Seattle Schools Board Meeting Mar. 12, 2025

Good afternoon, we will call the meeting to order momentarily and SPS TV will begin broadcasting.

All right, the March 12th, 2025 regular board meeting is called to order at 416 p.m.

We would like to acknowledge that we are on ancestral lands and traditional territories of the Puget Sound Coast Salish people.

Miss Wilson Jones, the roll call, please.

Vice President Briggs.

Here.

Director Hersey.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Here.

Director Rankin.

Here.

Director Yoon.

Here.

And President Taub.

Here.

All right.

Thank you.

I'm going to turn it over right away to Superintendent Jones for his comments, followed by a joint statement from the superintendent and the board.

Thank you, President Taub.

Good evening, everyone.

I want to begin tonight's meeting on a somber note.

Our district is grieving the heartbreaking loss of a sixth grade student from Washington Middle School.

This loss is deeply felt, and we also recognize that other communities are experiencing their own losses.

We want to remind families and the community that we are committed to providing necessary supports for those who need it.

Counselors and resources are available for students and staff as we encourage anyone who's struggling to please reach out.

I also want to take time to acknowledge another recent situation that impacted the bridges and interagency communities at our Rocks Hill Annex building.

President Topp and I had the opportunity to speak with students, staff, and families on site this past week, and we will stay true to our promises to provide students and staff a safer learning environment, which they deserve.

We're thankful that our students and staff are safe, but instances of community gun violence are traumatic, and we want to reiterate that we are committed to providing the necessary supports to those who need to process those experiences.

It's also Women's History Month, and I want to take a moment to recognize that the month of March is Women's History Month, a time to celebrate the incredible contributions of women throughout history and in our very own communities.

Women have played and continue to play a vital role in shaping education from pioneering educators to the dedicated teachers and educators, administrators, and staff who support students every day.

I'd also take the opportunity to celebrate outstanding achievement of our student athletes.

I want to say congratulations to the Rainier Beach High School boys basketball team.

They have been crowned the state champions.

I was thrilled to be at the game and witness their victory.

I also want to recognize Ballard's girls gymnastics team.

They have first place in state as well.

Give them a hand if you would.

Their hard work and dedication and determination have truly paid off, and we're so proud of them.

We also have other top finishers.

The Garfield Boys basketball team came in third in state, and we have four athletes who finished in the top three in wrestling in their respective weight classes.

And so the Metro League and Seattle Public Schools is really showing out.

These showcase the dedication and talent of our students, coaches, and we're immensely proud of their success.

Getting to our bread and butter around academics, we will have another presentation from our academics team on our progress towards improving college and career readiness for our African-American male students, students of color, and all of our students across our district.

We will go over our strategic efforts and our current trends and lessons that we've learned and plan interventions for keeping that progress going forward.

I'm looking forward to having that conversation with you this evening.

Regarding highly capable, yesterday we sent out a message to the community with an update on our highly capable services.

After careful review, we have decided to continue the hybrid model for the next three years.

Specifically, we are offering 8C programming in neighborhood schools while also maintaining the cohort model.

We recognize, please, And equally as important, we recognize the importance of highly capable programming to our students, family, and we're committed to a thoughtful, transparent process as we assess it during the next three years in the future.

We look forward to sharing more this evening in a conversation with the board.

We are also embarking on strategic planning.

So tonight our team will be walking the board through the planning process for the upcoming 2025-2030 strategic plan.

This will be the first in a series of regular updates that will follow a consistent format and schedule, which we'll introduce later this evening.

The strategies that we're developing will build on the board's goals and guardrails and the associated interim metrics which we will discuss this evening.

Our goal is to keep the board and our community informed and engaged as we shape the future direction of our district together.

So in closing, we have a full agenda this evening.

I'm looking forward to a productive conversation.

And thank you all for being here, your continued partnership, your interest in what we're doing here at Seattle Public Schools.

And with that, I'll turn it over back to President Topp.

Thank you.

I'm going to turn it right back to you because you're going to read, I believe, the first part of our statement here that we will be sending out to the SPS community.

Yes, and I will find that.

Please.

Thank you.

We acknowledge that this is a time of great uncertainty, and we are striving to provide stability and predictability to our students, families, and staff.

As we navigate the constantly changing landscape, we are steadfast in our values and will continue to ensure that every student in Seattle Public Schools receives a high-quality education with the supports that they need to thrive.

We are following the guidance of the Washington State Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction and continuing to serve students.

We are committed to providing high quality education to every student in our district, SPS students of every racial and ethnic background, income status, disability status, immigration status, language spoken, gender identity, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, and or any other personal characteristics will receive equitable access to educational opportunities and supports.

Thank you.

I'll continue the statement.

Our mission has not changed.

Our work will not stop.

The values we articulate in board policy 0030, ensuring educational and racial equity, and 0010, instructional philosophy, reflect the values of our Seattle community and define who we are as a district.

We live these values every day by celebrating the brilliance and experience of every student, cultivating learning environments that affirm student identities, and broadening students' understanding of the world.

Seattle Public Schools stands firm in our values and will continue to stand with and serve all our students and families.

Thank you.

And that statement will be sent out today to just reaffirm our commitment to our values.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

We're going to continue to plug along here, since we have a long agenda, and go to our student board member comments.

Yeah, so the student board members have been doing a lot of advocacy work.

A couple weeks ago, we helped draft questions for rainy day recess podcasts who are in the process of creating an introductory interview with all candidates running for the upcoming school board election.

And we've also been really active on Instagram with all our board meeting summary posts.

Aside from that, one of the main things I would like to bring up is the meeting with Seattle Youth Commission.

President Topp and the student board members are scheduled to meet with Seattle Youth Commission, also known as SYC, next Tuesday, March 18th, and this meeting will be held online, and calendar invites have been sent to all board directors, so please feel free to join the call if you have time.

JUST FOR CONTEXT, I AM A MEMBER OF SYC AND OUR COMMISSION OPERATES UNDER THE DEPARTMENT OF NEIGHBORHOODS FOR THE CITY OF SEATTLE AND OUR MISSION IS TO CONNECT YOUTH WITH ELECTED OFFICIALS AND ADDRESS ISSUES THAT AFFECT YOUNG PEOPLE IN SEATTLE.

THE COMMISSION CONSISTS OF 15 COMMISSIONERS BUT WE WERE MOSTLY SPEAKING WITH THE EDUCATION SUBCOMMITTEE TO TALK ABOUT OUR INITIATIVES AND ALSO THE FAP LEVY.

AND FROM THE STUDENT PERSPECTIVE, My peers have expressed concerns about many changes that have already been implemented or are potentially on the horizon.

And students are aware of what is happening, not only at the city level, but also at the state level.

And they are paying close attention to the decisions being made.

So I would just like to say that we, as student board members, are trying our best to ensure your voices are heard.

And we have been doing a lot of work.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, we're going to move into board member and liaison reports.

I will start off.

It has been a difficult few weeks for the Seattle Public Schools community.

As Dr. Jones shared, our community is grieving the loss of a Washington middle school sixth grade student, and no words I have can provide comfort or peace to the family or the community is grieving this tragedy.

Weighs on the hearts of us, and they're already heavy from recent passings of students and staff in the SPS community.

On behalf of the board, I want to share my deepest condolences to our families and our school communities that are grieving.

Dr. Jones also mentioned that our Bridges and Interagency school communities were also impacted by gun violence recently.

These students are safe, but this experience was one no student or staff member should go through.

I had the opportunity to visit our Washington Middle School Interagency and Bridges school communities with Dr. Jones.

And I wanna say a heartfelt thank you to all the staff who are working to support those communities, saw firsthand how hard they are working for our students.

And their work is vital every day for the success of our students.

I'M GOING TO MOVE INTO A LITTLE BIT MORE OF OUR BOARD UPDATES FOR OUR COLLEAGUES HERE.

SORRY, JUST A SEC.

OKAY.

FOR OUR COLLEAGUES, I HAVE A FEW UPDATES AS WE MOVE INTO ADDITIONAL COMMITTEE AND LIAISON REPORTS.

I've been working to share an update every month on the things that we have been doing and doing since the last board meeting, as well as sort of the updates on the work plan that we collectively worked on at our retreat.

First, I want to note, we have a full agenda tonight, and I'm going to encourage us to keep our comments and questions focused as we move through.

On engagement, we had our first full board engagement session on February 26th.

on the budget held at Bailey Gatzert and had a really awesome turnout.

It was wonderful to see.

I think we had some great learning lessons, ways to improve the process, and we will continue to, as we focus and make board engagement a priority this year, improve the process.

One of the things that I think was heard was how do we use this information that was gained?

Where is that feedback loop?

And we will revisit the themes that were shared at this engagement session at our next budget session because the engagement was on the budget and has mainly to do with budget topics.

However, our next engagement opportunity is on March 26th at Rainier Beach High School, and it will be with directors Hersey, Rankin, and myself joining that.

We're structuring this engagement based on the work of the board's prior ad hoc engagement committee as well as our work and discussions that we had during our retreat.

Directors Rankin and Briggs recently visited Whitman Middle School for our first stop on our monthly school visits.

And next month, board directors will be visiting high schools to encourage students to apply for our school board student member program.

Looking forward to that.

It will be my first time being able to see the center school.

And we'll continue to do these engagement sessions and school tours throughout the year.

Second, on our assignments for the year, Director Mizrahi will be our lead for our board work supporting the collective bargaining process.

State law and our policy share that the superintendent and his team will be negotiating with our labor partners, so that won't be us, but Director Mizorahi will be our board lead internally.

Next, a few reminders.

Last meeting, I shared that you would all board directors receive assignments for our self-evaluation sections.

Those have been divvied up.

You should have seen them in the weekly report, but we're going to be sending a reminder email as well, so please come to the next board meeting prepared for your section and review it.

Finally, quick highlight on our committee work, the ad hoc policy manual review committee chaired by Director Rankin met for its first meeting last month and she may have more to say there.

Forthcoming, we have our ad hoc policy committee on student safety is in the planning stages under Director Hersey's leadership and our audit committee chaired by Vice President Briggs held a quarterly meeting last week and Vice President Briggs, I'm going to go to you here real quickly for the announcement on completed internal OKAY.

BOARD PROCEDURE 6550BP INTERNAL AUDIT REQUIRES AN ANNOUNCEMENT OF COMPLETED INTERNAL AUDITS.

AS THE AUDIT AND FINANCE COMMITTEE CHAIR, I DON'T THINK IT'S ACTUALLY A FINANCE COMMITTEE, THOUGH.

I THINK IT'S JUST AUDIT.

ANYWAY.

I am announcing that at the March 4th quarterly audit meeting, the Office of Internal Audit presented two internal audit reports, McKinney-Vento and Foster Care Students Enrollment Practices Audit and Nathan Hale High School Audit.

All audit reports are discussed at a public audit meeting and the completed reports are posted for public viewing on today's agenda and on the Office of Internal Audit Department website.

Thank you, Vice President Briggs.

So there's a lot of work going on board directors, and we're all moving in different directions and doing our thing as we try to hold ourselves accountable to what we said we would do at our fall retreat.

Do other board committee chairs or liaisons have any reports for the board?

Director Rankin.

Yeah, is this on?

Yes.

Sorry, I'm going to, it's a hard time to be a person right now, I think.

I have a couple of clarifying questions actually about agenda setting and work plan.

When we approved, when we adopted the regular board meeting calendar last year to the legally required one regular board meeting a month, it was with the commitment and planning of still having a second board meeting a month.

but reserved for work session, study session, other business of the board, and community engagement in a two-way fashion to replace and improve upon one-way public testimony that would have been lost by that second regular board meeting.

I would like some clarification on...

where we are with that it looks like we only have one regular board meeting a month and that's all that we're meeting as a board and districts this size and our need to be transparent and hold do our business in public i'm not understanding how we're going to accomplish what's in our work plan in one regular board meeting a week and the when the board voted on that regular board meeting calendar the commitment was a second board meeting a week So I would like some clarity on that.

Connected to that, I would like clarity on agenda setting.

I requested, along with Director Briggs, to have our work plan discussed as an agenda item, and that was not honored.

In the past, We have had, if two board directors request something to be on the agenda, it goes on the agenda.

The ad hoc governance committee recommended even that any one board director could make a request.

So if there's a change in practice that I missed, apologies.

I'm just confused about how the full board participates in what we do together as a board and how we're going to have time to do that.

So I don't need that answered right now, but I wanted to just state that my request to have that become an actual discussion of the board about agenda setting and agreement on our work plan and how those things are going to happen, I'm requesting officially again that that is placed on a future agenda so that we can be aligned.

Every member of the board should have the equal opportunity to determine what we talk about, and it should be voted on by the board.

So I just need a little bit of clarity on that.

And also just for planning my schedule, what meetings I have when.

So the legislative liaison update, I have a memo in information items attached to the meeting minutes.

So you can read that.

The top things I want to note, I think, are that right now the House and Senate majority caucuses are working on their budget proposals.

And the state's revenue forecast comes out on March 18th.

So typically what happens is each caucus works on their proposed budget.

When the forecast comes out that gives a little bit more information about what revenue might be available to budget, they'll finalize their proposals and release those.

By the end of session, what will need to happen is for them all to come together and agree on the budget to fund our state for the next two years.

So there is a possibility of a special session if things are too far apart.

It's still a possibility right now.

We'll know in the next couple of weeks whether that moves from being just possible to being likely, but as for now, it's a possibility.

What you'll see, I'm guessing, is that the Senate budget is going to be more focused on what they wish to invest in, what they want to fund.

regardless of where the revenue may fall, what you'll likely see from the house is more of a, here's what we can afford unless we increase revenue.

So they're kind of coming at the same...

issue of grappling with their own deficit from two different directions.

Here's what we are trying to get to versus here's kind of the reality of what we'd have to deal with without new revenue.

And then we'll see more discussion between them all about what people are willing to do in terms of revenue versus cuts and what kind of a combination there will be there.

um i can't remember president top if you said it already or not but we will be in olympia tomorrow um i was going to remind uh i was going to say that and i think director mizarahi will be joining as well okay great so um we meet uh legislative liaison and uh board president um if available and i know up to one other director meet uh a few times in preparation for a session and then during session, in addition to our regular communications and advocacy without meeting.

So we're gonna have that meeting tomorrow in Olympia.

And everybody's gonna be cranky They've been up late and working really hard trying to get to today's policy cutoff.

Any policy that didn't pass the caucus it was introduced in by 5 p.m.

today is dead for the session.

So they've been doing a lot of late nights trying to get things to their butt.

As they're developing their proposed budgets, we want to make sure that we get another opportunity with our Seattle delegation to make really clear the reality for our schools and students and how dependent that is on what they can do to provide increased revenue for public schools.

And then, let's see, later this month, Director Topp and I are both going to Washington DC to advocate at the federal level.

I have a number of meetings with some different Washington delegates in addition to hearing from, sorry, I'm all over the place, hearing about more about what's happening at the federal level and how it impacts, in particular, urban school districts will be there with urban school boards and staff from across the country.

Yeah, it's the policy committee.

We had our first meeting.

of this year, we reviewed the charter and the scope of work and materials from the meeting are on the website with any other meeting materials, but I also shared a memo to the board that's attached in information items for anybody to read.

And it's got some examples of policy manual structures from other districts both in and out of Washington that I encourage folks to look at to see what it is we're working towards.

And...

Yeah, a number of school visits.

Oh, I do wanna say the visit to Whitman was incredible, to Whitman Middle School.

I volunteered there right after the pandemic and it was a community in dysregulation.

And it was a completely different school.

And what's really powerful and that I wanna highlight here publicly is that the principal has really taken ownership over creating a culture.

that supports staff and students to thrive.

And it's really a model for the power of ownership and personal responsibility and what we can all do to make things better for students, how important it is, especially now, to take care of each other.

and create the right conditions for students to thrive.

So thank you for arranging for us to take that visit and to the Whitman community for welcoming us and sharing with us what they're doing.

It's the kind of environment that we want for all students and staff, and it's possible.

A number of other things here, but I'll just move things along.

Other board directors?

Thank you, Director Rankin.

We're going to move to the tables now for progress monitoring, but we're going to stop at five for public testimony.

Director Hersey is our progress monitoring lead and will facilitate this portion, which will include a training and monitoring on goal three.

And please take your microphones.

All right.

In the interest of time, we'll go ahead and get started.

So I will pass it over to the superintendent at NST.

So in terms of stopping at 5, do we want to try to plow through and be done by 5?

Can you hear me?

OK.

Did you look in the mirror?

Yes.

Wow.

Wow.

All right.

Not necessarily.

I don't think we necessarily need to plow through, go at a comfortable pace for y'all, and we'll just do what we need to do.

Right on.

All right.

Thank you, Director Hersey and board.

We want to talk about college and career readiness this evening.

I'm joined by my colleagues from the Office of Academics, Dr. Caleb Perkins and Dr. Mike Starofsky.

During tonight's summary, we'll be summarizing our theory of action.

We'll be going through what the data is telling us, particularly in the areas of ninth and 10th grade credit earning and how it's informing the strategies that we are taking.

Tonight, we are looking at the class of 2025. Next slide, please.

We'll be reporting on the progress we've made with data for the interim measures, ninth and 10th grade credit earning.

We will be identifying the next steps related to specific strategy levers, including curriculum embedded assessments, grading guidance, college and career readiness data, and school improvement plans.

You all received the memos last week, so as a result, I'm going to go ahead and proceed with outlining our theory of action for helping our students graduate ready for college, career, and life before highlighting later the executive summary, sharing data, and discussing what we are seeing.

Next slide, please.

Let me start by reading our theory of action to help.

Sorry to interrupt, Dr. Jones.

It was just brought to my attention that we have AJ and another rep from the council on.

So it actually might make sense to have them do the training and then do the progress monitoring.

That's on me, sorry.

I just saw that notification in this moment.

Do we have AJ, is that kosher with y'all?

Yeah, that's fine.

Okay, perfect, thank you.

We'll adjust.

Do we have AJ on the line?

Yes, but I'm not clear on the timing that you all have.

What time are you wanting to be complete, both with the monitoring session and with training associated with monitoring?

Yeah, so that is not a high, so we don't have a specific time we're trying to be complete, right?

What we do have is a room full of constituents who have shown up for public comment.

And so we have about 15 minutes until we're going to switch back to take public comment, and then we will come back to the monitor, complete whatever we have not already completed for monitoring.

Does that make sense?

Yes.

In that case, I recommend that we go ahead and have the superintendent present the material, and then that way we can use that material as part of the training conversation later.

Makes sense to me.

We'll continue as we were.

Thank you.

Please proceed.

Okay, so we left off on talking about our theory of action, and let me read that since it's not showing up on the screen just yet.

If central office staff, school leaders, and educators provide high quality Tier 1 instruction, remove systemic barriers, and leverage Seattle's many assets, then African American boys and teens will experience improved access to and success in core courses, advanced courses, and graduation pathways.

This will increase their likelihood of success in a variety of post-secondary pathways and careers after graduating from SPS.

More recently, we've focused on the following specific levers to improve college and career readiness and the outcomes associated with that.

We've improved areas of curriculum embedded assessments, use of college and career readiness data, continuous school improvement plans, and grading for equity.

These strategic areas are directly connected to advanced coursework and graduation data in this memo, particularly with respect in improving tier one instruction in these grades and will be the focus of the analysis for this progress monitoring update.

So we track these specific levers through inputs, outputs, and outcome data.

So I will now quickly review the executive summary before sharing data and discussing what we are seeing.

In summary, Seattle Public Schools continues to improve supports for college and career readiness and post-secondary opportunities, particularly for African-American boys and teens.

Next slide, please.

In looking at SPS data for our interim measures, ninth and 10th grade credit earning, it shows conflicting information on whether we will be able to continue to meet the targets for the classes of 2027 and 2028. The data shows that we are maintaining post-pandemic progress, but not fully reaching the original targets that we've set.

In addition, we see that some students are needing more support.

In response, we are identifying next steps to better support students in credit earning related opportunities in four areas that we've mentioned before, curriculum embedded assessments, grading guidance, the use of college and career readiness data, and school improvement plans, or we reference them as CSIPs.

I want to note that the focus on developing personalized plans in the newly adopted life ready goal for 2025, 2030 will also improve our course planning for students.

Looking at the time, let's go on to the next slide.

Let's talk about some ninth grade data.

This figure with the ninth grade semester one on track rate illustrates that we are above pandemic levels in terms of supporting ninth graders to complete required credits needed to graduate on time and that we continue to stay on a higher trajectory and above our current set target.

That said, we are seeing some small declines.

The 24-25 semester on track rate for ninth grade African-American students is 76.4%, which is 2.7 points lower than semester one of last year.

For students of color furthest from educational justice in 24-25, the rate is 80.6%, down 1.9%.

uh points from last year if we go to the next slide we this figure this figure illustrates whether ninth grade excuse me whether 10th grade students are on track to graduate on time having completed advanced coursework all right on the next slide we're on the next slide i'm sorry i'm moving too fast Okay, thank you.

This figure, as I mentioned, illustrates whether 10th graders are on track to graduate on time having completed advanced coursework.

This is critical to post-secondary success.

In 24-25, semester one on-track rate for 10th grade African-American male students is 51.9%.

This is slightly up by 0.3 percentage points compared to 58.8% in last year's recording.

Students of color furthest from educational justice for 24-25 rate is 65.3%, down 2.6 percentage points from the previous year.

If we go to the next slide, we'll talk about the grade content area.

And essentially what you're seeing here are 10th grade African-American male students have been showing a steady decline over the past four years in all credit categories at the end of semester one.

This trend is similar for students of color furthest from educational justice, and this data is really what helps inform us around what additional support students need, particularly in specific content areas.

And one more data slide.

If we talk about this next slide, this is ninth and 10th grade credit detail.

And so this slide has four key points.

One is the percentage point of 10th grade African-American male students who did not meet any criteria is considerably higher this year compared to prior years.

For ninth grade African-American male students, who are off track, 17% did not meet any of their credit requirements.

This is an increase, a negative increase of 2% in comparison to the ninth grade African-American students from last year.

The percentage of 10th grade African-American male students who did not meet any criteria is considerably higher this year compared to prior years.

For example, in looking at the pink bars on the bottom right, the percentage of African-American male students in 10th grade who are off track after September 1 increased by 15% this year from 24% last year to 39% this year.

This speaks directly to the need for more options for students to earn credits and get back on track for graduation.

So I want to discuss the next slide here around lessons learned.

And this is probably the meat of it here.

In summary, the data shows that we are maintaining the progress we've made over the last few years in credit earning at the ninth and 10th grade levels after returning from the pandemic.

But there are still many students in these grades who are not currently on track to graduate.

That said, it's important to note that while 61% of African American male students were on track with credits after the first semester after 10th grade, ultimately 80% of these students did graduate on time.

We anticipate that the graduation rate for African American male students in the class of 2026 will also be much higher than the current 59.1% that are currently on track with credits.

Each high school has an MTSS team, or its equivalent, to regularly check in on the progress that 11th and 12th grade students are making towards graduation.

This is leveraging the consistent standard credit attainment reports for school leaders and counselors.

So, of course, we still have more work to do to ensure all students have access to the supports that they need to graduate ready for a range of post-secondary opportunities, and we'll seize those opportunities ongoing.

So given this, I want to turn to this slide and highlight some next steps we're making in these efforts.

So in the area of curriculum embedded assessments, the academic team is working with the Department of Technology to expand current Atlas reports to include curriculum embedded assessment data.

This will better enable us to identify instructional practices that are working and students who need more support.

In the area of grading for equity, the academic teams will work with school-based colleagues to develop clear guidance for implementing the equitable grading practices, including providing potential thresholds for retakes.

This will ensure that our grading practices focus on helping students get more opportunities to show their learning and earning credits.

In the area of school improvement plans aligned to school strategies, the CTE team is developing comprehensive professional development for summer and next year to support teachers in implementing high quality CTE pathways, a component of many schools CSIPs.

and this will enable more students to get the courses they need.

And the last point, and I think we can pause here for the five o'clock testimonies.

In the area of using CCR data, SPS plans to transition to a new state-sponsored high school and beyond plan for grades nine through 12 in the 25-26 school year.

This will inform and improve student course taking as it will be better informed by students' personalized plans.

So that is here, Director Rankin.

So I think we can pick up with questions that the board may have when we come back, but this might be an appropriate place to pause.

Can I ask a quick question unrelated to the progress monitoring?

I'm just wondering, for clarification, on our agenda, it says that public testimony will begin at or after 5 PM, which implies that it doesn't need to start right at 5 PM.

And I guess I just want to make sure that our coaches, AJ and Alicia, understand that they're going to be now waiting like an hour for us to come back here.

This is AJ.

It is inconvenient, but I would rather wait than leave your community waiting.

Yeah, we have a commitment to our community to begin public testimony at 5 p.m.

So we're going to move back to the diocese.

Can we change the language on our thing to say it will begin promptly at 5 instead of at or after 5?

just for just so everybody's clear about it because in the past i feel like we have started after five when we were in the middle of something else um and i totally appreciate that people don't want to sit here and watch our training session but i also want to respect the time of our coaches too and not leave them waiting so um just further clarification going forward would be great

I think providing clarity that we want to make sure we start public testimony on time and keep our commitment to hear from our public makes perfect sense, and we will work on the language.

Board staff, I think I'm seeing positive moving forward, but we'll head to the dais to hear public testimony.

All right, thank you.

I'm on the list.

Thank you.

hello all right we are now going to move to public testimony we have a long list which is awesome and i want to make sure we're respectful of everyone's time so please conclude your remarks on time if you have written materials we would love to see them please make sure to get them to staff and they will make BE DISTRIBUTED TO THE BOARD.

I'M GOING TO BE STRICT WITH OUR TIME LIMIT TODAY OF TWO MINUTES.

YOU MAY NOT BE ABLE TO GET THROUGH EVERYTHING YOU'VE PREPARED, BUT PLEASE BE RESPECTFUL OF OTHERS.

BOARD PROCEDURE 1430BP PROVIDES OUR RULES FOR TESTIMONY.

WE EXPECT THE SAME STANDARD OF CIVILITY FOR THOSE PARTICIPATING IN PUBLIC COMMENT AS THE BOARD EXPECTS OF ITSELF.

As board president, I have the right to and I will interrupt any speaker who fails to observe the standard of civility required by our procedure.

A speaker who refuses or fails to comply with these guidelines or who otherwise substantially disrupts the orderly operation of this meeting may be asked to leave this meeting.

I'm going to pass it now to staff to summarize a few additional points on how this will work and to read off the testimony of speakers.

Ms. Wilson-Jones.

The board will take testimony today from those on the list, and then we'll go to the waiting list if we're missing speakers from the list.

From those who are in the lobby for overflow, I will come back to any names that we don't get to.

So if we skip past you, please rest assured that we'll come back to you later.

Please wait until your name is called to approach the podium or to unmute on the conference line.

Only one person may speak at a time.

The board's procedure provides that most of your time should be spent on the topic you signed up to speak to.

Speakers may cede their time to another person, but this must be done when the listed speaker is called.

Time will not be restarted, and the total time remains two minutes.

The timer at the podium will indicate the time remaining for speakers who are in here in person.

When you see that light turn red and you hear a beep, that means your time is already over.

And we'll move to the next speaker at that point.

For those who are joining by phone, including some folks right now, please do mute yourselves right now on your devices.

And the beep that hopefully will come through will be the indication your time is exhausted.

Moving to our list now, for those who are joining by phone, you'll need to press star six to unmute on the conference line.

And for everyone, please do reintroduce yourself as you begin your testimony, as I will miss some pronunciations as we move through the list.

The first speaker today is Arthur Nesmonen, who will be followed by Chris Jackins and then Sarah Sens Wilson.

Hi, my name is Alex Nishmonin.

I'm a parent of two wonderful kids, one in Cascadia and one in our neighborhood school.

I had another story to tell you today, showing the real difference between the two highly capable programs between the schools.

But after reading yesterday's letter from SPS, I just wanted to thank you, the board, for your thoughtful decision.

So I'm happy to cede my time to my son, who will share his perspective with you.

Thank you for all you do.

Hi, my name is Dimitri and I'm seven years old.

Thank you for keeping the highly capable cohort program going for three more years.

Because of your decision, next year I can go to a school where I'll learn with other kids who love learning just like me.

My brother said he started loving school when he moved to Cascadia and my dad told me I'd make lifelong friends there too.

I know learning with smart kids will make school a lot more fun and exciting.

Thank you for giving kids like me another chance.

I really appreciate all the hard work you do for our education.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Chris Jackins.

MY NAME IS CHRIS JACKINS, BOX 84063, SEATTLE 98124. ON THE PERSONNEL REPORT, UNDER SEPARATIONS, THE REPORT LISTS INGRAM HIGH SCHOOL PRINCIPAL MARTIN FLOW AND DEPUTY GENERAL COUNSEL JOHN CERQUI.

I WISH TO THANK MR. FLOW AND MR. CERQUI FOR THEIR LONG TIME SERVICE TO THE DISTRICT.

ON THE PROPOSED $2.2 MILLION INCREASE IN THE GUARANTEED MAXIMUM PRICE FOR THE ECKSTINE WINDOW REPLACEMENT PROJECT, Does the school board automatically approve all contract increases when inflation is cited?

On final acceptance of the contract for the North Queen Anne school upgrades project, three points.

Number one, the board report cites change orders of 38.2% and states, quote, the change orders were significantly greater than expected for a project of this magnitude, unquote.

Number two, how about inviting district staff to discuss this in public tonight?

number three it's easy to do any board director can do it when the board president asks if any director wishes to remove an item from the consent agenda you say yes on board sponsorship of WASDA policy positions two points number one the suggested proposal would require training so that the board members follow what WASDA considers to be best practice Number two, but WASDA standards stink.

For example, WASDA encourages producing board meeting minutes which lack detail.

Please vote no.

And I welcome everybody here tonight.

Thank you for being here.

It's a great sign-up list.

There's a lot of people on the wait list.

And I suggest that you try to, in fact, let everybody speak who's on the wait list.

I know some of them are here.

Thank you very much.

The next speaker is Sarah Sense-Wilson.

Sarah will be followed by Christine Highlander and then Alex Feldman.

My name is Sarah Sense-Wilson.

I'm a member of the Ogallala Nation.

I'm a grandmother of an Olympic View student and a lifelong resident of Seattle.

I serve as the Urban Native Education Alliance elected chair.

UNEA is a grassroots Native-led volunteer workforce student-centered organization.

Our 18 years of advocacy and support for Native student success is a model for uplifting the voices of Native students while providing culturally responsive mentorship, tutoring, and a variety of educational, cultural, and academic opportunities.

I would like to share about our advocacy for SPS to adopt the unea resolution number nine boarding school education and to designate september 30th as every child matters day or orange shirt day the boarding school resolution brings voice and truth to a lengthy 100-year era of United States force assimilation policies.

This resolution was co-created by Native students, parents, educators, elders, survivors of boarding school, and the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.

We stand together to urge Seattle Public Schools to join the growing movement across Turtle Island and taking actionable steps to educate all students about the boarding school era and the atrocities endured by boarding school survivors and in remembrance of those who passed away due to the conditions they were subjected to.

SPS leadership has an opportunity to support this resolution and to bring truth, justice, healing and reconciliation to the survivors, descendants, and all student learners within your institutions.

We urge you to stand with us on the right side of history, make the right decision to uphold your core values through action, collaboration, and genuine commitment to quality education for all.

thank you very much and we support the cete program 100 we have many native students that are actively enrolled and benefit from receiving credit for career readiness thank you very much the next speaker is christine highlander christine highlander

Thank you for pausing the sunsetting of HCC.

I'm Christine Highlander, parent of two 2E kids in SPS.

Today I'm urging SPS leadership and the board to stop a practice that violates state law, specifically the prohibition on accelerated learning options for students not attending an HC cohort school.

Director Rankin mentioned the RCW and WAC last meeting, and for the sake of time, I'll refresh you only on WAC 392-170-080, which states that, quote, each student identified as a highly capable student shall be provided educational opportunities which take into account such students' unique needs and capabilities, end quote.

In reviewing CSIPs of neighborhood schools throughout Northeast and Southeast Seattle, they consistently do not include above grade level acceleration as a strategy utilized for HC instruction.

CSIPs frequently mention of differentiation and increased depth or complexity, but only two schools directly mention acceleration.

In one of those instances, the acceleration involves students being able to check out books that are above grade level, which is not instruction.

What is implied in some of the CSIPs and what I've heard from school staff is that in light of the overt direction from SPS that they not teach any content that is above grade level, computer software is the vehicle for acceleration.

A student can work ahead on their own using a program like IXL or Zern.

So SPS got rid of evidence based above grade level teacher led programs like Walk to Math and replaced them with tablets.

This begs the question of whether SPS is fine with another violation of state law by having computers replace teachers as the means for the district satisfying their obligation to provide access to accelerated learning and enhanced instruction as required by the RCW?

And is the board okay with being complicit in that?

i can see that the existence of cohort schools could be counted as the provision of educational opportunities but the mere existence of these programs should not be mistaken for access especially given the poor geographic distribution of hcc schools these cips are in place through 2026 but please ask with a sense of urgency to allow learning acceleration in neighborhood schools today thank you

The next speaker is Alex Feldman.

Alex Feldman, after Alex will be Robert Crookshank and then Claire Abe.

Hi, I'm Alex Feldman.

Just want to thank you along with a lot of other people for keeping the highly capable cohort open as an option for students while the district develops a new program for neighborhood schools.

I know this will help a lot of kids in our city.

I want to cede the remainder of my time to Sydney Deering.

Thanks.

Hello, I'm a teacher at Cascadia, and our district has spent a lot of money in recent years toward this alleged hybrid model of HC services, which isn't really happening.

No substantive outcome in the schools and a strong bias against providing it.

At all the district trainings I've been to as a teacher, we are firmly admonished not that we should only stick to grade level standards, Teachers are also not versed in the needs of neurodiverse students.

I have a letter from a parent who couldn't be here today.

She's Lauren Capel.

She's a parent of a 3E Cascadia student, which means he is brilliant and black and neurodiverse.

And she says, we have struggled in neighborhood schools getting Joseph's status as HC recognized.

And the inequitable treatment he and other HC kids I know have received just because their neighborhood schools don't have the capacity to meet them where they're at was devastating, not only academically, but to my child's mental health.

Cascadia has been a boon, and the school district has documentation from his IEP noting the marked difference between his mental health after switching schools.

In the summer and fall of 2021, the district hired a leading researcher in giftedness Dr. Christina Henry Collins to help do the talent development in neighborhood schools.

Big institute over many, many hours and days.

That could have been our cohort of leaders for services in the schools.

But the ball was dropped and the momentum was squandered.

Those teachers are all just dispersed.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Robert Cruikshank.

Hi, my name is Robert Cruikshank, and I'm a parent of three students in neighborhood schools in Seattle.

And I'm here to stand in support of all the option schools in our district.

There's a huge coalition here tonight.

You know, when you cap the enrollment of an option school, you help crash the budget of the district as a whole.

We saw last fall when the district tried to close all of the K-8 option schools, many of which had started off decades ago rooted in social justice and community movements.

The public rejected strongly closing them, but it seems that the district is still trying to close them just more slowly rather than all at once.

The district is removing staff from option schools and capping enrollment at those schools despite strong public demand, refusing to enroll up to their capacity, refusing to move wait lists.

This is an obvious attempt to try to close option schools.

When we came together last fall to fight the school closure plan, we did so as a kind of SPS NATO, an attack against one schools and attack against them all.

It doesn't matter which school our kids go to, we stand united against closures.

When we don't provide choices and don't process wait lists, families of all backgrounds leave and the district gets less money.

Families in the city clearly want choices within the public system.

Many of these schools are safe places for kids, like LGBTQ students, Native American students, and more.

We also know that one size doesn't fit all.

Kids are different.

That means schools should differ too.

It's not enough to differentiate within a classroom.

Sometimes a child needs the entire learning environment in the building to be different.

If you eliminate option schools, that doesn't eliminate the need for different learning.

It just means only those families who can pay to get it privately get that different learning.

That's inequitable.

And polling shows the public agrees.

Last fall, we asked about this question in our poll.

63% said closing option and alternative schools is inequitable.

Only 20% said it's good.

Instead of closing schools or cutting their enrollment, let's embrace equity.

We need to convene a task force to determine the best ways to ensure equitable enrollment in these schools and adopt those recommendations and have more option schools including in Southeast Seattle.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Claire Aube.

Claire Aube, after Claire will be Jay Lee and then Crystal Lee.

Can I approach to give documents?

Ms. Wilson-Jones, they have some documents for board directors.

I cede my time to Audrey Muntha.

What would you do if you could no longer afford your child's therapy?

Their counselors?

Their educators?

What if the people who gave you guidance for your child suddenly disappeared because you couldn't fund it anymore?

Could you shrug your shoulders and go, it is what it is, while watching your child become more sensitive and distressed?

I'd like to believe a lot of you would say no.

I'd like to believe that you would do whatever you could to provide that money and get that support back.

SPS school board, I, Adriana Mounta, senior from Cleveland STEM High School, am your kid.

Every queer student in SPS is your kid.

These queer students within your district make up over 28% of your children, and all of us have just lost our counselor, our advocate, and your only guide for giving us the quality resources we need, Mixed Crystal.

The aftermath, queer kids won't have the help they need.

For most of us, it wouldn't just be the absence of care, but the deprivation of it, something taken away.

This tells us queer kids that our well-being is dispensable, conditional, and insignificant.

How can we do well academically, let alone mentally or physically?

How can we feel present at school if our presence feels disregarded in general?

I know your values strive against this, and I trust that you would provide a quality education environment for us.

But if the scarcity of queer resources continues, I fear that trust will falter.

So, because I cannot reach out to Mix Crystal for help anymore, I am reaching out to you.

I know that there is a lack of federal funding, and I know that the removal of the CDC What Works in Schools grant is the very flame that burns our bridges to the roles we need the most, especially in this period of time.

I believe a good solution to dowsing this wildfire is using SPS's own funds.

If the federal firefighters won't help us, let's take out our own hoses and spray down these vicious flames so our students and staff have access to the bridge between education and love for queer students like myself.

I would like to cede over my remaining time to Veronica Cardona.

The district chose not to close four schools, three out of the four being majority white and with those three schools being less than 35% economically disadvantaged.

Now let's look at Cleveland High School.

Cleveland is about 87% minority enrollment and around 57% of our school is economically disadvantaged while still maintaining highest graduation rate in the district.

I'm going to need you to please conclude your remarks, Ms.

Wilson-Jones, would you please move on to the next speaker.

The next speaker is Jai Lee.

Jai Lee.

After Jai will be Crystal Lee and then Matt Sussman.

If anybody does have handouts for our school board, you can place them at the door that is near the entry to the auditorium and we will ensure that they are picked up and provided in hard copy and electronically to directors.

At any point, you can put them there and we will collect them and provide them to the board.

Hi, this is Jay Lay.

I will be ceding my time to Matt Burness.

Good evening.

My name is Matt Burtness, and I'm a second grade teacher at Dunlap Elementary, where I've been teaching since 2011. I want to first start by stating my appreciation for all the families here tonight and at prior school board meetings who are making their voices heard about options, choices, and advancement.

However, I'm here tonight not to speak for, but to speak up about our immigrant students and families who, despite plenty of lip service from the district, continue to be unsupported in SPS.

One year ago, I spoke at a school board meeting about how the district was choosing to silently shutter the BOC program.

If you're asking yourself, what's BOC?

You're not alone, as it's another option program that the district has supported in words but not in actions.

BOC stands for Bilingual Orientation Center and is now generally referred to as the Newcomer Program.

They are supposed to serve students, predominantly immigrant students with limited to nonexistent English, in small class sizes with individualized instruction to build skills in order to eventually move to the general education classroom.

There are three sites across the district, Hawthorne, James Baldwin, and my school, Dunlap.

However, The problem, however, is that the district has not sent us any students for our newcomer program, despite having two BOC teachers on staff.

And they will only assign students to these teachers when their class size hits a minimum of five kids.

It is unclear how thoroughly the previously mentioned options are explained to families, especially The options being attend their neighborhood school or go to a newcomer program.

It is unclear how thoroughly the previously mentioned options are explained to families, especially with language barriers.

It is clear that families here tonight know how to and feel comfortable advocating for their own children.

However, it feels like our immigrant families are being duped and not truly given a choice or option.

This is another example of students and families being turned away from option school programs.

now admits budget season our newcomer staff members are being given a choice with their zero sign students either self-displace themselves by this friday and join the hiring pool losing their right to return or wait around until june to find out if the district will actually send us students as it stands these students who might normally a handful of words in english or less are being placed in already overcrowded classrooms without sufficient support for them our next speaker is uh crystal lee

I'm going to interrupt really quickly.

We have a lot of speakers tonight, and we want to give everyone an opportunity to say their piece, so please try to stick to your two minutes and be respectful of others.

Thank you.

All right.

Good evening.

My name is Crystal Lee.

I'm a teacher at Cleveland STEM High School.

I just want to note that there are also 30-ish other folks in the lobby that you can't see in support of our students here as well.

I'm deferring my time to Liz Bergstenbure.

Hello.

I derive very little pleasure from being alarmist.

It is a favorite pastime of mine to make fun of middle-aged men on Twitter and YouTube with Roman statues as profile pictures who fume at images of women with dyed hair holding up protest signs and wearing pussy hats and call it the downfall of Western civilization.

But there's a difference between being alarmist and melodramatic.

and pointing out the many ways in which the government publicly and transparently does things that will harm the population.

America is currently led by one of, if not the most openly and obnoxiously bigoted, self-serving, and corrupt Oval Offices in the history of the country and is progressively becoming less and less habitable for all minorities.

We are living in a country in which a Filipino individual born in New York has a non-zero chance of being detained by ICE without due process and deported to El Salvador.

Because how else are xenophobic conservatives going to be able to avoid having to look at all that pesky brown skin?

Trans women across America have had their passports simply taken away with no sufficient explanation.

Don't say gay laws plague schools in red states based on the very sane and logical belief that teaching adults in college about something will indoctrinate them into trying to be that thing.

The more hostile a country becomes, the more support is needed to keep minority individuals safe, especially minority students.

The decision of whether or not schools should continue to provide classes that support and validate minority students is crucial.

It can mean the difference between students seeking out support in school from dedicated caring staff members or in unsupervised congregations with their peers, afraid to be open about their identity outside of those interactions.

It is now more important than ever for schools to be supportive of students who are becoming more and more oppressed with each signature President Donald Trump pens.

Some of the things that I've said today may seem shocking, insensitive, or in poor taste, but if you can't bring yourself to say the same thing about the current presidential administration, you need to take a deep breath and look around.

Being American is not a set of rules that schools are made to teach.

It's an intrinsic trait of those born in America.

Thank you.

Please conclude your remarks.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Matt Sussman.

Matt Sussman.

Matt will be followed by Jessica Chong and then Stephanie Govian.

I'm going to cede my time to David Evans.

Hi, I'm David Evans.

I teach at Hamilton, and I want to talk about the HC program.

My thoughts are based on the fact that I work with most of the accelerated math students at our school, and I teach all of the advanced math students.

When I first began at Hamilton nine years ago, we had six sections of geometry.

We had one section of Algebra II.

All those kids were qualified for those classes.

They wanted to do incredible things in STEM subjects in high school and college.

We now have one section of geometry.

Algebra II disappeared five years ago.

What we are doing in Seattle Public Schools is we're disappearing our top students in math.

Math is the least age-specific subject kids will take.

I have taught third graders calculus.

I've struggled to teach seniors algebra.

We have to decide to get out of the way of kids.

We have to let kids be able to advocate for themselves and realize their dreams mathematically.

Right now Seattle Public Schools is not serving middle school kids.

The only kids that are in my geometry class now are kids from Cascadia, which basically says that the only intelligent math students who are above grade level all go to Cascadia.

Statistically, that's impossible.

And Seattle Public Schools has to be in the business of allowing kids to realize their dreams.

I believe that we should not be ashamed of the HCC program.

We should bring it back, give it more parity, make it clearer who qualifies, and allow the kids to achieve at that level that they're most capable of achieving it.

I have very strong beliefs on this.

I fill out the vast majority of private school applications and I see our best kids every year waltz away to Lakeside, Sass, Bush, you name it.

They're leaving because we don't serve their needs.

And I really believe that we can serve the needs of kids mathematically and it's not based on their grade.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Jessica Chong.

I'll be discussing research on this flyer here in the back on the effects of highly capable cohort-based acceleration on students furthest from educational justice, FFEJ, that have come to light in the years since the prior board's vote to end the HICAP cohort.

We already know from decades of research in over 53,000 HICAP students that access to enrichment combined with above grade level acceleration is better for most HICAP students academically, socially, and psychologically.

Students from disadvantaged backgrounds have been less likely to be identified for services, but use of nonverbal cognitive tests, group level norms, and universal screening can improve equity.

As these changes have been adopted more widely, it's become possible to learn about the effects of high cap services, including acceleration on students FFEJ, including.

A 2020 study showed that Boston Public Schools program, which includes above grade acceleration in elementary school cohorts, increased on time high school graduation rates for black and Latino high cap students by 65%.

In 2024, Nobel Prize winner David Card and colleagues studied students eligible for free or reduced lunch in another large urban district.

Boys who received free or reduced lunch and were in the high cap cohort graduated high school on time and entered college 25% more often, which closed the graduation gap with girls.

The proportion of boys who finished algebra by eighth grade increased from 42% to 72%, and they took double the number of AP classes.

Suspension rates also decreased.

Importantly, two prior studies of this same district showed there were no negative effects on non-high cap students.

In summary, new research in districts using more equitable identification practices show that cohort services reduce educational inequities with the largest gains for black and Latino students, boys, and students receiving free reduced lunch.

These studies consistently show that students FFEJ, furthest from educational justice, have the most to gain from access and the most to lose without it.

Please reverse the district-wide ban and above-grade acceleration so a neighborhood model is possible.

Work with us on transparent and objective analysis to assess its outcomes and reconsider closure of the cohort given this research.

Thank you.

Next is Stephanie Govian, who will be followed by Laura Rose Murphy and Ari Ingles.

Thank you.

I'm Stephanie Govian.

I'm the parent of a second grader at Cascadia and the recent enrollment survey over 40 percent of currently enrolled families across demographic groups considered changes to the highly capable programs to be reasons to consider leaving the district.

That's four times the number of families that are directly affected by these programs.

I am thankful that you have heard their concerns and that you have decided to continue the cohort model for now while reassessing how to move forward.

But this simple pause is not enough.

There is much more work to be done.

For example, currently each school is responsible for designing their own highly capable program.

Their CSIPs vary dramatically, and there is no system to assess whether each plan uses best practices and meets legal requirements, including acceleration.

Neither have we seen a system to evaluate implementation and what support schools need as they progress.

We have not seen the criteria that must be met to define a functioning neighborhood highly capable program as sufficient to meet the academic and social needs of all of its students.

While those are being developed, there remain no backstop for communities without access to cohort schools, whether due to geography, special education needs, or other barriers.

And those students in schools need to receive prioritized support to ensure availability of legally mandated services to which they still do not have access.

While the district continues to improve its screening processes, it also cannot leave it to each classroom teacher to determine who will get tier two services, as is implied by the letters that went home, explaining that newly identified high cap students would by default receive only tier one services.

This entirely negates all benefits of universal screening.

Finally, information about highly capable services needs to be clear and available to all parents at all schools.

Every year, but especially now, when the newly identified families have missed appeals deadlines, thinking there would be no cohorts, and many believe that they have also missed the enrollment window.

Parents have been asking for this transparency for years, whether it is about highly capable programs, school closures, option schools, or many of the other things you're hearing about tonight.

A pause is simply not enough.

Please conclude your remarks.

I'm asking you to do better next time around.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Laura Rose Murphy.

Laura Rose Murphy.

Thank you for this opportunity.

I've never done this before.

My student is at a neighborhood elementary school with a lot going for it.

He has extended resource sped services in the gen ed room.

He also does not write yet due to his disability, and I got a letter saying he qualifies for advanced learning.

His teacher is great, but she says she has zero support from the district in how to help my son access appropriate level learning.

No resources, no training, no funding, and they don't even tell her who has qualified or how they qualify.

Neither her nor the principal could tell me anything about which level was appropriate for my son or accessible, despite the required math scores for HC.

And the advanced learning department avoided my questions until the time to appeal had closed.

The district has not replaced HCC.

Elementary advanced learning is paltry and not fully accessible.

Volunteering with the PTA, the number one thing I hear from all parents is my qualified child isn't receiving advanced learning in the classroom.

The district is throwing the teachers under the bus.

My child isn't academically challenged.

He spends his days reading in the corner or pacing the hall.

The teachers do not have the resources or training to educate 2E kids.

The UDL is not adequate for him to access the material.

The weighted staffing model is in direct opposition to inclusion, resulting in the more sped, the larger the class sizes, making it even harder for unsupported teachers to meet diverse learners' needs.

This is not inclusion.

This is not an education.

This is daycare.

There are many kids left behind at the intersection of moderate to severe support and advanced learning needs.

I talk to their parents all the time.

We must make sure advanced learning is actually inclusive of diverse learners and that the UDL provides access to advanced learning and highly capable for its students who need extra support.

Students with disabilities are some of the most vulnerable kids in our communities.

It is a legal duty and a moral obligation to protect them with a free and appropriate public education.

Thank you for your time.

Our next speaker is Ari Ingles, Ari Ingles, Ari will be followed by Rebecca Binns and then Eric Feeney.

Ms. Wilson-Jones, could you repeat the name?

Ari Ingles.

Hi, I'm Ari.

I get that you want to consolidate underfilled neighborhood schools.

Logistically speaking, I even support this.

I don't think anybody's gonna pull their kids out of the school system because their new school is a little farther away.

But then you talk about closing option schools.

You play shenanigans with option school enrollment, where you won't take any out of GeoZone students from the waiting list, despite the fact that the option schools are under-enrolled, despite the fact that the classrooms in the option schools are under-filled.

I think this is a mistake.

Options schools offer a different educational approach versus neighborhood schools.

Parents apply to options schools because the neighborhood schools aren't filling their kids' needs.

So what I'm saying is that closing options schools and playing shenanigans with options school enrollment, you're actively pushing kids out of SPS, which leads to greater inequity and lower enrollment, which, in turn, leads to lower budget.

I get that you can make many of these arguments about advanced learning programs.

And I agree.

And I make those arguments as well.

However, while advanced learning programs will take additional investment, the option schools already exist.

Use them.

Open up the wait list.

It's practically free for you right now.

Save your enrollee count.

Save your budget.

Go ahead and consolidate the neighborhood schools if you have to, but give us the choice to send our kids to option schools rather than taking them out of SPS.

Thanks.

The next speaker is Rebecca Binns.

Rebecca Binns.

Rebecca Binns, Graham Hill parent, former SPS teacher.

Thank you for being here.

Projecting enrollment in staffing schools appropriately is challenging, especially in the low-income schools where enrollment fluctuates throughout the year.

Knowing all of this, the district should have a responsive staffing model.

Last October, I testified here that we had 33 students in a single fourth grade classroom.

Now it's up to 40. We sought help from Director Katrina Hunt, Dr. Jones, Fau Manu, Fred Podesta, all of you.

They did not respond at all or cited a new policy that schools must be owed to teachers to receive October adjustments.

This new policy in action looks like 40 to 60 students that schools struggle to accommodate with zero financial support from SPS or staff.

Our district gets money from the state on a per pupil basis.

Where is the money for the 38 unaccounted for students at Graham Hill this year?

At Graham Hill, the class ratios should range from 18 to one for kindergarten, my son's class is 26, to 28 to one for fifth grade.

Why can't the money that SPS gets for these 38 students go to paying for a classroom teacher?

As of February, Graham Hill is owed two teachers.

We were staffed for 244. Now we have 282 students.

And the purple book for next year shows the district repeating the same mistake, projecting 23 fewer students than we have now.

Graham Hill is far from alone with this massively overcrowded classrooms.

The number one reason cited by the S360 enrollment study was that families left SPS because of class size.

With 40 students in a class and nobody at the district willing to help, they make a good point.

This happens every year and its effects are exacerbated by this new policy.

Policies can change.

You can fix this.

You can direct Dr. Jones to change this policy.

We shouldn't have to fight for teachers.

They are the foundation of our children's education.

The next speaker is Eric Feeney.

After Eric will be McKenna Gaudient and then Laura Marie Rivera.

Hello, my name is Eric Feeney and I'll be speaking on academic excellence and autonomy.

It is my understanding and observation that for about the last 10 years, SBS has been operating on a teach to the standard policy.

While the idea of getting everybody above a minimum is a fine concept, it becomes a problem when that becomes the stopping point.

Both in terms of hierarchical guidance and in terms of programming, we seem to be pursuing equity by having a singular low expectation.

This was overwhelmingly echoed in the survey data from February and the HC drama.

The public is telling you to increase academic rigor.

I strongly urge you to interpret academic excellence for all as your primary goal.

I know the goals are set at this point.

But this is a school system intended to educate.

How is the best possible education for all not the number one goal?

We should be the envy of the country.

Instead, you have many families committed due to philosophical obligation or financial constraints like a loveless marriage.

Side note, let's bring back 30 to 60 minutes of homework in K-8.

Self-study is an important skill.

Make it optional.

What are we doing that's making us the best?

If the schools can't even be inspired, how are we inspiring students to be their best?

Take the bureaucratic shackles off your individual schools.

Let those with the means and ambition lead the way.

Then help the others to follow.

If a school wants to do language immersion, let them.

If a school wants a STEM theme, let them.

If a school wants to bring back Walk to Math, let them.

If families want to enroll in a school that has space, let them.

When people are doing what they love and are excited about, that's where excellence comes from.

Lift people up, don't hold them back.

Next is McKenna Gaudient and then Laura Marie Rivera.

Do we have McKenna in the room?

If we could make sure our next few speakers are also moving into the room, there's going to be next after McKenna will be Laura Marie Rivera, Talia Tibelfitz, Sara Jimenez Guerra, and then Sarah Chad.

Hello, my name is McKenna Gadiant.

I'm a special education teacher at Cleveland High School.

I cede my time to Isaiah.

Hi, my name is Isaiah.

I am a queer student at Cleveland, and I am here to make sure my fellow students are safe and cared for.

By not assuring funding and mixed crystals position in the district, you are taking away our protection and our resources.

We should be able to feel safe in our schools and be who we are without resources to help.

Sorry.

without resources to get help if we need it.

Where does that lead us?

This could be detrimental to students, especially students who don't have any other supports or very little resources.

So I would like to ask the district that the district could pay for the LGBTQ plus program coordinator instead of relying on a government grant.

So we don't have to worry about this happening again.

I saved my time to NOVA.

OK.

Do you want to say it?

Hi, I'm Fox.

I feel that Seattle is a really accepting city.

We have a lot of feelings of unity.

And when I joined the GSA at Cleveland, I was hoping for more of this.

And that was exactly what I got.

I made some of the first friends I have in high school here.

And there's just a really tight knit community that couldn't have happened without Sam Crystal.

They set an example for me of what my future as a queer person can look like.

Seeing adults that I can see myself in is vital, I feel, to my future.

Sam works with, I think, every school in the district, and one of their most important jobs is preventing suicide of the kids here, the kids in this room.

of trans and non-binary kids consider suicide.

We are four times more likely to consider it than any other kid or I think just person in general.

One person commits every 45 seconds.

That's their job.

They're keeping this from happening.

We will see more dead kids next year if they are fired.

That's about it.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Laura Marie Rivera, who will be followed by Talia Nanasara.

My heart is heavy.

As things look more and more grim at the national level and the global thinking becomes blurry, I thank everyone here for coming together to act locally.

Advocates are disappearing from their homes, but for this meeting, we're focusing on our children, the future of our society.

To that end, I want to talk about excellence in education.

What is it?

Where is it?

It's written on the side of this building.

Dr. Jones, you promised us 180 days of excellence when you accepted this role.

I want that excellence.

I want it for my kids and for all of the kids of Seattle.

What does it even look like?

To start, each and every student deserves a safe and welcoming environment.

From there, what we're doing to acknowledge and include the many, many, many sometimes competing needs of our students.

Are our goals good enough?

Are they excellent?

I don't believe they are.

I want each of our students to be able to learn and grow to their fullest potential and to recognize that there are many paths to success when they graduate.

Our kids can't vote yet, but they're the reason we're here.

So what will they need to succeed?

What does excellence look like for them?

Is it social justice, the arts, sports, multiple languages, learning in your neighborhood, stretching for opportunities, advanced math, technical skills, or options?

The truth is that the goals, needs, wants of individual students are just that, individual.

And how does it look to truly include the marginalized students and differently abled learners?

Despite the SPS commitment to those furthest from educational justice, you removed the website pages for DEI and AAMA.

Someone thought that was okay.

The pages were quietly added back, but those actions speak volumes.

Seattle Special Education, PTSA, recently sent an unanswered letter to express the deep hurt by the district's lack of care for students with disabilities, highlighted by the unmentioned shooting at Bridges, and now the devastation at Washington Middle School.

We talk a lot about student outcomes, but what are we even doing?

We need trust, we need communication, we need safety, and we need opportunity for our children.

I don't think that's too much to ask.

Next is Talia Tittlefits.

My name is Talia Tittlefits and I have a son in fourth grade at an HCC school and a daughter identified as an advanced learner in first grade at our neighborhood, Title I, K-8 school.

We love our neighborhood school, so when my son was identified as HC in second grade, we were conflicted.

His teacher did everything she could to challenge him, but she didn't have the resources to offer more.

Unfortunately, this is a story we've heard over and over again from our families at our school.

The opportunities your child receives depend entirely on how much you are able to advocate for them, and in many cases, our HC students have received no support, materials, or instruction.

Compared to schools who describe advanced learning services in detail, our school's most recent CSIP only states that advanced learning services are in progress.

What does this mean?

For families like ours, it means nothing concrete has changed.

Our school still lacks a coordinated AL program.

There are no clear standards, no meaningful strategies, and no real support in place to help our children succeed at their level, especially in cases where kids are identified as HC in only one subject.

Our neighborhood teachers are working tirelessly in a diverse, multilingual, and highly stratified environment, and they are not given the staffing, materials, or professional development to make HC and AL learning a reality.

Our HC students might be handed worksheets, or they might be told to watch an extra video in the corner of a classroom.

This is not advanced learning or instruction.

This is a missed opportunity.

I'm not here to criticize our school.

I'm here to advocate for the resources our school desperately needs to ensure kids are taught accelerated learning and enhanced instruction.

A system where students' educational experience hinges on who their parents know or how much advocacy they can muster is deeply inequitable.

The future of HC and AL neighborhood schools should not be decided behind closed doors.

It should be transparent, coordinated, and accessible so that schools like ours are fully staffed, fully resourced, and fully supported.

Highly capable and advanced learner students regardless of their background or resources should not be excluded from instruction.

Thank you.

Next is Asara Jimenez Guerra, who will be followed by Sarah Chad and then Aiden Roberts.

Hello, I would like to cede my time to Yang from Rainier Beach High School.

I am Young, a student at Ranger Beach High School Filipino Club and a part of the Save Our Schools campaign as a youth activist.

I am here today, again, because me and my community have not seen any improvement with our education crisis, which is actually worsening.

Filipinos in Beach have witnessed and experienced countless issues that deeply affect how they are able to learn in our school.

Bullying still persists with no little to no protection.

especially among migrant youth.

Migrants are not just getting attacked by their classmates, but the state.

The current guidance to wait for their judicial warrant from ICE does not protect our students from further endangers them and their families.

We demand the district to keep ICE and federal agencies off LSPS schools.

The budget cuts limits resources for queer students and limits where migrant students can learn their history.

The only Filipino history class in Cleveland may get cut.

We don't get to learn our history of resistance, leading to the Filipino people to have no hope, when in reality it is a state that is all corrupt.

Under this district, we are forced into a system where students will be doomed to fail and have to rely on military recruitment to save their lives.

If this is how our school operates for students, are we clearly calling this a safe and secure education?

Filipinos in Rainier Beach demand you to provide more funding for cultural relevant education such as Filipino classes.

to prioritize quality education versus military recruitment and to advocate for our safety and protection amidst attacks on our rights.

Students and families, staff are human beings that should be protected and served under this district, especially in smaller local areas.

Stop putting effort in sugarcoating solutions when instead you can actually advocate for them.

Next speaker is Sarah Chad.

Sarah, if you're online, you'll need to press star six to unmute on the line.

Sarah, I can see that you're unmuted, so we should be able to hear you if you want to start providing your testimony.

Oh, it looks like you're muted again.

If you could press star six to unmute on the line and ensure you're unmuted on your device.

Looks like you're unmuted, but we're not hearing you yet.

Sarah, I'm going to go to the next speaker.

If you want to kind of work on sorting out the tech, maybe leave and come back.

The next speaker is Aiden Roberts.

I will call your name again, Sarah.

Hi, everybody.

My name is Aiden Roberts.

I am a special education teacher at Cleveland High School, and I cede my time to a student, Janelle Marrera.

Hello, everyone.

My name is Janelle Marrera.

I attend Cleveland High School.

I am here to talk to you about a topic our students care deeply about, which are the budgets for our school.

My experience as a student at Cleveland, well, I'm so sorry.

Facts.

Cleveland has capacity for 900 students, but the district is only projecting us to have 660 students, which is about 75% of our capacity at our school empty.

Every year, many students are applying and having to be waitlisted, and they are not being let in, even though we have space for For more students, effects.

Staff members are affected because of this under enrollment.

We are projected to lose 3.5 FTE for our school next year.

It will potentially lead to blocking certain humanity classes.

My experience as a student at Cleveland have been very good.

Teachers and IAs have given me a lot of support as I navigate through school, which I appreciate.

It sucks that teachers will have to be cut off from our school.

If teachers are fired due to limited funding, students will lose someone they trust that created a safe space for them.

Many of my peers have been concerned that firing teachers could lead to a larger class size, which would lead to burnout for teachers because of the increased workload.

There will be less one-on-one individualized learning for students.

There will be also fewer classes to choose from because there are limited teachers to teach the class.

Students are feeling worried and stressed out due to the uncertainty of how their learning environment will change.

Students who have IEPs and learning accommodations will have less support with their learning, which will affect their academic process greatly.

Before I finish, I would like to read this behalf on my friend.

I would like to talk about funding.

Funding is important because there is a huge gap within the district.

The money is just being used to protect the superintendent.

The supporters of the superintendent will say otherwise, but where is the leader that is supposed to be in charge and advocating for us?

Money should be used to fund the schools, particularly in the South End.

The South End needs more money because we don't get the same opportunities as a lot of other students.

For example, we have lower parent involvement because our parents don't know what is going on due to language barriers or them being at work.

They're working 12 to 13 hours per day.

At Cleveland, Humanities currently is at risk of being cut.

That would mean there would be less teachers in overcrowded classrooms.

This means no support for students, which means we can't learn how to read or how to write.

This is problematic because it's the most important thing in life.

We need to learn history because it is important to learn about our past in order to fix the present and future.

If we cut funding, we will lose a lot of teachers.

It's important to keep teachers because they're the backbones of the school.

They try to do their best to help a lot of students.

But given the resources, it's hard for them sorry for that to happen a lot of students are suffering there are not enough teachers that can help them if we start helping the teachers and have accountability within the district of where funding goes we will be a better district too often we dismiss dismiss the voices of our youth but they're the ones who will carry on our future and the next generation i'd like to have an actual conversation with you all And if you can't give me your time today, then I don't know what this outcome will be.

Thank you for your time and listening.

I'm going to go back to Sarah Chad.

Sarah, it looks like you are unmuted on the line.

Oh, now you're muted again.

If you could press star six to unmute.

There we go.

can you hear me this time we can yes you can go ahead oh my gosh i am so sorry guys i don't know what happened there um so yes i'm the parent of a current sixth grader at madison middle school i first want to thank the district and board for recognizing the value of the highly cohort highly capable cohort model and the need for additional time to ensure success for all within our neighborhood schools if we transition from that So in my case, my son was in the last Fairmont Park Elementary Highway Club cohort.

The cohort was somewhat unofficial in our time there.

It did require us compromising on some of that math acceleration you'd see in other HCC schools.

So we got one year ahead instead of two years ahead.

However, the bus ride that it would have taken for him to get over to Thurgood Marshall was just prohibitively long.

And I've heard the same from many other parents.

So it just did not work for our family.

Unfortunately, for the last several years newly identified highly capable students in our region, the Southwest region, have not had any cohort options besides 3rd and Marshall.

Many of our families are staying in our neighborhood schools, not because we're fully satisfied with the highly capable services provided there, but because the available option is just geographically impractical.

That said, there is significant inequity in accessible options for highly capable families in the Southwest region of the district.

The overall rate of highly capable identified students in Southwest is comparable to the other regions at about 18% per 2023-2024 school year data.

Yet Southwest elementary students account for only 1.7% of total HCC enrollment.

Contrast that with nearly 18% in central schools, nearly 25% in each of the other regions, Northeast Northwest, um and uh southeast excuse me southwest is severely underrepresented underrepresented and highly capable cohorts presenting a significant equity in your case issue the southwest region has been neglected as the district district's highly capable strategy has evolved and students are being left behind please ensure this inequity is accounted for in future planning the southwest schools must be provided equitable and accountable highly capable support by the 2025-26 school year And at minimum, please revert to allowing acceleration at least in now.

And I agree with the previous speaker who said this is possible regardless of the grade level.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Gordon McDougall.

Thank you, Gordon.

we can hear we can hear you in the room is that gordon hi sorry for the mix-up on the unmuting i'm gordon mcdougall of urban native education alliance and i would like to cede my time to john romero one of our elders um there's a little difficulty with him getting on so i'm not sure he will come on um john if you're there please unmute by pushing star six If we don't hear you, then I will continue.

Okay, I think he's having a little bit of issue in technology.

I will continue.

As Ms. Swilson indicated earlier, our students, our interns, our wonderful children who've been working so hard are used to learn so much about their own culture and learn about some of the horrific episodes in it.

The Indian boarding schools was the focus that they chose to to use to spread recognition of difficulties that native peoples have had across this country across this continent the boarding schools were horrific experiences strong native peoples everywhere survived them many died there at them many lost family members many are still buried there in anonymous graves and people should know about this the students work very hard on this resolution which you've heard or have before you and we highly recommend that you give it a lot of thought and work this into your curriculum we stand ready and willing and happy to aid in that effort many of us are highly knowledgeable about this topic and others and we hope and know that you will support us and all of our students native students and those who need to learn about this unspoken thing this horror horrific tragedy that happened up until I was 10 in 1970 when children were carried away basically to schools to cut their hair, to rip out their language, to rip out their culture.

Please work with us to ratify and rectify this terrible, terrible injustice.

I ask you to please conclude your remarks.

And we appreciate your help, and I'm sure we'll be in contact soon.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Hans Kell.

Hans Kell.

Good evening.

Hans Kael, father of two SPS kids.

I was going to speak today about transferring my youngest to a district next year with a highly capable program that works.

I wanted to put a face to the results presented in the enrollment survey.

But yesterday's email and hybrid HC services changed my comment.

First, thank you for listening and extending cohort schools for three years.

Second, with Dr. Torres, we seem to finally have someone senior responsible who has common sense and cares about the program and his kids.

I hope he finds a director of advanced learning who shares that mindset.

Third, Dr. Torres has a mess to clean up, and I hope the board and community give him and Dr. Jones the space to do so.

There's damage to undo, uncertainty to clarify, and trust to rebuild.

Much of this mess was manufactured by previous board directors.

It'll take time, but at least the first step, preserving the only existing HC services in SPS has been taken.

Questions remain.

Will students who start in the cohort in the next three years be guaranteed to graduate from it?

This would effectively extend the cohort out for six years.

Will above grade level acceleration continue to be offered in the cohort?

And just as importantly, will it be allowed for HC students in neighborhood schools?

Many neighborhood principals believe it is forbidden by district policy.

Is it, Dr. Jones?

Why do HC services fade out in middle school and vanish in high school?

When will we prioritize socioeconomically disadvantaged students for HC services and provide norming and support for them once they enter?

Why is there only one cohort school in the large geography of the South and Southwest?

Does the district understand MTSS in the context of the highly capable?

Offering tier one services, UDL, and equity and inclusion and calling it a highly capable program is not nearly good enough.

We want stability and proven approaches.

We need equity and inclusion without sacrificing legally mandated accelerated learning.

We need advanced learning leaders who believe in giftedness and advocate for it, not those who see acceleration as a harm to others.

I don't know if my kid will stay, but with Dr. Torres leading and listening, I'm more optimistic.

Thank you.

The next speaker will be Kat Behrend.

Do we have Kat with us?

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Hello?

Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you, Kat.

Hi, my name is Kat Behrend.

I'm speaking to you today as a queer person and a parent of an SPS student, also as a teacher at Maple Elementary on Beacon Hill.

I'm just worried about the future of district LGBTQ support in the face of recent federal funding cuts.

I know that the SPS health education office has received a federal CDC grant for the last 30 years that specifically funds a full time LGBTQ plus program coordinator staff position.

If this CDC grant gets cut it'll have a major negative impact on our schools will lose important staff training family outreach health and wellness supports to students.

teacher supports and all this at a time when queer and trans rights are directly under attack by the federal government.

I'm asking the board today to take a preemptive approach to this situation and to make a plan with SPS leadership to use district funds to ensure lasting LGBTQ plus supports across our district.

Every two weeks when I gather with the 30 plus students at Maples Rainbow Club, I see students who are hungry for a space where they can truly be themselves.

Where they can show up for their friends in a welcoming, safe, and inclusive environment.

Where they can speak about their fears and their hopes for the lives that they deserve to live.

a place where they can name the pain they feel when their identities are made fun of or questioned or misunderstood these children need teachers and schools that will ensure that they grow up feeling safe and knowing that they belong as a board you all have the opportunity to align your values for welcoming and inclusive schools with the real need to plan for adequate funding for lgbtq plus supports thank you so much for being fearless in your advocacy for lgbtq plus youth on this issue they all need us to stand with them and for them now and always so thank you all president top that was our 25th and final speaker for testimony

That concludes our public testimony for this meeting.

I really appreciate everyone coming out here, including all of our students.

It's really wonderful to hear from students.

We are going to move back to the tables for progress monitoring.

I'll hand it back to Director Hersey.

We're going to finish up our progress monitoring, and then we will take a quick break.

I have a real-time legislative update, which is that Senate Bill 5263 unanimously passed out of the Senate.

This is the bill that would fund special education and would yield about $25 million at the current level passed by the Senate for SPS.

So that's really good news and a huge thank you to Senator Peterson who championed that and I heard gave a knockout speech on the floor.

Thank you for that update, Director Rankin.

Oh, look.

All right, Director Hersey, I think since we have a tight agenda and a packed agenda and we have our coaches waiting, it would be nice if we started and then we will take a break after.

Yeah, so everybody in the room, I am so thankful that y'all came out tonight and we have a little bit of extra business we need to do.

So if you are interested in continuing a conversation, we have plenty of space on the other side of the door.

I am so sorry.

but we just wanna make sure that we are able to hear.

Thank you so much.

All right, so with that, we'll pass it over to our coaches to proceed with the training.

AJ, are you with us?

And if we could make sure that those doors are closed just to block as much of the sound as possible, we'd really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Yes, are you able to hear me?

Yes, sir.

You're a little soft, but if you can't fix it, no problem.

Let's get a little bit closer.

So we've already heard from the superintendent go over some of the monitoring report.

If you all have that handy, we'll use some of that in our conversations.

But to frame it up, my cousin...

has a pizza oven and he has spent literally hundreds of hours perfecting his pizza dough game.

Now, if you gave me the exact same ingredients, I could take those, but he knows the exact order to put the ingredients together and how to work the dough and how to rest the dough and all of those sort of things.

Even if we're using the exact same ingredients, What he would create at the end of that would be amazing.

And what I would create, none of us would really want to eat.

Effective monitoring is a lot like that, that there are the ingredients for effective monitoring, most of which you all are familiar with.

You already have the pre-reading, the handout that I provided you.

But then there's how you use the ingredients, how you combine them, how you work them together.

and so i want to spend time on both of those this evening a little bit of time on the ingredients because ideally you already know much of that but then more time just opening up the floor for some discussion around how do you use these in a way that makes sense for you all because you have to come up with a dough that creates the pizza that works for seattle public schools and that's going to have to be done collectively so we'll try to spend most of our time there this evening That being said, I do first want to just cover some of the basic ingredients of effective goal monitoring.

So I'd first just ask board members, what are the benefits?

Why do we bother monitoring to begin with?

What are the intended benefits of monitoring progress toward your goals?

So that we can know how children are doing.

Are you looking for a one sentence or just like,

Yeah, anyone, just chime in.

Yeah, so how we can know how our students are doing, if there are any changes that need to be made, or if we need to direct the superintendent to adjust course in any way, we have a regular look into what our progress is.

Yeah.

Anyone else?

What's the purpose?

What are the benefits?

Why do you bother monitoring at all?

It allows us to reflect for our community how our school system is doing for our kids.

Certainly.

Anyone else?

Let me ask the opposite question.

What are examples of things that are not the purpose of monitoring?

What are you not trying to accomplish by monitoring progress towards your goals?

Could you ask that question once again?

Yeah.

I'm essentially asking the opposite question.

The first question I ask is, what is the purpose?

What are you trying to create?

But I also find that it is often helpful when a board has had some experience with this, as you all had, to ask a harder question.

what are some examples of things that you're not trying to accomplish?

What is the non-purpose of monitoring?

If the purpose of monitoring is around checking progress for our students, that they're learning, that they're receiving the blessing we intend, that we're trying to find that out early enough that we can get an understanding of what pivots the superintendent intends to make.

If those are the purpose, what are examples of non-purpose?

What are we not trying to accomplish with monitoring?

We are not trying to have gotcha moments or setups for the superintendent to utilize whatever apathy or negative feelings we might have to get those out during progress monitoring, if that makes sense.

That's a perfect example of a non-purpose for monitoring.

Because it's not designed to be a gotcha moment to beat up on the staff.

when i when i think of that example i think of professional learning communities where ideally educators are coming together to have tough conversations about the data and what the response the data will be but the intention of a plc isn't to beat up on educators it's to really support folks as they're supporting children and so i'd say it's the same thing here is that it is not the purpose to beat up on your educators your superintendent It's quite the opposite.

Anyone else?

What is another example of a non-purpose of monitoring?

A non-purpose would be to ask seven elective community representatives to offer suggestions about how to make progress.

That is 100% not the purpose of monitoring.

Absolutely.

This isn't a, we'll all show up and give our best examples of what we think should be happening instead.

well it's really to get a deep understanding of what does the superintendent understand and what's the superintendent's beliefs about what should be done because if we're talking about realistically what's going to drive the staff's behavior the day after the board meeting isn't the set of board member opinions it's really going to be what are the beliefs of the staff.

And so the board, you have a vested interest in knowing what those beliefs are.

And monitoring is an opportunity to learn what those beliefs are, not tell them what you think they should be, which they'll listen to.

And if they agree with them, then they'll hold on to them.

If they disagree with them, they'll probably have forgotten them by the time they wake up.

And so that's definitely an example of a non-purpose for monitoring.

And so I just wanted to ground the conversation.

What's the purpose and what's the non-purpose?

because that then explains why some of the ingredients are so important one of the first ingredients for effective monitoring is you need monitoring reports and in the pre-reading that we provided you and it's in your documents attached to the agenda this evening we talk about the four key elements that have to be present for monitoring reports another key element of effective monitoring is a monitoring calendar this is a really important ingredient an ingredient that after some visits with you all it sounds like there are some adjustments that need to be made ideally in the monitoring calendar you're finding ways to make sure that each month you're doing some amount of monitoring of whatever the most recent data is recognizing that sometimes it'll be a little in arrears that it may be 30 to 60 days old, but it's still appropriate to be monitoring it.

And the monitoring calendar helps organize all of that so that you're not trying to monitor too many things because this is really about going deep, not wide, but so that also it's not a gotcha game, that it's really clear upfront each month which slice of our goals we're gonna be paying attention to.

So the monitoring report is a key ingredient.

monitoring calendar is a key ingredient let me pause for a second what questions or concerns do you have about either of those ingredients to effective goal monitoring any questions or comments about either of those key ingredients the monitoring report or the monitoring calendar

I have a question about the monitoring calendar.

Yeah, yeah.

By the way, hi, AJ.

This is Liza talking.

I don't know if you can see us.

We just can't see you.

Good evening.

Hi.

The monitoring calendar I've seen other districts do out the whole life of the goals, so five years of a strategic plan.

When we're looking at, ideally we have something to monitor every month, but I think we may have focused on there has to be monitoring every month and not what is important to look at every month, if that makes sense.

So as we are moving forward in this process and being at some point presented with a monitoring calendar, what should we be looking for when we're asked to approve it?

So part of the reason behind encouraging a board to monitor every month is to really...

create habits that are at the level of automaticity that we were just automatically every month we are dialed into what is the reality for our students and that is an absolute pivotal focus for the board month after month after month and one key way of accomplishing that is to actually strengthen that muscle every single month and so that's the intention behind the recommendation to monitor progress every month and to have scheduled that monitoring out for the full length of the goal.

So if the goals are five years long, to schedule that monitoring out for the next five years.

If they're three years long, schedule it out for the next three years.

Sometimes reality intervenes and the data set that you have to work with it doesn't make that practical um that though however has been relatively rare but if that's the case then certainly as a coaching team we can work with you to try to figure out how to navigate that but most of the time it's not a function of whether or not The districts have access to the data for monitoring those.

Sometimes it is most of the time.

It's just a matter of organizing it and spacing it out.

So for example, if you're monitoring three of your interim goals every month, you're probably going to run out of data.

And so you'll have four or five months left.

We don't have anything to monitor.

And so what we recommend instead is space those out in the trade off there.

is like I said, sometimes you'll be looking at monitoring report where the data is 30 to 60 days old.

But I would generally encourage you to work with slightly older data that the upside is you'll have a little bit better analysis from your staff because they will have seen what the results are by then.

But it'd be better to work with slightly older data and just have that monthly unbroken habit than to load yourself up with a bunch of monitoring reports in a month looking at the freshest, most immediate data.

But at the cost of not having consistent practice every month and at the cost of going shallow into multiple monitoring reports rather than deep into just one or maybe two.

Is that responsive to your inquiry?

Yes, very.

Thank you.

That's super helpful.

Other questions or reflections about these two main ingredients for effective goal monitoring, your monitoring reports and what should be in them, and your monitoring calendars and what should be in them?

All right.

And just know that as questions come up, we can go back.

So those are some of the key ingredients that the superintendent and their team really have to produce.

The key ingredient that the board produces...

are the questions that you bring and those questions tend to fall in three different flavors and again this is all material that's attached in your agenda so anybody else can if you want to follow along go look in the agenda for that information but the questions that you ask about these tend to fall into the three major categories are the questions that are technical in nature that they're really looking at how are things measured are they tactical in nature they're really looking at who's doing which actions or are they strategic in nature are they really trying to evaluate the relationship between where we are right now what we're doing and and where we are right now between what we're doing and where we are right now with the goals and so all three of these types of questions tactical technical and strategic are appropriate questions for board members to ask But what we do recommend is that just like with my cousin and him inserting different ingredients at different times in the process, that there are different times when you want to insert these questions, that all three types of these questions are perfectly reasonable to be asked before the board meeting so that you can be better prepared to have a really deep generative dialogue amongst each other and with the superintendent at the board meeting.

But at the board meeting, we really encourage board members to focus on strategic questions.

Again, to really push for a deep, generative dialogue that is dialed into what are the high-level strategies we're pursuing and what is their relationship to accomplishing the goals that the board's adopted.

all of the questions that you have to ask are always going to be appropriate.

If anyone tells you, well, you can't ask those questions, they probably have a misunderstanding of this key ingredient, the questions that the board members ask.

But there certainly is a season at which adding them into the recipe gives you better results.

And the best time to add technical and tactical questions in is before the board meeting, the best time, as well as strategic, definitely the best time to have the deep strategic conversation is at the board meeting.

So let me pause there.

What questions do you have about this key ingredient that the board brings to the recipe, the questions that it asks, whether technical, tactical, or strategic?

What questions or comments do you have about this ingredient, the board member's questions?

all right and again at any time feel free to jump in um and we can go deeper into anything that you're curious about i guess aj sorry just it's more of a confirmation question um yeah you know that that any question at any time is a or any any question any of these questions is a question that's you know we can and should ask um so the the tactical and technical questions should be ahead of the meeting and then shared with all board directors in preparation of the meeting, yes?

Absolutely.

But not only shared with the board members, it's also valuable for the community to have insight into what is the nature of the conversation that its representatives are engaged in.

And so our coaching is certainly to share both the questions and the response to those questions as a Q&A document that is attached to the agenda so that community members can be abreast of the questions of essentially the work being done by their representatives on their behalf.

And so, yes, it should definitely be made available to all board members, but it's also wise to bolster the transparency of your work to make it available to your community as well.

Thank you.

Any other questions or reflections about this key ingredient, the questions that board members ask as part of monitoring?

Yeah, I have a question, AJ.

This is Evan.

So I guess sometimes I get a little bit in the weeds around submitting questions in advance versus discussing it in real time at the board meeting.

So theoretically, what if we all submitted all of our tactical, technical, and strategic questions in advance of the board meeting and then got answers back from staff?

Then what are we talking about during progress monitoring?

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense.

And so thank you.

So first and foremost, it is definitely appropriate as board members, if you want to submit all those questions in advance, you're welcome to do so.

It should allow the superintendent to be even better prepared to have the conversation when they have an understanding of the directionality that the board wants to go in that conversation.

And so it's certainly appropriate to submit all those in advance.

That being said, even if you receive answers to strategic questions in advance which you won't always receive those frequently as we're visiting with superintendents like definitely get all the technical and tactical questions answered but it's perfectly appropriate to say we are spending our time and and this is a strategic question that was submitted in advance and we are working on that and be prepared to answer this question at the board meeting it's a perfectly appropriate approach for the staff to take and so it signals to the board thank you for letting us know so we can be prepared and we will in fact be prepared or the superintendent could in fact answer those questions in advance Either way, it's still appropriate for board members to ask any strategic questions they want to ask at the dais, whether they've shared it in advance or not, and whether they've received an answer to it in advance or not.

Most often what happens is when board members receive answers to their strategic questions in advance, that often jiggles loose for the board member some additional adjacent strategic questions and in which case our encouragement would be no need to recover ground that's already been covered ask whatever the next questions are but if there are questions of a strategic nature that you feel are valuable to surface for the full board even if they've already been answered it's still appropriate to ask those that is not the same case with the technical and tactical the point of answering those in advance is so that you don't have to cover that ground at the board meeting and ideally Even when you ask strategic questions in advance and they're answered in advance, that helps propel you to the next level of depth of the conversation in person.

But to the point of your question, worst case scenario, you ask a strategic question, you get an answer.

If you still want to ask it at the dais, you're perfectly within your rights to do so.

Is that responsive to your inquiry?

Yes, indeed.

Thank you.

Other questions about this key ingredient that the board brings to monitoring the questions that it asks.

All right, and so those are the kind of really the most important ingredients that you have to work with.

The superintendent brings some to the table.

They'll put together a monitoring report, though the adoption of that belongs to the board, not the superintendent.

But the superintendent knows when data is available, so that's why they bring that to the table.

The superintendent brings the monitoring reports to the table, and then the board shows up with questions.

And the interplay and the blending of these are the key ingredients you need for effective monitoring.

So I want to spend the rest of our limited time together, just opening up the floor to have a conversation about not merely what the ingredients are, but how we combine, how we use the ingredients.

Because there have been some concerns that some of you have surfaced for me.

And so I just want to make sure that there is a space for people to get their questions answered and create some shared understanding.

So for the first part of kind of the how, of monitoring i actually want to go back to a comment that was made earlier which is this is not intended to be a gotcha opportunity to beat up on staff whether it be the superintendent or anyone else that's part of the reason that the monitoring conversation is in fact intended to be between the board and the superintendent i understand that you all are kind of wrestling with this my watching of your board meetings leads me to think, and this is my interpretation, so if you disagree, you're welcome to your opinion.

But my view of watching your board meetings is that there is a reluctance to have the superintendent really own the entirety of the monitoring conversation.

for fear that the monitoring conversation may be weaponized and use the opportunity to kind of beat up on the superintendent that is certainly a non-purpose of monitoring and so i think there are a few things that can be done to manage that what i see happening in boards where that energy has kind of come into it is that then there is a reluctance to spend time on monitoring period because it feels like it's injecting toxicity rather than being what an effective PLC is in really injecting possibility.

Or I see boards still doing monitoring but shying away from having the superintendent in the firing range and instead bringing other staff in.

And so I think it's a decision that you all have to make.

i think the most uh healthy recipe involves this being a conversation between the board and the superintendent but that only works when there is a feeling of safety around the conversation the moment that it feels like it is just a shooting gallery then you don't get most of the benefits of monitoring at that point I think it's a reasonable though suboptimal decision of the board to either not to do less monitoring.

I don't think that's a good plan, but I see folks pull the superintendent back and pull more staff in to kind of spread the assault across multiple people and hopefully minimize the assault on the superintendent.

I see that as a reasonable adaptation, but but it is an adaptation it is not it's not the it's not the best recipe but I can understand how you can get there and if that's necessary I see that as speaking to a failure of the board to create the optimal conditions for monitoring to be effective so some things that you all can consider doing where that's the case One, as board members, it's very appropriate to reach out to us as coaches and have a conversation before the board meeting, particularly if you've ever felt like, um one of your questions has landed the wrong way of landed a way that you didn't intend i would strongly encourage you to reach out to us and we can work with you on workshopping some of that in advance so that's that's one thing that you as individual board members can do this isn't for us to censure you or to tell you what to ask not to ask that's that's not our role But certainly if you want to make sure that you show up in the way that you intend, then that's something that we can support you in and would be absolutely delighted to do so.

We have other boards across the country where literally coaches will meet with board members a few weeks before the board meeting just to go through their questions and make sure that they understand increase the likelihood that they'll be received the way they intend another important way that you can handle this in addition to reaching out to your coaches is frankly a lot of this falls on the shoulders of the board chair to simply pause questions or conversations that in the board chairs judgment so this is purely a judgment call that in the board chairs judgment are not actually contributing to understanding the reality for our students and understanding what are the strategies that are working and not working, what we've learned from and what we're going to do next, but they go into evaluation of the superintendent as an individual employee.

And so when we start to have conversation that looks like it's trying to reflect on the character of the superintendent rather than the performance of the system, If that is happening in the board chair's judgment, our coaching would be that the board chair has an obligation as the role of the chair to pause that because that is inconsistent with what you all have said that you would do.

Monitoring is not a time to...

offer critiques on the performance of the superintendent as an individual contributor.

It is a time to really evaluate the performance of the system as a whole.

So let me pause for a second.

I've offered two ideas about how the ingredients are used.

Let me pause for a second and hear just any reflections or any questions about either my analysis of what I've seen from your board meetings or these two ideas I've offered of strategies that you all could use to strengthen the quality of your monitoring.

What questions or reflections do you have about this?

I'll offer a reflection.

I think that like, the struggle that I have, looking back, like, especially over the past year, given that there's just been so much going on is that like, it feels as though we spent a lot of our time doing that, like, and by that, I mean, utilizing progress monitoring to express our frustrations with other things.

And so that to me is just time that we could have used really diving in deep and spending more of our energy and limited time together focused on children.

And I think where I am curious, and I guess what my question would be is, I know you haven't looked at a lot of the past board meetings, but I think this will probably be a good opportunity for us as a board to replay the tape and really go into our next monitoring sessions with a more clear-eyed objective focused on students.

And so whenever our next board retreat is or whenever we have another study session, I think it really would be good to take a look at some of our past monitoring sessions and see, Specifically, where could we have improved our questioning so that we don't fall into the same pitfalls?

And if that's out of order or out of line, AJ, let me know.

But I am looking for something that we can look back to, to point directly to and say like, hey, this is a part of this that we need to own.

And this is like an example of how we could do things differently moving forward.

But you tell me if that's not a good idea.

Yeah, so we're actually big fans of people replaying the video.

It's kind of like an effective coach going back and watching the game tape after the game's over and just looking for where opportunities for continuous improvement.

It's not about what do we do right or wrong or good or bad.

It's not about any of that casting judgment or aspersions.

It's really about where opportunities for me as an individual contributor, as a board member, to really step up my game and be more effective at representing the vision and values of my community.

So to that end, a few things.

Yes, I think it's definitely valuable to go back and look.

One of the things that I've done for you all in the past is I have coded some of your monitoring conversations.

I've literally written down the questions you've asked and then coded them.

using the instrument that you all again have in your agenda packet that looks at how smart is each question and then provided that back to you.

And so we can continue to do that because that's the reason we provide that to you is so that you can have a way of looking back with a tool that helps you reflect on, okay, I see where I could have improved this question.

Or I see some other examples of some really great questions.

Now that gives me some idea of how to frame the inquiries that I have.

And so that idea of going back and replaying the video and us helping provide some coding of your questions.

I think those are excellent strategies.

I know from having previously coded your meetings.

You all in the past, and this is a previous incarnation of the board, I don't think I've coded one of the monitoring meetings for this incarnation of the board.

But a previous incarnation of the board, you all were definitely extraordinarily verbose.

And so trying to get to how do we be just really dialed in to what is it we want to ask.

So for example, I remember one of the meetings I coded earlier last year.

And what would happen is you'd wind up, there'd be a three-minute statement and then a question and then another three-minute statement and then two more questions.

And then the staff would only ask the very last question and then the board member would get frustrated because they never got an answer to the first question.

i don't actually fault the staff for that that is just poor question asking on the part of the board and so it's things like that that when you go back and replay the video i think become a little bit more obvious when you look at us coding your meetings it becomes a little bit more obvious and that can be an opportunity for you to improve so i would strongly strongly encourage that as a strategy for folks my commitment that i'll make them part of our team is we will code your next your next monitoring conversation, not necessarily tonight, but in the future one, we'll code that and then provide that for you.

And if any of you want to have a one-on-one with a member of your coaching team, you've got Alicia, you've got Carol, you have myself to go over those questions, we'll happily do so with you.

Other questions, reflections about the ingredient that you all bring to the table and questioning and how you can do so in a way that lifts up the intention of monitoring, where it is a very aggressive interrogation of the performance of the system, but isn't necessarily a...

tearing down the performance of any individual within that system.

Any other questions or reflections?

I just have a quick reflection.

I say I appreciate the tools in the toolbox given tonight to be able to try to make sure that monitoring stays about the strategy and how we're moving forward.

I think those are both very helpful.

yeah one thing i would add to that is what a number of districts doing this work will often do is they'll rotate who the facilitator for the monitoring conversations is i know that you all have done that in the past i don't know if it's still a practice you're doing we certainly encourage that if you do it there is a real challenge for the facilitator whichever board member is facilitating that particular monitoring conversation and the challenge is that if there are questions that seem inconsistent with the tone and intention of monitoring, it's really on you as a facilitator to call it out.

Earlier, I mentioned the board chair's responsibility.

If there are questions that are actually not relevant to this agenda item, It is the board shares job to call it out.

And this is not this agenda item monitoring isn't evaluating the individual contributions of the board of the superintendent alone.

It's really looking at the performance of the system as a whole, which is. itself a reflection on the superintendent performance but it's different than looking at did the superintendent personally do X to the superintendent personally do Y that's not actually the intention of monitoring and so that is an important thing for the board to do but that's just not related to this agenda item so if board members are asking questions that are not related to this agenda item the board chair needs to really call it out and to say actually we need to stay focused on this agenda item however if during the monitoring conversation whoever the facilitator is here's a question That sounds like it is related to this agenda item.

It is about the monitoring report.

But that it is that the kind of the tone or the intention of it really are creating more of a kind of a hostile conversation rather than a curious conversation.

That the facilitator, it is in fact your duty to call that out and say, hold on, hold on.

Let's workshop right quick.

What are you trying to understand so we can make sure that we ask that in a way that you actually get an answer to your question.

And that is absolutely an appropriate role for whoever is facilitating that particular monitoring conversation.

Other questions or reflections on this before we switch to one more topic?

I know we're short on time, so I don't want to keep you all all night, but I do want to try to be responsive to the issues that you all have surfaced with me.

I have a question about what you were just talking about.

I really like the idea of rotating the facilitator, especially if there's concern about something feeling personal.

If it's just a different board member.

we have the opportunity to kind of take collective ownership over that.

What would be the best, I mean, is the best way to build that muscle for each of us who may be doing that just to do it?

Or is there something you'd recommend?

Is that a conversation that we have as a board and make some kind of a...

agreement for ourselves about how we want to do progress monitoring or is that just a sort of you know mutual commitment by way of being on the board that will support each other in developing that muscle and and yeah yeah

This is definitely a scenario where I recommend that you build the road by walking.

And so just sign up and do it.

Now, certainly, I would encourage board leadership to lead by example and step forward first just to demonstrate what the expectation is.

And so that means they have to make sure that they're doing the work to level up their skills.

If you do rotate facilitators, know that you can reach out to your coaching team and whoever the facilitator for the following month is, we will gladly meet with you and walk through the monitoring report and walk through the process to help prepare you so that you are set up for success.

So this isn't something you just have to kind of muzzle through on your own.

We'll provide scaffolding.

But yes, there's not gonna be a point where you're ever perfectly prepared.

You just gotta step up and do it.

What I've seen probably, there's a bunch of ways you could do it.

My favorite approach, I saw a board chair, she just put everybody's name on a list.

And fair enough, she put her own name on the list first and she put her vice chair's name on the list second.

And then ask, who feels most prepared to go next?

And you'll be three months out.

And who's most prepared after that?

You'll be four months out.

And then once they got to all seven board members, they just started over again in just a constant rotation.

And so I really enjoyed that.

But however you get there, I think it's perfectly fine.

But I do think it will help you build muscle.

When you are having to listen to the questions with the ear for, is this helping us accomplish the purposes of monitoring while avoiding the non-purposes of monitoring?

When you have to listen with that ear, the following month when it's not your job to do that, I almost guarantee you will be more effective as a participant for having had to facilitate.

Other questions or reflections before we pivot to one more topic?

Okay, so one other thing that's really important, and I've heard several of you bring this forward before, and this really starts to look back at Superintendent, you and your team.

But part of the thinking behind monitoring is that ideally, reality matches the vision, and that's to say that current student performance matches the goals that the board has set that represent the community's vision.

But if that's not the case, That's only problematic if there's also no growth.

So if we aren't at proficiency, that's not a cause to raise the red flag in a monitoring conversation, because the next thing you have to look for is, do we at least have growth that is moving us in the direction of proficiency?

And if you don't have growth, That's still not necessarily a reason to raise the red flag in a monitoring conversation if there is a strategy that's sufficiently aggressive to cause the growth to get us back on track to proficiency.

If the answer to all three of those questions is no, then we have a real challenge that the board is...

Definitely in its rights to push back on.

And in that moment, our coaching would be definitely do not accept that monitoring report.

Either table it and tell the superintendent to kind of step that up and bring it back.

or simply voted down just simply vote not to accept it and then move on but you have put the superintendent on notice that this this was not acceptable because it doesn't demonstrate that there's growth that there's proficiency it doesn't demonstrate that there's growth and it doesn't demonstrate to there's a plan sufficiently aggressive to get us back to growth and that is a compelling reason to either postpone it or to simply vote it down saying we're voting not to accept this And that is relevant towards the superintendent's annual evaluation because the annual evaluation is essentially the amalgam of all of the monthly monitoring that you're doing.

And so if you get to the end of the year and half of the monitoring reports were accepted and half of them won't, the superintendent shouldn't be surprised that their annual evaluation is less than rosy.

And so it is meaningful for the board to be clear with the superintendent when expectations are not met.

And again, the expectation shouldn't be, are we 100% proficient?

I would love for that to be the expectation, but that's not...

That's not always going to be realistic.

I mean, the whole point of your goals is you picked areas where you really need to make significant progress, where there's a high degree of difficulty.

And it's not even necessarily problematic that you don't see growth yet.

But if you don't see a strategy sufficient to move the needle to cause growth, then that is red flag territory.

And so this is a shout out to the superintendent and their staff, as well as board members, is that one of the other parts of effective monitoring is to tease out that last mile of that conversation, is are the strategies present in this monitoring report sufficiently aggressive to cause growth that will get us back on track?

And this is a judgment call.

This isn't a series of seven education experts on the dais.

No, this is a judgment call.

And it's a superintendent's job to make the case that our strategies are sufficiently aggressive to begin to bridge the gap on behalf of our children, to help them gain lost ground.

That is on the superintendent.

It's not on the board to assume that the strategies are sufficient.

sufficiently aggressive it's on the superintendent to to make that argument and make that case and to demonstrate that and if the superintendent fails to do so then the board one of their two options is to vote that down and then bring that forward again at the annual evaluation of the superintendent and so that this is a really important part because because both the board and the superintendent have to play your parts and it's a tricky part on the part of the superintendent you've got to have clear alignment of strategies with the interim goals and the moment that they're not sufficiently aligned expect the board to shoot it down if you come with an unending bucket of uh things you know like a magpie building its nest out of every shiny thing expect the board to shoot that down like well we have 50 different strategies we're doing okay expect the board to shoot that down Like, you have to be clear, you have to have evidence of alignment between the strategies and the interim goals.

On the board side, there is a reasonableness test here.

It's not, and the question isn't, do I like the strategies?

Do I agree with these strategies?

Are these the strategies I would pick?

That's not the standard.

The standard is, Has the superintendent made a reasonable case that there is alignment?

Have they provided reasonable evidence that there is alignment between the set of strategies that have identified?

And that if those strategies are executed, that those would result in movement of the interim goals that we're monitoring.

And so there's a reasonable standard.

Again, it's not about do I like the strategy?

Do I agree with the strategy?

It's the strategy I would pick.

But it is about has a superintendent made the case that there is alignment between this strategy and accomplishment of the interims such that if we execute on this, that this will cause growth in our students that will help us get back on track.

So let me pause for a second.

I know I've thrown a lot at you, but this is kind of where the rubber meets the road.

And so I want to make sure that you all have a chance to reflect on this.

Certainly, Superintendent, if you want to jump in, but board, like what questions or comments do you have about kind of this last mile of monitoring conversations, which is about the alignment of the strategy of with the interims, and do we have evidence that the strategies are sufficiently aggressive to cause growth to get us back on track to accomplish the goals?

Board member, superintendent, what questions or comments do you have about this?

AJ, this is Brent.

The term that really resonates with me is sufficiently aggressive.

I like that term.

And what I also appreciate is kind of the, I think you mentioned the squishiness of it.

And I'd like to go there with trying to define that term a little more than, I think I understand what that is, but I think as we have about eight people around this table right now we may have eight different definitions of sufficiently aggressive and so if that is correct if you could speak a little bit to just scaffolding a bit the sufficiently aggressive term that'd be great or if it's if you say nope that's for you all to figure out that's understandable as well

So the first thing to be clear about is by the time you get here, it is purely a judgment call.

And so the best coaching is don't get to the point where you're not showing any growth and you're completely off track of accomplishing the goals.

The best answer is be on track for your goals.

And if you're not, demonstrate that the growth that you're making will get you on track to your goals.

Those are purely objective.

But if the objective evidence does not suggest that you're on track, then it does become a subjective conversation about, Are the strategies that the superintendent is putting in place sufficiently aggressive?

So let me give you, so while I can't give you a stronger definition, because we've literally gone from an objective standard, we missed that.

An objective standard, we missed that.

And so this third tier is legitimately a subjective standard.

So I can give you a much stronger definition for that.

I can give you some examples.

So I'm thinking of one particular district where the superintendent brought forward.

Essentially, we're going to do the same thing we've been doing, but we're going to try to do it better.

Did the board vote that up or vote that down?

Brent, what do you think?

I think originally they voted it up, but after they had some coaching, they probably voted it down.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because essentially at that point, the board was like, wait a minute, but this is the exact same thing that we've always done.

and it hasn't worked out for the last 20 years, there's not compelling evidence that's gonna work now.

And so in that situation, the board was really either expecting the superintendent to show some radical breakthrough in implementation.

Hey, here's the evidence that we've been implementing this at 15% effectiveness, and here's my strategy to implement this at 85% effectiveness.

So either the superintendent brings that or the superintendent acknowledges these strategies haven't worked at any level of effectiveness and so we're bringing a different set of strategies and here's what those are so that's one example where the superintendent was not effective at convincing the board that they were taking adequately aggressive approach to this another example a superintendent brought forward a monitoring report It said, here's the data, and they actually write it a chart that shows students who perform this well on this indicator, they all seem to hit the goal, but students who perform a little bit lower on this indicator, they all seem to miss the goal just barely, and students who perform super low on this indicator they just completely aren't anywhere close to the goal.

And so all of our strategies are focused on moving this particular indicator because as students perform better on this indicator, our evidence shows that there will be that they're going to make progress on the goal on their own, and we just haven't put much energy into this particular indicator.

That's what the superintendent put in her monitoring report, and the board accepted that.

That's an example of monitoring the board accepted, because what she did as a superintendent, she showed, here's what I as your superintendent believe is a straight line between this particular behavior of the district and this performance of our students.

And so this is the behavior that, as a superintendent, I'm going to attack.

And here's the evidence.

And by the way, personally, I strongly disagreed with that superintendent's interpretation.

But what she brought forth was absolutely compelling.

And even though some of the board members were like me, it's like, I don't know about that.

That doesn't meet the way my brain sees this problem.

I think she did meet the standard of being able to make her case that she was taking sufficiently aggressive action on something that she had clear data was aligned to moving the needle on the interims.

And so even though I personally disagreed, had I been on that board, I also would have voted to accept that monitoring report.

Because it wasn't about do I agree or disagree.

Is it the strategies that I would pick?

It's did she did she demonstrate that she was taking a sufficiently aggressive action?

And in this case, she absolutely she did make that case.

But part of the way she made it is she brought she brought receipts.

She brought evidence to show here's exactly.

If we know this, we will move the needle for children.

Our evidence clearly shows that.

So that's why we're 10 toes down on this particular strategy right here.

And so those are two examples.

One where the superintendent got it sent back to him and the other where the superintendent in a really equally tough situation.

actually managed to convince the board and they accepted it.

And so I hope those are helpful.

The other thing I would say to you, Brent, is our team is fully available and ecstatic to work with you all just as an outside set of eyes.

Like we certainly are not in a position to replace your wisdom with our own.

That is not our job.

That's not our intention.

You'll have to pick the strategies, but we can certainly provide an external set of eyes that can be a barometer.

They can say, yeah, that actually makes sense to us or As an outsider looking in, what you're saying doesn't make any sense to me.

Maybe I'm just lacking context, but I don't know if that'll make sense to the board either.

That kind of just third-party gut check, just know that we are definitely happy to make time to provide that, if that would be of value.

Thank you for your response, and thank you for making the resource available.

Thank you.

Board members' thoughts on this?

It's the last step in the process.

Yep.

Yeah, I really appreciate this last part has helped me get some better clarity around the acceptance.

We have struggled to, I guess, agree or be willing to vote to accept or not.

Some because of, oh, it's not legally required by the state, but it's not legally required because it's our board governance business, which the state doesn't tell us what we can and can't vote on for our own work.

The state tells us items that we have to vote, we have to come before the board for action in terms of implementation and operational things that have been delegated to the superintendent.

So I appreciate and I'm going to I guess encourage us to take this next step in our progress monitoring journey that has gone through now three board chairs, third board chair, to add that we do vote to accept the monitoring report.

I think it offers a level of clarity, excuse me, clarity, and also is for us as board members, a way for the community to hold us accountable to doing our job, if they can really see not just, did certain board members ask certain questions, but did the board find this to be acceptable progress, yes or no.

So a technical question is, I think we just, if it's on the agenda as a potential item for board action that covers the legal challenges, or not challenges, but legal issues that have been argued, or at least were argued to me to not accept it, we can vote on anything we want as long as it's noticed to the public that it is an item that the board will vote on.

So the question though is if, oh sorry, go ahead.

Please ask a question.

Oh, just the accepting or not accepting, if it's not accepted, we don't expect that it's corrected and returned to us, right?

It's just sort of a, hey, that one didn't hit the mark and we'll come back to it later.

If you want to pause and give the superintendent a chance to bring something back, then we would recommend that you table it.

and then that will trigger the superintendent coming back at the next regularly scheduled meeting and bringing a revision on it but if the board is prepared to effectively render judgment to either accept or not accept then someone would make a motion to accept someone was second and either that motion passes in which case it's accepted or that motion fails in which case it's not accepted at the end of the year as part of the superintendent's annual evaluation The sum of all monitoring reports, accepted and not accepted, are the key evidence that the board is using for its evaluation of the superintendent.

And so there is meaningfulness in accepting or not accepting, which is why we recommend that you do vote.

That's really helpful.

Thank you.

Other questions or reflections before we round out?

I would just like to think about this concept more about voting on progress monitoring.

I think the thing that I struggle with is I think we as a board will struggle to vote to accept data that is not bad data, but data that is reflecting a bad scenario, right?

That if we are down by 5% in a certain metric, and that puts us not even like we're moving toward our goal, but we're actually further away from our goal.

Yes.

Right.

But that the other criteria is met, right?

That the superintendent understands exactly why that's happening and has a killer strategy to get out of it and articulates it well and we all buy into it.

It would still be, I think, challenging to be like, yep, we accept this.

It just looks really bad.

It feels bad.

And so I want to think about how that would play out.

I understand the point of doing it, but it seems challenging to me.

Yeah, you are absolutely correct.

So thank you for surfacing that, because that will seem odd, certainly to you all, but also to your community at times.

But yes, part of the reason that you're doing this is to definitively affirm for the superintendent, and I want to clarify for this, the board as a whole, not any of you individually, but the board as the whole is the superintendent supervisor and the superintendent does have a right like any other employee in your school system to have clear feedback from their supervisor so the moment you all don't provide that you were setting your superintendent up to fail by not providing them clear feedback and so that's the intention of this are there other ways you could do it that aren't this certainly but that is what the intention of this is is to provide clear feedback and so if you aren't going to do this then you've got to start asking yourself the question, what is the process that each month we're providing clear feedback to our superintendent?

I can't think of anything else you all do that even approximates that.

And so that's why we'd recommend, since you are already doing this, that you would use this in that way.

But it is awkward.

And so part of what you as board members have to make sure that you're constantly communicating, is that the acceptance isn't to suggest.

So if a monitoring report says we're not where we need to be and we're not showing growth, but to your words, the supernet has a killer strategy to get us back on track to grow, to get us back on track for proficiency, then that is in fact what you would be accepting.

Yes, we accept that the superintendent has a strategy to give us where we need to be.

We are not accepting you.

We're not saying that we agree or that we are okay with or endorse being off track for our students.

But we are accepting that we are holding the superintendent accountable for having a powerful enough strategy to serve the needs of our students where they're at right now.

Or to say definitively, That's not happening because the voting down the acceptance of a monitoring report only has authority in so much as you voted up other monitoring reports.

And so it is awkward to explain to folks because there's a three-part standard that you're working with.

Are we on track with the goal?

If not, are we making growth?

If not, is their strategy sufficiently aggressive to get us where we need to be?

But communicating that doesn't really fit on a bumper sticker.

And so that is a struggle that is normal for you to have.

Other questions or reflections before we transition?

I think that's it.

Thank you so much, AJ.

We appreciate it.

I just want to express gratitude for just having us be a part of your journey.

And again, I can't reiterate it enough.

Whenever any of you individually are struggling, reach out to us.

Again, Alicia or Carol and myself would be happy to make time one-on-one to visit with you.

We have many of our board members across the country where we literally have scheduled standing time every single month.

I'm thinking of several boards that are a couple states to the south of you where we just have standing monthly meetings with individual board members to just help them be the best version of themselves on behalf of the community they serve.

And so just know that you think it is wise for your teachers to have coaches and for them to tap into that as a resource to help them serve children.

You probably think it's wise for your principals to have coaches.

I hope you think it's wise for your superintendent to have a coach.

It's wise for you to have that to be the best version of yourself on behalf of your children as well.

And so taking advantage of that speaks to your willingness to be in a constant state of continuous improvement, the same as you'd expect for all of your staff.

And so for allowing us to be a part of that journey, thank you.

Madam Chair.

Director Hersey, does that wrap up progress monitoring?

It does for me.

Appreciate it.

All right, then we are going to just take a eight-minute break.

We're going to come back together.

It's now a seven-minute break.

We're going to come back together at 710 to continue business.

We'll be back at the dais.

I'm gonna call board directors back to the dais.

We have now reached the consent portion of today's agenda.

May I have a motion for the consent agenda?

I move approval of the consent agenda.

Second.

Okay.

Approval of the consent agenda has been moved by Vice President Briggs and seconded by Director Mizorahi.

Do directors have any items they'd like to be removed from the agenda?

Seeing none, all those in favor of the consent agenda signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Those opposed?

The consent agenda has passed unanimously.

WE'RE GOING TO NOW MOVE TO THE INTRODUCED ITEMS ON TODAY'S AGENDA.

THE FIRST ITEM IS THE ANNUAL APPROVAL OF SCHOOLS PER WAC 18016220. AND I'M GOING TO TURN IT OVER TO CHIEF ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICER TED HOWARD WHO WILL BE PRESENTING THIS ITEM.

Good afternoon Dr. Jones and board directors.

This is our annual approval per the WAC 180 16 220 to acknowledge that all our schools have CSIPs and this is acknowledgement from the board that we have done that and Two things that we want to add to the feedback that you gave us was a comprehensive needs assessment that we put in along with the root cause analysis into the CSIPS.

Call on directors to ask questions.

Oh, Director Rankin, sorry.

You're saying root cause analysis and

Comprehensive needs assessment.

Comprehensive needs assessment.

So is, you said those are added in.

Does that mean that every CSIP has that indicated?

Yes.

Okay.

So I have a, since this is an introduction item, it's just something to think, that we all can think about.

We have over the last decade, probably, moved from this kind of funny, check, yep, there's something on the website, even if it says, even if it's just like a placeholder on the website, that yes, everybody has a CSIP.

So can you, well, I guess either you or Superintendent Jones, if we between now and action were to like, wander around and look at one of the 106 CSIPs, what should we look for to sort of prove the data-driven and promoting positive impact?

If you can recommend anything.

Yeah, Director Rankin, I think there's kind of two pieces to it.

One is just, as you mentioned 10 years ago, that's the evolution of the CSIP being actually a tool that we use for continuous improvement, and it's even directing some of our strategies.

And so we did have it perhaps as a checkbox, and you were part of the group that pushed us staff to make sure that the CSIP was something real.

But I would hope that you would see in any CSIP some direct alignment.

What was the term that AJ used?

That's sufficiently aggressive around some of the key things that are unique to those schools.

And so each one of our 106 building should have some evidence of something that is critical, specific to that school, and tied back to the goals.

So goal one, two, or three, or goal one, two, and three.

So I think that's what we would see.

So Ted, if you could add on to that if you need to, or if you think that's sufficient, then we can keep moving.

Yes, what you'll see is growth data, number one, and then you will also see the impact of evidence-based practices in those CSIPs.

It's like an architectural plan that is flexible and will continue to grow each month as buildings decide what they need, what they need to shift, what they need to change along with their budgets as they work throughout the year.

So it should be in real time making those shifts and adjustments, and we'll be able to see that in the future.

Thank you so much.

I have one other thing that I wanted to just offer that I know Issaquah does, which is they affirm the annual approval of schools as required.

They also use it as an opportunity to meet together uh and you know they'll alternate and it's a much smaller district but maybe we could do something regionally or something but they alternate between um one year all the high schools high school leaders will come and bring their c-sips and actually present them to the board and talk about what's working and what's not working in their building and have the opportunity to talk amongst each other as high school leaders oh, hey, that's really awesome.

How is that working at your school?

We'd like to implement something like that.

How did you get started?

Whatever it might be.

And then the second year, they would meet in feeder patterns for neighborhood schools.

So like the elementary and middle schools that go to one high school in their feeder patterns, the second year would come and meet together to talk about their CSIPs so that the high schools can kind of hear maybe what needs might be coming their way or what's been successful and just kind of like pre get to know student needs and just also align and support each other and then they do it, they alternate every year I am not going to suggest that in the midst of all of that's going on that we start doing that right now.

But I think it's a great practice that we might want to think about for the board to have an understanding of not just check their RC SIPs, but what do they mean?

How are they used as a tool for building leaders to have the opportunity to collaborate in that way?

And then, of course, if it's a board meeting to also reflect to the public what's going on.

So, thank you.

So, Director Rankin, if I'm mistaken, please correct me.

Ted, we had yesterday principals came together talking about CSIFs regarding evaluation criteria three.

and they were looking at how some of these key elements are manifested in their CSIPs and they were, it was a big PLC for principals.

Is that accurate and is what Director Rankin talking about happening already here in some form or fashion?

Yes, it is.

The only difference is the board is not a part of that.

But yes, they do this in their small POCs with their ed directors as well as doing it differently where they come together down here on Tuesday.

So that is small.

Then it gets to a bigger level where they are looking at consistent practices and how they can engage and support one another.

That's great.

Thank you.

Other board directors?

OKAY.

THEN WE'RE GOING TO MOVE ON.

THE SECOND ITEM IS THE REVIEW AND APPROVAL OF THE 24-25 CAREER AND TECHNICAL EDUCATION CTA ANNUAL PLAN PER BOARD POLICY NUMBER 2170. EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF COLLEGE AND CAREER READINESS DR. KAYLA PERKINS WILL BE PRESENTING THIS ITEM.

I just want to say earlier this year, I got to see our students developing through CTE during a visit to the Microsoft campus with Cleveland and Lincoln High School students and their robotics teams.

But I will pass it to Dr. Perkins now to share more about this year's annual plan.

Thank you, President Topp.

Thrilled to come here as we do annually per policy 2170 to submit the district plan for providing CTE.

We do this every year to really highlight the goals and outcomes.

And we're particularly excited this year because of the connection to the new life ready goal that the board approved in January.

We are already working on specific aspects of the CT plan so that it's aligned fully to some of the aspects of developing a plan and implementing that plan for students and highlighting work-based learning experiences as well as the CT and STEM pieces that President Topp was just alluding to.

For the remainder of this short introduction, I just want to turn it over to Brian Day, our CTE STEM director.

If you do not know Brian, he was the CTE director for Everett for many, many years until we wooed him here to Seattle to take on a bigger challenge.

He's incredibly skillful at methodically building strong programs.

He gets rave reviews from everybody from school leaders to the special ed, PTSA, and many more as we heard in the public comments.

So I just want to give him a chance to share a few highlights, and I'll pass it over to Brian Day.

Thank you Dr. Perkins and thank you Dr. Jones and board members for allowing me to speak very briefly tonight.

Our annual plan this year is meant to be a community-accessible document filled with images of our students engaging in career-focused activities.

Though it contains a wealth of information, I'll highlight a very few guiding principles.

First, we aim to build a K-12 in-demand career pipeline as we strongly believe that the earlier we can introduce students to potential career opportunities, the better prepared they will be for their futures.

For example and President Hoppe you pointed out our robotics teams that I believe were at Lincoln and at Cleveland Microsoft.

These groups have been part of Seattle schools for a while.

They represent great opportunities for our students.

Our aim is to ensure that these opportunities are accessible for every student in our district.

So we need to spread these opportunities by including more high schools, more middle schools, and more elementary schools.

As part of this specific effort, we've launched a coordinated elementary robotics program and we're proud to have 23 new robotics teams this year.

Our goal for the following year, next year, is to have every single elementary school have a robotics team, and at least two teams at each school in the year after that.

We hope that students stay interested in robotics and computer science continuing through middle school and through high school.

We know that there are many computer science and software engineering careers in this area.

It's actually the number one career field.

Strong research shows that students decide very on if they're interested in STEM careers.

So we have to take advantage of this.

The earlier, the better.

So with this guiding principle in mind, we need to introduce computer science starting very early in the grades.

For computer science specifically, we started the elementary program just like the robotics program, aiming to train teacher leaders at each building to incorporate computer science into the regular curriculum.

This partnership is with Amazon and has already shown great success.

Another important guiding principle is the removal of barriers to ensure greater accessibility for our students.

We have a strong and growing internship program called CareerQuest with different versions like CareerQuest Technology, CareerQuest Science, and CareerQuest Finance.

These are very exciting opportunities.

A crucial part of increasing accessibility is addressing barriers like the number of hours needed to earn internship credit.

The state requirement of 188 hours can be a significant barrier for our students and industry.

Next month, there will be a policy proposal to allow mastery-based credit for internships.

If passed, this will greatly increase participation for all our students, as we truly believe that each student should have the opportunity to gain real-world work experience before they graduate, every single one.

Our program is growing and poised for even greater growth.

With your continued support, we can ensure this growth translates into meaningful opportunities for all students.

The report is designed to make data both accessible and visible, sparking curiosity and engagement.

I'd like to remind the board and everybody listening that we live in the Seattle-Puget Sound area, home to many in-demand careers that pay very well and are still growing.

People from all over the world come here to find employment in these areas.

There's no reason why our students shouldn't have these jobs.

We should demand it.

Thank you again for your time and support.

Questions from board directors?

More comments?

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I don't have a question.

My question is, are you ever considering leaving us?

And if so, can we convince you not to at any point?

Because everywhere I go and engage with community members involved in either the trades or they have students in these, I say, if somebody says, oh, you're on the school board, we have this program, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I'll say, well, you need to talk to Brian Day.

And they're like, I've already talked to him.

He's so great.

So I just wanted to publicly thank you for the work that you do to bring these opportunities to our students and partnerships.

And it's really exciting.

And even kids that don't go into these careers, this hands-on learning and building spatial relationships and just having the opportunity to play and explore is super important.

And I also think that CTE right now is what is keeping my son in school and has actually made him get on time to school most days now because he has a CTE class in the radio station.

So you're keeping kids in school and giving them pathways to succeed.

And I just really can't thank you enough for working

for us and our kids in our city i highly appreciate that seattle is a great place we have all these opportunities around and it's challenging to figure out how we can incorporate them into our classrooms and not just for a few students but for every single student we really need to take advantage of that thank you

Other directors?

All right.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

And reading the CTE annual plan is probably one of my favorite parts of the year.

It's very cool to see all the things that we are doing in our schools.

So thank you.

Thank you.

The pictures are very good as well.

We're going to move to the tables one last time, board directors.

We're going to stay there till adjournment and hopefully move through the next items quickly.

That's why.

So it's going to be a goal of mine before my term as president is over that I work on how many times we move back and forth in a meeting.

But we are now going to move into interim metrics for goals.

In January, the board established new district goals for student outcomes.

Our next step is receipt of the superintendent's draft interim metrics to support our goals.

And tonight's task is really to make sure to review for an alignment of these interim metrics.

It's not our job to say what the interim metric should be.

It's the superintendent to tell us and see if they are in alignment.

So I'm going to pass it to Superintendent Jones now to begin this presentation of those interim metrics, which, yeah, go for it, Dr. Jones.

Thank you.

This was...

This is a great opportunity for us to talk about these interim measures.

These goals have been thrashed through pretty vociferously by our team.

And today I have Ira, Cashel, Mike, Caleb, and Dr. Anderson.

We're all here to just try to give some insight as to what we've tried to do with these goals.

We'll be reviewing the goals that you approved and sharing our interpretation of those goals.

And then we'll, after going over our interpretation, I'll ask you to respond to two essential questions.

What in the superintendent interpretation resonates with you and what would you adjust?

So I want you all to kind of feel free to give that feedback.

I also ask, will these metrics allow you to monitor and assess progress toward the goal?

If not, what information is missing?

And so with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Starosky to orient you to the role of our interim measures play in helping us meet our overall goals.

Dr. Starosky.

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

So for everyone in the room and those who are listening and watching, what we want to make sure is that we're not just assuming that everyone knows what we're talking about when we say top line and interims.

And so our first slide is really to just define what a top line measurement is.

And it's a final summative assessment that evaluates progress towards a goal.

And typically this is conducted at the end of a school year.

So when we're talking about a top line measurement, we'll be talking about things that happen at the end of the school year or the end of the term.

And typically those would be state test scores, graduation rates, and district-wide achievement benchmarks.

An interim measure, which we are focusing on tonight, is a progress check.

conducted at regular intervals, so either quarterly, mid-quarterly, but it's something that's happening inside of the top line measure.

And for us, that is the opportunity for us to be able to guide our strategies, to make adjustments based on ways that we're seeing with our interim measures in service of the top line measure.

So next slide, please.

Thank you.

So when we're looking at a basic understanding of top line versus interim, that a top line has an endpoint of success.

An interim is periodic.

It's leading up to a specific point directly connected to that top line measure.

The purpose of the top line is to measure overall success.

The purpose of an interim is to inform strategy and implementation, which we've spent a good amount of time tonight learning and discussing this evening.

And the scope of a top line is broad and final.

and the interim is more detailed and diagnostic.

And so you can see that reflected in some of the things that we shared earlier this evening.

So the top line and interim measures are both essential because they are data-driven, and it helps us inform our decision-making.

So for us, what it's connected to, the things that we've been spending a lot of time in teamwork with you and our staff, is what does that mean for Seattle Public School students?

We had the theme of a strong start and a stronger finish.

And for us, at the elementary grades, it's confident early readers.

So that's our early literacy goal.

We're also moving on towards strong mathematicians, so that's our middle school math goal.

And then ending with our life ready goal, which is our graduation personalized pathways.

So the connection, that's second grade top line, sixth grade top line, and then our school link, which we'll be hearing more about in the coming days.

in the future.

So our theory of action connected to all of this is that if we select interim metrics focused on adult actions, so we're focused on the actions of adults and are predictive of our top line goals, then we, the adults in our system, will ensure staff across Seattle Public Schools are working in a coordinated way to improve student outcomes in early literacy, middle school math, and on-time graduation with personalized pathways.

So with that, what we wanted to make sure is that we're clear discussing some of our assessments, and I will hand that off to our future Dr. Jackson here.

Thank you, Dr. Swarovski.

So we have selected this pyramid to illustrate the assessments that are used within the Seattle Public Schools and how each assessment builds upon each other from daily classroom interactions to state level summative exams.

For the purposes of tonight's discussion, we're going to focus on three types of assessments.

Starting with the middle blue tier, I would like to acclimate us with a couple of common definitions.

Screeners are quick assessment checks that can be administered at large scale to identify students who may need additional instruction or intervention.

Continuing up the pyramid are benchmark and growth assessments, which are administered two to three times a year.

This type of assessment is curriculum agnostic and enables the system to monitor students as they progress towards grade level academic standards.

And summative assessments, as Dr. Starosky mentioned, is the assessment that we administer once a year, usually in the spring, to provide accountability to the state and federal level while simultaneously helping us assess our system effectiveness.

Superintendent Jones and our team are recommending the following interim measures as a framework to support the new strategic goals.

For the early literacy goal, we are recommending the dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills, also known as DIBELS, as one of two measures to monitor the early literacy goal.

As a screener, the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy assesses students across five foundational literacy domains in a short timeframe.

This assessment is administered in September, January, and May of each year to students in grades K, one, and two.

The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills has been successfully implemented district-wide since fall 2021. The dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills is also recommended by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction as a screener for weaknesses associated with dyslexia after the publisher added the rapid automatized naming component.

This edition enhances the dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills assessment by identifying potential weaknesses associated with dyslexia while also sustaining its original framework as a strong tool for assessing foundational literacy schools and student growth over time.

Can we go back to the pyramid slide?

Thank you, I'm gonna be here for a moment, sorry, for this.

Okay, the second measure we are recommending is the measure of academic progress as a growth benchmark assessment.

This measure is being recommended as an interim for the early literacy goal and for the sixth grade math goal.

In 2022, Seattle Public Schools expanded the measure of academic progress district-wide to provide critical insights into student progress.

The measures of academic progress is a nationally normed assessment with a database of over three million students allowing us to use its predictive analytics to assess students' growth and future performance.

The Measures of Academic Progress is a computer adaptive assessment, adjusting the difficulty of questions in real time based on each individual student's responses.

For younger students, it includes accommodations such as audio directions and developmentally appropriate visuals.

Currently, the measures of academic progress growth reading is administered to all K-5 students in the fall and spring and to all K-8 students in math in fall and spring.

The final measure is the Smarter Balanced Assessment.

As Dr. Swarovski mentioned, the top line measure of our second is our second recommended interim measure for our sixth grade math goal.

This assessment is developed and sustained by a consortium of states that ensures validity, reliability, and bias resistance through continuous review and educator involvement.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment is required at both the state and federal levels.

Since the pandemic, the Smarter Balanced assessment has been streamlined to reduce testing time while maintaining rigor.

It includes a computer adaptive component, adjusting questions based on student responses, and a performance task where students engage with primary and secondary sources to reduce synthesized responses in literacy and math.

Together, these assessments provide actionable data to guide instruction, support achievement, and drive continuous improvement across our system.

While these assessments are integral to our system, they do not represent the entirety of our approach.

They work in concert with the daily teaching and learning, which is the foundation of our system.

I will now turn it over to our executive director, Cashel Toner.

So thank you.

Okay, so hi everybody.

Let's shift to the next slide.

Yep, okay, so let's check in how and do some sense making about what ERA just described for the various assessments we're proposing and see how they relate to one of the goals.

So we'll talk about the early literacy goal first.

Goal one states the percentage of students in second grade that meet or exceed key grade level standards for foundational literacy skills will increase 10 percentage points by June 2023, 2030, sorry.

Focusing on second grade will strengthen the work the district has been doing over the last five years in kindergarten through third grade and help ensure that students enter third grade with strong reading foundational skills.

Goal one will be measured by the proportion of students who achieve the measure of academic progress' RIT score that is predictive of students' success on SBA in third grade, the first year the students take that assessment.

This will ensure that our new top line goal is anchored in the full complement of reading skills that are predictive of meeting standard.

Let's move on to the next slide.

Okay, so this slide, I'm just going to walk you through what the interims are.

And I just want to call your attention to the different, well, it's a little hard to see here, but maybe in your packet you might be able to see it a little bit better.

There are a couple features happening on this slide.

So you'll see proficiency and growth.

indicated in the first interim and then in the second interim you'll see proficiency and the third interim is also focused on proficiency.

So that's an important thing to realize and then I'm going to walk you through each one of those interims and then talk to you about how they all work together.

So with the top line goal in mind we developed three interim assessments to track multiple dimensions of student progress across kindergarten through second grade.

Student achievement at the end of second grade reflects learning, this is kind of obvious, but from grades kindergarten and first grade, as well as the progress made in second grade itself.

So when you look at these metrics, we want to monitor our progress from kindergarten and first, and then think about how that connects to second grade.

So interim one uses the measure of academic progress to measure student proficiency and growth at the end of first grade.

The proficiency metric identifies how many students meet grade level reading standards and how we're progressing toward the top line goal the following year.

The growth metric captures improvement among students who have not yet met proficiency.

Since students start at different levels, this helps us assess whether our system is on track and if we're moving toward improving the top line metric.

Interims 2 and 3 use DIBLS to measure the proportion of students proficient at foundational literacy skills.

Together, the measures of academic progress, which assesses comprehensive reading skills and the dynamic indicators of basic early literacy, or DIBELS, which focuses on foundational skills, provide insight into which aspects of literacy instruction are working and whether future attention is needed.

I'm just going to kind of summarize how we see these working.

If you work from the bottom of that slide and go up, first we're thinking about kindergarten dibbles, and then that feeds into first grade MAP and dibbles, and then that then supports the top line measure of second grade spring MAP.

So we'd now like to pause and turn it back over to the directors so that you can share with us any feedback in response to these two questions.

Let's see, I think the questions are on the next slide.

Yep, what is the superintendent's interpretation and does it resonate with you?

What would you adjust?

Will these metrics allow you to monitor progress towards the goal?

And if not, what information is missing?

Director Briggs.

I just have a quick clarifying question.

And also just thank you for walking us through.

It's really helpful to hear your thinking and just walking us through these goals.

I really appreciate getting to do this with all of you.

So is the reason that we only have growth in addition to proficiency in interim one because of the starting at first grade and coming in at different levels so that it doesn't make as much sense, I guess, to measure growth for subsequent years?

Yeah.

So somebody take the lead in kind of talking about how we balance growth and proficiency and give some insight into that dialogue.

And I'm looking at you, Cashel, but if Dr. Anderson has something to add, please do.

Sure.

So we had a long discussion about that and how to situate how many metrics to bring forward, how many should be balanced with growth or proficiency, how to present that to all of you.

And our thinking was that having the second grade growth and proficiency will give us some really interesting information to help us make course corrections along the way and help us understand if we're on target.

And we did try to narrow just a little bit with proficiency in kindergarten and first, understanding the developmental component of it, and then also thinking about wanting to have a focused conversation around a few data metrics, not too many, not too few.

And so that's where we landed, having about two-thirds proficiency, one-third growth component to bring forward to you.

It doesn't limit us in any way to think that that's the only data we'll be paying attention to, but we did land on that composition of one-third, two-thirds to focus our conversations at the board level.

My colleagues, did I summarize that okay?

Hi, I'll just add Eric Anderson, Director of Research and Evaluation, that to the conversation you had earlier with AJ to help us understand, are we either reaching the goal or are we making growth towards the goal?

And then also importantly, do we have the strategies and do we have an understanding of what strategy should be to make that improvement?

Growth is really important as an analytic to help us understand our own efficacy as a system.

It also helps us understand why and under what circumstances kids may be making progress and not making progress.

So having that additional analysis is really helpful to surface our interpretation of the progress that we're making, as well as being able to consider the students that maybe they're not there yet, but we also care about their progress.

Director Mizrahi.

Yeah, first of all, I want to echo what Director Briggs said.

I appreciate the walking us through it.

It's super helpful.

The question I have is, we didn't really have time to dig into the progress monitoring, but it looked like one of the recommendations on that was to improve the use of curriculum embedded assessments.

So I'm curious why we're not building those into our goals for this interim measure.

Anybody take that on?

It is part of it, but it's not on our publicly facing, if you will, on the interims, but it's a strategy that we're using.

Ari, you want to take that?

Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

It's not helpful.

Okay, there we go.

We are, we, they're new.

They're literally six months old at this moment.

And so I think it would be a little too enthusiastic to say that this is going to be a measure that we really understand the data and therefore can explain it to you.

That is not to say that they're not incredibly important and everybody's talking about them and using that information.

and it's helping inform classroom instruction.

I think we're still just trying to get our heads around how do we aggregate this and provide it to you versus how a vendor might do it through their report.

I don't know if what that will look like a year or two from now, but right now I would say we're just trying to give you good data versus just fast data.

And who knows this time next year?

I'll just quickly add that to build on Dr. Jackson's point, DIBELS has been well established by research as a strongly predictive and reliable, it has all the psychometric properties of a reliable assessment, even though it is a formative assessment, as well as MAP.

Those same analytics or analysis has not been done for these types of assessments, and they really are formative and meant to be for teachers.

DIBELS, of course, is a teacher tool as well, but we're just not sure that it has the type of data to produce to be sharing at the system level that will be meaningful, but understanding the adult behaviors around the use of that assessment, of course, will be really important to the discussions.

Just to be clear, our commitment to improving our use with our educators about curriculum assessments, embedded assessments, is unwavering.

It's just premature right now.

So we have better measurements at this moment for the interims.

Got it.

I think that'll make sense.

One more thing.

The shared interest, it sounded like the board had, was really around the foundational literacy skills.

And DIBELS answers that question for us.

It really helps us understand how kids are progressing across the continuum of foundational literacy skills and then how that relates to MAP, which then is also predictive of SBA.

So I feel like that shared interest around foundational literacy skills is, DIBELS would be the assessment to use for that.

Yeah.

Director Rankin.

Thank you.

So the first prompt is what resonates with you, what would you adjust?

In looking at the interpretation of this goal compared to the interpretation of the other goals, for some reason, and maybe it's just the way I'm reading it, it feels like it's jumping suddenly to something very technical as opposed to, and I think you know this, so I'm not concerned that this is something that's not.

not being interpreted, but that our intent is that students develop strong early literacy skills to be readers and to be learners into the future.

And so for some reason, this interpretation feels like it's jumping a step much more technically than some of the others.

So I don't know if that's...

it doesn't feel to me like a direct interpretation of the goal, which is that we want students to be strong leaders, which is, it's not necessarily, yeah, it's just jumped to a little bit of a technical thing in a way that the other interpretations sort of describe, here's what we think the board thinks is important about this.

So I don't know if that is manifesting here, but, Something about the interims, the growth one for me is the strongest.

Because what I'm looking for is, I don't think, we don't want you to just give us data because there's data to be collected.

We wanna know, do you believe that monitoring these things and changing adult behavior related to these things is going to help students be successful?

And the growth one is the one where I can really see that it was identified, my interpretation of this is that it was identified that a barrier to achieving the top line goal of early literacy skill, seeing growth in that measure, was that students of color furthest from educational justice in grade one may that you have seen may need to make more growth than one grade level and so that identification of that specific student population the specific time frame and that what you're looking for is not just It's not just this assessment, that assessment, but it's actually saying to me, we staff are going to be making sure that we are providing leadership and resources to see that growth in this student group that is a focus for...

closing that gap, meeting proficiency that will then increase the level of proficiency overall.

And so I guess, yeah, so generally what I am looking at is, are these measures that you've provided ones that you are using for decision making?

And I can see that most strongly in the growth one, as opposed to the board wants some data, here's some data.

But I appreciate that the distinction that you made, Cashel, about...

Or maybe...

Somebody on that end of the table.

That...

what are tools that are already being used in the classroom, because what we definitely don't want is just, well, let's figure out something to measure, throw some new assessment in there that nobody's actually using.

So I guess my question attached to that is for the three proficiency goals, How will the data collected on those measures impact decision making and instructional leadership when you receive that data before you share it to us?

Anybody want to take that one on?

Cashel?

Sure.

And before you take that on, know that these questions are open for you all to respond to, not just tonight.

Some of us need to sit back and kind of marinate on what these are.

So as you think of things, we'll leave this open for at least a week or so so that you all can reflect on this.

So if we don't answer all the things right now, but we're interested in your all's reactions to these questions.

So Cashel, please.

Yeah, the first thing that makes me think about would be looking at the data of, you know, kindergarten.

See how this fits together, right?

Goes kindergarten, proficiency on DIBELS, then it goes first grade, proficiency with DIBELS, and then we get a little more dimensional at the second grade, at first grade, also looking at MAP, proficiency and growth.

What I think will help decision making, first of all, is to be much more explicit about how these goals fit together, and then what professional development might we consider for our system in order to help folks understand how important these progressions are for learners and how you know kids that aren't necessarily on track what do we need to do as a system in order to respond and and adjust right so i think that the professional development question is a decision making point that first comes to mind and then also i'm curious to learn how we can get a little tighter around the interaction between MAP and DIBELS because initially when I've looked at that data, you can have students that are proficient on DIBELS, but there's a MAP gap, if you will.

So I would like to learn about that and explore that with all of you and also with our educators.

I really appreciate that point because you know our goal isn't for students to do well on tests our goal is for students to be able to demonstrate that they have learned and that they are learning so I appreciate that that distinction there.

Superintendent Jones you want to keep going.

All right, transitioning to the next slide and looking at the sixth grade math goal.

So obviously the top part is what you approved, the percentage of sixth graders prepared to succeed in grade level math coursework in seventh grade as measured by the sixth grade SBA.

Our interpretation, as it says, is that you really wanted to make sure there was students who are having a strong foundation in math in elementary grades and transitioning well once they get into middle school so that that sixth grade year is a critical one to ensure that they have access in seventh grade and beyond to more advanced and other opportunities related to STEM and math.

So that's how we interpreted it and that very much shaped what we looked at when it came to the interim.

So I'll go straight to the interims.

Next slide.

So Cashel did the heavy lifting in terms of scoping this out, but you'll see there's a similar pattern.

We tried to have basically mainly proficiency, but some growth.

And you'll see that we're looking at the elementary grades, which is new, looking at grade four, grade five, and then obviously the grade six one at the end is similar to what we're doing now in terms of looking at the fall To Director Rankin's question earlier, that's going to give us data to respond to in the fall so that we can begin to plan the year.

But the other data points would be helping us think about how to support our elementary grades and what is going well in the elementary grades.

What supports do students need as they transition into middle school?

So the specific, back to soon-to-be Dr. Jackson's presentation and helpful orientation, that we're looking really at the Smarter Balanced assessment and the MAP assessments.

Those are our two main metrics.

To Director Mizrahi's point, that doesn't mean we won't be looking at CEAs and lots of other things.

But these are the top line.

These are the things we're going to set formal targets to.

These are the things that we think will be most predictive of the top line measure and will drive adult action.

So I'll pause there and we'll go to the next slide and revisit our questions.

Directors.

Director Rankin.

Thanks, I'll make it quick because I have a similar wonder about what these things tell you as you're doing your work and also appreciate the growth for the specific student group.

Yeah, I think there is more work to be done.

I think that your question is a good one in terms of how we're gonna couple the looking at things like the curriculum embedded assessment data work coupled with what we see in the spring and what we see in the fall.

But in each of these cases, what I think the push from the board that's been so helpful is thinking about are students leaving elementary grades ready to succeed in sixth grade?

So one of the things that I think this will enable us to do, say interim one, even on proficiency, is to understand what does the incoming fifth grade class look like?

We've done some of that, but this will push us to do more of it so that those sixth grade educators are more informed and ready to support those students.

Can I just add, because I think it's, because you're kind of asking what questions are we going to be asking ourselves when we're looking at this data, right?

And I think what you guys did to set this goal at sixth grade is really helps us focus on that transition, not just from elementary to middle, but also just the learning expectations, the instructional shifts, the content shifts that occur from upper elementary to middle school math.

you start to get into different types of abstract thinking and things like that that really aren't as present.

And so I think our inquiry by looking at fourth and fifth grade will really be like, is that preparation occurring?

Where are the gaps occurring?

And it'll discipline ourselves, hopefully, to really understand that trajectory in a way that we didn't necessarily focus as much on when we were doing the seventh grade goals.

So I think that's our hope.

I just have one more thing to add to that, if that's okay.

I am wondering, given conversation this evening and this week and forever about advanced learning, and maybe we don't know this right now because I'm fully owning that this is a diversion from what we're actually talking about, but I wonder if the grade four, if we're using that already as an interim measure, what noticings we might have about what then the feeder middle schools should think about their course offerings depending on the proficiency of students in fourth grade.

Might that tell us better how many sections of geometry there might need to be, you know, whatever that may be for students who are achieving ahead of grade level to continue on their journey in the course that's right for them.

Anybody want to take a shot at talking about credit bearing opportunities that could be yielded from this?

Well, certainly there's a national conversation, a Seattle conversation about, for example, accessing algebra.

There was comments, obviously, in public testimony about accessing geometry and algebra, too.

But really, the thing that we have been pushing for a while and had made some success is the idea of accessing algebra, which gives high school credit by the end of eighth grade.

To be able to do that, you need to be able to succeed well enough in sixth grade math.

so that you can take Math 7-8 Compacted in the current iteration.

There are other variations to that, but if we want to talk about the overwhelming majority of Seattle Public School students, the overwhelming majority is really about teeing them up for success in Math 6 so that they can succeed in this Math Compacted class called Math 7-8.

So much more to say, but.

Yeah.

Is that responsive to your...

It was, and as Dr. Perkins says, there's a lot more to say, and I'm going to reserve that for when we are talking about accessing math courses rather than this.

Thank you.

Goal three.

OK.

With your permission, we'll move on to the third goal, Life Ready.

It's the record for the most words in the goal.

But anyway, it's got a lot to unpack.

This is obviously the goal that you approved in January for Life Ready.

But the big takeaway, I think, has been really helpful from the conversation is that you want to make sure students are engaging in a meaningful, personalized planning process, and then taking steps to actually be able to implement that plan.

So that's what we're really going to focus on in the interims, the ability to develop a plan that's meaningful, that's connected to their interests, and the ability, the skills, the course taking, what have you, that enable them to be able to be successful, including things like work-based learning and applying to post-secondary programs.

So that's our interpretation, that you really want those two elements.

And so as you'll see when we go to the interims in the next slide, that's how we've organized the interims.

Go to the next slide.

Dramatic pause.

There we go.

So the first set of interims, and I think, again, back to Director Rankin's point, how is this driving adult action?

We're trying to pick, thinking about different grade points, different milestones in a student's experiences.

So those top two are really about the details of completing the High School and Beyond Plan and how we're going to make it more meaningful.

So by the end of eighth grade, you're supposed to be already thinking about possible educational and career goals.

We don't want to lock anybody in at eighth grade, of course, but so they can begin developing their four-year plan.

That's a required part from the state and one that we think we can make a lot more meaningful as we're transitioning to this new tool called School Links.

Then at 11th grade, there's another set of milestones that are critical on the plan building where you get sharper on your career and educational goals and you begin to connect it to specific post-secondary programs.

So that's the developing the plan part.

On the implementing the plan part, what we heard from you and what we think is important is that we want to set up students to be able to pursue multiple pathways and maybe even change their mind and maybe even think about different pathways.

So we want and are excited to share with you data across content areas by the 10th grade, similar to what we're doing right now with our top line.

But what's different is by 11th grade, we'd like to give you a clear sense of how many students are really on track to meet a math pathway, an ELA humanities pathway, and a CTE pathway, with the goal that pretty much nearly all of our students should have access to all three.

So once again, the idea is that there's two main sets of interims, developing the plan and being able to implement the plan.

And with that, we'll go back to your questions and your discussion.

Directors?

Director Rankin?

Thank you.

Is there, well, so the other three goals or other two goals have three interims and this one has two.

Is that just a, I mean, because of the goal really is the completion of the plan and there are so many different things that are embedded in the plan that another, like the plan itself only almost contains interims of its own.

It's true.

And so there's a lot of metrics to look at in the top line measure.

We're excited about that.

FAFSA completion, work-based learning completion.

We expect that we'll be reporting to the board on all of those components.

I will share, for what it's worth, there's four bullets within the two, which is the same thing as the literacy and math.

We actually tried to get it down to three, but we just thought this level of data was important.

So this is actually almost four interims, is what you're saying.

There's really four interims here.

That's not bad.

And then, so the rollout of the state tool, you know what I'm going to ask, I think.

Originally, we were slated to not be brought into that until 2026. Did I, am I to understand correctly that we get to have it and start using it this fall?

Is that what?

We are in intense conversations with the plans to do just that, yes.

That's fantastic.

I won't exaggerate.

It was inspired by the fact that the Life Ready goal is centered on high school and beyond planning, and also that we heard very loudly and clearly from our counselors and a number of educators who have started to look at the new tool and said, we would like to move faster.

That's awesome.

Is there anything the board can do?

Is there encouragement or persuasion to be made from the board to OSPI, or is this just a technical, we'll see if we can get added to it kind of thing?

We're all set in terms of OSPI.

I think there's a lift.

Yeah.

Again, thank you for the question.

I'll just say that helping our community, there was a lot of conversation before we implemented Naviance.

Some of you may recall some of those back and forths to the extent that you can help with that level of communicating with your community members about what's the exciting part about this.

And we can obviously help that.

That's what I think would be helpful.

I think it's an extremely exciting opportunity for you all to be able to talk about with community how to use it, a new tool, how it's going to support kids.

I'm really excited that we're able to access that the first year of this and not have to...

wait yes and not to dampen your excitement however we will be kind of first to market on this and so it's we will be kind of the ones who are working the kinks out so yeah i think we have to be very deliberate and and not be hasty hastily roll this out we need to be connected with our educators connected with the students around what their needs are we need to be doing a lot of engagement with those who are going to be stewarding this and so I just wanted to make sure that we I'm kind of talking to us actually we're not too eager but we take the requisite steps to do our own formative assessment along the way so that we're implementing this with fidelity so thank you for yeah

I guess I'm not saying I expect that we're ready to hit the ground and everything is rolled out, but just to echo that, I think being transparent, like, hey, this is a new goal.

This is also a new tool from the state, and we're gonna work with our families and staff and students to learn how best to use it and how best it can support our students, I think is actually a really great opportunity.

All right.

So we're going to move on to the next part, our highly capable services update.

I don't know if we want to reorganize if we're all staying up here or switching up.

Board stays, staff will switch.

Thank you.

Thank you all.

You can have it, or you can't have it.

All right.

Okay, so we are now going to do a brief update on highly capable services.

We had a long conversation last month.

We've heard a lot of testimony, I think emails.

Dr. Torres Morales, I think you sent out an email yesterday to our SPS community with an update, but this kind of closes the loop in the conversation that we started.

So I'm going to pass it to Superintendent Jones now for the update.

Thank you, President Topp.

That was a really good lead in.

And I know we are coming close to the close of this meeting, so I'll be brief.

Yes, please.

And if we go to the next slide, I just want to say this clearly.

The objective of this recommendation for service delivery is to provide students and families with reassurance of access to highly capable services.

As we look at how we move forward, what Dr. Torres-Morales is going to talk about, it's with this reassurance that we're trying to provide.

So without further ado, Dr. Torres-Morales.

Good evening, board.

I'm here to provide an update for highly capable programming as we continue to move through the next few years in our servicing for students.

So next slide, please.

This slide just details the components of the highly capable program.

As you recall, in our last meeting, there was a commitment to have a report available for the board and the public by April 1st.

We are still on target to do that.

The elements of the plan will include the number of students, the district's plan to identify and place students, a description of the program goals, a description of the services the program will offer, the instructional program description, description of the ongoing professional development, program evaluation, and fiscal report and assurances that the district is legally compliant.

And this is in compliance with both state law and our school district policy.

Next slide, please.

So we are making a commitment to expanding access and inclusion.

I want to note that as a school district, we have made significant strides in increasing access to highly capable students, vis-a-vis the number of students that are qualified for services through our universal screening process.

Additionally, every school has a structured plan to support HC students through their continuous school improvement plans.

Alongside HC expansion, we're actively integrating inclusion strategies to support all students, ensuring they receive appropriate enrichment and resources.

This is driven by the inclusion initiative that's embedded in policy 0010, which is the instructional policy for the school district.

Next slide, please.

So our recommendation for the next three years is to continue in a hybrid model.

That would be that we have the neighborhood school model, and we also have the cohort model available.

So students will continue to be identified through the universal screening process in grades one through eight via a holistic evaluation of the students' existing and available data and information assessments.

Families of students in grades two through five will be given the choice to decide if they would like their student to receive their services via the cohort model or in their neighborhood school.

Services will include differentiated instruction, accelerated learning, enrichment opportunities, et cetera.

The hybrid model provides both centralized and neighborhood-based opportunities addressing diverse student and family needs.

Next slide, please.

In terms of the professional development, neighborhood and cohort schools, essentially all schools in Seattle Public Schools, will participate in professional development aligned with the inclusion initiative during the 2025-2026 school year.

Some of this includes professional development and accelerated learning, the universal design for learning, multi-tiered systems of support, or MTSS, and restorative practices, also known as RP.

Advanced learning teachers from the central office are available to work directly with schools on how to provide services for HC eligible students.

These teachers also receive additional trainings in the Universal Design for Learning to address how to engage students in accelerated curriculum using the elements of UDL.

Additionally, all school leaders received training during summer 2023 and summer 2024 via our School Leader Institute on the universal design for learning, multi-tiered systems of support, and restorative practices.

Next slide, please.

in terms of potential policy implications want to note that we are in process of consulting with our legal department on the 2190 policy to see if there are any potential changes needed at this time we do not believe so but we want to confirm that and we're still looking at reporting on the plan that is written in policy 2190 by april the 1st In terms of superintendent procedures, there will need to be updates to Superintendent Procedure 2190 and 3130, as there's language included in there on the cohort phase-out, and we need to update that language to capture this recommendation.

Next slide, please.

In terms of our goals and guardrails, which we were discussing earlier this evening, we wanted to provide an alignment for how a decision such as this and how we're going to move forward in our highly capable programming align with the established goals and guardrails.

When we were looking at this, we feel that this aligns to guardrails one, three, and five.

In terms of guardrail one, there's ongoing consistency and access to the cohort model to provide reassurance to families.

The plan provides time to reduce variation and fidelity of services in the neighborhood school model.

In terms of guardrail three, there is ongoing screening practices to increase identification of students and access to the program.

And in terms of guardrail five, the enhanced universal screening, the investment in professional development, and there's gonna be a strengthening of the math acceleration.

So by spring 2026, resources will be realigned to increase access to accelerated math to all students as needed.

Next slide, please.

In terms of our goal alignment, when we think about second grade reading, the focus that we're gonna put on MTSS implementation should directly align with increases for second grade reading as we're gonna be looking at data-driven practices.

For sixth grade math, getting more access to highly capable services should push academic growth, particularly for our highly capable students, but access to accelerated learning will do that for all students.

And when we think about life-ready goals, the ability to have some acceleration in math should push on our indicator that we have for algebra that we want that to be taken by the end of ninth grade.

Next slide, please.

Here we have just a draft of what the rollout is gonna look like post-recommendation.

So right now we are in year zero, review of current resource allocation through resource and strategy analysis.

Next year is HC service and math acceleration delivery initiatives incorporated into the strat plan.

So we're working through that now.

Then there's gonna be the three years.

So years one, two, and three.

So I wanna be clear that when we say year one, that means next school year.

So that is 25, 26. Year two is 26, 27. Year three is 27, 28. So what we're gonna be doing at that time is running the hybrid model, meaning parents will get choice if they want their students to remain in their neighborhood school to access their services or go to a cohort model to access their services.

What we're gonna be looking at at the district level is the smarter balance assessment results for our highly capable qualified students that are accessing both versions of the model.

looking at the map growth results for their students that are accessing both versions of the model, and also looking at the safe and welcoming results for those highly capable students that are accessing both services of the model.

The purpose of this is for us to really get an understanding of what's really happening.

Where are we seeing the best portions of our investment?

So for example, The SBA in general, what we find is that our students who are qualified as highly capable will be on standard or above consistently, but this is a gut check for us to say, is that happening in both models, yes or no?

The second measure, the growth measure, looks at, for the individual student, are they making a year or more of growth from where they started from?

So that shows us, is this really getting the students the acceleration that is necessary for them to make their academic growth in needs?

And finally the safe and welcoming survey results is partly related to some of the feedback we've received from community that a lot of our students when they do access the neighborhood schools feel othered and that is part of the reason why some of our families are accessing cohort models because the students feel more safe and welcome in those spaces.

And so this is a way for us to check are we living up to policy 0010 and making sure that our kids feel safe and welcome in all environments at all times.

When we hit year four, this is the time for us to do the data analysis and then really strengthen our implementation based on what we find out.

What are we doing?

Where are we going?

How are we doing this?

And are we doing this well?

This will give us the data and the runway to be able to really make a determination on that.

And then post that will be just to continually improve and iterate on what we are doing.

Next slide, please.

There are some operational considerations to this recommendation.

So for example, student assignment.

There is some work that will need to be done with our operations team around that.

Budget implications in terms of resourcing, staffing, et cetera.

Staffing is noted.

Communications and engagement.

I have made a commitment, and we will continue to do so, to one, we will be hiring a director of advanced learning this spring, and two, at a minimum, we will have a cadence out of what these engagement sessions will look like for highly capable families across the city before the end of the school year this spring.

And finally, just the planning and cadence of how all of this is going to roll will be shared as we continue to move.

And I thank you, and questions?

I'm going to encourage us to try to keep our questions focused here so we can move along, but Director Mizrahi.

It's getting weird.

So not so far off.

OK, one somewhat technical question.

Mr. Evans, who by the way is my daughter's math teacher, not for geometry, brought up this point about only students that have gone through the cohort model are able to access the higher level math in middle school.

So as we grow out of the neighborhood model, will the highly capable students who go through that neighborhood program be able to go into the, I guess it's geometry, right?

Geometry in middle school and do that level of math if they haven't gone through the cohort program.

Part of this recommendation involves us engaging with our curriculum academics and instruction team to review the policies around our math acceleration so that we have a clearer understanding of what that looks like, not only for HC eligible students, but for all students in the school district.

Who has access to this?

Who does not?

And how are we moving through those progressions?

So that's part of the discussion that is going to take place as part of this recommendation.

I appreciate that.

Second question.

Well, first of all, I just want to say I also appreciate the implementation and monitoring.

I think it's clear that we're not kicking the can down the road on highly capable, but actually trying to figure out what's working best, how we can improve the neighborhood program.

Because I think we heard from a lot of people They like the cohort model, but they also want robust, highly capable education in their neighborhood schools.

The question, though, on staffing, do you have any anticipation?

I mean, I know inclusionary practices to be successful take more staffing.

So what is your anticipation on what those staffing needs might be?

We're in that analysis at this time.

We are not 100% clear just yet.

But we do know that it potentially would take more staffing.

A lot of the work we're going to do is around the professional development of what this looks like.

And we don't have a clear answer on that just yet.

But we will be sure to share that with the board when we know more.

Director Rankin.

I just want to say thank you.

I know.

Rocky and I have been working on this for two something years.

And he was greatly missed when he was on leave.

And it's really exciting to see something tangible.

So my, I guess, question or comment is that from the so those are basically our commitments as a district your commitments as staff to how we serve students i want to kind of honor that that we have a commitment to make two which is part of the importance of this policy update that we approved in september about the things required by state law being provided to the board that that gives that will give us the opportunity to see from you how how those numbers are changing, where students are being served, how they are or aren't accessing services, and what they are, a description of the services the program will offer.

So I will expect to see in next year, the description would be, here's what's at neighborhood schools, here's what's in the cohort.

And as you make adjustments, I would expect that annually, we would see some different information based on how things are evolving.

And so that will also allow, let's see, if we're talking about three years, it's potential, potentially nobody at this table will be here in three years.

So that will also offer whoever comes next the opportunity to continue to monitor and provide to the community what is and isn't happening instead of three years from now people having to restart this whole conversation.

So I just want to say thank you.

for the work that went into it.

I know I've heard from families how much they appreciate the commitment to connect and listen to them from you all.

And I'm excited just to keep this going and we'll hear more about it in April.

I appreciate the time thank you I appreciate here the clarity we have to families on how we are moving forward and that we have the understanding that you know we like this like what's happening in some of the neighborhood models where we are implementing this and implementing it well and we're seeing some really awesome and interesting results that I want to keep tracking but also sort of a realization that maybe we have not fully implemented it in all our neighborhood schools the way we have and so this hybrid really provides a strong way to move forward.

I also really like how the data collection, the three things, you know, are they at level, the growth, is the growth happening, and the sense of belonging.

I really appreciate those three, and I think they're really thought out.

So thank you for your work and for helping provide our community clarity on where we're going here with highly capable services.

So board, this was labeled as a recommendation.

With your concurrence, I'd like to take the recommendation off and say this is how we're moving.

This is also going to be deeply embedded in our strategic plan.

So it's not going to be a separate initiative.

It's going to be supported structurally as we move forward.

With your concurrence, we're going to start to move on this.

And I think with Dr. Torres Morales at the helm, I feel we're going to be in good stewardship.

All right.

I think that is a perfect segue into the last item on our agenda.

This will be a monthly occurrence.

We're going to receive an update on the strategic planning process.

This is going to be included on our agenda monthly so the board can stay updated throughout this work, but the superintendent is responsible for coming up with the strategic plan that aligns with our district's goals, and our guard rail.

So I'm going to pass it again to Dr. Jones to now share more about where you are in the process.

I'm joined by Deputy Chief of Staff Eric Gersey here, who's going to help me with this presentation.

But really, we want to give, as Director Topp mentioned, the first of several updates on our strategic planning process.

And as a board, you all have established goals and guardrails, critical governance tool.

And what we have done with those is we're planning on doing an internal analysis, reviewing data, outlining the initial year one of the strategic plan.

This plan has been, the planning to get to this point has been strong so far, but we have an even greater opportunity to bring a comprehensive five-year plan to the board that will drive our academic progress.

And so with that said, I'd like to go on to the next slide, please.

So we started with Seattle Excellence, a strategic plan, and that was frankly innovative, groundbreaking, something that had never been seen before.

Some people even came to Seattle Public Schools to work because of our unapologetic focus on targeted universalism.

In that plan, we named African American males as the group that the system needed to improve outcomes for.

Since that time, we brought forward student outcome-focused governance to really solidify our commitment to not just a set of activities, but to a set of outcomes.

And so we move now to where we currently are, year zero, and this is the year of stabilization.

We took this gap year, if you will, between Seattle Excellence and our new strategic plan to do a diagnostic around what are the operational, academic, initiatives that we need to look at to shore up so that we can launch into the next strategic plan with fidelity and intentionality.

And so this period of time that we're in is during the strategic development.

And we're really trying to make sure that we're assessing the current state of the school district.

We're establishing a clear vision for the future.

We're outlining specific goals and action steps to achieve that vision, and we're prioritizing key areas for improvement.

And so with that said, next slide, please.

We are looking at these reasons for moving forward with a thorough, robust process.

We want to make sure from the outset in this plan that we are ensuring meaningful community and stakeholder engagement.

We know that schools are the heart of our community and that the strategic plan should reflect the voices of students, families, educators, and local stakeholders.

And we want to stand up a very deliberate process for us to gather broad input, ensuring that communities' priorities and concerns are addressed in the final plan.

This approach will ideally strengthen trust and build long-term support for what we're trying to do.

As we go across this continuum, we want to make sure we're developing well-researched, sustainable initiatives.

As we move into this process, we've done a learning needs analysis.

We will be having the benefit of a resource allocation analysis.

And we're told that the process that we're engaging in early on is one of the best in class in terms of how we're approaching this.

And so our strategic plan will be better informed by data, research, community needs, and this will be reducing our risk of having a reactive or short-term decision making.

So as we go forward, we're going to enhance collaboration across departments and schools.

Some people have labeled us as having silos, and this will help us break down some of those silos.

We're going to make sure that we're having a back and forth, an iterative conversation with those who are actually on the front lines of providing educational service delivery and those who are working at the system level as well.

And as we go through this process, we're going to be trying to make sure that we're strengthening implementation and accountability.

It's going to make us stronger as we go forward.

This transparency that we'll have about this process will help us to have, again, a robust process.

And then we want to make sure at the end of the day we're building a more adaptable and future-ready district.

We want to make sure that what we're pushing forward is going to be forward thinking, it's going to be innovative, it's going to get us ready for those things that we talk about, college and career ready, not just at the point of high school, but when students start their first day at Seattle Public Schools, we need to be thinking about how are we having an adaptable future ready district.

So with that said, I'm going to hand it off to Eric to kind of talk about some of the specifics around how we're realizing our opportunities through this planning process.

Thanks, Dr. Jones.

If we could go to the next slide.

great okay great on the next side we can see that we're going to be walking through a four-phase strategic planning process over the next that'll take us through the end of the calendar year.

And we've tried to be super intentional about sequencing the process in a way that will allow us to have a robust strategic plan that will be both concrete, that will be sequenced, that will have metrics, and that will hopefully integrate our academic strategy with our financial strategy.

Because we're at a point in the district where we know that we can't afford for those bodies of work to live in isolation anymore, but we need to bring together what we're doing from a teaching and learning standpoint with what we're doing to attach necessary resources to fund the initiatives.

So just walking from left to right, we're currently in the goals and guardrails development.

The board has adopted top line goals and guardrails, and we're currently in the process of setting interim goals and guardrails.

We went through that just earlier.

with the previous presentation, and we're supposed to wrap that up in the next several months here as we come to you with draft guardrails next month, and then we wrap up with final goals and guardrails in April or May.

We're currently undergoing a resource and strategy analysis to first paint a comprehensive picture of where our resource and strategy set broadly defined lives across the district, meaning How equitably are our people, time, and money distributed currently?

And we're also gonna be conducting what we're calling a system strategy return on investment to take a really close look at our current initiatives to understand what's our theory of action for driving change in outcomes and how are we seeking to get there.

From there, we're going to be bringing the board an initial set of strategies that we're going to pursue during year one.

And we're going to begin to really bring the community along in that process.

And then we're going to deepen that work going into the fall with a more detailed set of multi-year implementation metrics and a very clear instructional vision and plan for the work.

There's sort of three guiding sort of buckets, philosophical buckets that are driving the four particular phases that we've laid out here.

The first is that we want to make sure that we're gathering feedback from the community in an authentic way that brings them along, that we're not just asking the community the vision and values you've done that work as a board, but that we're coming to them understanding what we've learned, from our resource and strategy analysis, coming to them with draft ideas, coming to them with possible strategies that they can react to so that the community is really shaping our plan and that we're tapping into their ingenuity and we're tapping into their innovation.

And then secondly, we know that we're approaching next year rapidly and we need to be super intentional about making sure that we're getting off to a strong start next year and then taking the time we need during the summer and into the early fall to look out and forecast for the following four years so that by sort of late fall, we have a really clear vision of where we're going to be going over the next five years.

The other thing that we've heard, one of the things that we've done is conducted some initial engagement with our school leaders.

We've held two listening sessions.

And school leaders have told us that while they have a very clear vision for the work at their building, central office needs to come alongside them with a very clear vision.

And we need the time to merge the visions that we have at the school level with the visions we have at central office, so we're all singing from the same song sheet and we're all rolling in the same direction.

If we can move to the next slide, this is just a very brief overview of the work that we've already accomplished.

You know that we've conducted a student needs assessment.

I don't want it to get lost on us that we're starting from a place of strength, that Dr. Hart told us we have a lot of great work that we can build on as a district.

We also recognize that we need to accelerate our progress and that coming out of the pandemic, We haven't necessarily caught up in our two goals in third grade literacy and seventh grade math from before the pandemic.

And we need to not only catch up, but surge ahead.

So that's the first body of work is the goals and guardrails development.

Secondly, we're in the midst of conducting a very thorough and robust resource and strategy analysis.

What we're doing is we're combining student-level data, school-level data, employee-level data, and finance data to understand a through line between what's budgeted in our spreadsheets and what's actually going on in the classroom so we can understand how our resources are distributed across the system.

And we're going to be able to ask questions like, where are our most experienced and highest performing teachers, which students have access to those teachers in our school system.

That's not a question we're really asking right now.

What classes are students taking?

Are students who have similar levels of performance having inequitable access to rigorous coursework?

We heard a lot about mathematics tonight.

How can we ensure and what sort of sequencing shifts might we need to make?

So we're currently undergoing that work and the big sort of headline that I want us to walk away from this slide with is that we're taking the time to do things in the right order.

A lot of last time, our last strategic plan, we launched a strategic plan and then we kind of retrofitted goals and guardrails into the strategic plan.

A lot of districts will sort of develop a set of strategies and then say, wait, how are we going to pay for all this?

we're first understanding where our resources distributed across the system, and then understanding starting from that place with a really clear picture of our resources, how can we make shifts in our resources, shifts in our strategies based on where we are.

So if we can go to the next slide, we want the board obviously to come alongside us in this process.

This is what you can expect.

This is what you can expect, very drafty, but this is what you can expect through the end of the calendar year.

Again, at the next meeting we anticipate coming before you with some additional information about just how our school funding equity looks across the district, an initial snapshot, and then we're going to update you on our thorough plan for community engagement as sort of a preview.

We anticipate at least a three pillar plan that includes multilingual translated survey information that's distributed in many ways, meeting families where they are, targeted focus groups, including with community based organizations.

that we know are trusted messengers with our community so that they're out there, including with families, students, other organizations, and then larger town hall style focus, you know, opportunities for families throughout the city of Seattle.

And then this will come alongside coming into early summer, which you can expect to see as a really clear theory of action for how we're going to achieve the goals within the constraints of the guard rail.

So what are sort of the big strategies that we're going to be pursuing over the next number of years and then we're going to be breaking down those strategies with a set of key actions and those are going to get more and more specific going into early fall.

on the next slide you can see that we have a series of overlapping work streams that are going to come together to form a comprehensive plan but again in early summer what you're going to see is really strong initial actions for year one we're going to bring that back out to the community multiple touch points so that then coming into late fall we can refine the plan and having a very clear revenue picture in hand, making some initial shifts.

And the board has talked a lot about what's the budget going to look like to achieve the goals.

What you can expect to see is an initial down payment in year one with some initial shifts, and then going into the next four years, increased alignment year over year with the budget so that we can achieve a more coherent school system on behalf of our students.

Back to Dr. Jones.

So we threw a lot at you here, but this is a snapshot of where we're going.

It's pretty comprehensive.

You can see it's integrated.

We're trying to make sure that all the pieces are aligned and that we are moving intentionally.

So I want to see if there's any reactions, responses, wants, wishes, desires of the board as we move forward.

What will be good next time we come before you with this?

But this is our first.

opportunity to talk about this is the vision for the strategic plan or the development of the process.

So we're open to questions, thoughts, ideas, guidance, given your tolerance for time at this point.

I know it's late.

we'll hopefully make the questions somewhat brief but i appreciate this i appreciate the information i appreciate the fact that we will have a regular update to see progress and see the progress you're making because i think you are doing a lot of work to align all of these pieces and that's the strategic plan really pulls all of the the goals the guardrails the budgets all into into one so thank you and i really like the and I'm excited for the engagement portion and the the multiple iterations of here here's the plan what's the feedback we may not be able to incorporate all the feedback but we've gone out there and said please provide your feedback here here's what we could and could not incorporate to try to to try to address concerns that we hear but I know director Rankin

Thank you, yeah, I wanna really, really thank you for this timeline, that it's okay if it changes, it's okay if things don't go exactly to plan, but I think something we really struggled with in our, and I'm kind of guessing this is maybe a learning from last year, is that we kind of didn't know when we should expect things to happen and what information when and how to really um oversee the the the process of looking at um or being learning our our budget and facilities and whatnot so i think this is great i hope that we will continue to be getting this type of information even if it's an information item of you know we are here The two questions that I have are with the engagement, I think it's going to be exciting for people to engage on learning strategies.

It's going to be difficult to have to talk through things like budget trade-offs, like changes to transportation, potential changes to buildings.

So I guess I'm asking slash encouraging where in this does that, sort of go along with it that, again, learning from last year, when we heard tonight, let the wait lists go and fill our schools.

Well, that's gonna drain already almost empty elementary schools.

So there's just trade-offs to all of these things.

So how can we help, or I guess how can you all, how do you plan to help support the community in understanding that the strategic plan is not aspirational.

It's actually how we're gonna do these things for our students and the choices that we have to make to get there.

And I think the earlier that those conversations can be had with community, how they will be impacted, what input they might have, the better.

And also an opportunity to get them excited about this is hard, but we're going to be able to do this.

And then the second question is I noticed that this...

Director Reiki, can we respond to that?

Oh, yeah, yeah, please.

Yeah, so one of the elements that we didn't mention is we will have an advisory task force guiding us along the way.

So when we get those...

huge issues kind of thrust upon us that we need to respond to.

We can probably stress test those with the advisory committee or the task force to help us to center how we would have those conversations with communities.

So I just wanted to mention that.

That was something that we didn't mention, but it's part the engagement that's gonna be guiding us as we go forward, thank you.

That's great, thank you so much.

And the second one's really quick.

I noticed that the timeline, and I had my interview with the research firm, so I understand that they are seeing the scope of work as they anticipate taking till December.

So if we're looking at December, technically we're sort of looking at our goals and guardrails going into effect in terms of monitoring in September.

So do we plan to still start the monitoring on the new goals at the beginning of the school year based on strategies that are maybe already being implemented even though we won't have approved the final strategic plan?

I think that's a tremendous question.

But Eric, if you have a solid answer to that, go for it.

But I think we need to work that a little bit.

It might be a question for our June retreat.

I don't know how solid it is, but we've begun.

So what you're going to see in June, and part of the reason we've kind of broken it into two pieces, the year one and the sort of extended plan, is that we are making some initial strategic shifts.

How are we backing up to make sure we're building educators' capacity in K-1, K-1, K-2 to meet the early literacy goal?

What's it looking like in middle school?

You heard Dr. Perkins talk about some of the initial secondary shifts that we're going to be making.

What does it look like to fortify the work around the high school and beyond planning in school?

So those initial shifts are going to be coming.

And this goes back to your earlier question, Director Rankin.

One of the things we're going to have access to is a national database of what other districts are spending in particular areas.

So we may be way over, way under in certain places.

And that can allow us to make shifts to liberate resources initially.

But it's really, again, we're looking at an initial down payment and then ongoing alignment.

Great.

And I think June retreat totally makes sense so that we're all clear when we're going to start monitoring and how it relates to evaluations and everything.

So that's it.

Thank you.

Maybe staff can make a note of that.

All right.

Thank you so much, Dr. Jones.

Thank you.

Just one last reminder, our monthly engagement session is coming up on March 26th.

I hope since everyone stayed here so long, hopefully folks will feel like they want to join us as we sort of flex our muscles and get better and better at our engagement.

But there being no further business to come before the board, the regular board meeting is now adjourned at 847. Have a good evening, everyone.

Thank you.