacher does assign, our teachers have extra work opposed to say average teachers but also like the every night thing for math we get homework just about every day after school or every day at the end of class. And there's like days I cannot do that. I either get it done in class or I get it done before the class starts but last year there was a lot of times during the winter, during wrestling where I would have class on Monday and then have class on Tuesday and it would be due Tuesday and I could not do it. And there's just a lot of sports like that where in one night you do not have the time whereas if you have school on Tuesday and it's due Thursday, you have two nights to do it. You have two maybe free periods or like for the juniors two days a week, we had 30 minutes after lunch instead of our junior academy. So can you expand on why you couldn't get it done Monday? I'm just curious. I mean, you get out of school at 2.20 right? Wrestling practice can't be more than two hours. So say that's six hours you have kind of after school to the time you go to bed if it was a normal whatever. It depends on the sport. I play lots of sports. But in the fall, I could have a soccer game where I leave right after practice if it's in Linden. I don't get back until eight or nine. I would like to shower and eat. If it's wrestling. First of all, you would, but no, just reflect. If I have wrestling and it's during the week that means it's a meet. Sometimes we leave before school ends or pretty soon after school ends and those last a very long time. I'm lucky if I get back by 10. Yeah, no, I understand the sports travel thing, but right practice can't be more than two hours a night or something. So I would assume that most nights there's plenty of time. Yeah, I will have... I'm just curious. Yeah. So it's a sports related thing that that would be preventing you from going to the gym. I do not have a job. Most of the time I do not have to take care of my little brother. Sometimes I do. But say normal practice for track is right after school. So if I was going to go to practice through right after school homework would not be an option. But like for soccer, it starts at 430. So I could even just stay after school and then go straight to practice or I could go home. And yes, for most practices, I would have time. Yeah. So it's the game night kind of thing that presents the most challenges? Usually, yes. But if you have a job or... No, I understand. I was just wondering your example. Yeah. What you were trying to say. I think it's also important to think about how even if you have a sports or something or a theater or something or you get home later. And even if it's not like you're getting home at 10, if you're getting home at like 7 or something, it's still hard to then have to sit down and do work. Like you have to eat food, shower. You want to say hi to your family. You're tired from the day. You've just been doing school all day. I feel like it's also important to consider students' mental health in that way. Being sure that you have some rest because you're just constantly going all day. It burns you out so quickly. And then it's hard to then do... Like then if you've been given quality homework, it's hard to give it what you could. Yeah. Just stress out. You're tired. You've been going all day and then you have to do more homework so then a lot of students end up half-assing it. And it's not fully effective. So the note I took and make sure that this captures is this idea of reasonable flexibility. Mm-hmm. Does that make sense? Like it's part of your classroom management plan. Well, it's also connecting with the teachers and saying, hey, it was due Tuesday, but given... I'm looking at my schedule and I know I can't get it done by then this Thursday or Friday, okay? And the teachers would have a responsibility to be reasonable about that. I don't think that is a possibility. Yeah. Just kind of... I mean, it goes back to what I was saying before and maybe I didn't make my point clear enough, but it's sort of, again, my concern is this top-down approach and it's unclear what the mechanics are here about how this is going to be enforced. But I guess my concern is, while it seems clear that what you're trying to do is create better homework, what I'm worried about is just creating another box that teachers have to check, which could actually lead to creating just more busy work. Exactly. Instead of doing the opposite, which is what we're trying. And I'm also concerned that the more restrictions there are like this, the less teachers have the ability to do what they're supposed to do, which is to use their training to create lessons the way they do it. Say you have a stellar teacher who assigns very little homework, but gets the job done very well and you have another teacher who assigns tons of homework, but it's low quality homework. Like how do we, I just don't see how this actually achieves any of that. The structure that is being built is a hierarchy with department leaders, with grade team leaders that are trained to have the discussions about taking a look and facilitating discussions with their teams, about taking a look at the data that is coming that they're collecting from the work that their students are doing. Using that to be able to kind of determine what needs to be adjusted, what needs to be tweaked, what activities need to be upgraded and upped on, and then the expectation that the team, as a team is carrying them out together. And so there is a hierarchy piece that is being built and is built into the budget for next year as well to be able to pay those things for it. So we're talking about teams of teachers getting together, looking at the statistics that they're getting from their students and saying we need to adjust how you do it. Based upon what we're seeing, so we all worked on these three learning standards this last week. This is how the students did on them. It looks like they did okay. It means that it's okay for us to move on to the next piece or, oh, this is a really important standard and it looks like the student didn't do well on this. We need to stop for a moment and figure out why and try something different to make sure that they learn it before we move on. And that usually means adjusting the learning activities that the students have presented in the classroom. And so they try to find a better way of doing it. And so it actually builds into a whole system that informing professional development because there are gonna come times where those teams are gonna be working on having the students do better on some learning that they're struggling with. And no matter what they try as thoughtful and as good as it is, it's not gonna have an impact. That's when the communication comes back to us as the kind of overseer kind of curriculum folks, they're giving us the feedback on what they need PD on. We're having trouble with these three concepts. We've tried all these things, it's not working. So it either comes down to we need some training on the concepts themselves or maybe we go visit a school where they do this really well and we learn the learning activities that they're using. And so it provides us with that feedback to develop the professional development plan for the teachers, but it's the teachers that are telling us what they need as opposed to us doing it. Well, I guess the note I would like you to take then is I was like all that information in here so people can actually understand how this policy is supposed to actually work and be implemented. Yeah, there's a couple of different parts and pieces that will all come together at one point in time. At the beginning of the year, there is a eight phase learning program piece that we are working on. Part of it is getting the curriculum documents up to speed to where they should be and tied to the common core. It's getting the assessment systems up and running. It's developing that hierarchy of teacher leaders within the building to carry on this work because this really should be the work that they're engaged in. We need to train them to do it and step back and it just becomes a part of culture. So there was a whole part, eight phase kind of learning plan that we're putting into place to create a learning program and this is just one of the phases. One of the phases is also talking about assessments. Are we assessing kids properly? Are we assessing them enough as it giving us the information that we truly need to be able to do this other work that we're finding that should be very valuable and important. So half, just another perspective maybe to consider one of the things that we've been sitting in this room having. Yeah. Apologize. My guess is it's- May I have your attention please? May I have your attention please? A fire has been reported in the building.