January 22, 2020 — Meeting Transcript

Machine-generated transcript — may contain errors.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right.

I want to call the meeting to order. I'm told I need to use this gavel, so I'm going to gavel us in to order. So let's say that act becomes its beginning. I'm going to start with the Pledge of Allegiance, and Jen is going to select somebody to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Please. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, so we are really excited that we are at Captain Elementary. I do want to say, you noticed that some of the board members are eating, so we apologize for that.

We came a little early to take a tour. And for at least two of us up here, this is our alma mater. So it's kind of fun to take a tour and you guys haven't gone here. Oh, sorry, three.

So it really, Really, really fun, although it has changed a little. So I guess we starting with the presentation from our students And over to you Good evening everyone My name is Jennifer Martin and I have the privilege of serving as principal of this amazing learning community Self-regulation is something that we continuously work on whether we're cognizant of it or not. We all encounter trying circumstances from time to time and if we are able to recognize when we are experiencing one of those trying circumstances, We are able to become regulated. We are able to do something about anything that we're feeling that might cause us to be dysregulated and manage our feelings and get ourselves back into a healthy place.

This is a skill that needs to be taught and practiced. This is the goal of Zones of Regulation. This year here at Captain, our teachers introduced to all of our students the Zones of Regulation, or the Zones for short. This is a universal tool that provides common language for all students kindergarten through fifth grade.

The Zones is a systematic, cognitive, behavioral approach used to teach self-regulation by categorizing all the different ways we feel and the states of alertness that we experience The Zones Framework provides strategies to teach students to become more aware and independent in controlling their emotions and impulses, managing their sensory needs, and improving their ability to problem-solve conflicts. This evening, Captain's students are excited to share with you how they use their learning with the Zones of Regulation. Please welcome Riley, Khan, and Lauren to the stage. Good evening, St.

Louis. This is Riley Adams coming to you from Channel RMC. You can always trust me to bring you the latest highlights and news stories around town. Tonight, I am at a location at Ralph M.

Kaplan Elementary School to learn firsthand from their students about the zones of regulation. With me is 5th grade students Lauren and Con. Lauren, what exactly are the zones of regulation? Thanks for asking Riley.

There are four zones or categories that make up the zones of regulation. Each zone is identified by a color and our feelings and states determine what zone we are in. Let's take a look. The red zone is used to describe extremely elevated levels of alertness and big feelings and emotions.

A person may be overly excited or experiencing anger, rage, sadness, or terror when in the red zone. The yellow zone is also used to describe an elevated level of alertness and big emotions. However, one has more control when they are in the yellow zone. A person may be experiencing stress, frustration, anxiety, excitement, silliness, the wiggles, or nervousness when in the yellow zone.

The green zone is used to describe a calm state of alertness. A person may be described as happy, focused, content, or ready to learn when in the green zone. This is the zone where optimal learning occurs. The blue zone is used to describe low states of alertness and down feeling such as when one feels sad, tired, sick, or bored.

The zones can be compared to traffic signs. When given a green light or under green zone, one is good to go. A yellow sign means be aware or take caution, which applies to the yellow zone. A red light or stop sign means stop, which in the red zone this is often the case.

The blue zone compares to rest area signs where one goes to rest or re-energize. All the zones are natural to experience, but the framework focuses on teaching students how to recognize and manage their zone based on the environment and the people around them. For example, playing on the playground or in an active or competitive game, students are often experiencing a heightened internal state such as slowness or excitement and are in the yellow zone, but it may not need to be managed. However, if the environment is changed to the library where there are different expectations than the playground, students may still be in the yellow zone but have to manage it differently so their behavior meets the expectations as a library setting.

This is great information, but how exactly do you manage the zone? Captain students have developed tools and skills they can use. Let's check out how this works. Here's Andrew, Owen, Sandy, and Anaya to tell us more.

The red zone is a place where you might feel terrified angry or over I mean out of control You oh yeah you need to stop and reset To do this you can either count to ten practice deep breathing or just go somewhere else to calm down When you're in the yellow zone, you may feel excited, anxious, or silly. A tool I like to use when I'm in the yellow zone is the sensory area. My favorite tool in the sensory area is the line walk. The line walk may seem pretty easy when you're in the green zone, but when you're in the yellow zone, it takes a high level of brain power and focus.

Using that high level of brain power and focus, you can pull yourself back into the green zone. The green zone is the best place to apply your growth mindset. Strategy I use is self-talk to put myself up. I say stuff like, you can do it, or you're almost there.

If I feel like I'm going toward another zone, I'll take a walking lap to keep myself in the green zone. The green zone is the best place for learning. When you are feeling down, sad, or bored, you are in the blue zone. In my class, we have a calming corner where you can take a break or use a strategy to get back into the green zone.

When I'm in the Blue Zone, I like to distract myself by thinking of a happy memory or reading a book to get back into the Green Zone. This has been very informative. Thank you. I just have one more wondering.

Adi, can you explain to our viewers at home what the Sensory Walk is here at CAPT? Sure, Riley. The Sensory Walk was designed by Capt. C.

Taylor and Occupational Therapist Ms. Henry. They designed it for students to manage their zones. Research shows that our brain powers enhance with physical activity and movement.

The coordination and concentration required helped us focus and learn. This sounds like it helped create a cultural mentor wellness. You're right. This indoor motor sensory pathway allows any student immediate access to tools that help them build self-regulation skills.

It is located right at the top of stairwell D. Be sure to check it out before you leave. Thank you, Adi. It is evident Captain Elementary values learning and teaches students to understand and meet their own unique learning needs.

This sounds like a school I want to go to. This is Riley Adams signing off from Channel RMC. School Board, back to you. That was awesome.

Thank you all. Let's give another round of applause. Thank you very much. Really cool.

So public participation is next. Do we have any? Looking for credits. Okay.

All right. So we do not have any public participation. So we're going to move on to superconductive communication. All right.

Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I just want to give our parents and audience, first of all, I want to say thank you to our students again. That was incredible.

Thank you for giving us some more information about the zones of regulation. And it was great to go upstairs and tour and see some of these tools that you're using to regulate yourself. And really thank you for explaining it so well to our board. And very creative.

I think we have a future newscaster over there. So thank you. So I want to say good evening everyone. You know, I get to be a part of many great opportunities as part of this district, and tomorrow I get to be part of an opportunity where I am going to go see our CHS symphonic band and our bravo dance groups perform.

And so I did get to go see a sneak peek today of our symphonic band. And I just wanted to share with you just something that was really unique that they were doing. And I'm not sure if the board was able to hear this, but as part of our Clayton Education Foundation, they wrote a grant to get a piece commissioned by a musician to have an original piece. And the piece was commissioned and inspired by Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird.

And so what's really neat about this is that the piece is absolutely beautiful. They were connecting it to some of the literature that the students have read. And then the other thing that is amazing is that the woman Mary Ben who played Scout in the original movie is actually narrating a piece during the performance So I got to meet her today We start struck with her So I just think that it was amazing that our students were able to you know they were able to do this Our teachers thought of this creative idea and have this experience So I going to be really happy about being able to go down there tomorrow and support them In the board memo last week, I told you that I got to go to the Transformational Leadership Institute where Michael Bullen was speaking. And again, I'm just being starstruck.

He's somebody that I have read about, read many of his books over the years. The board read his book, The Governance Core, Coherence, Deep Learning. And he really was challenging educators to approach learning in a different way to address disengagement, inequities, and making sure we're taking care of the well-being of our students. And one of the quotes that he shared I thought was just really great.

It says, if we want learners who can thrive in turbulent and complex times, apply thinking to new situations, and change the world, then we must reimagine learning. And I think it's really important as we think about some of the work we're doing around our strategic plan, we have the capacity to reimagine learning. And the direction that we're moving will cause us to think differently about our instructional practices, giving students more voice, and thinking about different ways to measure success. We want students to feel safe and confident and valued.

We want to make sure that they have a personalized and equitable learning experience where they can achieve personal growth in their social, emotional well-being as well as their physical well-being. So tonight, we are going to be talking about our assessment report. And our assessment report does give us a lot of data to tell us how our students are doing. But it doesn't capture everything.

And I think that that's one of the things that we need to think about as we move forward is like, what are the ways that we truly measure success? And so this assessment report is a way that we hold ourselves accountable and it informs our work. This data is really integral to our work in that we're constantly asking ourselves, how do we know we're having impact in growing our students? The larger scale data that you saw in the report is used to evaluate our overall achievement and to influence our curriculum development, our pedagogy.

And the more localized data at the school level will inform instructional decisions, interventions, and supports. So tonight's going to be an opportunity for the board to check in about where we are as a learning community. And Melita is going to present the big picture perspective. Since we have some new data around the social-emotional well-being of our students, we've asked Robin to join us at the table as well, and she's going to talk a little bit about some new measures that we're using that can influence some of the ways that we can better support the social-emotional learning needs of our students.

We then also have our principals here, who we are very grateful that they're here today, to support and talk a little bit about how they use the data more locally to inform decisions in the classrooms. Superroportionate, Proprietary, and Proprietary. Recommendations for the upcoming school year. And it's going to be an opportunity for the board to ask questions again and to give input about that would be helpful to her in the budget development.

And lastly, I was going to talk about, I told you it's my new favorite four-letter word, snow. And so it has been, I just want to say that, you know, the decisions to close school around inclement weather are ones that are very difficult. And I never want to close school. I never want to, even though I have lots of emails from students that sometimes say they would like us to do that.

But we have to base decisions on the information that we have. Last week we got some information that it was going to be very, very treacherous. And when we're thinking about the treacherous weather and thinking about our students and then on buses, we have to think about our students walking, students driving. We have to think about our teachers coming from different locations.

And so we make the decisions in the best way we can. And we're not always right. And last Friday was an example of that. I want to just share publicly that we do really, the primary focus is the safety of our students.

And so, I just want to say that publicly, is that we really do try to make sure that we're not missing a day. And I try to be a holdout on that as much as possible. But sometimes we just have to make a decision that's in the best interest, what we think is in the best interest of the students. I just want to share that with you.

I sometimes, like tonight, I'm reaching that yellow zone because I keep getting these buzzes on my phone saying there's a new weather report and I know there's going to be something for tomorrow morning. So I'm going to try to move back to green zone on that. So thank you so much and I really do appreciate the boards coming earlier to the school visits because it's important for our students and our staff to share the great things that are happening and I really appreciate you giving that extra time to it. So, I'm going to turn it over to Adam to see if there's anything that he has in terms of student board report.

Yeah, so first was that was an unbelievable tour and it was so nice to be back and just being in this space and feeling that happiness. It's really a happy place for me to be back at Captain and I loved it to be here. I wanted to talk a little bit about, the first thing was when I met with the district advisory council to talk about the panorama scores and we looked at, we wanted to look at the panorama scores first as they were really interested and excited about that new assessment. And so it really was apparent as we were walking around today why we were doing so well in our third through fifth grade classrooms in self-management, in self-advocacy, and in social awareness.

And it's really evident in everything that we're doing here at the elementary schools, and it was just neat to see that in practice. The other thing I wanted to talk about was we're starting to be getting into transition time. So that means for our eighth graders, they're going to be coming into the high school soon and touring and getting to sign up for classes and go through that whole process. In addition, seniors are really finalizing that college process, which is always a huge deal at the high school.

And then I also want to talk about, most importantly, this huge opportunity that our government and our Globe students, So Glovis, our school newspaper, just had an opportunity to go to the Iowa caucus and talk to Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren. And Sarah Freeman asked a question on the environment to Joe Biden, and she said that he gave a thorough five-minute response. And it was just really amazing to be one of those young people up there in the audience and asking a meaningful question. And they all had an amazing experience.

One thing they talked about was visiting Andrew Yang's offices and just kind of going around and knocking door to door. And trying to get some more information there. And they said it was a great learning experience in fostering that young leadership. And so I just thought that that was a really amazing opportunity that our young students had.

Thank you. So we're going to move on to item 6.01, which is our measures of student achievement. Do you want to say something first? Can I ask something about it?

You can. Okay. I was wondering, I think it's great that your student reps are meeting. I was wondering if the board could get just kind of the names and maybe a little blurb about why they decided to do that.

Because I know we really talked about wanting to have a diverse group. I was hoping I was going to ask during board communications, I was going to see if everyone wanted to come to our next meeting. Or maybe spacing it out a few at a time because we would love to have you all. We just kind of finalized and that was something I talked about with them at the end was if they feel comfortable yet with having folks come in.

I know Dr. Gordy's been to a meeting, but I wanted to make sure that they felt ready, and they said that they're ready to start having folks come in. So that was something that I was coming up. And I think the other thing that Adam shared tonight is that he's assigning note-taking to the students as well, and then he's going to be, after each meeting, share that out with the rest of the students as well.

Good question. So 6.01, we have one information item in the visual student achievements for the 19-20 school year. So I guess that's the laying of the ground. Oh, and the principal's shift?

Everybody's coming up? All right, everybody, come on up. And just a reminder, this is an information item put purposely as an information item because this is really more of an update. Not that we can't ask clarifying questions or think of any questions.

What's that? It is just all the stuff, right? Yes, yes. .

Thank you Good evening Is that, so you still have to project, it's not going to, it's for the, it's for the Good evening. So the purpose of our presentation tonight, like Sean said and like Joe said, is that it's an informational item. And so the report that was submitted to you has a lot of information in it. I'm not going to go through each assessment and talk through each assessment because I feel like we've done that within the report.

So really what What we're looking at tonight is to give you a picture of large scale assessment data used by the state and then by the district. And then to share how that data informs our instructional decisions at the school level and at the classroom level. And so that's why the principals are here. And Jamie Jordan is traveling with a group of teachers right now to High Tech High and so Tarita Rimes is here in her place.

So thank you Tarita for coming. So I'm going to start by talking just a little bit about lifting some things out of the report for And so the annual performance report, which is really the report that we get from the state, that gives a very broad brushstroke picture of where we stand in relationship both to state standards and then we can compare some of that data in-house. And it really focuses on three areas. So the idea of status, so the school district achievement, and that's based on a three-year average.

And so when we look at our status in comparison to state averages, we're exceeding the state average and then we're well within what the state calls the target range. Progress is the second area and that is movement of students between proficiency levels with the goal being that the majority, that 100% of your students are proficient or advanced on the state assessments. And so while we're on track in the ELA area, we're at the floor in math and science. So that's meaning that when you look at those proficiency levels, our percentage of students that are proficient and advanced is not moving at the rate that it should be moving.

Growth then is looking at movement of individual students. So when we have two data points on two subsequent years for individual students, so it's looking at that movement. And in that area, we're on track both in math and ELA. So the piece, I feel like every time I come to the table, I talk about the fact that the state is in sort of a state of flux.

We're less in a state of flux at this point. So this is the first time that we were actually able to compare data between two years for ELA and for math. That is not true for science and it's not true for social studies. So when you looked at that report, social studies, we were in still a pilot year.

Science, this was our first year of data. And I will say sort of as a disclaimer, the state very quickly moved from new standards in science to holding us accountable to those new standards. And so what I think across the state, what we saw was districts seeing some flux because they implemented new standards and then held us accountable to those right away without giving like an implementation time for people to start to change up some parking. So when we look at our MAP assessment data, and the state defines what they call the super subgroup, which is students that are African American, free and reduced lunch, English language learners, Hispanic, and special school districts, so students who are on an IEP.

When we look at that data, we see that we're both on track in all areas, but we notice that we still need to continue to focus our work on the achievement of students in this group. So you'll see that there's a difference in scores between our total population and what the state defines as the super subgroup. When we did a further data dive looking into that, and this was kind of interesting being able to finally compare two years of data, One of the things that's pretty exciting for us to notice is that we are starting to see movement of the percentage of students in the below basic range. So where we're not necessarily yet seeing improvement in the areas of proficient and advanced in the percentages there, we're seeing movement out of below basic into some of the other areas.

So we're excited to celebrate that. That's a big thing for us. When we look at district data then, so in that report I started from the state and then went to the district data, You'll see that we see a lot of parallels in both percentages of students in proficient and advanced or whatever the comparable nomenclature of those areas is. But then we're also seeing some similar movement of out of the below basic.

So the same thing that we seeing on the state test we starting to see on the district tests also And where that not necessarily true in all grade level cohorts there multiple instances of it And I had provided a Friday memo to you guys earlier about that when we were talking about the equity piece So I think that's a big piece for us to celebrate. So the big picture data that we use, as Sean said, it informs us from a curriculum standpoint. And it informs us from a programming standpoint. But in the day-to-day operations with students, it's not as helpful because oftentimes we don't get that data back until the student has already moved to a subsequent grade level.

And so we feel like the local data that we generate is actually much more helpful to us in making instructional decisions on a day-to-day basis. So I'm going to pass it on to the principals. And I've asked them to spend some time talking about, from their perspectives, what that looks like on a day-to-day basis within their schools, focusing on things like how we share data with our teaching staff, how we use these data to make instructional decisions, and then how we use data to progress monitor. And then after the principal's talk, Robin's going to talk about the panorama, which is the newest piece, and a very different piece for us than all the other information that's in this report.

So good evening everyone. My task is to tackle the first part of Melina's three-part piece. So I'm here to talk about how we distribute the information around standardized test score data, such as the MAP. So each elementary school principal receives news of how individual students performed on the MAP test in those students who administered, when the test was administered in the spring of the year, as Melina says.

We receive this information in the summer months. And this year, we felt fortunate we received the information in July. So that's one of the earliest receivable dates that we've had at this time, at this point. So, third, fourth, and fifth grade students take those exams.

This past year, we received our scores in July as I share in principles, then review the information with Melaina Garganigo, our Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning, and then we tend to push out this data to a limited team. For Glendor School, that limited team involved my instructional coordinator, school counselor, our content leaders in literacy and in math, and our science specialist, who was very interested, of course, to find out how our fifth grade students did on that science exam. Grade level teachers, both the student's current teacher, so the grade they just entered, the fourth or the fifth grade students, they receive this information as do past teachers. So my students in third grade moved on, they're now in fourth grade, and I'm a recipient of their MAP test scores.

These scores are, as I shared, in literacy and mathematics, and they receive this information as the school year kicks off. The science map assessment is shared with middle school as these students have now moved on to the sixth grade. And yet our fifth grade teachers also reviewed to see how they did on that. Like I shared, it happens all about the first opening couple weeks of school and that information is combined with other information about each student that we're transitioning up to the new grade level.

So elementary school principals, the instructional coordinators and content area specialists, then meet with each grade level team about every four to six weeks throughout our entire school year. This is during their shared planning time and it's an opportunity to review student growth or lack of growth throughout the school year. Our goal for these sessions is to model Learner driven and evidence informed decision making with an emphasis on relationships as interventions for students are determined. The standardized test data like the MAP scores are added into spreadsheets along with additional evidence that help determine progress as teachers Students teach and students move, hopefully grow, within those standards that our MAP test, the standardized test, will assess again the following spring.

It is a point of pride when our students perform well on the MAP, right? We all love to see those public scores. And when students underperform on the MAP test, then we do seek out additional evidence about the student and his or her relationships. What's the relationship that the child has with school, with his or her teachers, with learning in general?

MAP scores offer one data point. If viewed as a standalone measure of success, we would fail to tell the whole story of any one elementary school-age learner. Attention to both social emotional and academic skills acknowledges what we know to be true that children in our elementary schools are more than a single test score They in fact are multifaceted human beings growing and learning as individuals with our support right So during our regularly scheduled problem-solving meetings, again, that take place about every four to six weeks at all three of our elementary schools, I'm present, Instructional Coordinator is present, they're present in these sessions. Our content leaders are present alongside grade level teachers.

And we work to unpack and examine further data sources in support of determining what best course of action to take for students. So, and I get to pass the microphone on to Patrick who gets to answer that part of Elena's question to us. I'll do my best not to knock anything over over here. So essentially as we're presenting this, I kind of put together a bit of just almost like a flow chart that talks a little bit about where is data coming into our lessons and when does it come into practice for our teachers.

As I look at this chart, essentially every time you see an arrow on there is a point where data is coming into effect. So we're using data constantly. The universal screeners are those things at the beginning of the year students come in. We give them an SRI, we give them an NWEA, we may give them a teacher's college assessment.

We get a sense of where are our students at the beginning of the year. The easiest way to think about this is kind of like, almost like a medical analogy. This is a physical that we're giving all the students to see how they're doing to determine what level of care they may need from there. So if we have students who are in need of immediate medical care, we want to make sure that they're already getting those things and we start to look at Do we have urgent interventions that we need to put in place right away?

Other students, we can begin that core curricular instruction. Using the medical analogy, that's like thinking your diet, your exercise routine is the things you're constantly doing. As you're doing those things, you want to conduct and compile and evaluate those pieces. That may mean you're getting on the scale, you're taking your blood pressure, you're doing all those things.

If you're still not meeting the standards, you may go back and see your doctor again. They may want to reevaluate what you're doing, adjust your programming just a little bit. And if you are meeting the standards, they say keep doing what you're doing, move to the next step. You may want to run a little further, go a little faster, think about what comes next, and then you continue to grow along those pathways.

Most of our students, if you look at the flow chart, they go from universal screenings, core curricular instruction, conduct, compile, and evaluate the assessments, meet standards, and then go right back to the core curriculum and move to the next standard. A large number of our students stay in that cycle. If they're not meeting, that's where we start to look at what other things may need to happen. These decisions are made in the lesson.

It can be as quick as a teacher seeing those students just not quite getting this one lesson, where they're getting a very formative assessment, something that comes from a running record from a conference with the student, and they're pulling that student back for a reteaching. It may mean pulling a group of students to a table and having a group where they see several students that are having a similar issue, and we work together on a specific standard that comes from that lesson. It also may mean that we're seeing some students that are coming up after a We're a bit of a benchmark checker, a couple of lessons into it and seeing if they are still not working on something. So we go and we meet once a week with our teams and our coaches and we say these are students we're having issues with.

We're trying to figure out what might we be able to do in collaborating with our teams and we share data. We look for resources, additional ideas, and work together to think how can we best address these students' needs and what might we be able to do to meet their needs as we're talking about this through our work together as a team. And then again, as we continue to do this, we evaluate that data. If we're able to come up with something that works for them, we then move them back and they get back on the meet standards and they go back along that track.

So again, this can be done both on a teacher team or it can be done on their own on a day-to-day basis. So there is a plethora of choices that comes when we talk about data. It can be everything from a teacher observation to the data that Beth was just talking about, all the way to more formative, all the way to more standard end-of-unit tests, and we're thinking assessment of learning and assessment for learning. So that assessment's driving our lessons, driving our instruction, driving our plans, driving our care plan to continue that medical analogy, or determining whether we will need to make some sort of intervention.

If we look for an intervention, we look at a personalized approach. We want to talk about, one of the things we're seeing is we want to get to know the students. Who are the students we're intervening on? What are they bringing with them into the classroom?

What are the strengths? How do we utilize their strengths and not just see them from that deficit model that we've traditionally looked at it from and think about who are the students and what's the best way to reach them? What do we see about them? What are we seeing in the data that we do have on them that shows us where their area of breakdown may be?

Or is it, again, medical analogy? Is it that they don't exercise enough or is it their diet? Is there something we need to think about? How can we put that in there?

Who is this person and what's going to motivate them to best follow that need? And then we have those collaborative pieces where they're able to look at this and say, Planning out what kinds of interventions to offer students. They're working with coaches, they're working with their teams, finding things that are working, finding things that may be out there. Today, for example, in the district, we had teachers that were going to umbrella meetings, and those umbrella meetings are even giving them a chance to go beyond just their own building and work with teachers from other schools to think about what can we do to continue to grow and how do we continue to use these things.

At each of these steps, there is data that guides that piece. It's not done without data. So when we talk about what kinds of data do we use, it's hard to think about when are we not using data. And it may not always be numbers.

Sometimes it's evidence. Sometimes it's what we're seeing from students, and it can be zones of regulations. As the kids were talking about it, if we have a kid who's frequently not in that green zone, it may not be a reading thing that they're missing. It may be the fact that they're coming in that yellow and red zone, and we need to be thinking about that and how do we best meet that need.

So we involve our counselors on these things, but that is not necessarily going to show up on an SRI or an NWEA. That's going to show up in what we see when we interact with our students. We get to know our students as people and we care about them. So I'm going to turn this over to Jen who's going to talk a little bit about how do we make sure we progress monitor that as we continue working through those steps.

Thank you, Patrick. So I would like to drill down a little bit more into what an assessment cycle might entail. So if you look at the screen, what you'll see is a line that represents a unit of instruction, noting the beginning of the unit and the end of the unit. Before teachers dive into the beginning of a unit of instruction, they're already planning ahead, and part of that process is through a pre-assessment or some type of prerequisite opportunity to know what skills students are coming in firm with and what skills might be lagging behind.

The benefit of doing a pre-assessment of some sort is to do it early enough so that teachers have an opportunity to collectively analyze that data and determine what interventions might need to be put into place in order to level the playing field for our students to begin the unit with the necessary requisite knowledge that they need. When a teacher team is looking at a unit, they're also looking before ever beginning the unit. They're looking all the way to the end. They're keeping the end in mind, and that's the summative assessment.

Summative assessment also, if you compare to, to maybe tag along to Patrick's medical analogy, this is the autopsy data. And so if we don't assess our students along the way and know whether or not what we are doing instructionally is having a profound impact on their academic growth, then we run the chance of getting all the way to the end of a unit and then realizing a child didn't acquire the information that we were hoping that they would learn. So it's important to look at both the requisite skills and also keep the end in mind as to what exactly will determine whether or not a student has learned what we're asking them to learn. Along the way of your unit, many teacher teams will come together and look at data collectively.

That would be considered a common formative assessment. So the team is determined that they are going to use a particular exit slip or maybe a small quiz or some other way of determining across a grade level where students are in their learning. The benefit and the power of this is that we come together as a team, just as Patrick mentioned, with our umbrella meetings, but we get a chance to talk in real time with the data that is right in front of us, and it gives us an opportunity to respond to our students before we get to the summative assessment, before the learning has ended. So this gives us an opportunity collectively to learn from one another and even to share resources.

So we sometimes can look and see that a particular teacher has had a high level of success with a group of students. We can not only ask that teacher what he or she has done to try to replicate that, but it gives us an opportunity to leverage our human resources to share students or to maybe reach out to specialists that have particular expertise and content To come in and to make sure that all hands are on deck for our students along the way. I'm going to add four more circles to this slide. These TFA's stand for Teacher Formative Assessment.

So not only is the team coming together once or twice throughout a unit to talk and analyze data collectively, but teachers are constantly assessing the effectiveness of their teaching and as a result through the student learning. This might look like an exit slip. It might look like a checklist. It might be conferring notes or anecdotal records that the teacher is looking at.

So when Patrick says we are always looking at data in some form or fashion, this is just a representation of how that might look through one particular unit. When a unit has ended and we collected the summative data the teachers at the elementary level oftentimes log that into what we would call a trend sheet This is an example of a math trend sheet So these are ended unit scores for students We also color code the data that we see And the first line that you see there is just an example student to kind of show the teachers where to go The students below the gray bar that actual data from one of our first grade teachers And so it gives us very quickly at a glance an opportunity to see which students have mastered those skills and which students we might need to intervene with We also have an opportunity to look at this and determine which students need enrichment and which students need challenge. So when we're thinking about progress monitoring for students, we're thinking about students who both need enrichment and challenge as well as remediation and reteaching. One of the things that I find interesting when you look at data like this is that you can look over a period of time.

You might notice in the middle is a cumulative review. So, even though a student may have had very high numbers or percentages of proficiency along the way, we also want to make sure we circle back and ensure students are retaining that information. So, although this is just a sheet of numbers, it gives us a picture, one piece of a picture of a student and their learning. We also do something similar in the area of literacy.

This year, the elementary teachers are looking to triangulate all of the literacy data. We have a lot of information that we're collecting throughout the year, and this trend sheet gives us the ability to look at benchmark testing, universal screeners, all the way throughout the course of the school year, so we can continue to monitor that progress. Something else that I'd like to share with you is a way in which we believe that progress monitoring is most effective. And that is, if a student is not performing at grade level, we recognize that students must accelerate their learning if we're ever going to close the gap.

So when you look at this particular graph, what you can see, the blue line, excuse me, the yellow line is the district expectation. That's the line at the top. The blue line down towards the bottom would indicate what one year's growth would be without acceleration. The red line that you see would show the rate in which a child must progress in order to close the gap and ensure that they are meeting the same standards as everyone else.

And then the green line that you see there is actually student data. This graph comes from Glenridge. And this is a student who is actually performing above the accelerated trend line. So this is another way in which our teachers look at data to make sure students are progressing at an adequate rate.

And then this is another example of what that might look like from a teacher's raw data sheet. And so you can see this is a teacher, a reading specialist teacher, and this is one of the reading recovery students. And they log the books in which they're engaging the students with, the dates in which they're taking those progress monitoring checks. And then we're also noticing how we're advancing the student and with what rate and with what success.

So at this point in time, I would like to turn things over to our middle school colleague. Are you ready? I'm so nervous. Here's Teresa.

My heart is beating fast. This is my first time. So if I talk fast, just tell me to stop. So I'm just here to talk about how we have restructured our intervention classes at YDAM.

We still use data to make informed decisions about placing our students in math interventions or reading interventions. But more importantly with Mad, I know Melaina mentioned how we aren't really moving. And what we noticed at White Owl is the same students were in the intervention classes. And what was even more eye-opening is that the community conversations, alumni were talking about how they were in the same intervention classes.

And they also talked about they didn't know why they were in an intervention class, they didn't know how to get out of intervention. And then when we talked to our students, it was the same thing. And so we started our work last year really talking to teachers, the PLCs about talking to your students about their data. What does your data say?

Do you even know your data? And so I also took on that and pulled individual students and so we said, why are you in this class? Well, I've never been good at math. Or I don't know, I thought I was good at math, so maybe that's why I'm here.

Do you know, what do you need to do to get out of the class? They did not know. And so we started having those conversations, Spervantage of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. Spervantage, and the next slide So we have a And in addition to that they also work on items in the class So it concurrent They work on strategies that they should have learned from kindergarten up until whatever grade they in And then they also work on current strategies in the classroom And then at the very end if there time then they work on homework We're going to have a discussion with the teachers about what we're going to do with the students.

Spervantage of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. Spervantage, Pursuit, and So our literacy teacher is working with one student. Our reading specialist is working with one to two students now. And then our students who have tested out of reading services but still need a little bit of support, we put them in a course called DaVinci, where they do research and they have support.

And so they're out of that class, but they're still getting some type of reading support. So we have a DaVinci course. So we've really restructured our intervention classes to be more responsive to students. And so students can see an end, and they Sper통령, Board of Education, Education, Education, Education.

Let me just talk a little intro. When we started doing some equity work at Clayton High School, about two years ago, one of the charges I gave to our department heads, one of our building goals, is to examine the barriers to enrollment for African American kids in our honors and AP classes. Superroportionate, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. We did a little bit of a tweak to our process.

One of those tweaks we did away with a letter of intent in English and then we started looking at some of our data points that we were using. Particularly we were looking for those kids that were academically capable but maybe just needed a little bit of a push or an encouragement or somebody reaching out and saying, hey you should do this. We had some success in that regard. This year we tried a pilot this year, particularly our social studies class, because social studies has the largest offering of AP courses of any of the departments.

And so what we did is after identifying juniors, African American students that were academically capable and we thought, you know, we encourage to take an AP social studies class. We developed a cohort group of these students and invited students to be part of this cohort. And it was much like the idea of many of us have gone through doctoral cohorts in our doctoral programs, but kind of like with the same thought in mind. And so the cohort actually meets on Tuesday afternoons after school.

And Tashaun Young, our activities director, serves as kind of a mentoring role and leader of the group. Paul Holscher is serving as the content expert for this area We let the kids drive the conversation as to what they wanted or what they needed out of the group Like I said we originally invited 21 students to participate 17 chose to participate of those 21 students And 14 of the original 21 are still regular attendees at the weekly meetings. Now, obviously, we have kids that are involved in theater and sports and a variety of things. So there's some coming and going based on their schedules.

But we have a really robust group that continues to meet every week. And I was meeting with Tashaun actually just this morning, and she said that she asked the group if they would prefer to go every other week or if they were getting busy. And the group overwhelmingly said, no, we want to continue to meet every week because we really, really like this. We've also had a lot of participation.

Mike Sankey, Dr. Regina Moore, Sheila Powell Walker have all been guest speakers and kind of popped in and out actually to kind of just be a mentor for the group. And it's really, they've really developed a really strong sense of community. And our hope is that in this time period, like for example, that they'll talk about, and Tashawn was telling me, you know, there's a variety of topics that we'll talk about.

It could be just about anything. And then they use the rest of the time for work. It doesn't end up being a whole lot of tutoring because they work together in study groups. So they subdivide into course-like groups is what they do.

And then spend some time working together. And in supporting one another. Our hope was that if this pilot is successful, that we could possibly use it as a model to expand to other departments and potentially grow the program. Now, you may say to yourself, what does this have to do with the assessment report?

And so the reason that I bring this up is that the college board has a, I'm sorry, the college board oversees the PSAT. College board also oversees all AP courses. One of the things that they have developed over the years because they have the data on hundreds of thousands of students going back decades is they have all of the performance data on both the AP scores and the PSAT scores of all the students who have ever taken the test. And so they developed a program a handful of years ago called AP Potential.

And what this program does is it actually develops probability tables for individual student success in AP courses based on their data profile actually from the PSAT. Now, one anecdote about this is that last year I tried to use this data, And I was looking at the data and kind of plugging it in to AP potential. And I kept running into a roadblock. And I called Carolyn Blair and I said, there's got to be something wrong with our data.

I said, we're missing some students. And she said, no, they're all there. I'm sure of it. The data we were missing was when I was looking at the roughly 300 students that had taken the PSAT, roughly 200 last year's juniors and roughly 100 or so last year's sophomores.

I believe we had six total African-American students that actually took the test out of 300. And so there wasn't really a whole lot of data to go on within the AP potential program, particularly for the purpose that I was trying to use it. And one of the reasons is, well, a PSAT is particularly important because that's the test that we use in junior year or the college board uses for the National Merit Program. And then the software is taken as a practice.

But historically, that test, it's a fee-based test. Students pay their $25 and take the test. And so one of the things that we did this year in our move to basically using the PSAT for all students is that this year, for the first time, we had every student in the junior class took the PSAT this year, which has given us a very robust data set, actually, for AP potential. So we were able to plug the data in and then what's interesting is that, like I said, that the AP potential identifies individual students and looks at their data profile and then gives you a printout of what courses that they have a 60% chance of scoring a 3 or better on an AP exam in that particular discipline.

And it's completely individualized. You can drill down to individual student data. But one of the things that it did is it gave us a really robust data set and it's a really good tool to identify kids that maybe we had missed in our regular process. I mean, also, it's a great tool for any bubble kid where we had a question about whether we were going to recommend them for AP or honors.

And so, I don't know how far to go into the weeds on this one, but it's very individualized in the sense of Like for AP Chem, they look at a student's evidence-based reading, writing, and math scores, and then they have probability tables for that. In AP Lang, they just look at the evidence-based reading and writing. And for calculus, they just use the math score. But, you know, the correlation, you can then break it down by student, and I can go to individual students and, according to their data profile on PSAT, identify whether they have a 60, 70, 80, 90% chance of getting a 3 or higher in any given AP test Based on that data profile and all the historical data that College Board has.

So, like I said, it's not the be-all, end-all, but we then took this data. I shared it with all of the coordinators and the department heads, and we're incorporating that into our recommendations this year. One of the things that is different is that in the past, that all juniors and sophomores took the PSAT together in the fall. Now we are separating it out where the juniors take the PSAT in the fall, The softwares take the PSAT 10, which will actually be coming up in here in February.

So then once we get the 10th grade data, we will also redistribute that. And it's a little late in the rec process, but not late enough that we can't make some changes actually in identifying students. But that's one really kind of neat way that I think that we're using the data. And it shows that the PSAT has been the switch to making sure that every kid has access to the PSAT has been really, really important for us in high school.

All right, so now we're going to switch gears and talk about a new data set that is part of the assessment report, which is information that was collected through our tools that we have from Panorama Education. So last spring the social-emotional learning committee helped select Panorama Education as a vendor that we would use to implement surveys to help us learn more about how our students are experiencing the teaching and learning environment and also would give us data on how students would perceive themselves in very specific areas. So last spring we piloted the surveys with elementary schools in grades 3 through 5. And then this past September we brought it to a much larger scale and we administered a two-part survey in grades 3 through 12 to look at some really specific areas.

So one part of the survey focused specifically on social emotional learning skills and competencies. And so the topics that we measured were self-efficacy, so basically how much students believe they can succeed in achieving academic outcomes. We also looked at self-management, which basically examines how well students manage their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors when they're in different situations. And then social awareness, which looks at how well students consider the perspectives of others in comparison to themselves.

And then the second part of the survey looked at social-emotional learning supports and environment. And so the two topics that were focused on in our survey were related to school climate and then students' sense of belonging at school. So, panorama education then takes all the data that is collected from our students to generate an overall percentage of students who responded favorably on each topic. So, students have, depending on the question, they might have five choices to rate how they're feeling or they might have seven choices.

So, if it's seven, it's anything that got rated four or higher. And if it's five, anything that got rated three or higher is considered a favorable response. And so the vendor also compares the percentages to all of the other schools in their national data set, some of which are in the St. Louis area, to determine a national percentile in each topic area.

So in our skills and competencies area, so again, that's talking about self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness, our district data fell near the 90th percentile nationally at the elementary school level in the areas of self-efficacy, self-management, and social awareness. And then at the secondary level, the district data was in the 90th percentile for self-management, 70th percentile for social awareness, and the 40th percentile for self-efficacy, which Adam kind of talked about a little bit earlier. And then when we looked at supports and environment, in grades three through five, the district data was in the 50th percentile nationally for school climate and in the 80th percentile for sense of belonging. And at the secondary level, the district data was in the 40th percentile nationally for both school climate and sense of belonging.

So some of the things that we've put into motion as a result of getting this data is happening at a lot of different levels. I would say at the district level one of the first things we been doing is as a social learning committee we took some time to do a crosswalk between profile of a graduate the social learning data collected from our surveys and then the CASEL standards which is a national set of core competencies related to social learning to start building some connections between the work that we were currently doing and kind of what it would look like over time if we were making progress in those areas And one of the other things that is starting to grow out of that is just a common language around what we're talking about when we're developing student social-emotional learning skills. I would say some of the themes around the things that are happening at the building level are more opportunities for student leadership, bringing more student voice into how students are experiencing the teaching and learning environment. Also, more creative opportunities for parents to come together around shared learning through book studies.

Also, more opportunities for students to build meaningful connections with each other and with their teachers. Also, there's been work around building teachers' leadership in this area and building teachers' resiliency in working with our students. And then lastly, creating opportunities for students to really build their own vocabulary around their own thoughts and feelings and how they are feeling about school and how they're experiencing the teaching and learning environment. So we'll be giving the survey again in the spring and we're really looking forward to watching that needle move, especially as it relates to all the different work that all the different buildings have been doing to really address the things that they saw in their data.

All right. Thank you very much. That was a lot, but thank you. So, board, questions?

Any questions? Anybody have any questions? No questions? Well, I have questions.

Go ahead, Jason. All right. Since you asked. I noticed a couple of things.

So number one, this is great. All the things we just talked about are actually pretty awesome. The PSAT, I thought that was really cool. I didn't know, so the fee, who charged that fee?

Was it the school district that charged the fee or the national fee? The college board charged that fee. So did we pay for that? So the way that we handled it this year is that we paid, we're paying for the PSAT 10 and then for the PSAT 11 this year we did not budget it in but anybody who couldn't pay we took care of and then next year we'll budget in the PSAT 11 for all students.

That's pretty cool. I think that's actually pretty awesome. So I was discussing earlier with Louie, my friend Louie, about barriers to entry and those are some barriers to entry. I'll say one of the things we did do this year for the PSAT as well, students, we invited students to pay for the test, but anyone who could not, we supplemented that with other funds.

That's pretty cool. Good job. That's good stuff. I do notice that on the assessment part for 3rd through 5th grade, I see there's like a, around 4th and 5th grade, African American students start to go one way and then the other students start to go another way.

Do you all notice that correlation and what do you gather from that correlation or from that data? If you don't have an answer, I'm perfectly fine. I think we're going to come back to this later on. Right?

It's just a question. You don't have an answer, though? No. I think that that's...

We do notice that in the data. I mean, that's something that we recognize, and I think that that is why, Melina said at the beginning, we're continuing to look at, This is still a pattern that we're seeing, and that's why we have to start thinking about beyond just the measures of success that we have with our standardized assessments, what are some other ways that we need to approach instruction and measures of success differently. But, yeah, I mean, it's still an issue that we see. So we mentioned choice-based, right, and I love what Tarita was sharing about engaging students with their progress.

The chart that Jen shared that she said came from Glenridge, that's actually shared one-on-one with third and fifth grade students if they are seeking literacy support or in need of that with our literacy specialists. She doesn't, on the left side you would see that there are numbers there. She's got the formula for what level reading score that means. Students don't necessarily have that information.

But what is really helpful is that when they see that green line of theirs start to go in one direction or the other then they really partners in this process of like why am I here You know what this about So that engaging a student one way through you know even with the Panamera survey data talks about self You know what one playbook step that you can do to increase a student self K and make them more responsible for their learning I don't know if it answered your question, but globally, so I'm talking individual students. You asked in general, yet, right? Right. Well, yeah.

You look at each individual student to see what their pathway might be. Yeah. I've seen real success with some of our African American students. Okay.

Let's see. Oh, so there has to be a correlation between socioeconomics and outcomes, right, on these tests. Have you all noticed that as well? It seems like, so if you're, I'm assuming, maybe below middle class in some capacity, living in a certain community, you might struggle more.

Have you all noticed that from the data? Is that what you all extrapolated? Yeah, so I think what you're pointing out is the, like when we desegregate the data by lunch status, what we see within that is a discrepancy. And I think some of the ways that I've seen within the buildings that we're approaching some of that work ties into some of the work that our social workers have been doing in doing some professional learning with our staff around, like, you have Maslow's hierarchy and then you have Maslow's hierarchy of school need and looking at, like, what are the basic needs that children need to come into school to be ready to learn.

So what are the things that we can put in place within the context of our community to help students be able to, so students who might be dealing with trauma, students who might be coming in with other factors that are creating barriers for them, how do we take down those barriers to be able to allow them to access learning? So that hierarchy is like looking at those different pieces, and I think that leans into a little bit of what Patrick was talking about. Well, actually, all of our principals talked about really knowing our students well, and then being able to meet their needs in a much more personalized way than maybe we had done in the past. Awesome.

And then so it also took me to think about, so if that's, there's a correlation with socioeconomics on one end of the spectrum. There's also a correlation with on the opposite end of the spectrum where the kids are doing well. So I noticed that we're in the middle of this like, what do you call it, the terminology of this like, these numbers, the numbers that we're talking about, the range. And we're in the middle.

So my question is, are our kids doing as well as they could, being that socioeconomics plays a part, a major part in success and failure? Could they be doing better? It's a question. And how much of it can we control for outcome?

And how much of it is maybe our approach to successful kids and academics is antiquated? And then I have a follow up question if anyone wants to like, that wasn't rhetorical, that was actually a real question. I think some of what you're saying is some of what we're also seeing when we think about like the development of our strategic plan, Thank you. So, I think that's really important to us and that we've all committed ourselves to and our staff has committed themselves to really studying that and being able to think through that.

So, I think to your point of are our students achieving exactly how we want them to be achieving? No. Are we continuing to do work on that? Yes.

And I think we continue to study it and we continue to try things to see whether there's response to that. And I think the piece around progress monitoring may be a good example of this, of when we make a decision about a plan that we're going to put in place for a child, we have to progress monitor because if they're not making growth with that plan, then we should abandon the plan. And so there is a lot of we dealing with children and so there a lot of push and pull in trying to figure out what the best for this child and what the best is for Malena may not be what the best is for Robin And so there a lot of Spervantage of Education Proposition O levy agenda motion carried So I take to heart your comment about antiquated practices because I really think that's the spirit of where we're headed with the strategic plan is really thinking very differently about education. Like the traditional education system is not necessarily set up for everybody to succeed.

So how do we break that apart to be able to have that goal of all children succeed? Can I just add one to that? I think the example that Tarita gave too around, like I do believe that sometimes some of the practices that we have in place might seem antiquated or the student doesn't have any ownership of it. And so it's something done to them versus they're working with the student.

So when she was talking about an intervention, like the barriers is that we were keeping students in maybe an intervention that was maybe more of the same, that was producing the same result. And so changing the structure is removing that barrier, but then also allowing students to do something like a Da Vinci class, which is problem-based and getting students to have ownership of what they want to learn. Then you start seeing some students to start celebrating. And that's what I said earlier about Michael Fullen said the way to approach inequities is to personalize learning for students and go deeper.

And that's where we need to start examining that because sometimes we might create the box for the student. And then we have to actually let them grip the pots. Right, right, right. That's a good point.

I didn't mention this, but I did mention this one celebration. After we looked at our data, 60% of our students have made already a year's growth with this new intervention that we have, so it's working. Can you say that again? 60% of our students that are in intervention classes have already made a year's growth.

That's awesome. That's good work. Other questions? Maybe.

So, well, first, most importantly, Frank Hackman, happy birthday. Frank, is it your birthday? Oh, thank you. Aren't you 40?

You've got to be a little louder. Okay, so, Melaina, I thought this was great, and I looked at, well, everybody, I thought it was great, but I was compared to the rest of the people, and I thought it was great. I'm going to turn this report to last year's report, and I really like the way that you structured it this year, so thank you for doing that. I heard a lot of really good things tonight.

I love that we are focusing on, you know, it seems like there's flexibility to move kids in and out of different areas where, you know, It seems like we're looking at a kid who might be in an intervention and then once they don't need to be there, then they can more easily move out of that intervention. So I was really happy to hear that. This is a really hard topic for me because most of you guys know how I feel about the standardized test. So, for me, like when I get it in the mail, I put it in the trash can because I don't want my kids to know what it says because I don't think it means, I don't think it's indicative of how they're going to do in school or where they're going to go to college or how successful they're going to be in life.

So, it goes in the trash can. But, with that said, I'm glad that you guys do what you do with it. It concerns me a little bit that the kids are so aware of what they get on these tests. Sometimes there are a lot of tears in my house with that PSA.

Thank you. I had a hard time interpreting the data on this, but if what I think I'm reading is correct, that was really the most concerning thing of what I gathered from tonight is that if our kids don't believe in themselves and to the extent that these, these, Standardized test scores that kind of matter but in the big picture of life don't matter probably that much. How that affects the way that they feel about themselves is something that I would like to just be aware of, I think. So, but overall I was really happy.

It seems like there was some good movement. And that was basically, those were most of my comments. Other questions? So I just did, I wanted to ask a question about your story about the PSAT.

I want to make sure that I followed that story. So if I'm understanding it right, when you were trying to use that as a tool to dig into the recommendation process. Last year. Last year.

Was that the first time you had tried to use that? That particular program for PSAT, the AP Potential Program has existed for a few years. I'll admit when I looked at an earlier prototype about four or five years ago, I was pretty underwhelmed with what it was doing. Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried.

Also, I just wondered as we think about that as all of the work that we've tried to focus on in these equity issues, are there other things like that at other levels that we haven't figured out yet? That's a blind spot because of a systemic institutional correction that could be made that hasn't been or whatever. What are the parallels to that? Is that inspiring other thoughts about that?

It's not an easy answer to that question, but I think it's something we should all be thinking about. What are the other things like that that we can find to make that? It's a great story. Hopefully it will bear fruit in having that data for all of our students.

I think that's part of the constant question now we're asking is like what systemic, how do we look at this systemically where we are inadvertently putting in barriers? We're just not removing them. Right, we're not removing them. Whichever it is, right.

One of the things that we've done this year, and Bort will hear about this later, is that we looked at our summer programs for this upcoming year. Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. I mean, that's a constant. And I assure you that there's probably blind sets that we don't even recognize yet.

Gary, I would say one thing too that we, another thing we did this year which is kind of connected is that as we were looking at students' ACT scores and those kids that maybe scored in that, there's kind of two groups we identified, but that group where if you're scoring in that 18, 19, 20 range where going from a 20 to a 23 or 24 could mean significant money for you in terms of Scholarships and then looking at what kids are able to afford ACT prep and then our PTO was actually very, very generous this year and we identified particular kids through our counseling staff, targeted those kids and then the PTO is funding a special ACT prep course just for that group of students who may not have been able to afford that. And so, you know, those are other things like that that we're doing. So I wanted to ask something about the gap and also about dyslexia. And I was thinking about that idea of, you know, can we just kind of forget these scores or, you know, just, you know, not put a lot of weight in them.

And I wonder though I wonder if that is almost coming from a position of privilege You know that for me I know my kids are going to be okay and I'm not sure that, you know, predominantly black schools that are failing or not doing well or students that kind of fall in that group feel like they can just say this doesn't matter. I mean, because they've been aware of this gap for a really long time. So I think paying attention to it as you all are, you've got to. My question is kind of on a really high level.

When you think about what the board's job is to do as far as accountability and we allocate resources and we decide on how much time we're going to spend on certain topics throughout the year, when you think about what our role is, how do you think we can assist you all In really making a dent and progressing in the work in terms of our African American achievement gap. What can we do? Do we need to spend more time talking about it? Do we need to give you more resources?

What is it that could make a difference? Or are we getting in the way in some way? I can talk at it from a district level, but then you guys can talk about it. I think that the board has been supportive in terms of like, well, what we always do is look at our resources.

And so sometimes we have to reallocate our resources and we have to think about how we're spending our resources differently. I think the example of making, removing a barrier for all students to take that and then putting the onus on the district to be able to take on that, it's really important. And so what I would say from my perspective is that when we start coming to you in the near future about some of these ideas that we're wanting to do that maybe around personalizing learning in a different way, we may be looking at different measures of success. But I totally agree with you is that we can't afford to not look at these other accountability measures too.

So we have to parallel that. So there will be some different approaches that we might have in terms of how we are approaching our human capital in terms of supports in our schools. It could be that we might need to shift some things that have always been in our school district that we might say that it's kind of outgrown its effect. And so, and we don't know exactly what those are going to look like, but I think that a board being open to new ideas and new ways to approach it and holding us accountable to make sure that we're making sure that they're growing.

And so, I think that that's important. Can I say something to that point? Here's another theory. So, could it be that there's nothing else U.S.

administration could even do? Are you maxed out? Are these kids kind of hopeless? Or is it kind of beyond your scope?

Can you really have an impact much more than you have now? How much more rearranging can we do to reach these kids? That's a serious question. No, I don't.

The other thing is this, it's like, there's a thing called patchwork, right? Patchwork is when we just try to patch up a few things to keep it moving in a certain direction. Brown versus Bord was kind of a patchwork. Instead of focusing on the issue, which is disinvestment, instead we're like, let's move these kids to another side of town Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried.

And our kids who are coming from lower socioeconomic spaces consistently perform poorly based on these tests. And we're at the top half of the poorest performing poorly. We have the best kids in this let say in this city right perform but they perform poorly though But the better and to the best of the poor of course performing kids So could we be in a position where there nothing else we can really do I can afford to say that I mean I think that what we can say is that we need to maybe change some different practices that might be good for all students, not just our African-American students who are maybe not being successful. It could be that we're not looking at piling more on than we need to do, but changing maybe some of the things that we do so we're using our time more efficiently.

I think I've shared that a number of times at this table is that we can't let our excellence be one of the things that causes us from being successful. Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. How do we hold teachers accountable in that way where you're saying, don't pity them, treat them 100% equal, like give them the love, give them the support you would?

I think that that goes to our culturally responsive teaching that Melina mentioned, is that that term that we often use now is like, how are we expecting all of our teachers to be warm demanders? We want to have good relationships. We want to make sure that they know the students but are expecting a lot of them. And I think that one of the questions that we're asking ourselves is like how do we actually build that into our evaluation model?

And think about that could be an indicator that that culturally responsive teaching is just an expectation for all. We need to hold everyone accountable to it. I think we've also started most recently in some of our work that we started with Jamie Almanzon Thank you. Clear learning objectives.

So not just do you have your objectives written on the board, but do the students know why they're learning what they're learning and how it fits into sort of a greater progression. And then looking at the level of questioning. So the kinds of questions that we're asking and to whom are we asking them. So are we asking low-level questions to a specific group of children?

Are we asking higher-level questions to a specific group of children? And so providing that specific feedback to teachers to continue to grow that practice and to think through it like a Spervantage, Pursuit, and Superexpensive, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried. So, that's what we're trying to do. And we've been working with teachers to be able to do that same thing.

So, it's not just about removing children and putting them with somebody else, but also, like, how do we continue to build the skill of our entire staff? So, peer policing. That's interesting. So, my question to you, though, is...

I didn't call it that. Some shit I made up. But my question is peer policing Does that really work though Is there any evidence Like is there like academic evidence that that really works Because I mean we watching our current federal government right now go through a very interesting time Doesn matter what side you on You can still see it You can still see folks who are in the same group They not necessarily policing each other So, my question is, I don't have any evidence of our peers policing each other in an academic setting. Is it really going to be, I mean, if you don't have the lens to see that teacher X is biased or is, you know, talking down on a certain level to a certain student, Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried.

Spervantage, What I notice from staff as I'm walking through and I'm working with teachers is the language, the shared language that we're using across the district about very specific things. So the term warm demander is a term that we're using across the district. Build relationship but hold kids to high expectations. The idea of thinking about objective student talk, teacher talk and questions because we're focused on very specific things, it allows us to give So it's not giving feedback on a multitude of things.

It's saying, we're going to give feedback on these specific things. So then what am I seeing in classrooms is I'm seeing a very different practice of helping students to be aware of what they're learning and why they're learning it and why it's important and how it fits into a progression. I'm seeing teachers use video in a much more prevalent way than we have ever before to self-assess and to sit down with a principal or another administrator and get feedback from that video. So now it's not me coming in and seeing something in your classroom.

It's you seeing it in your classroom and now we're going to talk about it and be able to move. I am seeing differences in that sense. I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it.

I just want to get another voice. I just want to add one more question. I'm not trying to. But you are.

Hey, everyone has a chance to talk. Lily, did you have anything else? Yeah, I just want to return to Sean's answer, but anybody else? Yeah, well, Lily, so I think what I would say goes with several of these things.

To go back to Lily's initial question, which was how can the board support us, I think some of those things even comes back to the understanding of this conversation which we're having now. So like Jason, when you first started, your question was, are we exhausting ourselves to no end? And I would say one of the things I would ask for the support is understanding that that's the exhaustion we want. There's a good stress and there's a bad stress and there can be a good exhaustion.

I can't sit here and say I'm ever going to be okay with writing students off and saying we've checked this box, we've arrived, we're done. Because every year, I have a new set of kindergartners that come in, and what those kids may need may be different than the fifth graders that are leaving me. So I can't say I've ever checked that box. So I think it's also an understanding that we have to continue to learn and grow, and there may be some patience within that as well.

So we may see, as we're talking about self-efficacy or other things, that there could be a direct correlation to the fact that we've been focusing all these conversations on testing and standardized testing and achievement gap that comes back to that. So if the conversation that we quickly started with, how do we grow in this different direction and meet different students' needs, we came quickly again about the achievement gap in standardized test scores. The more we have that conversation, we could end up doing, it makes it hard to not continue to do the same thing, which could be leading to other things that we're also not aware of. So there's going to be an understanding of thinking about how we're addressing these things, whether it's through our strategic plan of taking that step back and looking at when we talk about a profile of a graduate, what are we talking about at this point What success we say we want for our students, how do we then make sure that, what does that look like and how do we start making sure that happens?

And right now what that talks about and what we're hearing Sean say and what I'm hearing Melinda say is that may require some change and that may require, we're going to have to identify those barriers and we can't just start plowing ahead thinking we know what direction we're going. We may have to stop and take a step back and look and see what are we learning, what do we know, what do we need to do. So when I would say looking at this, I think we have to start broadening our view of what success looks like, and that from a board, I'd like for that understanding to come from there, thinking about if this is what the strategic plan, this is the direction that we're going in, help us figure out what that looks like, and then support the fact that we may have to have some different conversations, and that we want to continue to learn and grow in that direction, but that may require a little bit of change and some time as we're doing that, and some learning for all of us. When we talk about policing, peer policing, the word policing to me and having to do that comes from a place like if I don't police them, they're not going to do what they want.

Whereas I think we look at this and say those teachers come into that classroom every day because they love their kids and they care for their kids and they want to do the best they can. And if they knew exactly what the answer was, they would do it. Like when you ask the question about the fourth and fifth grade, you look at it and part of that was if it was a simple reason why, I already knew the answer that you wouldn't see that result. Right, so this isn't a question of why are we or why aren't we, but let's figure this out together because we're really all on the same team looking to do the best we can for our kids, and let's figure this out.

And then my, does anybody else have anything they want to add to the board? Just to your, to Lully's original question actually about some things we can do, and one of the things I think we do have to look at is being, how do we make our resources more responsive and flexible? I mean, that could be monetary, but not necessarily monetary only, but in terms of staffing. I would say the example, this PSAT, making sure every kid can take it, and the ACT prep class, and even funding kids that can't afford APs is only made possible because our PTO is really generous, and they did a direct appeal to parents.

So, you know, that we rely on them a ton, and so it would be nice if we had a way of accessing funds for successful initiatives that have demonstrated some level of success, actually, and have flexibility to access that within the same budget year. Dan, you might want to reiterate what you mean by that with the AP costing. Some people might know. Those tests cost money, too.

Yeah, so every AP test costs about $90. So there are families that if you have a student who's taking four or five APs, actually you're looking at approaching $500. And some kids will take courses and not take the exam because they can't afford them. So for our kids on free and reduced lunch, there is a bit of a fee reduction, but the college board still charges everyone.

And so we, you know, our PTO has been really great in terms of the care fund helps support that, the families in need and your students in need, and we've been able to subsidize a lot of our kids that way, but looking at how we do that and not necessarily relying on the kindness of strangers to make sure that that happens. And I also wanted to ask about, I found it really interesting to have a section on the dyslexia, the screening tools, and our initial kind of findings, the 11%. Because one question I had, is that the percentage you would have predicted that we would have about 11%? It's a lower percentage than what you find in the general population.

That's also not 100% of our students being tested because we had not, we haven't screened our kindergartners. Like we're in the process right now of screening our kindergartners, so I'm assuming that that percentage is going to come up a little bit once we've screened all the students. And then my second part is that I didn't see any of the data from that and I think it would be helpful, maybe in the future for us to actually see since we're just starting this and we're going to be doing a curriculum review Thank you. And some of the items might be tied into thoughts about, you know, changes in our curriculum, that it would be helpful for us to see some of that information from the FAST.

I wonder if that would be helpful in the literacy report because some of the stuff from the data is going to, like you said, it's going to influence some of the work that we're planning to move forward from that. So to put that data within that report might be, like maybe that's the right place to put That's the right place to put it for right now and then next year . Yeah. Thank you.

Stacy I just had a comment I just wanted to thank you all so much for each of your presentations because like we received this huge document of all these numbers and it easy like to lose focus when you just looking at numbers that we talking about kids like real kids So each of you told such great stories about how that impacts our kids and how you involve them in the conversations and taking ownership and personalizing your own learning. So it just put it all in perspective for me because you're staring at numbers. It's not personal, you know, or intimate. So I appreciated all the stories.

And I also appreciate that I think we all share the feeling that these standardized tests are each, you know, just one indicator of a child's success. So I want to keep that in perspective, too, anytime we talk about standardized testing. Like, I think about all these colleges and universities that, like, more and more every year are dropping tests altogether. So I think there's like a movement to recognizing that there are other ways to show that a student has potential to be successful.

So I just, anyway, I appreciate all the work you did in telling us the personal stories about what you're doing with kids in relation to the data. So thank you. Christopher, do you have anything? Yeah.

Thank you. And I also, I had a question from the District Advisory Council, which is, is there a correlation between panorama scores and standardized test scores? I fiddled around on panorama education. I can find anything, so we're just wondering.

I think they are building out tools to help districts better understand relationships between the social and emotional learning data and standardized testing. I'm not sure, but I should probably qualify that with standardized tests That's the first thing that we're looking at. And then we're looking at what other things that school districts are interested in pulling into the portal to look at next to the data. So those are new features that they're rolling out and offering as additional services that school districts can take advantage of and are ones that we are starting to look at.

They're also adding in other features related to tracking different interventions, both academically and social-emotionally for students as well, which are also things we're taking a closer look at to see if that would better help us understand how our students are experiencing Spervantage of the teaching and learning environment. Can I follow up on Adam's question? This is actually one I had, but I wasn't going to bring it up. And I don't know if this is what you're getting at or what their question was getting at, but is there a correlation between high-achieving, high-performing school districts and their wealth and a feeling of underperformance and not having been self-actualized because of the pressures that they're under And that feeling of not ever feeling successful because that fear of failure and that high pressure.

So I'm wondering if that's... Is there a correlation between lower self-efficacy and higher standardized test scores? That is something I will have to speak with them more directly about, as I, too, am starting to learn more about the tools and the power of the surveys that are available to us. And I think that's an excellent question worth us exploring, particularly as we look at data over time, especially as our students get older in the school district.

Actually, one piece of information around that when we were kind of drilling down in some of the data, one of the things I was surprised by actually, and not to belabor the point, was that you could actually drill down to the individual student level and see individual students on there. When I was actually looking at individual students who had identified, who had reported low self-efficacy, I was actually kind of shocked because I know the kids, actually. And a lot of the kids that were on that list are kids that are in AP classes and doing well in honors classes. But they reported low self-efficacy, which was really kind of surprising to me.

So that's actually, honestly, that was probably my biggest takeaway from looking at the data. The other part of that was, you know, third through fifth grade, we saw high self-efficacy rates and high standardized test scores. And so the other part of the question that I wasn't able to answer, but what's happening when we go through third and fifth grade? No, not to be defensive, but I would note that actually that score that was reported, that is the 40th percentile against all schools at all levels.

If you take our score and look at it compared to all other high schools, we're on the 90th percentile. But it does make you wonder because that's obviously a national trend. So just real quick on that. Adam, we noticed even on the elementary schools that we had a fair number of our students who were qualified as gifted that also reported low self-efficacy, which we found interesting as well.

So even though it's third through fifth grade, yes, they may be a little bit higher. We did notice that also just knowing the kids as we looked through it I thought well that kind of an interesting finding Now I also would caution this in saying one test one day I don know what just happened for all I know the kid may have just taken a test and not done very well And that's the other piece that as we look at this, even though we do have a couple of points maybe, I think the questions can sometimes be, could be answered based on something that may have happened that day, especially with some of our younger friends. They could have had a difficult day on the playground, and then you ask, are the other students here nice to you? And they may have just had an issue on the playground, so they may pick no that day, whereas if you ask them the next week, it could be different.

So we want to kind of be cautious on that. So even part of what we've looked at that is we want to understand not just what the data says, but what's the student's story behind the data, and really trying to understand the kid and what may be leading them to answer this that way before I start to make hypothetical guesses as to why or fill in some of those blanks. Because that worries me because we're talking about students and how they internalize some of these things. Any other questions?

Sure. Do you find that the way that the child is performing in the classroom is consistent with the standardized test score? So in other words, like, is it, you know, a kid that's getting A's, is then it equates to a high standardized test score versus a child that is in, Or is there not necessarily a direct correlation there? And do we have that data?

We do. So like the data profiles that Jen was showing, as we've started to build out those data profiles and then with our sort of district color coding system, you can look across a child and see a child that's all blue. You can look across a child and see a child that's all red. And then you have children that, depending on the test, It looks different and those are sometimes the children that we spend more time unpacking to try to figure out what is really going on here and what is the accurate read.

And so that's when I think we default more to the classroom assessment and what the teacher is observationally seeing for a child. Any other questions? I have some. So tell me about multiracial groups.

That seems maybe new to me. Why do we track multiracial groups? How do we really gather information from a multiracial group? So that's a state coding piece.

So we get that information from the state and it's self-reported, I think. Is that information useful to you? I mean, have you been able to gather? Because you don't have a lot.

It's easy to say, like, white, black subgroups, right? And then you can figure it out and track it and understand it, but you can't really track multiracial. I agree. All right.

So you feel the same way? Right, because it's not, I mean, it's probably the most heterogeneous of those groups in sort of pulling from a multi, like we don't know what that multi-race means. Sometimes folks will actually then say multi-race and then identify additional groups. So we do pull that data, so whenever, to drill down as best we can.

Okay. But I think the reason why we report it is because the state of the state. Got you. Any questions?

Yeah, last one. I'm almost done. Exhausted practice. I know I mentioned that earlier.

I wasn't trying to say that you all have exhausted yourselves. I'm just trying to get you all to think outside of the box, right? Meaning like, it may be beyond our control, it may be beyond actually doing what we're doing in the school. It may be where we have to advocate to our community leaders to really get some change happening in our schools.

And we can correlate folks from a lower socioeconomic class, right, and folks from a higher socioeconomic class as success, those who are failing. Then we can also say, we can also look at that data and say, well, maybe if we advocate to our elected officials to change some of the issues that are happening in our communities, right, then maybe that will also have an impact on kids being able to focus. The household itself being focused on the paradigm which is academics and then going to college and then getting a job as a standard method of earning income That all I was trying to get at It wasn just hey you all exhausted yourselves I knew that where you all would go That's why I kind of set it up like that. But I was trying, I'm also trying to say that we need to be looking at even more innovative thought process On how we're going to have an impact on these students who are performing poorly, especially since the metric to get into college, the metric for jobs is based on some kind of standardized things.

I don't know if there were any comments here. I would agree with you. I do think that's part of it. I think that's part of it.

Maybe that's an option that we have to look at. So I think when you talk about what are the things, that may be something. What does that look like? I don't know.

So that's where we have to try to figure some of those pieces out. Maybe that is the answer, so let's see what we can do to try to make this work. If that could be the answer, how do we discover that avenue and what does that look like? So I think those are the kinds of things that if those are things we want to start talking about, then let's work together on figuring out what that avenue looks like.

Other questions? Okay, we're going to move on to our first study item. That was an information item, believe it or not. So 7.01, thank you all, we appreciate it.

7.01, I'd like to check in. Thank you. Okay, the formal budget development process for the next school year begins tonight. The budget framework maps out the district's overall strategy for the creation of the budget.

So tonight I'll present information on an overall macro fiscal policy, strategic level regarding revenue projections and proposed expansion plans within specific departments such as school buildings and facility maintenance and categories such as salary and benefits. Tonight is also an opportunity for the board to question and provide input that will be used to finalize some more macro budget document So, the five-year projections, they are used to build that macro budget and are continually updated as information is received. There have been significant changes in several data points that I provided up to, that I will provide updated information throughout this presentation. Changes in enrollment drive our staffing.

As a result, enrollment projections The Voluntary Student Transfer Program will continue to enroll siblings for the 2021 school year. We're anticipating, is it seven new students, I think, we were told. However, 24 students will graduate. Therefore, this will represent a decrease in tuition for this program of approximately $117,000.

Revenue from the students enrolled in the district as statutory tuition students is projected to decrease approximately $45,000 The Board of Directors of the Education Committee has been working closely with the Board of Directors of the Education Committee to address the concerns raised by the Board of Directors. As they continue to move through the school, we continue to see more residents. That then results in class sizes exceeding the class size standards at the upper levels. So we'll continue to monitor that to see if there's space at the kindergarten or lower levels for tuition students.

We are not currently anticipating any significant changes in state and federal funding. However, I would like to point out that during the 1920 school year, this district was awarded a $125,000 federal grant that we anticipate to be renewed for up to five years. So that wasn't in the budget last year, and we will be bringing that with budget revisions moving forward. So this grant supports the work of the Clayton's All-In Coalition.

The first half of the fiscal year saw interest rates above 2.5%. Doesn't sound too exciting to most people, but for us it's really exciting. However, due to the Federal Reserve reducing the Fed fund rates back down to levels from March of 2019, or back to 1.5%, we've been researching new investment options in order to maximize earnings on the current payments we've received this month. On the plus side of this decline in the Fed Fund rate, it allowed the district to refinance bonds last month, in November, resulting in a $2.6 million savings.

New developments are continuously monitored because they are our primary means of increasing our tax revenue. So Regents Bank, 212 Clayton, Borden, and Ceylon in Clayton, as well as Central Park Townhomes and Allegro in Richmond Heights, Our recent developments that have been completed and are all included in new construction. These developments represent approximately $850,000 in new tax revenue to the district over the past two years. Centene University, or their early childhood development center, and the Clarendell of Clayton will add approximately $500,000 in new tax revenue over the next two years.

Several other developments, including the Boulevard South, Resident Inn, or you could also say Apogee Office Tower, they're both presented for discussion. AC Hotel at the old police station, Forsyth Point, which was previously Shaw Park Point, and Fred Kramer's new developments are all in conceptual phases and are waiting on approval, and therefore, then, these are included in the projections. The new Centene Tower has an occupancy and per discussions with the County Assessor's Office, they anticipate will be placed on the tax rolls at 100% as of January 1, 2020. However, commercial buildings are added to the tax rolls when under roof.

Therefore, there was new construction added as of January 1st, 2019, and is included in the current year revenue projections. The percentage that the county considered the building complete was substantially higher than my original projections. After talking to the county, they considered the building 70% complete as of January 1st, 2019. The We had thought we would get about $500,000.

We ended up getting $715,000 from this parcel. The county has confirmed that the abatement will be applied next year, and then the taxes will be reduced. Protested assessed values continue to remain a challenge for all of St. Louis County, resulting in continuous fluctuations in assessed valuation, including the data and the tax payments, and that all causes significant fluctuations in our revenue trends.

In 2019, the district was able to recoup $1.2 million in protested taxes. Trens normally have us paying back around a million dollars in protested settlements through the first six months of the year. Oddly this year, we have had no tax settlements at all. So currently our revenue is up around a million dollars.

I've reached out to the county and asked numerous others, as well as numerous other CFOs from the district has also reached out to the county and the The county says they have no appeals pending. There were over $10 million of protesting tax payments for Clayton last year. So we do assume some of those will be successful in their protest, but for some reason we have had no payments or taxes at the current time. So it doesn't make sense, but we will continue to monitor and see what happens.

In addition, the 2019 tax assessments increased approximately 19% for residential and 14% for commercial. This is significantly more than 11% average during the 2017 reassessment cycle. Since Prop E was successfully passed this removes all the provisions from the Hancock Amendment in the tax calculation Had Prop E not passed we would only be able to collect CPI We would have to roll back the rate, and we would only be getting $800,000 this year in additional tax revenue plus remit construction. Instead, we're allowed to set the levy based on a higher increased assessed value percentage than was originally projected.

Further, tax assessments that were provided by the county in September, what we set the levy on, this was the first year in the last, as long as I can remember, that they were not finalized. It's a state law that they're required to be finalized, and they were not. So we had to base our tax levy on the information that was known at that time. As a result, the final assessed values at the time of billing in November resulted in an additional $2.6 million in revenue over what was projected.

So I am going to be receiving some more information in February regarding the amount of protested taxes for 2019. Still probably won't have information on settlements for 2018. But because of all these unusual fluctuations and the ability to get some more information in February, I am asking that we wait until more information is received to discuss tax revenue for next year. And so in April, we have a budget update meeting.

And so typically, it's just a limit update, but I would like to do more of a study of the tax issues that we have and decide how we're going to move forward with the taxes at that point in time. There are also significant legislative bills related to property assessments that were heard by the House of Ways and Means. We did have a couple CFOs that went to testify on those, but actually the CFOs didn't get heard. It was all the assessors.

Most of this affects the assessor's offices. The bills basically try to cap the amount of assessed value growth that can be applied to a parcel. Most opponents are concerned that it will create unfair assessments between neighboring properties. So basically, as I mentioned, we were seeing a 19% increase.

Some parcels In Kansas City, they were seeing over 30%, up to 50% even. And that's been the biggest trigger because Kansas City has a waiver of the Hancock Amendment, and so they can increase their taxes for that whole percentage. So that's where most of this has been driven from. The issue for us is the more our assessed value goes up, the more we can roll our rate back, and we're getting near our maximum authorized levy, which once we hit that, We have to go back out for another vote of the people.

And so the ability to raise the assessed value more allows us to have more fluctuations in that maximum enterprise value. So that legislation does impact us negatively. As well, it impacts our bonding capacity. Don't anticipate us needing any additional bonding capacity at this time.

However, if we would want to do something, it could potentially impact that. So we will continue to monitor these bills and their impact on the district. So the revenue was kind of the hard part on this presentation. So are there any questions on the revenue at this time?

Just why don't you go through the whole thing, and then we'll go over the questions at the end. Okay, so in looking at expenditures, they should be pretty straightforward. There's really not a lot of fluctuations from the expenditures, from the projections on what we had during the operating levy, or anything like that. We pretty much stayed consistent with what we had said.

So we'll start with salary increases. This represents 63% of the operating budget, Superroportionate, Bored, and Superexpensive, Proprietary, and Proprietary and Surgical Ops is the largest setting of the school district. In the past, the school district has been a major source of education. And then, technology and capital improvement plans represent 3% or $1.5 million of the operating budget.

So, the CIP funds will be increased 2% for CPI, and $1.5 million for additional capital improvements, Superintendent Board of Education Proposition O levy agenda motion carried for furniture purchases for a total of TIP funds are held flat at along with an additional in contingency reserve because 2019-20 was the third year of the approved technology and improvement plan, and so that plan needs to be brought back to the board for review later this spring to decide how that will be. So other expenses which represent 9% of the operating budget or $5 million such as liability insurance, utilities, buildings and grounds, SROs, we really don't have a lot of say in how those increase and normally we just budget 2% for CPI. So in summary, revenue is projected to decrease 2.7% next year, and this is primarily because, based on the information we know today, we do not anticipate any recoupment of taxes. So that's a $1.2 million decrease in tax revenue.

As I mentioned, we'll continue to discuss tax revenue in more depth in April when we have more information. Expenses overall basically will increase 2.5%. And although the district spent down approximately $10 million over the past four years because of the successful passing of Prop E, we are projected to have approximately a $4 million surplus in 2020. That will continue to build up.

Thank you. Before I open up to questions, I just want to underscore that Mary Jo is giving us very specific information based upon today, and it could change, right? There's a lot of information we don't know, so I just want to, you know, I'm just going to answer our questions, of course, but there's a bunch of this that could change between now and April or now and May when we put the question. Yeah, I just think it's important to emphasize this is draft, draft, draft, and so it's important to know that this isn't the final recommendation.

So having said that, questions? Go ahead, Kristen. I have two. Go ahead.

So first question is you talked about how there's normally we have to pay back a million dollars each year. They haven't asked for that million dollars yet this year. You said that there were $10 million worth of protested taxes. Is that much higher than what it normally is?

Is it normally $5 million? Is it normally, you know, what's the... We've seen significant fluctuations in that balance. So that was 2018.

So, 2017, we actually had 14 million, which was our highest. So, last year was lower than the year before, but it was actually higher than, I would say our average is more than seven. Seven. And we normally pay back a million.

So, that means out of those $7 million, normally about a million dollars is successfully protested. Successfully protested, but we have to pay back. Okay, I'm channeling Dr. Bernstein here.

He always talked about that even though we had to pay it back, we'd be able to then recoup it the next year, so it didn't really matter. And yet, it did that we weren't able to do that for the last, how many years? It was about three years ago. Three years ago that we weren't able to get that money back that we paid back.

Yeah, and that year after we actually paid back over $2 million. We paid back over $2 million. Okay, so there's still a bunch of unknown, but in this scenario, if we, let's say it turns out that we have to pay back a million, are we in a situation like we were three years ago where we're not going to get that back? I don't know that until I get way more information in July, but right now, last year at this point in time when we were working on the levy, I had enough information to know as of that point in time that we were going to get back $1.2 million.

Right now, as of today, there is nothing to recoup. So it doesn't make any sense, and I'm not the only one who feels that way, but we're not getting any information out of the county to tell us anything. So what they have said is that things are getting settled at the Board of Equalization earlier, but what doesn't make sense to us is Board of Equalization happens before payments are paid in protest. So, we're like, the timing doesn't, it's not a valid response.

So, I should, I should have said the first part. Thank you. And thank you for being so diligent this last year and noticing things and being on top of the city and state or whoever it is that you're on top of to do things. So, we definitely appreciate that.

I think I asked too much. Questions? Anybody else have questions? I had something really quick.

I not sure that I really asking I put it in a question form but it really about when under the recommendations when you come back and talk to us about the technology improvement plan and I think I might have brought this up in another context but I think I guess my question is how will you ensure that there going to be a critical analysis of the pros and the cons of the tech plan And I guess what I asking is I think it really I would want to hear whatever we needing that we kind of looked at the things like the one-to-one and that we've gotten input from teachers and students and parents kind of on how that's going That investment's worth it at any other future new investments in technology or removing of current things that we're spending on you. And I think that's a really important piece of it. Yeah, I think that's just part of the natural process of it is that we've implemented a plan. We're evaluating it and determining how we're going to move forward from it.

So that's why we did it in a three-year cycle. So that'll be part of it. Okay, so we're moving on to our next study item, which is policy IL on assessment and Melaina, 7.02. Melaina, can you just give a brief reminder about what this is, this month's about?

Right, it's specific to the assessment program, so requirements that are given to us mainly by the state through statute related to assessments. And the main change that's being recommended comes out of state statute and it's really related to the ACT work keys and students being able to have access to that assessment. Both if the state requires, so remember a couple years ago that the state required us to give the ACT, the state funded it. So in that case then the students would have access to the work keys assessment through state funding.

Or if the district funds the ACQ, which actually we do, then we provide an opportunity for students to have access to that assessment if they wanted to take it. So that means that they can actually get what that individually he to question that they got right or wrong. The word keys assessment is actually like a career assessment. And the one thing that I would say from the perspective of our district, I'm not recommending changing the language, I think, here, but just for your context of this, we actually give a different assessment through Maya Learning that's sort of an equivalent assessment, and when we move to that system, we don't deny a child access to the work piece, but the test that we're doing is actually giving it to all students, and then the counselors meet with the students to talk about it as a part of the assessment.

So, it's sort of a similar assessment. So, I'm not recommending any change of language. The other thing is, the other thing that's highlighted is around the high school equivalency examination. So, Missouri Option Program.

So, if a student, and we do have students who participate and get a diploma through Missouri Option. So, just making sure that that's a part of this. Other than that, the EOC piece that's highlighted about examinations, the potential for those to be waived, those are all things that we already have in place. All of this comes from statutes, so I would recommend just moving forward with it the way that it's recommended.

Any questions or comments about this one? Thank you, Melina. All right, the next one is Policy BBA. It's on illness and injury.

All right. Good evening. So policy update EVBA is related to illness and injury response and prevention, which basically outlines that the board expects district staff to assist and respond if somebody becomes injured or ill while on district property or in district transportation or at a district activity. So that might mean calling emergency medical services, administering CPR, etc.

So the main changes are one, to bring, MSBA has just rewritten a few sections to just bring more clarity to the policy itself. And the other one, too, is they just adjusted the language to better reflect the CPR requirement in accordance with Missouri law. So at this point in time, I would recommend that in the future that the board would adopt the policy as MSBA has recommended. Any questions about this one?

Great, thank you. All right, check out. So in terms of the policies, there's really no check out for there. In terms of the budget, coming back to that question on technology, and that's part of the plan to do an evaluation of what we've done.

In terms of the check out around the assessment, we're going to include data from the dyslexia report into our literacy because that is going to help inform some of our work there. And then we're going to constantly thinking about ways that we hold ourselves accountable to what we're doing for our teachers and thinking about making sure that we're doing what we can, not to just be exhausted, but to be able to continue to think about innovative in different ways. But I think the biggest thing is thinking about going back to that self-efficacy and seeing about whether or not there's a correlation between the way our students are feeling as they progress. I took lots of notes from that conversation, so I definitely will process with our central office team.

Awesome, thanks. So we're going to move on to our action items. So, the motion for 8.1? It's a move that the Board of Education approve policy AC, prohibition against discrimination, harassment, and retaliation, as presented in the report provided to the board.

Second. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions?

All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Passes 7-0.

Thank you. So 8.02. Moved that the Board of Education approve policy EF, food service management, as presented in the report provided. Second.

It's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All in favor? Aye.

Any opposed? Pass it unanimously. All right, 8.03. Before you read this, just because I think I learned from the last time, I have a suggestion on the protocol.

So can I say that before you read it in case people agree and then we go with an amendment to it? Does that make sense? Sure. I think I'm understanding that.

Sure. So my suggestion, and I worked on this one too and talked with Joe about it. My suggestion would be that I didn't catch on the first round through is that I think it would be better, it's just that part about the board having 12 hours upon receipt of the email to give any input. I'm wondering if it would actually be better if we have, if the board has a chance to give input after the president has gathered information from the superintendent and then if there's any legal stuff that the board gets to kind of see what the response is going to be and then says whatever rather than early on.

So that if there's some... Some of the questions might be answered when we hear... Yeah, it might be answered and it might be like, oh, I would add this and then the president can work on either taking that in or whatever. But I'm wondering if it should happen later rather than initially.

That's my only point. And I just think, and Lily and I talked about this, I think the counterpoint is I'm just afraid that that's going to slow down the process. So, in other words, because somebody sends us an email and there's 12, you know, we're going to respond, you're going to get a response within two business days and then you have 12 hours to kind of give input I think the time should be the same because it was the 12 o'clock. I don't think, I wouldn't want it to slow up the response either.

The time frame should be the same. So I guess that speeds up, that means the superintendent has to respond a little bit quicker. I guess that gives you a little less time. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm saying.

It has another step, which I think, so I guess I would say I'm not in favor of adding that because I think that that makes it a little more comfortable. What we try to do is get information as soon as possible, but there are sometimes there are situations that it takes longer than, maybe a certain period but I don know what other board members feel like Well I feel like we talked about this before but you were more specific in this situation And I appreciate the thought behind it I think I shared before that I feel like having served as president and the gravity of some of the emails and then some are not. So, in my opinion, that we have appointed a president to respond on behalf of the board. So, for me, in this situation, I would be more inclined to not be in favor of that, because I think we have to be, in some cases, we have to be swift or swifter.

I don't know what I'm not trying to do in the right term. But I think we're allowing the president to have that kind of latitude to be thoughtful about what the answer is. I think I'm not in favor of it if it means adding a day to the process. If that's the only way for it to happen, then I don't get that.

Other thoughts? Maria? I move that the Board of Education approve the protocol responding to concerns from constituents as presented. Second.

Okay, it's been moved and seconded. Any other comments or questions? So, just maybe clarify because this, the protocol as presented was what was noticed on board docs. Yes.

Correct. We've been talking about the proposition. We're saying we're not going to change it. We don't have a motion to change what was presented and we're moving forward on what was presented.

No, thank you. That's a good clarification. So any other comments, any questions? All in favor?

Any opposed? Passing to the other slate. Thank you. Okay, so we are moving on to our consent agenda.

Motion to move that the Board of Education approve the consent agenda. Second. It has been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions on the consent agenda?

Do you want to read the donation first? Or after? I think after. Okay.

All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Passage in Amsterdam.

So there are, thank you for saying that, there are donations. I don't want to say that there's new glasses of meth like this to read. So we wanted to thank Diane and Douglas Dawson, I think, actually for a very generous donation of $15,000 to the Clayton High School for the creation of a collaborative space for the math department. That's one.

And then there's second, which is Mrs. Irene Monica Amrikoff of Siegfried for the generous donation from the Harry M. Siegfried Revocable Trust in the amount of $6,000 for the district. So two great donations.

Thank you. Okay, so we're moving on to board communications. Oh, I'm sorry, financials. Yeah, thank you.

So do we have a motion for, do I remember my answers? I move that the Board of Education approve the payment of current expenditures and investments as submitted. Second. Second.

Second. Any comments or questions? I just have one quick question. Okay.

I'll be brief. Thank you. It's a five-part question, you've broken down four different steps. So, you know, this is detailed information, as you know.

You don't have a whole lot of time to go through it, and I don't really know, like, the history of, like, what these numbers really mean, you know what I'm saying? Like, if it's out of whack or not. But just a few things. Instruction and Curriculum Development We have over what we had from last year Is that accurate Which month is that This is November I didn even do December I spent all day on this But like November yeah November yeah And then it this sheet here Superintendent, Board of Education, Proposition O, levy, agenda, motion carried.

Spervantage, Spervantage of the year, budget, and the budget of the year. We can discuss it offline actually. One last question, this is a larger number. Interest, bonded and debt-ness.

The interest on there is... Was it higher or lower? Kind of high. Higher.

Well, probably because we... It was higher than last year. So yes, negative $818,000. So it goes by the bond schedule, but there's also subsidized interest.

And so the last bonds that we refunded in 2017 eliminated a bunch of the subsidized interest. So it's kind of weird. The interest will change because of that, and then we've also accelerated our debt schedule. That's what I thought.

That's what I thought. That's what I thought. That was a correlation. Gotcha.

Yeah. Cool. That's easy to tie back to. It was a debt schedule.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was easy. Any other questions on the financials? All in favor?

Any opposed? Passes unanimously. All right, so the December financials. Moved that the Board of Education approve the payment of current expenditures and investments as submitted.

Second. It's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions? All in favor?

Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Now we're moving on to board communications. Sorry I was rushing.

Does anybody have any board communications? I have two very quickly. One is there are two proposals right now for early childhood to put on the November 2020 ballot. Thank you.

And even some thought about 032 And then another is looking at property tax initiative And it looking more just at three and four year olds So anyway just to tell you about that And then just finally you all saw it but I just say it for the record that the candidate filing is closed So we have five folks on the ballot And in that order are Chris Winn and David Gulick and Gary Pearson Kim Hurst and then Nathaniel Millett I do want to share of course a few things Superintendent Board of Education Proposition O levy agenda motion carried Spervantage, Propriety, and Equality. That's what the deal is. Okay. Anybody have anything else?

Go ahead. Can I just make a, I mean, I guess a little bit of a question for the first legislative advocacy committee meeting of the year of the districts participating, and that is Friday, and this is maybe not a great thing to advertise as a candidate. I'm going to miss the first meeting because I'm going to be in California last week, so not in the night. But there are a lot of bills that are pending and that have been filed, I don't know if pending is really the right word, related to education.

We don't know what's going to happen with any of them yet. They all may go nowhere. Some of them will probably go somewhere, and some will probably go a long ways. And I think it would be anybody who is available, some Webster Grows, 8 o'clock.

730. 730. And I will be there, and Sean will be there, I think, right? I'm sorry that I can't be there, but I think it's good education for anybody who can, not just us, but anybody.

7.30 to 9. This Friday. And Susan Goldhammer from MSBA will be there kind of as a special speaker to talk about all things legislative. I mean, I think they're very good.

And we will host one in March. Ours is March. So the legislative meeting will be in Clayton. So candidates could come.

Yeah. Anyone can come. Absolutely. In some districts, parents come, students come.

It's really educational. It's absolutely wild. And there's a lot of things that can potentially affect us. And we may be in a position where we're asked to talk to constituents and voice support or opposition to different things.

And it just helps a lot. I'm sorry. I had to. No.

I appreciate that. That's great. Awesome. Yeah, go ahead.

I have one Parks and Rec. I should update it. Sure. If you haven't noticed, the ice rink is gone.

The building will be gone soon. And the new facility, they've now changed the name a few times, so I'm forgetting what they're calling this new facility. But it's supposed to be ready in spring of 2021. So this winter and next winter.

Anything else? Yeah. I just wanted to say that I know we talked about this a little bit earlier, but on February 3rd we'll be having our next District Advisory Council meeting. They're at 7.30 in the morning on Mondays.

So if you'd like to get up early and come hang out with us, you're welcome to do so. And I'll send out an email and talk with Joe and Dr. Gordy about it and the Advisory Council, just clarifying it, but I'll send out an email confirming it. And then I'm also going to invite them to the meeting on February 5th and have them come and watch.

And this is all the students from all the different grades? This is the high school. We're still working. We're still developing the elementary school and middle school district advisory council.

It's a process itself? We meet at the high school. We usually meet in the principal's conference room, but that won't be big enough. So maybe we'll meet in the library in the morning and I could work on that.

Anything else? Motion to adjourn. Moved by the Board of Education, adjourned. All in favor?

Any opposed? We're adjourned, thank you.