Seattle Schools Special Board Meeting Oct. 23, 2024

I please figure that out.

I do not need to be in prime time.

Big, big size thing.

I'm also happy to just be camera off.

Y'all know I'm here.

Everybody knows what I look like.

Yeah, you can stay camera off for now.

That's fine.

And then when we move into our next section, we'll have a display on the screen.

All right.

Awesome.

Good afternoon, everybody.

The board meeting will be called to order in a moment, and SPS TV will begin broadcasting.

A moment.

This is President Rankin.

I am now calling the October 23rd, 2024 board special meeting to order at 4.33 p.m.

This meeting is being recorded.

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

And for the record, I will call roll.

Director Briggs has let us know that she will be arriving shortly.

Director Clark.

Present.

Director Hersey.

Here.

Director Mizrahi.

Present.

Vice President Sarju.

Present.

Director Topp.

Here.

And this is President Rankin.

All right, we've got two topics we're covering tonight in our work session.

The first one will be shorter than the second.

SO OUR FIRST WORK SESSION THIS EVENING IS TO DISCUSS THE BOARD'S ROLE IN LEGISLATIVE ADVOCACY.

UNLIKE SOME OTHER GOVERNING BODIES OR LOBBYIST ROLES THAT PEOPLE MAY HAVE PARTICIPATED IN, WE HAVE SOME SPECIFIC CANS AND CAN'TS IN TERMS OF LEGALITIES AS SCHOOL BOARDS.

WE'RE GOING TO TALK ABOUT THAT.

OUR LEGISLATIVE AGENDA, WHICH IS OUR APPROVED DIRECTION TO THE DISTRICT ON PRIORITIES FOR ADVOCACY IN THE OUTCOMING SESSION WAS INTRODUCED ON OCTOBER 9th AND IS SCHEDULED FOR A VOTE ON NOVEMBER 19th.

TONIGHT WE'LL BE HEARING FROM CLIFF TRACEMAN WHO HAS JOINED US.

And apparently, I have learned, Cliff has been the district's lobbyist for quite some time, and this is the first time he has been asked to attend and participate in a board meeting, which I find a little bit like, really?

But, you know, we're happy to have him here today.

So he is our contract lobbyist, and so we will hear from Cliff on the current landscape going into legislative session, what his role is, how he works with our district and other districts.

We will also hear from Julia Worth from our board office on the board's role per policy and state law, and Julia is also the staff point person in this building for all things legislative.

So I will hand it over to Cliff and Julia.

And then after they both share, then we'll have some time for questions if directors have them.

All right.

Getting advice on how the microphone works.

Hopefully you can hear me.

Okay.

Our technology.

This is why we need state funding for more technology.

So I'm Clifford.

Cliff is super soft on my end and my volumes all the way up.

I don't know if we can boost his mic a little bit, but.

Hopefully that is that better friend.

marginally but yes.

So I'll speak loudly.

I'm Clifford Traceman contract state lobbyist for Seattle Public Schools.

I also lobby for three other school districts in addition to the other work I do in Olympia and I have been the lobbyist for Seattle Public Schools for many many years.

And I'm going to spend a moment just telling you a little bit about the lay of the land of the Washington Washington state legislature for this year.

a little bit about our alleged agenda, a little bit about what we hope to accomplish, and I really like Q&A.

I'd much prefer Q&A than speaking much, so I'm going to do it as briefly as I can.

As most of you know, the Washington State Constitution has us meet a biennial budget process where it's a long session, a 105-day session, followed by a short session, a 60-day session.

In a long session year, which we're about to enter, they pass a two year budget.

In a short session, the intention is to tweak the second year of that two year budget.

So there are things that are called budget years and those are the long session years which were about to enter so this is a budget year and it's a year that's right for us to advocate for more ample funding from the state as is their duty uh...

not only for seattle public schools but for the k twelve districts throughout the state of washington So as we head into what is considered this long session, the budget process will begin later than usual.

So usually we wait until there is an economic forecast in February to determine how much money the state has to spend.

And then you will see the House and Senate introduce and start to move their budgets through the legislative process sometime in mid to late March.

and the final budgets don't pass until later in april when the legislature adjourns uh...

around the twenty something of april so that's in terms of the lay of the land of the calendar in terms of the lay of the land of the makeup because it's an election year you have quite a bit of turnover not so much in the seattle delegation a little bit uh...

few retirements But throughout the state, there will be many new House members, many new senators, and it does take them some time to get up to speed.

And there are various legislative committees that impact the K-12 community, both in terms of policy and funding, more than others.

And we'll see changes in some of those committees.

And during Q&A, I'm happy to talk about a little bit what those changes may be.

it's a long session year it's a big budget year and it's a year that's ripe for opportunity to uh...

have the legislature hear from us on the need for k twelve funding unfortunately uh...

it's also going to be a tough budget year in the four year outlook and they do budget for the four year outlook even though they pass a two year budget, there is estimated to be as much as seven or eight or even more billion dollars in deficit spending.

So it will be a very hard year for the legislature to balance all their priorities and that will be a challenge for us, that will be a challenge for everybody.

Bringing it here to home, we put together a legislative agenda every year that you introduce and you pass.

I believe that President Rankin mentioned that has already been filed for introduction.

And the legislative agenda is our guide in Olympia on how to operate and how we spend our time working with the Seattle delegation and the legislators.

And we work very closely with all the staff here, some who are in the room, to make sure that we're aligned in speaking with one powerful, clear voice in Olympia that adheres to the legislative agenda that the school board passes.

uh...

and how we work uh...

we work in concert with others uh...

when seattle public schools or any district goes to olympia alone tends not to go very well uh...

when we go in a coalition and in concert with others uh...

it tends to go much better so we work very closely with uh...

you know the alphabet soup wazda wasa which are the trade associations, if you will, the big associations of school board directors, school board administrators and superintendents.

We work very closely with them to align our agendas as districts with their agendas.

Same thing with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.

Chris Reykdal is the current superintendent.

We work very closely with OSPI and we really try to work out any differences we have with the associations or with OSPI behind the curtain, if you will, so we are speaking with a clear voice in front of the legislative branch when we're advocating for the kids in the state and public education.

And we work very closely with the Washington Education Association, WEA, SEA, to make sure that we're aligned with our teachers in the union as well.

uh...

with that i will just say that the big agenda items this year and i'm happy to take questions on them are what we're calling the big three the big three being special education which is a huge component of our and other districts funding uh...

challenges and what's called MSOCs, materials, supplies, and operating costs, which is basically like the blocking and tackling of keeping the lights on and keeping our buildings up and working.

And there are nine categories that are woefully underfunded by the state under what's called MSOCs.

and finally the third of the big three uh...

transportation uh...

particularly uh...

homeless and special passenger populations is woefully underfunded by the state and we are as a community as a district and with our coalition partners going to work hard on pushing the big three this year to help this board and this district and all the districts in the state deal with their structural funding deficit.

And there are many districts that have a structural funding deficit due to the legislature not unfortunately keeping up with the requirement to amply fund K-12 education.

Finally, I just want to thank the board for the opportunity.

I particularly want to thank Julia Worth who is amazing to work with and helps coordinate this big bureaucracy so we can speak with one voice.

President Rankin is very engaged in the legislative process and we rely and I rely heavily on her expertise and we need to this year and going forward rely on all your relationships not only with the Seattle delegation, but with other legislators to ensure that we are pushing what is best for our kids as far as we can this year in Olympia.

So with that, I think I'll stop and maybe turn it over to Julia.

Thank you, Cliff.

So I'll just be providing a brief overview of our process during legislative session and some of the board and staff roles.

So once the board has approved the legislative agenda, that is kind of the key that unlocks our ability to lobby down in Olympia.

So once we have that agenda, that drives what board members and district staff are able to lobby on.

So we are able to engage with CLIF, meet with legislators, testify on bills as representatives of the districts, and using district resources.

this goes for board directors as well.

So district resources includes things like your district phone, your district computer, if we're reimbursing you for mileage to Olympia, and any staff-prepared talking points or materials that you would be using.

So if you're using any of those things, you can only lobby on the adopted positions from the legislative agenda that you'll vote on in November and speak as a representative of the district.

You are allowed by state law to engage in direct lobbying as opposed to indirect lobbying.

So that means that you can call a legislator, you can email a legislator, you can go and testify in committee on specific bills.

What you cannot do is indirect or grassroots lobbying, which would be something like asking families and community partners to advocate on a specific priority or bill.

So if somebody asks you, hey, what is the district working on?

What should I be asking my representative for in Olympia?

You can say that the district has adopted a legislative agenda, which can be found on our Seattle Public Schools website.

You cannot say that we have adopted legislative priorities on our website and please call your legislator and advocate for X, Y, and Z.

So that's where the line is for direct versus indirect.

There is a memo in your packet for today's meeting that provides a lot more detail what policy board policy number 1225 outlines in terms of the board's role in advocacy as well as the state law and around the do's and don'ts.

of lobbying with some more detail about what's direct versus indirect.

Also some links to the public disclosure commission that has a lot of really helpful guidance on what is allowed and what is not allowed.

The content of that memo can also be found on page 40 of your director handbooks.

So if you're ever looking for that information late at night.

There are two different sources for it, or you can email me and I will get back to you in the morning on it.

In terms of roles during session, as Cliff said, it's incredibly important that we speak with one voice and that we are really coordinated in our efforts and messaging.

We're here to support the district's lobbying strategy, and we work with content area staff and experts in the district as well as the board's legislative liaison to develop positions on bills that are aligned with the legislative agenda that you all adopt.

And then we also work on what actions will be taken by the district.

So will we be testifying on a bill or just reaching out to legislators, meeting with our delegation, emailing legislators, things like that.

Part of that strategy is also determining who is the best messenger for particular actions that we'd be taking on bills.

So there will definitely be times where one of you is the best messenger.

So we'll be reaching out to you, asking if you are able to testify or email legislators or join us in a meeting with a legislator to talk about a particular bill.

There may also be times where you are aware of a bill or have gotten a request from a legislator that you would like to meet with or you would like to testify on a bill.

In that event, please reach out to me and we will help coordinate.

So if you reach out to us, we can help provide you with talking points.

for testimony or for your meeting.

We will help with the technical side of signing up for committee because there's a whole online process now that you have to do versus just signing your name on the paper sheet when you walk in.

And that way, if we're also involved in any sort of legislator meetings that you might have one-on-one, we can help with coordinating any follow-up needed.

So if a legislator requested specific information, we can help coordinate that and make sure that we are being responsive to them.

So really, this is to ensure that we are coordinated in terms of messaging, that we're coordinated in terms of being responsive to legislators, and also coordinated when we are providing public testimony in a committee meeting.

So we don't want eight folks signed up representing SPS necessarily testifying on a bill.

We might want one or two folks signed up at most for that type of thing.

So really important to be communicating with myself, with the legislative liaison, and we'll help coordinate your engagement with legislators as well.

The board's legislative liaison during session will keep the board updated on activities, advocacy that's happening, status of bills, and how we're faring during legislative session.

If you have any questions about anything, please reach out to me, reach out to your legislative liaison.

And that is about it for roles.

I'm happy to also take any questions that you might have.

Thank you.

Director Sarju.

I really do have a question.

Please ask it.

So actually, I have two questions.

One, the website has never been particularly friendly, in quotes, to find most things.

even if you're a school board director.

So imagine how difficult it is for somebody who doesn't speak English as a first language, doesn't have a master's, a PhD, a law degree, dot, dot, dot.

How can we make it, or can it be possible to make it such that people can easily navigate Because there are people who do want to be involved in this, but they shouldn't have to spend 20 minutes on the website trying to find something.

So it's a question, but it's also a request.

And of course, Julia, I was looking at you.

I was making all kinds of faces as you were talking.

Yeah, I know.

You were.

You did a good job of ignoring my faces.

I think I understand the difference between what we can and what we can't do.

And then there's always the minutia.

So, fully get that as a board director, I cannot tell Bev, we're pretending like she's not working at the district, but she's a mom in my neighborhood.

I do have a mom in my neighborhood named Bev and she's black.

So the Bev in my neighborhood, who's black, she comes to me and she says, oh, I was looking and I'm wondering what you think about this.

What am I allowed?

Because we are going to get those kinds of questions.

So there's a fine line between, like I get, I can't say, oh, you know what?

These are what we're advocating for, and you need to grab a whole posse and go down to Olympia, and this is how you need to do it.

I get that that's not...

not what we're supposed to be doing, but what if people have questions?

What am I legally and safely allowed in conversation, if that makes any sense?

Yeah, so if somebody comes to you and asks what you think about a particular bill, you can always defer and say that you'll reach out to district staff and find out what the position may be on something.

As you said, you can't say and.

Please go and sign in and testify and do all of the things.

And if someone is asking for more technical information, like trying to understand what would the impact of this be on Seattle public?

You died.

I died.

Can I borrow your microphone?

Please.

We need a battery budget.

If somebody's asking for information around, you know, how will this impact, how will this budget proposal impact Seattle Public Schools?

you can also provide that type of information.

So say like, you know, we would estimate that this would provide X number of dollars.

And again, can't say, so go call your legislator and make sure they pass this, all that kind of stuff.

But certainly we get questions from folks about, you know, what would the dollar amount be off of this or what would the impact to Seattle Public Schools be if we did this to graduation requirements or something like that.

So that's information that we can provide as well.

Can I add two things to that which one is which relationships and partnerships with local PTAs and other organizations that advocate for kids and public education is really great because they they exist to advocate and they are allowed to directly say to their members we adopted enough if if if if he says we adopted this legislative platform on behalf of our but based on how our members voted and said that they can turn around and say to their members this bill is coming up it's aligned with our legislative priorities let's do a letter writing campaign let's do a postcard writing campaign they can be more direct and so i've had the experience well as a as the legislative uh...

ADVOCACY CHAIR FOR MY KIDS SCHOOL AND THEN SEATTLE COUNCIL PTSA DOING THAT BUT ALSO AS THE LEGISLATIVE LIAISON FOR SEATTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS I HAVE GONE TO PTA MEETINGS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION WHERE THEY ASK ME TO COME AND I SAY HERE'S THE ADOPTED DISTRICT It includes all these things.

So we will be, you know, you will see district staff and representatives of Seattle Public Schools advocating on these things thank you so much for having me tonight I leave then they can turn around and say to their meeting so based on those things here's things that we are also advocating on and now members who are not school board directors who are allowed to directly advocate let's talk about how we as community members and advocacy groups are going to do this so those partnerships are really good you just have to be aware that you're providing information that is also one of the reasons that i provided last year uh...

legislative liaison updates in writing was so that anybody could actually go onto our minutes and see if i reported to the rest of the board this bill is dead this bill is moving forward and we would benefit this much money from it so that it's public information, that is not any one of us specifically saying keep advocating for that, but people can see what happened.

There's also, I mean, WASDA has a bill tracker that anybody can access online that is really comprehensive about just bills in general.

And then that impacts any of the WASDA positions of which there are like 200. So it's a lot.

And then Washington State PTA will do a bill tracker too.

So there are a lot of different resources for people to use to direct advocacy that we can say, hey, are you a member of your school's PTA?

See if you have an advocacy chair.

Check in with them to sort of So that we're helping facilitate, but we're not doing that direct, you should advocate for these bills.

And then I just add one more thing is that our legislative agenda is typically kind of big buckets, specific buckets, but large buckets because we don't know what all bills are going to come forward.

And if we get too specific in the legislative agenda, we could accidentally limit ourselves if a bill comes up that we're like, oh, shoot.

THAT WOULD ACTUALLY BE REALLY HELPFUL, BUT WE ONLY SAID WE WERE GOING TO ADVOCATE FOR FUNDING FROM THESE SOURCES OR WHATEVER.

SO IT'S A LITTLE BIT BROAD ON PURPOSE SO THAT WE CAN BE NIMBLE AND RESPOND TO OPPORTUNITY AS THEY COME UP THAT ALIGN WITH WHAT WE NEED, WHICH IS, AGAIN, WHY IT'S SO IMPORTANT THAT WE KEEP CONNECTED TO CLIFF AND JULIA BECAUSE THINGS DO HAPPEN VERY QUICKLY.

SO THE MORE COORDINATED, THE BETTER.

Brandon.

Director Hersey.

Hey, thank you so much.

So I've got a couple of questions.

So I guess the first one, Cliff and Julia would be given that we have had conversations about transportation and special education.

Now, in the past, what is different besides like, a lot of districts experiencing funding shortfalls, that gives us more confidence that will be successful this year as opposed to others?

Well, is this on?

On special education, just a reminder, two years ago, I'm going to call it the K-12 community, but statewide from Yakima to Camas to Seattle to Bellingham, everyone pushed for more special ed funding and increasing what's called the special education multiplier, which is a formula that drives more money to districts.

to kids in need to families to the classroom and the state number on that was an increase of three hundred and seventy one million dollars which i forget what the seattle number was but it was very beneficial to to our needs in our family needs and that was because that was a direct result in my view of the coordinated efforts statewide uh...

so it really is important to speak with one powerful voice when we can and the special education deficit as even well it's probably as large now as it was before the infusion of that three hundred seventy one million dollars billion million i'm sorry million dollars on transportation We have very little to be optimistic about, to be honest with you, because it's been a slog.

And the transportation formula for the state is something called the STARS formula.

It's very antiquated.

It's very hard to understand.

There's been an interest by the legislature and by OSPI and Superintendent Reykdal to rewrite that every single year since I've been lobbying for you.

And there's still that interest.

But the focus on the homeless McKinney-Vento kids, on the special passenger kids, does seem to be at a higher level than recently.

And so it's not, would be...

naive for me to say that I'm optimistic that we'll get a rewrite of the transportation formula that would be a more equitable way to drive money through the state to districts for transportation.

I think that's still a high bar, but I do believe we'll get increased funding for those special passenger populations.

That's helpful.

My next question is, We've heard some talk around like different opportunities for funding or like options around how we run our levies and the amount of money that we can ask for.

Could you talk a little bit about like from your vantage point, what's potentially on the table so that we can have an understanding of like, you know, if we get one thing and not another, what those potential impacts could be?

Yes, and that is part of our ledge agenda going forward and has been in the past.

Last year, Dr. Jones went down with a coalition of superintendents, sat around on a Saturday all day long waiting to testify and advocate forcefully for allowing us the levy authority that our voters have already given us, allowing us to collect that so we can start to solve some of our own problems as it deals with the broader funding challenges and that bill failed and one of the main reasons that bill failed despite the advocacy of us and other districts is because that only benefits some not all and in order to benefit all there has to be funding for something called LEA which is levy equalization which is a pot of money that helps those districts that are not as property rich as let's say Seattle and that does take state funding.

And the coupling of the increase in the levy that is free to the state with the investment in LEA, which is not free to the state, last year in a short session they just could not get that done.

It's something we'll pursue again this year.

The chances of a so-called levy fix without LEA are low.

And we care about all the kids in the state, which is why your ledge agenda has LEA funding in it, because we want all the kids in the state to benefit.

Yeah, that's really good.

Go for it.

Oh, sorry.

I was just going to add, there was also a coalition of school board directors that advocated for a bill that had LEA funding in it.

But I think, as Cliff said, it was in a short session.

It was just not...

something that they were really willing to look at, but I have already heard more legislators talking about a levy and LEA a little bit at this point in the year.

So I'm hopeful that...

that will move the needle somehow.

And I think, doesn't levy, the levy lid would impact something like only 11 districts, but it's like half the kids in the state.

I can't remember exactly.

It would benefit way more than 11 if they wanted to go out to their voters and ask for that higher rate given by the state.

But I believe it was 11 could just collect the money.

11 districts like us that already had the voter.

Already have the voter support for a higher rate than were allowed to collect by the state.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that leads me to my next question.

So we've already secured levies at a higher rate.

Would that require us to go back to voters in any capacity, or could we just collect that cash?

If I understand the question, we have a Our current levy, we don't collect as much as we're authorized by vote.

Already approved, right?

But going forward, maybe I'll turn to Julia or a board director to talk about what choices you have going forward.

The existing levy that's in play right now, we already have voter authorization to collect a higher amount.

So my understanding is we could immediately collect the higher amount if we were authorized.

But we have a levy vote coming up.

And I believe we would still be asking voters to approve the higher amount and then collect whatever the state authorizes.

That's helpful.

Last question is, do we know what the difference is between what we have collected and what was approved?

And I'm fine with the ballpark.

That also can be an email.

Yeah, I'll have to look.

I know that we already, we're the only district in the state that has a higher per pupil collection amount than anybody else.

Other levies are capped at $1,500 per student.

We can go up to, what?

$35 million.

Okay.

We can go up to $2,000 per student, which already is a little bit prickly for some people.

So some of the ask last year was actually just allowing everybody else to have the same rate that we did and not change our rate.

But it would be like $35 million.

Cool.

Right on.

Thank you.

That's all I got.

Any other questions from directors?

It's helpful to hear the lay of the land with the state budget shortfall.

Are there conversations about how the state plans to address that?

Are they looking at other revenue options that we're going to be weighing in on?

Is it going to be all through other cuts?

What's the broader game plan there?

There will be a discussion about increased revenue this year in the Washington State Legislature.

The party that's in control, by all accounts, will continue to be in control.

Most people predict at larger numbers.

So there is the likelihood there will be revenue discussions.

As you know, it's the state's constitutional duty to amply fund K-12 services.

education under its existing general fund authority.

But we're blessed with a very strong legislative delegation.

The Seattle delegation is the strongest in the state and are well positioned to advocate for our kids and our funding shortfall with or without revenue.

What ultimately happens, I don't know, but certainly there will be revenue discussions for sure.

And we put in our legislative agenda also an acknowledgement that without new progressive revenue, sustainable and ample funding for public education is really a pipe dream.

I mean, that's not how we worded it in the thing.

But because we want to be, you know, if something reasonable comes up, we want to be able to say yes.

Yes, we support that because even though we are very lucky to have a strong legislative delegation and to have a generous tax base, property tax is not the best or most equitable way to fund education across the state.

And so although we will take the lift of the levy authority if we can get it, ultimately the longer term fix is more progressive

More state revenue, wherever it goes, allows more opportunities to fully fund K-12 education.

All right.

Well, thank you so much, Cliff.

That was fun.

Thank you very much.

We were nice.

Maybe you'll come back.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

And thank you, Julia.

And also, directors, it's now October, so plenty of time to continue discussing, asking questions, get a refresh in January as session is starting.

and all of that.

Oh, and also for everyone who's going to the WASDA conference, that is a, I spent a lot of time at the WASDA conference in 2022 connecting with other school board directors on special education funds and deficits before going into the 2023 session.

So WASDA conference is a great opportunity to make some of those connections with people across the state and talk about our common issues.

All right, Brandon, is that a new hand up?

No.

OK.

Let us transition now.

Does anybody need to take a break away from the table, or should we just invite the next folks to join us?

All right.

So our next part of tonight is more work on the 2025-2030 strategic plan goals and guardrails.

We drafted just a...

A RECAP OF WHERE WE ARE.

WE DRAFTED GOALS AND GUARD RAILS FOR THE AUGUST RETREAT AFTER EXTENSIVE ENGAGEMENT FOR ABOUT A MONTH AND A HALF IN THE SPRING HEARING FROM OUR COMMUNITY ABOUT THEIR PRIORITIES.

WE CAME BACK IN AUGUST TOGETHER AND LOOKED AT ALL THE INFORMATION AND INPUT COLLECTED.

from representation from our diverse Seattle community, started some drafts, and now here we are tonight.

Staff has had some time to sit with, work with the drafts, and we are also joined by, and I didn't realize we were getting him in person, so that was exciting, joined by Dr. Ray Hart from Council of Great City Schools, The council conducted a student needs assessment for us that will really help inform the refinement of our goals and guardrails and help us better identify where the biggest opportunities are and where, you know, which of our students are in need of the most attention and resources to achieve our goals.

So after Dr. Hart's presentation, we will hear from our superintendent and staff on proposals regarding their iteration of the goals and guardrails and interim metrics, and then we will talk about those and continue that collaboration to refine.

And that'll be it for this evening.

7.30.

7.30.

So, Dr. Hart, please take it away and welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Before you get started, I'd just like to say it's an honor to have Dr. Hart here.

He's the Executive Director for the Council for Great City Schools.

He personally made it to here because he's invested in what our achievement and our progress that we're making regarding student outcomes.

I just wanted to say it's a big deal that Dr. Hart is here.

And so I had a chance to preview some of this information, and I think you all will find it transformative and help our understanding of where we need to go and how we need to invest our resources.

So, Dr. Hart, thank you so much for being here.

Add one more piece of context that I realize we blew through, you know, more acronyms, CGCS.

Council of Great City Schools is a national organization that's been around since the 50s.

We're a member district.

It is urban school districts.

So there are 78 member districts from the 50 states plus Puerto Rico plus maybe one in Canada.

Canada is no longer a member as of this year, but 78 including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico.

Yeah.

So we're the only member district in Washington state.

Some other districts based on you either have to be the largest district in your state regardless of size or have at least 35,000 students.

So some states have multiple members.

We do not have anybody else in our state that has 35,000 or more students.

And your city size has to be at least 250,000 residents.

Oh, that's right.

That's what trips up most districts.

So Salem Kaiser has applied for membership, but they don't qualify.

Got it.

So Dr. Jones and I are on the board.

And as a collective, this organization does so much for urban school districts and the unique issues that we face as compared to some other districts across the country.

and do tremendous amount of advocacy at the national level on behalf of our students and yeah.

Just thought I would, I realize we may not all know that, so.

That's okay, and now I don't have to introduce myself.

So President Rankin, members of the board, thank you, Superintendent Jones.

As was shared, it's an honor and pleasure to be here with you.

Looking forward to the conversation.

I'm gonna go quickly through our slides so that we can allow time for questions and answers.

I will share that the slides, if you're looking at the slides, online you have slide numbers but if you're looking at them on hard copy the numbers didn't print but I'll note them as we go so I've got the slides numbers so just feel free to note the slide number that we're on as you go through if you have any questions.

So again, Ray Hart, it's an honor and pleasure to be here.

I want to thank the council's team and thank the staff for their support.

The council's team and the staff have been working closely together over the last few weeks to pull all of the data together to be analyzed that we'll share with you today.

I want to particularly thank Keisha Osei-Sarfo, who is our director of research, as well as Chester Holland and Brian Garcia, who are members of our research team, and they're the ones who work diligently on this.

And I know that you've been working with our governance team as well.

I want to thank them for the support that they provided to you.

So I'll go quickly, and all we're going to do is initially provide a very high level understanding of your data.

We did get individual data.

There is some additional data that you'll find in the appendix of the slides.

So we've got a number of slides that I've shared in the appendix that I won't share with you directly, but we can reference them if necessary, and it's also background information for you as a board.

In addition to that, we're going to look at pre and post pandemic trends, identifying some of your district needs, but we're also going to look at some of your peers around the country and what your peers look like.

And then finally, we'll share what hopefully will be a foundation for taking a look at the goals and guardrails that you've established.

So I'll begin on slide number three, which really identifies a couple of things.

The first of which is we took a look at Seattle Public Schools and where you are relative to the rest of the state in data that comes from the US Census Bureau.

We also looked at other school districts in the area.

And we particularly identified two school districts to compare you to, and I'll point them out as well.

They are Portland Public Schools, which is just to your south, and then San Francisco Public Schools.

What you'll note is we've identified here in your district, so within the district boundaries, what percentage of your families are in what we would consider more abject poverty.

and that is those families that make less than ten thousand dollars a year uh for the household income those families that are ten to fifteen thousand for household income and those families that are fifteen to twenty five thousand in household income you'll see why that is important in a moment i'll also note that those families that are making um this income um are representative of this is the percentage of those families so in seattle it's about 5.5 percent of your families so percentage of the families within the district boundaries that's not necessarily the percentage of families that are actually attending seattle public schools that percentage will be higher so as your families opt for private schools or other school options it'll actually drive up that percentage in your buildings does that make sense to everyone The other thing I'll note while we're looking at this slide is that free and reduced price lunch is actually 185% of the poverty level.

So it's 185% above the poverty level.

Poverty for a family of four is about $45,000 to $50,000 a year.

The free and reduced price lunch is significantly higher than that.

which is why these income levels at 25,000 or less for a household income is significantly poorer than poverty.

Does that make sense to everyone?

All right, so I just wanted to note that.

I'll go through the next slides pretty quickly because your enrollment you already know, so we won't harp on your student enrollment.

You know what that is, you know what those trends are.

On the next slide, which is slides five and six, you already know what your ethnicity is across the district.

It has been relatively consistent, so I won't spend much time on those.

And then you've got higher priority groups as well, which I'll talk about in a moment.

In particular, students of color furthest from educational justice, which is a variable that you've created to monitor.

And I'll talk about that, but you know what those percentages are.

Similarly, you know what your percentages of English language learners are, former English language learners, as well as students with IEPs.

I won't go through that.

But I will stop on the next slide, which is slide number eight.

And what we've done is taken a look at not just what those percentages are in the district, but at the bottom of that slide and or bottom of that table and to the right, what we have done is identified the percentage of students in those groups that are free and reduced price lunch.

So even though African-American students, for example, are 12% of the population overall, 80% of your African-American students are free and reduced price lunch students.

And I'll note that we talked earlier about not just free and reduced price lunch, because it's 185% of the poverty level, but if you really dig deep, which we weren't able to do with your data, and I'll show you an example of what that looks like in districts in a moment, If you really dig deep, quite often those students are also the poorest students in the population.

So not only are they free and reduced price lunch, but they're also more likely to be or have a higher percentage of students who are in abject poverty.

What I'll also note here is your other students, which is your Native American students and your Pacific Islanders.

71% of that group is free and reduced-price lunch.

Similarly for your Hispanic and Latino students, 53% of those students are free and reduced-price lunch.

So when you look at your students in poverty and we look at your performance, and I'll show you this in a moment, but when you look at your academic achievement for students, and I'll use a black-white comparison as a comparison, If you were to compare African-American student performance to white student performance, you say, look at the disparities, this is huge.

It appears to be a racial disparity.

It is actually not.

It is an economic disparity.

So what you're really looking at is the economic differences between those two groups, not the racial differences between those two groups.

And so it appears on this slide, you'll see that 80% of your African-American students are free and reduced price lunch compared to white, which is 11.11.

So if you're trying to compare racial groups to each other, and I'll show you how this plays out in the data in just a moment, it's really, you've got to think in the back of your mind, this isn't really what I'm seeing.

What I'm really seeing is economic differences.

And I'll show you in a moment why that is the district's biggest challenge.

The other thing I'll share is on this particular slide, before we move on, your, actually it's on the, well, it's on this slide, and I'll note it when we go to the next slide, your multiracial group, You have a category that you've called students of color furthest from educational justice.

But you'll note here that your multiracial, it's on the previous slide, but on the previous slide, your multiracial students have a 23.3% poverty level.

which means that they aren't quite as impoverished as some of your other groups.

They're actually a little more advantaged, but they're in the group that is called students of color furthest away from educational justice.

So what you're doing is kind of combining kind of race with income, and you're creating a category that really looks at the combination of the two, but income is really the driving difference.

And you'll see that group that is students of color furthest away from educational justice actually performs better academically than most of your students, but it's because it's less impoverished.

So on the next slide, you'll also see some of the things that you might already know.

Here are African American males, for example, 71.7% homeless students.

which you already know, 97.8% former English learners as well as English learners are about 70% poverty.

So again, what I'll share and what you'll see in the data as it plays out is that poverty is the driver for many of your greatest challenges.

And if you were to identify students based on poverty, you would encapsulate most of the students that are in greatest need independent of race.

Um, and so that is something that I'll point out as we go on the next slide, uh, I'll show you, this is not your data.

This is actually from Washington, DC.

It was a study that was done just before the pandemic.

But what I point out, what I want to point out here is the identification of, and this was their, um, at risk indication.

So this is what they created, but they created an at risk indication that was homeless students, students in foster care, students who qualify for food stamps and TANF, and then students who are over age for their grade.

And on the right hand side, you'll see the PARCC performance, which is similar to SBAC.

If you recall, PARCC and SBAC were both part of the consortia, so the assessment is similar.

But these are standardized scores.

that allow you to compare what the at-risk students look like compared to free and reduced price lunch, and note that the at-risk students are in the free and reduced price lunch group, meaning that their actual student achievement is pulling down free and reduced price lunch, but you can see that the challenges educating those students who are significantly at risk is much greater than even the challenges of educating kids who are free and reduced price lunch.

They're both a challenge, but that at-risk group is more of a challenge.

This is what one of the indicators that they use to compare or help identify students who are significantly at risk.

So we'll come back to that.

On the next slide, which is slide number 11, and on slide number 11, you'll see your pre-K, TSG, both literacy and math performance.

We'll talk more about this in a moment, but these are your kids who are coming into the system.

On the left, you've got all students, and one of the things that we noted is kind of the change with where students are coming in, but in 2023, You'll note that 67% of your students came in, kind of in terms of a literacy performance level, where you would expect them to be as a student population.

I want you to make note of, in math it was 61.5.

I want you to make note of that number.

That's about 33% of your students who were not.

So between the two, you've got 67, 53, you've got somewhere between 35 and 40% of your students on average between those two years coming in who are not ready.

And I'll talk more about that in a moment, but just want to note that it does vary by race, which again, looking at it by race, you've got to keep in mind that you're really looking at income.

And so that variance is really driven by income.

So on the next chart, and this is where I'll make note of what you just saw, and this is slide 13, it's the next one.

This is math and the next one.

So what I'm looking at is now reading for all students grade three through eight.

And you'll notice that Seattle, which is the blue line, there are about 65% of your students in grade three through eight who were proficient in reading in the 22, 23 school year.

That 65% is roughly similar to this slide we just looked at where 35% of your students were not ready in pre-K and about 35% of your students didn't pass the third grade achievement test.

And I'll talk about kind of From that perspective, when you start to look at kids across grade level, one of the questions that you want to begin to think about is how are we moving students as we go?

Particularly between pre-K and third grade, how are we beginning to move students?

What are we doing?

We'll look at the consistency across grade level in the next slide.

Before we get to that slide, I'll make another note here.

But essentially what you want to begin to monitor is kind of where you are, what does that look like, and what's the trajectory of kids as they move through the early childhood grades.

The other thing I'll note here is that you are consistently higher than the state.

This is going to show up across most of your data.

So I know that as a district, you may say, well, things are problematic.

They aren't where they need to be.

Actually, your base that you're operating off of is actually pretty strong.

So you're operating from a place of strength, not a place of weakness.

However, there is room for growth and improvement.

So that's why you wanna set goals.

That's why you wanna establish your guardrails.

You wanna say, we want to grow, we wanna continue to improve.

And so looking at that is important.

But you'll see that you'll consistently be about, here you're about 20 points higher than the state, not quite 20, a little less, about 18. But you'll see that you didn't have the declines that the rest of the state observed.

They served 10 point declines.

Coming out of the pandemic, your declines were about five percentage points.

So again, that is coming out of the pandemic, that is a strength of the district, the district can build on.

You'll see how that actually plays out when you look at where your students are relative to where the state is in a few moments.

But this is reading.

The next slide actually shows you by grade level.

So all grades is what we just looked at.

This compares the state to Washington, but what you'll see in reading is pretty consistently across 63, 64, 68, It varies because each of the tests are different, but roughly about 35% of your students struggle year after year on the state assessment.

And that is consistent with what happened with your pre-K.

So what you're looking at is year after year, those same students who struggled initially continue to struggle throughout.

And I'll show you how that plays out from both an academic perspective, but also from what happens when your students get to high school.

On the next slide, you'll start to see comparisons that we'll share.

This is the reading comparison to some peers of yours.

And you note in that first slide, the second slide that I shared, where I noted the relative abject poverty across San Francisco and Portland, the state of Washington, they're all very similar.

But you'll note that in reading, you are significantly higher than your peers, 13 points better than San Francisco, 10 points better than Portland, considerably better than the state of Washington.

So again, the district is operating from a place of strength relatively.

They've got the same relative abject poverty, but you're performing higher, which is a testament to the work that's already been done.

But I'll talk about the work that needs to be done.

On the next slide, you'll see mathematics.

The story in math is very similar.

Math is slightly lower than reading, which is to be expected, but you're still about 20 points higher than the state.

On the next slide, you will see math across the grade levels.

The one thing I'll note here, and it's one of the things that we'll continue to analyze, we didn't have time to do it before, this meeting, but we'll continue to work with the district.

You'll notice that math starts off in third grade about 64%, and it consistently drops to about 51% by eighth grade.

That's some analysis that we can do on how much kids are growing in the grade level, what does that growth look like, and how are your benchmark assessments helping you establish what that growth trajectory should be.

Quite often what we see is that the benchmark assessments aren't quite aligned to the state assessment, in this case SBAC, and so where you think you're hitting the growth target, you're actually not, and it plays out in what looks to be a decline over time.

But math is a place where you'll want to kind of monitor what are we doing, what does it look like over time.

and how are our kids progressing.

So the next slide is slide 18, and you'll see again, despite what you just saw, we saw kind of the averages, where you are compared to the state is much higher, but where you are relative to your peers is consistently much higher as well.

So much higher than San Francisco, much higher than Portland, much higher than Washington.

They are all similar districts in terms of demographics and population, but you're performing higher than they are.

On page 19, you'll see the beginning of our looking at your data by race.

So we start with math by race.

But what I want you to note is going back to the first slide, I know you can't jump back and forth, so I'll remind you.

The differences in these performance levels, 21% for African Americans, 37% for Hispanic students, 59.8% for all students, et cetera, is consistent with the level of free and reduced price lunch that we saw earlier.

So if you remember, 80% of the African American students were free and reduced price lunch as compared to 58% of the Hispanic students.

What's actually happening in your academic achievement is the percentage of free and reduced price lunch in the group drives what the academic performance looks like.

Does that make sense?

So again, it looks like there are significant racial differences, but what's built in here is also significant economic differences.

Does that make sense to everyone?

All right.

As math, reading by race is very similar.

So reading by race basically follows the same sets of patterns.

I won't go into it in detail.

Then you've got Asian students, won't go through that in detail, but they're on slides 21 and 22. So if you keep going, yep.

So you'll see Asian students on slides 21 and 22. Again, you're either on par with or better than your peers, which is what this is showing.

On the next slide, slide 22, you will see again your comparison to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco.

But you'll notice when we start to look within race, you, the state, and other districts start to align.

So it gives you a good feel for the fact that where our students perform are comparable to where other students perform.

On slide 23, which is the next one, you'll see obviously a significant drop for African American students in terms of achievement.

But again, your African American students in Seattle are 10 percentage points higher than San Francisco, 10 percentage points higher than Portland, and comparable with where students are in the state.

So you're about the same.

Next is African American students in reading.

And so what you'll see there is similar, just that Seattle is slightly lower than Washington State, but significantly better than your peers.

Hispanic students is the next group.

Again, won't spend much time on this, but you'll see that your Seattle is significantly better than your peers, as well as the state in your education of Hispanic students, and that goes for both reading and math, which is slide 26. And then last is white students in the district.

That's slide 27. And what you'll see on slide 27 is that your white students also outperform their peers.

So they're outperforming their peers in the state significantly and they're outperforming their peers in other, in both Seattle and, I'm sorry, you are Seattle, in San Francisco and Portland.

I'm reading that going down the list, I apologize.

So that is for both reading and math as well.

And then finally, multi-racial, added multi-racial because this is a significant portion of your population, but you'll see again that those students are outperforming their peers in San Francisco, Portland, and Washington as well in both reading and math.

And then here I'm gonna digress a little bit.

I'm gonna talk a little bit about your goal setting process and why you want to set goals.

So before we go on to the next slide, just wanna share what you want in terms of the monitoring process and what you want to do as you're going through the monitoring process.

So once you set your goals, what you want to begin to hear from the staff as the staff present to you during the monitoring sessions and they share, here's what we're doing, here's where we're going.

What you want to push the staff to do is to have deep conversations about root cause analysis.

What's actually happening?

Why is this actually occurring?

What are we actually seeing in the data?

And then what are the things that we can do about it?

One of the things that I often challenge staff to do, and this shows up in your data as well, if you look at, we didn't share it with you, but we took a look at it.

If you look at those students who are in poverty, typically they aren't terribly different from their peers in first grade reading.

And typically they aren't terribly different from their peers in second grade reading.

But when they get to third grade reading, there's a huge gap that grows.

And what I often ask school districts and their staff is, why all of a sudden in third grade is there a significant gap between kids who are in poverty and kids who aren't?

Think about, well, what happens in third grade?

What do standardized tests do?

I won't quiz you, because I normally do.

So I normally don't give them the answers, but I'll give you the answers in the interest of time.

But I quiz them about what happens in third grade.

What happens in third grade is that kids have to comprehend what they're reading.

There's no standardized test in third grade that's measuring a kid's oral fluency.

They're measuring comprehension.

So when you sit down and take SBAC or even MAP assessment, what they're asking kids is can you comprehend what you just read, not can you call out the words.

And I give examples of what that looks like for staff.

If I ask staff then, what drives comprehension?

So what are the things that drive a kid's ability to comprehend?

The two major drivers, and I'll show it to you in a moment on a slide, the two major drivers of comprehension are background knowledge, and vocabulary and we don't develop vocabulary by looking at vocabulary words I know teachers have vocabulary words that's one way to do it where I write the word and write the definition try to remember it what I often share with districts and I'll show you this on the next slide is that any child any three-year-old can learn the meaning of any word in the English language there's no word in the English language a three-year-old can't learn the meaning of If I were to ask a child when they came into class in the morning, how were things in your domicile last night?

They're going to look at me like I'm crazy.

And then if I ask them, where were you last night?

They say, I was at home.

They say, OK, how were things in your domicile last night?

I just taught them through oral language the meaning of the word domicile.

So now when they get to third grade and they read about domestic policy or they read about domes or anything like that, they have something to draw on as they're reading.

That's how we all develop our oral vocabulary.

But for students in poverty, you have to be intentional about the vocabulary that you use.

What you want to begin to hear from, just as an example.

What you want to begin to hear from the staff, and the staff may not buy into what I just shared, I'm just giving you an example.

But what you want to begin to hear from the staff is here's the root cause.

Here's what we believe the root cause of the problem is.

And then here's how we're addressing the root cause of the problem.

So as they message to you what they're doing to address whatever goals you've established, you want to make sure that you're listening for not necessarily the changes.

The changes are important, but what you're really listening for is what are the root causes and how are you addressing those root causes and how you're realigning the work that we do to address the root causes of what you see.

But it's also why it's very important for you to get the goals right.

Because in getting the goals right, what you're actually charging the district with doing is targeting understanding the root cause of those particular goals that you've established.

Does that make sense?

So the example that I just provided for you, I'll give you a little background on.

The next slide shows you kind of an example.

So it's just an example using that.

These are the words in the research literature that the research says third graders uh preschoolers excuse me preschoolers can learn should learn the meaning of their um bathroom another house everything those are things hot you know at one we could we are two we tell kids what hot is um it's not a word that from an oral vocabulary perspective i really want them to know on the other side of the coin um and if you you'll have to hit it twice but what you'll see are some words that in pre-k's around the country i've visited i've heard teachers saying to pre-k kids you all have been extraordinary today i'll let you go rummage around in the playpen and get something to play with do you think kids know what that means absolutely i get to go play in the playpen but what you're doing is you're being intentional about the language that you use as a teacher to build their oral vocabulary so those are just some examples And then the next slide just shows you what I just talked about.

But I share that to share that, you can keep going, one more click.

I share this just to share that what you want to understand from the staff is as a staff share, here's the things that we're doing to address what we perceive as being the root causes of the differences between the students that you've challenged or you've challenged us to improve outcomes for and their peers who tend to do better.

drive us to think through what that looks like.

And then we'll come back to you and say, here's what we're doing.

What the staff also, and this is one of the things I share all the time about the process.

You all just had a legislative conversation, which was great.

I'm glad I was here for the legislative conversation because there was some conversation about driving dollars toward students with special needs, driving dollars toward or getting additional LEA funding.

In that additional LEA funding, what you want to think about is, and what you want to advocate for, I know you can't advocate, but when you go to speak, you just had a conversation about what you can and can't advocate for.

When you go to advocate with your legislators, which you're legally allowed to do, think through and ask the superintendent, what is it we need to do to target our advocacy around the goals that we've set?

So it's not enough for you as a board to say, okay, we've set the goals.

Now, Mr. Superintendent, you go make it happen and we're gonna sit back and watch.

What you really wanna do is say, okay, now how are we collectively moving the needle How are we connecting with the community?

What does the district need for us to connect with the community, connect with the legislature to drive dollars and resources and supports toward doing those things?

The only reason I show you this is just to tell you the top two things up there are background knowledge and vocabulary, which is what I talked about, but Scarborough's Rope is a way of building out all of the things that kids need.

But you'll notice the red, which we often talk about the word recognition, which is phonological awareness, is the blue at the bottom.

That's being able to read the words.

Comprehension is built by the things at the top of the rope.

So it's an older rope, but it's an important element to make sure we're doing both.

So I will Just share a few more slides with you to wrap up the conversation.

I'll open it up to questions and answers.

On the next slide, I want to show what I alluded to earlier, but this is where you are relative to the state in recovery from the pandemic.

So you remember I said you're doing a pretty good job overall.

Your students in recovering from the pandemic are actually doing better than the state.

All students are not quite doing twice as well as the state in the recovery.

So Seattle is in the blue.

The state is in the orange.

Your Asian students are more than twice recovering from the pandemic at twice the rate as the state.

What you'll notice is your African-American students and your homeless students are are not recovering as fast as the state, but why is that?

This is a quiz, pop quiz question.

All right, so you modeled the response, income.

So remember I shared earlier what became obvious to us as we looked at the data is that those things that show up in the data where you have significant need for additional improvement are those things that are specifically tied to income.

Your African-American students, again, income.

Your homeless students, income.

In those other areas, your students are doing fairly well.

English language learners who are also low income.

are on par with with where the state is so that those are some of the things that that are critical and then I'll share the next slide which is reading so this one is math the other slide is reading which is similar so this is just recovery from the pandemic the last thing one of the things I'll share about this as well particularly as you look at homelessness And this is the challenge.

This is what you're actually challenging the district to do.

What I'll share with you is that you are no different than the rest of the country.

Everyone in the country is struggling with educating low-income kids.

It's commonplace.

It's the same for you and others.

The challenge, and this is, I'll give you an analogy.

from a time when I served at the district.

But the challenge is how do we take those factors and make sure those factors that influence student achievement go away.

When I was in a district, homelessness was a big challenge for us as a district.

And we got to a place where I analyzed our district data.

I was in a large urban district as well.

We analyzed our district data.

I sat in front of a group of principals like this, and I told the principals, homelessness is not a factor in student achievement in our district.

And our principals looked at me from across the table, I'll never forget it for my whole life, and screamed and yelled at me.

What do you mean homelessness is not a factor?

Do you know how hard we work?

And we go to the homeless shelters, we're working with their families, their parents, et cetera.

Do you know what we're pouring into helping our homeless kids?

And I said, yes, I absolutely do.

And all of that work has meant that homelessness now, kids who are homeless and kids who are not aren't different in their academic outcomes.

That is what you're trying to do for the student groups that you target.

You're not trying to upend homelessness.

You can't change homelessness.

You're not trying to upend poverty.

What you're saying is what are the resources that the district can put into place so that poverty and homelessness are no longer a factor in terms of academic outcomes.

Does that make sense?

That is a challenge.

It is a challenge for everyone in the district.

And I can guarantee you they're all working toward it.

But it's something you all collectively have to work toward together.

It's got to be we're all in this.

Here's where we're going and here's how we're going to collectively work toward making this happen.

So I share that story with you just to give you a perspective.

From that, we'll transition to high school.

We didn't do a lot with high school, and I'll share with you why.

There's quite a bit in high school in the appendices where you'll see IB performance, AP performance, et cetera.

The reason we didn't do as much with high school, we know high school is important, the reason we didn't do as much with high school and i'll show you why in a minute that 35 of students that are struggling that i talked about getting them to a place where they can access ap courses in high school etc is a three through is a k pre-k through eight challenge if they don't get to high school in that place and i'll show you how it how it plays out if they don't get to high school in that place then changing these numbers is a challenge in high school you can i can add more kids to AP classes, but I'm adding kids who aren't really prepared.

The biggest issue is prepare them before you get there.

So from a high school standpoint, we did look at high school.

You'll notice that there aren't many differences across your racial groups in terms of the average number of AP tests taken.

That's actually a good thing.

I'm gonna show you a difference on the next slide.

But what this says is once a kid enrolls in AP courses, on average, they're taking about the same number of AP courses.

So if I'm an AP kid, I'm taking one and a half to two AP courses depending on racial group, and that is actually growing.

So that's actually a good thing.

On the next slide, what you'll see is where the differences actually do occur, and that is the percentage of students actually taking or participating in taking AP tests.

That differs significantly by race.

It is going up for every racial group, which is a great thing.

Asian is pretty consistent, but all the other groups are going up.

But in addition to that, again, think in the back of your mind, income.

So essentially income is driving this chart just like it's driving the others.

Almost finished, you'll see the AP pass rate on the next slide, which I won't discuss in detail, but as you can expect, it varies.

The next slide I will spend a few minutes on, and this is your fall map proficiency.

And this is not as much for the board, I shared it, I'm sharing it so the board has an understanding, but also sharing it for mostly for the staff.

What you'll see in this is we looked at your MAP assessment and we looked at where your MAP assessment suggested that a student was in the fall of the year, so this is fall 2023, where a student in the fall of the year was predicted as passing the SBAC assessment.

90.3% of the time, if a kid was predicted to pass the assessment, they did.

That is a great thing.

What it says is if a kid comes in ready in a particular grade level, by the time they get to the end of that grade level, they have grown enough throughout the year to meet the end of the year target.

What it also says in that column to the left where it says reading 2023, no, and SBAC, yes, and you see 24.9%, I'll round that to 25%.

those are the kids who at the fall were not predicted to pass the state assessment but the district got them to a place where they could pass the state assessment that is a good figure and so from the district's perspective they'll want to continue to monitor those numbers how are we doing are we getting kids who aren't there there and then moving the needle obviously or making sure you monitor that top right column under reading which is yes i was predicted to pass no i didn't make it monitoring those students to see what happened.

I won't go into detail on math, but you can see that math is 86.8%.

So it says two things.

First of which is, these are the kids that we're moving.

But what it also says is, yes, the map assessment is a pretty good barometer for whether or not our kids will hit the benchmarks that we want them to hit in the fall.

And we can also identify those kids we need to work more closely with.

So last few slides, got five left, and we'll talk quickly.

You remember I talked earlier about how that 35% of students coming into pre-K, I talked about that 35%, where they are, what it looks like.

What you're looking at is attendance.

And you may say, let's set a goal around attendance.

First of all, attendance is not what students know we're able to do.

So we'll push you towards setting goals around what students know we're able to do.

But what's important about attendance is that attendance, particularly as you get into high school, is not an attendance problem.

Yes, should you go out and try to recapture kids, knock on doors?

Absolutely, school district will do that, they always will.

If you take at ninth grade and you add up the two numbers on the right hand side, you've got 17.7% and you've got 13.4%.

That is your chronic absenteeism.

That chronic absenteeism when you add those two numbers together is 31%.

Does 31% sound awfully familiar?

Have we gotten somewhere around 30, 35 percent of our kids somewhere?

As you go throughout the system, you remember we said 35 percent weren't pre-K ready, then we've got 35 percent who consistently didn't pass in three through eight, and then we get to ninth grade and all of a sudden 31 percent of our kids are chronically absent.

It's a different set of kids.

It's a whole new set of kids who are chronically absent than the ones who are struggling throughout.

You shake your head no.

So you say, all right.

So it is chronic absenteeism, particularly in high school, is an academic problem.

He said, I got to high school, and I wasn't prepared to do the work.

And because I wasn't prepared to do the work, I couldn't get the credits I needed to move on to 10th, 11th, 12th grade.

I start repeating ninth grade.

I get frustrated with school, and I stop coming.

so you don't address attendance in high school you can address it by knocking on doors but the real double down is i got to make sure kids are prepared when they get there does that make sense otherwise i put too much pressure on on high schools we do i can show you some other slides i didn't include them here but we actually do a really good job in urban school districts of getting kids to graduation who typically would not make it it's why your graduation rate is higher than 67 percent because your high schools are high school and K through eight.

They are doing a very good job of helping kids get there, get to that point, despite where they started.

But again, the big challenge is making sure they get into high school prepared.

And that's why that number also grows as you see go across the grade levels.

Last couple of slides I'll share are about suspension.

Again, suspension is not about what students know or are able to do.

But just to point out to you kind of where students are, you'll notice that suspension is relatively nonexistent in the elementary grades.

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, it balloons.

And so just understanding what that means as kids transition to those middle grades, you'll see it.

IT STARTS TO TAPER OFF IN HIGH SCHOOL, BUT THE REASON IT TAPERS OFF IN HIGH SCHOOL IS THE REASON I JUST GAVE YOU A FEW MOMENTS AGO.

THE KIDS WHO WERE CHALLENGED AREN'T THERE ANYMORE.

SO BY THE TIME YOU GET TO 11th AND 12th GRADE, THEY AREN'T THERE.

SO THAT'S WHY IT TAPERS OFF.

THE OTHER THING I WILL SHARE WITH YOU ON THE NEXT SLIDE IS GOOD NEWS.

You'll see a couple of things.

This is your suspension rate.

This is actually lost instructional days due to out of school suspensions.

And you'll see that that is actually going down.

So your African-American students is actually highest.

But pre-pandemic, it was 42 days of lost instruction.

That is actually almost half, not quite half of what it was pre-pandemic.

So not where you want it to be, but much better than where you were.

Um, so celebrate, um, some wins continue to work toward, uh, making sure that, uh, again, those students who obviously are, are struggling the most in the district, uh, are in class.

Again, 27 days is a lot of class time.

And so if you think of that as class time year over year for some students, it is why they get to 9th and 10th grade and they're not ready.

So the same on the next slide, which is the second to the last slide that I'll share.

And that is lost days due to suspension for your high priority groups.

Again, African American males was at 53.16 days of lost instruction is now half at 24.5.

So it has been reduced significantly.

More work to do, as I shared at the outset, much more work to do.

And then last is lost instructional days by student groups.

You'll see your students with IEPs pre-pandemic 32 days post-pandemic 14.5.

So it's half of what it was with that.

I am right at 39 minutes and 59 seconds.

So I will stop.

I was given 40 minutes and we'll open up the floor to questions.

Okay.

All right.

Any questions for Dr. Hart?

Dr. Clark.

That's OK.

Can you hear, okay.

This was very informative so just wanted to start out with appreciation and for all the work that you guys put into this.

I have a couple of questions.

So the first one is when I was looking at the back on slide number maybe it was one, two, three, where we have the percentage of households by income level where you were telling us how kind of you selected the districts that you would compare us with.

I was just curious in the way that I'm reading this, we had the same numbers for the rest of Washington, The rest of Washington numbers look more similar to the Portland Public Schools and San Francisco Unified School District than the Seattle Public Schools to me.

It looks like our total is closer to Phoenix Union High School District and Washoe County School District.

So were you looking at certain income categories within these three?

Did you weight those differently or how did we end up

Being compared to those districts?

Yeah.

Perfect question.

It's the reason that we also added some of our other large urban.

So all of these are council member districts.

But you notice at the bottom we've added Cleveland, Detroit, Dayton Public Schools.

When I say that you're similar, statistically you are very much similar to the schools we compared you to for two reasons.

One, Portland and San Francisco also have SBAC scores.

So I wanted to point out that, um, why show, um, I can't remember what, why show may have expect.

I don't think so.

They don't think so.

They have a, their own state test.

Uh, but the reason we selected those schools was because they have SBAC scores, but all, Overall, all of those school districts in the top Anchorage, you're only slightly different.

So 5.5% for Seattle versus 5.7% for Portland, that's essentially the same.

So statistically, those aren't different from each other.

Also, why I shared the schools at the bottom, those are schools that are significantly different than Anchorage.

Um, Seattle, I wouldn't compare you to those school districts.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Uh, just trying to give you a, a broader picture in this chart for the range of abject poverty across, um, across the council, but that your range and the districts that we compared you to are, you're almost the same.

Okay, that makes sense.

And then I was curious if we go to, I think, the slide three, four, maybe it's five, student race, ethnicity as a percent total of enrollment.

I thought this was really great how you broke out um like the other race groups even though obviously the percentage is smaller and that we know who is in those groups and i guess just data erasure is just a big pet peeve of mine and i'm not claiming that you did this on purpose or that this is just one of my pet peeves It would be great to carry the other race groups throughout all the data, knowing that they capture our Native students.

I think it would be really helpful for us to...

And that they are also a group that...

experiences poverty, I think it would be great to have an understanding of throughout this presentation, whenever we were calling out like by race, I guess, graphs on SBA and other things, I noticed that that group is not there.

So great question.

And the chart that she's referring to is chart number eight.

You remember I mentioned there is an appendix?

We carried out the racial groups through every analysis that we did.

So every analysis that we did is carried out.

I just didn't include it for time sake in the top part of the presentation.

Once we made the point, I didn't want to keep showing the same, it's going to be the same trends throughout, but they are all in here.

So you notice that there's 148 slides.

I only went through 44. Okay.

So you can look through it and get detailed information about anything else you want.

Okay, thank you very much.

So great question.

And I think I'll let others ask questions at this point.

All right, I see Director Hersey, go ahead.

I just wanted to say thank you for all of this, just because when we get into the weeds or not even necessarily the weeds, but when we have folks sharing opinions without data, it can be incredibly disheartening.

So being able to have a conversation that really gives us an opportunity to have some adequate and accurate comparison is really nice.

So my question is, like, given everything that I've heard, one of the conversations that we were having is, like, as we go into our next round of goals, where should the focus be, right?

So for me, as an educator, I think a lot about how do we backward map from our desired location?

The reason that I say that is that we, I mean, you just articulated very clearly that, like, We have students that are coming in that are not on level or ready in pre-K.

Compounding with that, it seems as though that our gap is not necessarily in reading as much as it is in math.

And so in your experience, have you seen districts that focus in, say, on one goal that is academic, focused on what students know and are able to do, have had more success than potentially a district that is in our situation now that has three goals in three wildly different areas?

So we'd just love to hear your feedback and riff a little bit on that.

So AJ Crable is online.

I will echo my inner AJ Crable.

I think what you know from what we've shared with you through our governance process is that setting five goals means you're likely to accomplish two to three.

Setting three goals gives you a higher likelihood of actually accomplishing those three.

The analogy, I don't know if AJ used this analogy with you, but I'll use one with you.

If I have a gallon of gas and I put a gallon of gas in a single tank for a car, I'm going to get a lot further than if I take that same gallon of gas and I put it in five different cars.

So if I try to take that gallon, put it in five different vehicles, I won't get as far down the road.

With that being said, I will say that it's not, you know, for you as a board, you can deliberate over whether you want to have one goal or TWO GOALS, THREE GOALS, OR FIVE GOALS.

OBVIOUSLY, WE'RE NOT GOING TO RECOMMEND THAT YOU GO BEYOND FIVE, BUT WHATEVER YOU HAVE BETWEEN ONE AND FIVE DEPENDS ON YOUR NEEDS AND THE NEEDS OF THE DISTRICT.

AND SO, WOULDN'T RECOMMEND YOU GOING ONE, WOULDN'T RECOMMEND YOU GOING FIVE.

THAT'S YOUR CALL.

THE ONLY THING I WOULD RECOMMEND IS YOU DON'T HAVE SIX.

And I know that didn't answer your question, but it's based on your needs.

It's based on your needs and it's based on what you as a collective body feel your district needs.

I pointed out both challenges in reading and math and challenges in reading and math in different places throughout the K-12 continuum.

So what you choose to focus on is you as a board.

What I will also tell you is that um if you set for example a third grade reading goal i'm just making this up if you set for example a third grade reading goal does that mean that the superintendent and district team are going to ignore pre-k first grade second grade and third grade and just focus on resources on third they're not so what they recognize is i can't hit that third grade goal in five years if i don't focus on the pipeline of kids coming up through the system so you don't have to set a goal at every grade level for reading in order to make a significant dent in reading.

Yeah.

To me, what that signifies is that's like where we would be getting progress monitoring right like if we are focused in on a third grade reading goal we should actually be taking closer looks at what's happening in kindergarten second graders x y and z um that's not really a question as much as just me thinking out loud um so that's helpful thank you i think where my head is just continually going is and this is for my colleagues is given the fact that we are in a tense financial environment, it would be interesting to me to have a conversation about the number of goals and what focus that we want to choose so that we can actually see strong progress in a targeted area as opposed to trying to cover as many bases.

And I think that'll likely be the result.

based on the conversation we had at the retreat.

So just wanted to put a pin in that so that we can return to it at some point.

Thank you.

The other thing I'll just point out is that the interim goals, keep in mind if you set a third grade goal, superintendent determines what the interim and team, determine what the interim goals are.

So you may not see, they may monitor second and first, second and third, you know, first and second grade, but you may not see that as an interim goal.

That's their prerogative.

Right.

Absolutely.

Any other questions for Dr. Hart?

All right.

Thank you so much.

You're welcome.

May I jump in?

Yeah.

I just want to thank President Rankin for commissioning us to make this happen in terms of doing this learning assessment.

I think it's really important that we've done this.

I think this gives us new fuel for what we're trying to get done, but I just wanted to take a moment to recognize President Rankin for asking us to do this.

So proceed on, please.

Thank you and thank you to the council for your support and yeah, as I think Brandon said, having, we do a lot on anecdotes and people's individual feelings and having real data that we all can ground ourselves in and as we talk about how to best serve our students and how to use what resources we have to make improvements on student outcomes is pretty exciting.

So let's see.

I think we go now to our superintendent.

Yeah.

Does anybody need a little stretch break?

I'm okay to keep powering through personally.

Good.

Okay.

Let's do it.

Can I ask a quick question?

Yeah, go ahead.

Are we trying to actually nail down our goals in guardrails tonight?

No, this is just ongoing conversation.

I mean, if we do, great.

But if we don't, we don't have, you know.

Okay, great.

Ray, would you like to stay up here?

Okay.

Yes, it is.

Want to switch over to the deck for goals and guardrails, please?

All right, team.

All right.

Good evening, board of directors.

I have a team with me here.

I'll let them introduce themselves.

But before we get started, I want to express, once again, deep appreciation for the leadership and vision that you all have brought to the process of setting goals for what we want students to be able to know and do and guard rails to guard the work of the superintendent.

So starting from my left, we know who Dr. Hart is and Dr. Strickland.

Yeah okay Dr. Starosky please.

Good evening directors.

Mike Starosky assistant superintendent of academics.

Good evening Cashel Toner executive director curriculum assessment and instruction.

Good evening Caleb Perkins executive director of college and career readiness.

Good evening.

Eric Jackson, Director of Assessment and Instructional Improvement.

Good evening.

Eric Anderson, Director of Research and Evaluation.

Yes.

So thank you.

So on August 29th, you set goals and guardrails based on extensive community engagement.

DESIGNED TO UNDERSTAND WHAT THE COMMUNITY'S VISIONS AND VALUES ARE.

IT'S AN HONOR TO PRESENT MY INTERPRETATION, TEAM'S INTERPRETATION OF DRAFT GOALS ROOTED IN THESE VISION AND VALUES.

I'LL ALSO SHARE ALTERNATIVES THAT MEET THE COMMUNITY'S VISION AND VALUES AS WELL.

AND WE'LL INCORPORATE WHERE WE ARE IN TERMS OF PERFORMANCE LEVELS ALREADY AND WHAT THOSE GREATEST NEEDS ARE.

We'll talk about what's developmentally appropriate for students, the trajectory, and our interest in valid and reliable measures.

We'll give the full details on our thinking and really try to show how it's outlined in the memorandum that we sent to the board.

As we move through this, I'll pause to solicit the board's input into my interpretation, see clarification where upgrades can be made, and for the board to provide direction along the way.

So we'll have pit stops along the way so we can get your feedback as we move through this.

I WANT TO OFFER A BIT OF CONTEXT ALSO AS WE MOVE AHEAD.

AS THE BOARD HAS ADOPTED STUDENT OUTCOME FOCUS GOVERNANCE FRAMEWORK, STAFF HAS BEGUN TO PURSUE STRATEGIES THAT CHANGE ADULT BEHAVIOR IN THE SERVICE OF THOSE GOALS.

I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT AS A STAFF AND ADMINISTRATION WE HAVE MORE WORK TO DO TO ENSURE THAT OUR WORK FULLY ALIGNS AND CASCADES THROUGH THE ORGANIZATION.

This next set of goals and guardrails presents an opportunity to get better at that work and accelerate what is working, try new things, and continuously improve.

This evening we will discuss the description of our goals and guardrails as well as the interim goals and guardrails, but not baselines or targets that focus on specific groups of students based on race, ethnicity, or service.

So when I come back to you, you will see how we've fully incorporated what we've learned from the student needs assessment as well as your feedback today into the goals attached with baseline data targets going forward over the next five years.

Some of these goals require us to do new work or put new systems and structures in place to better serve students.

And we embrace doing this new and exciting work, but it may take time for us to set those baselines and establish a full suite of measurement infrastructure tools.

And I will look to reflect those requirements with the board.

So as we continue to build out the assessment and measurement infrastructure in the coming year, we will evaluate opportunities to incorporate additional valid and reliable data sources to support more frequent reporting intervals for progress monitoring.

So I want to start with my understanding of what the goals are.

Next slide, please.

So the board's goals are long-term, outcome-driven targets focused on improving student performance.

These are SMART goals, SMART's strategic, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound goals that are designed to challenge the organization and drive measurable change in student outcomes over the next three to five years.

This is going to, again, require shifts in adult behavior across the district.

As a superintendent, I set interim goals, as Ray mentioned, that are aligned with the board's long-term goals.

These shorter-term goals are predictive of final outcomes and are within our control, allowing us to track progress and make necessary adjustments.

So together, these goals and interims are about having a strong start and a strong finish for our students across their trajectory of time with us.

Kindergarten ready leads to elementary ready, leads to middle school ready, leads to high school ready, which leads to life ready.

And so these goals check in with our students along the way to monitor whether we are getting there or not.

So with that said, I will turn it over to Dr. Eric Anderson, Director of Research and Evaluation, to frame our measurement infrastructure.

Dr. Anderson.

THANK YOU, DR. JONES.

SO AS WE GO THROUGH THE DRAFT GOALS, YOU'LL NOTICE THAT THE SUPERINTENDENT RECOMMENDS USING THE SMARTER BALANCE ASSESSMENT OR SBA AND THE MEASURES OF ACADEMIC PROGRESS OR MAP ASSESSMENT FOR TOP LINE AND INTERIM GOAL METRICS.

AND WE JUST WANT TO START OUT BY SAYING THAT THESE ARE HIGH QUALITY ASSESSMENTS.

THEY ARE TOOLS ALIGNED TO OUR LEARNING STANDARDS AND ADOPTED BY THE STATE AND SCHOOL DISTRICT AND PROVIDE VALID AND RELIABLE STUDENT OUTCOME INFORMATION.

Both are computer adaptive, meaning that as students answer questions, the tests adjust in difficulty, improving the accuracy of measurement for individual students and for groups of students in the aggregate.

The SBA actually includes performance tasks, which are written.

And they require students to apply knowledge in real world scenarios.

TO MEASURE CRITICAL THINKING, PROBLEM SOLVINGS, AND ANALYTIC WRITING.

THAT REFERENCE TO WHAT DR. HART WAS SAYING, BY THE TIME THEY ARE TAKING A THIRD GRADE ASSESSMENT, THE TEST IS ASKING THEM TO DO SOME VERY CHALLENGING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS.

MAP, UNLIKE THE SBA WHICH IS ADMINISTERED AT THE END OF THE YEAR, IS ADMINISTERED FALL AND SPRING AND SOMETIMES IN THE WINTER, PROVIDING TIMELY, ACTIONABLE DATA DURING THE YEAR AND IS MODERATELY TO STRONGLY PREDICTIVE OF FUTURE SBA SCORES FOR THE SAME STUDENTS, DEPENDING ON HOW CLOSE IN TIME THE TWO TESTS ARE TAKEN.

SO WITH THAT INTRODUCTION, I WILL TURN IT OVER TO ERA JACKSON, OUR DIRECTOR OF ASSESSMENT, WHO IS GOING TO REFINE A LITTLE BIT MORE CONTEXT ABOUT OUR ASSESSMENT WORK.

Thank you, Dr. Anderson.

Welcome.

So one of the things that Seattle Public Schools we've done over the past few years is really develop a portfolio of assessments.

And also with that idea of believing in multiple measures.

And this chart here shows just one aspect of our multiple measures, but it does not cover the whole breadth and depth of the multiple measures that help inform us about our student progress.

And as you can see, All of these assessments are a little different because they have been created to examine different facets of the learning continuum.

They are not expected to do the exact same thing over and over and over again.

And so as we think about what data is collected, we want to think about what lens we want to look at for our student development in their academic and life ready goals.

So as we think about our district monitoring, we want to think about what is the most reliable, what is the most valid from our current portfolio of assessments, which are up here on the screen.

So therefore, I do reiterate what Dr. Anderson said, that MAP and SBA right now out of our current portfolio is our most valid and reliable assessments and measures for our goals and guardrails.

And so back to you, Dr. Jones.

Yes.

So let's talk about early academics, strong start in the early grades.

So when we turn to the board's early academic goals, the board goal seeks to increase the percentage of second graders proficient in English and math as measured by assessments of literacy and mathematic progress by 2030. This approach aligns with the community's vision for a strong start in elementary school, providing a clear picture of students' foundational skills with a top line focus on second grade.

So in terms of my interpretation, our interpretation, we will measure whether students are on track to reach proficiency in both English and math for second graders using math.

By measuring student proficiency in these foundational subjects, we will be able to gauge whether students are on track to succeed in later academic years.

Next slide, please.

So turning first to the board's early academic goals, the board seeks to increase the percentage of second graders proficient in English and math as measured by assessments of literacy and mathematic progress by 2030. This approach aligns with the community's vision, again, for a strong start in elementary school, providing a clear picture of foundational skills with a top line focus on second grade.

So under this interpretation, this will measure whether students are on track to reach proficiency in both English and math for using the MAP measures.

So as we go forward, I'm going to ask Ms. Toner to talk about this interpretation from a predictive perspective.

Sure, thank you, Dr. Jones.

Okay, so under this scenario, we are proposing one option could be to have three interim measures.

And the first one would be first grade map, right?

So that would be a predictive indicator of future academic success.

And the second interim would be second grade predictive success.

And then the third would be taking a look at accelerated growth for second grade kids.

Also looking at accelerated growth and students that are at the proficiency benchmark for second grade MAP.

So that's the scenario that we've laid out here under this proposal for ELA and math for second grade kids using the top line measure.

of MAP and then those three interim benchmarks.

So next slide please.

So what we wanna do now is ask is the interpretation of the draft goal in alignment with what the community's vision and values and the school board's thinking.

Second question, has the board's thinking changed regarding these goals in light of the student needs analysis that was presented by Dr. Hart?

Who wants to go first?

Directors, anyone?

Director Briggs.

Sorry.

I was writing something down.

Okay.

So the draft goal was percentage of second graders.

So we're just saying second graders in general.

Are we then thinking that we will sort of...

What's the word I'm looking for?

Delineate which groups we're actually targeting in the interim measurements?

Does that make sense?

So this is like a universal goal, and so are we going to...

ARE THE TARGETED STRATEGIES GOING TO BE DELINEATED IN THE INTERIM MEASUREMENTS, I GUESS IS WHAT I'M SAYING.

DOES THAT MAKE SENSE?

ARE YOU ASKING IF WE'RE GOING TO DESEGREGATE THE DATA AND SET SPECIFIC INTERIM BENCHMARKS AROUND THE SUBGROUPS OF KIDS THAT POTENTIALLY DR. HART WAS TALKING ABOUT?

Yeah, so basically I'm talking about the idea of universal goals and targeted strategies.

Sorry, that was a really roundabout way of getting to that, but that's what I'm asking.

So, yep, we absolutely could do that, but this scenario is looking at second grade kids, so then we would, and using maps, so just want to be really clear about that, and then we could set some subgroup targets inside of each one of those interim benchmarks.

And then the next conversation would be about strategies or like how we're gonna do that.

Yeah, Dr. Anderson, will you respond to the universal goals and targeted strategies, please?

Yeah, I think, so your question is right on, because that's, I think the idea is that the goals themselves would be universal for all students, but the strategies and the interim metrics would be targeted.

But we didn't want to put that in yet, because we wanted to have Dr. Hart present his, and have the board have a better grounded understanding of which groups we want to center the work on, and then of course the strategies will be commensurate with that.

Anybody else?

And Brandon had to hop off, so I'm not ignoring looking for him.

He's not here anymore.

Yeah, Dr. Hart.

Just really quickly, just want to point out that now I'm stepping in for your coach.

So I'm definitely stepping on toes.

BUT KEEP IN MIND THAT THE BOARD WROTE A GENERAL GOAL.

SO THE BOARD DIDN'T ASK THE DISTRICT TO TARGET SPECIFIC STUDENT GROUPS.

YOU WROTE A GOAL FOR ALL STUDENT GROUPS.

SO JUST KEEP IN MIND THAT HOW THE DISTRICT THAT INTERPRETS THAT IS BASED ON THE GUIDANCE THAT YOU PROVIDED IN THE ORIGINAL GOAL.

SO YOUR ORIGINAL GOAL DIDN'T PROVIDE GUIDANCE FOR LOOKING AT INDIVIDUAL STUDENT GROUPS.

So I have just a technical question about the assessment page.

Well, I guess another time I'm interested to know how much classroom time is spent on assessments.

And I know some of that is just for curiosity because the state requires them.

So that's not something we can negotiate around the time.

But I guess in general what I know are COMMUNITY HAS ASKED FOR IN THE PAST IS, YOU KNOW, USING THAT TIME EFFECTIVELY AND SPENDING LESS TIME ASSESSING AND MORE TIME LEARNING AND ENGAGING.

SO THAT'S JUST A QUESTION ABOUT THE TIME THESE THINGS TAKE.

BUT THE CURRICULUM EMBEDDED IT.

CAN WE RESPOND TO THAT?

OH, YEAH, YEAH.

HIRA, WERE YOU GOING TO SPEAK TO ALL THE IMPLEMENTATION SETUP, WORK, THE CALENDAR THAT YOU KIND OF PUT TOGETHER?

YES, PLEASE RESPOND TO IT.

I WAS AFRAID MAYBE THAT WAS A

Surprise question.

It might be, but Ms. Jackson's ready.

No, I sleep with this information.

No, this, I would say it's actually less than what people expect because we are now no longer, we're moving so much more into a digital phase.

So perfect example, the Smarter Balanced Assessment, after the pandemic, they revised it and became much smaller.

And so it's not this big behemoth.

It is probably anywhere from like 45 minutes or so, and it can be parsed out in sections so it doesn't have to be done all in one place.

all in one go.

For example, for the MAP assessment, same piece.

It's computer adaptive depending, I'll be really honest, if a student is, as Dr. Anderson said, if it's adaptive and the student keeps going and going and going, they're going to be there for longer because they keep hitting a higher and higher threshold.

But it's going to be, they really do look at the developmental appropriateness of it.

So for our younger students, it's going to be like less than like 20, 25 minutes.

And there's a variety of ways that we give guidance to our schools about what that looks like.

So there's not like we're not stopping instruction like we're parsing it out.

And I think for each of those, we could kind of go through and talk about what does this look like in a classroom in real time versus just stopping teaching for three weeks and doing that.

These are not the AP exams.

These are.

quick measures and assessments that we wanna do, that we wanna respect what our students have, what their stamina is.

And that's part of where our educators come in to really kind of monitor and parse that out.

Great.

I bet.

So I didn't know that this aspect changed, but the other thing that changed is pre pandemic, everybody would have to take turns going by class to the library.

And there would be that whole chunk of time where the library wasn't available to anybody because it was testing and everyone was there in there for half a day.

So we also don't do that anymore because now there's devices in the classroom.

That is correct.

And so cool.

It just changes the whole the whole scheduling and the whole experience.

That's great.

Um, the curriculum embedded assessment, it sounds like this big new thing, but then I see like the frequency.

So my question I guess is end of unit tests and kind of class quizzes.

That's what we're talking about, right?

That's, that's not actually a new thing.

That's part of just so is what's new that we will be collecting more of that data to look at across the district.

Okay.

BECAUSE THESE ARE THINGS I ASSUME, I KNOW MY KIDS AND WHEN I WAS A STUDENT, YOU FINISH A UNIT, YOU TAKE THE UNIT TEST.

It is, and I think one of the pieces we're working on, and it is a phased implementation, is the piece that we're now trying to bring it together so that we're embracing the digital age.

And so we're bringing these into platforms and allowing us here at this table to look at the data when it's ready.

I'm not saying it's ready this year, but when it is ready.

And then also simultaneously being able to allow our principals to engage in that data And really my biggest hope is the idea that we're going to have this common language and this common experience.

And so that's really going to just enrich the practice across the district because now we're all going to be looking at the same platform, all going to be talking the same language.

And that hasn't always been the case.

So that's a big lift for us right now.

One from the board perspective too that allows us to see you know different populations at different schools how resources might be better allocated based on what a school expresses they need to make progress as opposed to a formula that is just based on how many kids there are.

For example in terms of the.

Draft goal and the questions that Dr. Jones just asked, I feel like it does reflect what we heard from our community about priorities is ensuring that kids are prepared, that kids have the foundation that they need to go on.

And then from Dr. Hart's presentation, what has changed for me a little bit, maybe not changed, but maybe reinforced is, seeing that that 35% who is coming in not as proficient in literacy or vocabulary or whatever the case may be, that that same 35% is not demonstrating proficiency in third grade, that what that says to me is that some of these interims need to focus on that 35% because those are the students who are the farthest away from achieving grade level at second grade um i have a wonder if you know there if we think i don't know i wonder if if we believe that map is that these are necessarily the best indicators and how we will then drive strategy to them.

So if we had an interim that was, so if we have percentage of sixth graders are proficient out of all students at this time, would it, looking at this data, to Evan's point, INTERIMS ALONG DIFFERENT TIME POINTS MAKE SENSE TO ME, BUT INTERIMS FOR DIFFERENT STUDENT POPULATIONS WOULD ALSO MAKE SENSE.

IF WE'RE LOOKING AT THIS PRE-K LITERACY READY SPRING ASSESSMENT, HISPANIC STUDENTS AND BLACK STUDENTS ARE THE FARTHEST AWAY FROM THE TOP SCORE.

SO SHOULD WE THINK ABOUT THE STUDENTS WHO ARE THE FURTHEST AWAY FROM MEETING THE GOAL AND FOCUS OUR INTERIM ON MEASURES THAT IMPACT THOSE STUDENTS so that strategies are targeted.

And I'm thinking a lot about title dollars and the way that we currently use poverty as an indicator for increased staffing.

But if we look at outcomes versus THAT GO INTO A SCHOOL, WE SPEND A TON OF MONEY AT SCHOOLS WITH THE WORST OUTCOMES.

AND IT MAKES SENSE TO SPEND THE MORE RESOURCES THERE BECAUSE THOSE STUDENTS ARE DEMONSTRATING MORE NEED FOR SUPPORT, BUT WHAT I SEE IS THAT THE DOLLARS ARE NOT GOING TO THE RIGHT PLACE BECAUSE WE HAVE THIS VERY PRETTY PERSISTENT, CONSISTENT LOW DOLLARS, HIGH ACHIEVEMENT BECAUSE THEY'RE STUDENTS THAT ARE, THEY'RE THE SCHOOLS WITH THE LEAST NUMBER OF STUDENTS IN POVERTY.

AND THEN WE HAVE A BIG, BIG GAP IN TERMS OF ACHIEVEMENT, BUT A SUPER HIGH SPENDING.

AND IT'S NOT THAT I'M NOT AT ALL SUGGESTING WE SHOULDN'T BE SPENDING MORE MONEY FOR THOSE STUDENTS.

I'M SUGGESTING THAT THAT MONEY IS NOT BEING SPENT EFFECTIVELY.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO IN TERMS OF THE INTERIMS TO, I GUESS THIS GETS INTO THE STRATEGIES, BUT WHAT WE WANT IS FOR OUR RESOURCES TO ALL BE ALIGNED WITH INVESTING IN THE THINGS THAT WE BELIEVE WILL BEST SUPPORT MAKING PROGRESS ON THE GOALS.

THAT GOES TO WHAT ERA WAS SAYING ABOUT WE HAVEN'T EVEN HAD A COMMON ANYTHING.

WE HAVE HAD A LOT OF FORMULAS OF, OH, THERE'S THIS MANY STUDENTS, YOU GET THIS MANY STAFF, AND WE DON'T EVER OR WE HAVEN'T BEEN EXAMINING THE OUTCOMES.

AND, OH, YOU HAVE THIS MANY STUDENTS IN POVERTY, YOU GET THIS MANY ADDITIONAL STAFF OR THIS MUCH ADDITIONAL PROGRAMMING, BUT THAT GRANT OR THAT PROGRAM MIGHT CHANGE YEAR OVER YEAR AND NOBODY'S ACTUALLY MONITORING IT BY NOBODY.

I MEAN, THE BOARD, BECAUSE THAT'S OUR JOB.

MONITORING WHETHER OR NOT THOSE STRATEGIES WERE SUPPORTING STUDENTS AND MOVING INTO THIS STRUCTURE, THIS IS HOW WE CAN ACTUALLY HAVE THE CONVERSATION ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT THE WAY WE'RE SPENDING OUR RESOURCES, DOLLARS, AND EFFORT IS OR ISN'T MAKING A DIFFERENCE FOR THE KIDS WHO HAVE THE MOST TO GAIN FROM IT.

SO THE INTERIMS I'M WONDERING ABOUT IS THAT THAT'S

So one of the things that Ray was reminding us is that we need to be able to express how are we realigning our work.

And so as we do our progress monitoring, as we're looking at strategies, you all should be able to see how we're taking title dollars and reallocating to the various groups who are furthest from educational justice in terms of our demographics.

And so I think that's where you would find that in terms of our strategic refinement, our strategic abandonment.

You would see the dollars following the challenge that's in front of us.

And so I think that's the place that you would see it.

But if anybody else wants to respond to that, please do.

I'm not sure if it would be in the interims, but it would be more in the progress monitoring around our strategy.

And Ray, while you're here, do you have any counsel or coaching on us for that specific question from President Rankin?

I would give the exact same answer, that when you're doing the monitoring process of the interims, that's what you want to listen for as a board, is the alignment.

And even when you're having conversations about budget, is the budget aligned to what you hope to accomplish based on how you've established the goals?

And do you see it reflected?

Thank you.

Any other directors have questions about where we are right now?

Director Sarju.

I don't necessarily have a question.

If you're listening online and you got lost in President Rankin's articulation, you got a friend over here.

And I can say that to her because we're in relationship.

And I was trying to follow it and have to admit that I wasn't able to follow it all.

But what I was thinking is this is a draft goal.

And if we need to change it, because Dr. Hart pointed out what we've put down on paper, then we need to change it.

As I listened to his presentation, I have to say that I felt really validated that I'm not stupid.

And what I mean by that is race and economics have always gone together.

So when we talk about poor kids and poor black kids, what we know, that's exactly how the system was designed.

And it's working well, right?

It continues to work well.

This school district is not gonna solve poverty.

That's not the job of the school district.

But our job is to receive those kids, no matter their income, and essentially do right by them.

And we're not doing right by them.

And so as I think about this, Everything needs to be aligned with that.

I don't have the same gift to articulate it like Liza, my board colleagues.

No, I am very serious about this.

I will continue to talk about black boys until that first Tuesday in December at five o'clock.

And whomever it is, I hand them that baton.

But I'm not veering from that.

And so when I'm thinking about progress monitoring, y'all are going to have to convince me.

I'm just saying.

And if you don't, OK, I'll tell you.

But I'm going to move on.

And then the next time I'll come back and I'm going to say it again and again and again.

We have enough data.

We don't need Dr. Hart to come out and present all 148 pages to us.

We know what we need to do.

The question is, are we gonna do it?

Are we gonna change our behavior and are we gonna do it?

We don't need any more data.

This city is so academic and so like they love the degrees and the data and talking and pondering and discussing.

We have enough.

We just need to get to work.

And that's what I want us to do.

I want us to take this and let's get to work.

Because you know what, these kids are telling us what they need and we're not listening.

Year over year, the outcomes aren't changing.

That means we're not listening.

That's a hard, and we're, I'm talking about all of us, right?

We're all a part of this, but they're telling us what they need.

That data about high school All I can think about is the school to prison pipeline.

You know in BSK we have an entire strategy that is aimed at that.

Because by the time they get to seventh grade and they've been suspended so many times, we can predict what's going to happen.

But we needed to be fixing it before that, right?

And so I'm expressing my my partly my frustration, but also my passion around.

I don't want to keep going over the data.

That's why we have Doctor Jackson.

That's why we have Doctor Anderson.

Bless them.

They went to school.

They got trained.

I know her mama and her daddy.

She's born smart.

She's got everything she needs.

Let's utilize what we have.

And let's get to work for kids.

We can't keep coming to this table and hearing the same thing over and over again and thinking magically we're going to get a different result because we're talking about this at a high academic level.

We know it has never worked and it's not going to work.

So what can we do to move this forward so that next year we're not having the same conversation?

I'm being honest.

I will show up if that's a conversation y'all want to have, great.

I might check some emails or something, but I really want to get to work for kids.

That's what I want to do.

I have gifts and talents.

Everybody at this table has gifts and talents.

Let's bring them and let's get to work for kids.

Alright, so.

Next slide, please.

These are some alternatives that I'd like to share with the board for vision for a strong start.

It might look like breaking up the early academic goals into two or three goals across kindergarten through 8, one in literacy and one or two in mathematics.

Next slide, please.

And so my first alternative would be to shift the top-line goal for literacy to third grade, which marks the accumulation of foundational skills instruction per state standards.

You heard Ray talk a little bit about that as well.

The Smarter Balanced Assessment, which is administered for the first time in the third grade, is the most reliable measure of student success across the full continuum of grade-level literacy skills, including reading, writing, speaking, and listening.

and as Ray shared with us, comprehension.

We recognize that this is similar to our current goal in third grade, and while we have not met our current targets, we believe there's significant merit in the goal and the assessment tools that are already in place.

We've seen some promising gains, but we also recognize that we would need to monitor our efforts earlier, which the interim goals do, and shift strategy and adult behavior in some areas in order to significantly accelerate progress.

I'm going to hand off to Cashel to talk a little bit about the goals here as well in the interims.

Thanks, Dr. Jones.

Okay, so under this scenario, under the superintendent's interpretation, interim goals will measure predictive student success and development across the spectrum of our early grades.

These interims would capture the second grade interests of the board.

So to be clear, in this scenario, we've, focused on third grade top line measure of SBA and then we proposed three interims that capture I think the interest of the board around monitoring in those early years and you know help us think about a P3 continuum so that preschool through third grade trajectory.

The first interim would be first grade proficiency at or above ELA on MAP.

And then the second interim would look at second grade proficiency on MAP very similarly to that first scenario we were talking about.

And then the third interim would look at second grade proficiency and accelerated growth in MAP and that accelerated growth is really important because it helps us think about kids that aren't necessarily meeting that proficiency target, but are growing on a rate that will help kids get to that goal of third grade SBA proficiency.

And remember, the era was, and Dr. Anderson were talking about what SBA actually measures, which is that complexity of comprehension, kind of synthesizing the comprehension and vocabulary and background knowledge all of those skills that Dr. Hart was talking about.

Yeah, so that's what this scenario looks at.

That was a lot.

Do we want to pause for any digestion of that?

Director Clark.

Thank you.

I guess my question...

Maybe Dr. Ray could tell me if what I heard you say was correct.

I thought I heard you say that there's a drop off in grade three of the was that for both math and literacy or just math math scores.

I thought it was literacy too that because of the change in how the test is given and what we're measuring, we're seeing that drop off?

I was speaking specifically to literacy.

To literacy, okay.

So, If we already know that that drop off exists in third grade because we're now measuring comprehension, I'm not sure that, could you explain to me how the interim three goal in particular is gonna help us increase the outcomes for students in grade three?

Sure.

So it would help us as a system to monitor the kids that are not kind of addressed in interim 2. because interim two is looking at second grade kids that are proficient, whereas interim three is looking at second graders who are having that accelerated growth metric, which is what we know kids need to be able to be proficient on the third grade SBA.

Dr. Anderson, you want to add anything?

Yeah, and Aira, you can maybe add to this as well.

Currently, we're given a version of the, there are two versions of MAP, and it kind of depends on which one you want to give in second grade in particular.

The one we're currently giving is really more around foundational skills.

But there is a 2.5 version of MAP.

That version of MAP would have more of the reading comprehension type of items that would be more predictive, so it would be a better leading indicator.

I REFER TO ERROR IN TERMS OF THERE MIGHT BE SOME COMPLEXITIES IN MAKING THAT TRANSITION, BUT WE DO THINK THAT'S POTENTIALLY FEASIBLE.

SO RAY IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.

WE DON'T HAVE A SECOND GRADE SBA, BUT WE DO HAVE SOME MEASURES THAT COULD BE LEADING INDICATORS AROUND COMPRESSION, POTENTIALLY EVEN BUILDING OUT PERFORMANCE TASKS OR OTHER TOOLS TO GET A BETTER READ AT AN EARLIER AGE.

So my personal interest in recalling our conversations in August, what I prefer about second grade is because that drop-off that we're talking about is basically second to third grade is the transition from learning to read to reading to learn.

And I would like us to focus on ensuring that students have all learned to read.

So that's kind of my interpretation of what the community said was important in terms of a strong foundation is not can they pass the test in third grade, but do they have the foundational skills and have they learned to read?

Because when we get into third, fourth, fifth, sixth grade, Nobody's teaching how to learn to read anymore.

They expect you to be reading to learn and comprehend and do all these things.

And so if we haven't made sure that kids go from second grade to third grade, we're setting them up for...

NOT BEING PREPARED.

WITH THE GOALS, AS I THINK DR. HART WAS SAYING EARLIER, WE DON'T ABANDON ALL THE OTHER THINGS.

THESE ARE JUST BASED ON THE PRIORITIES OF WHAT WE HEARD FROM THE COMMUNITY WOULD REPRESENT THE THINGS THAT WE WILL BE LOOKING AT MOST CLOSELY TO FIND WHETHER OR NOT THE DISTRICT IS SUCCESSFUL.

Because we still have a stack load of policies that are things that are required by state law that you have to do.

And we do expect to see are happening.

But if we're defining what is the most like if we're defining what we're going to kind of shine the spotlight on.

for whether or not the district is making progress based on what the community said were highest priorities.

I know we heard a lot in the sessions that I was in, heard a lot about early intervention and making sure that students with disabilities and multilingual learners had that early support.

So that would be why I would kind of make a personal pitch to stick with second grade rather than third grade.

But because then we can still we still have the third grade data to be like well did it make a difference.

What does this look like on the SBAC.

It's just that when the when the board is evaluating the success of the district we're evaluating it based on what the goal is.

Dr. Anderson, I know you want to respond.

I want to characterize this as kind of the early warning indicators, early reassurance.

If you're responding to that, that would be great.

Please.

Yeah absolutely.

And I think maybe what we're proposing with the third grade goals an alternative is it's both and right.

So I don't think it's we just want to focus on third grade and it's all about the SBA.

It's it's as much about kindergarten first grade second grade and the developmental trajectory for students.

And I just let me let me turn over myself.

I have another thought on it but I think Mike you might have one too.

Let me just make one other quick point then.

We've looked at some of the data for example Dibbles which is a foundational skills test students of color who are at or above benchmark may only have about a 40 or 50 percent chance of actually making that next step.

And so if we just focus on foundational skills it doesn't give us a really strong leading indicator necessarily that they're going to make that transition in the later grades.

It's just something to be mindful of that if we just if we end at second grade it may not give us the full story.

We just have to be aware of that.

And also what we wanted to do was provide you an option that was a yes and and not ignoring the priorities of what you've heard from the public with second grade but also being able to fold in second grade as a part of a third grade trajectory.

and that we could be looking at and paying attention to in a disciplined way, pre-K, first, second, and its connection to third grade, but have the third grade being the one that, you know, that's the destination or a mile marker.

But along the way, we just wanted to be able to give you an option that was a yes and an interpretation from us.

And then in addition to that, is being able to build on some of the focus priorities as a system that we've been doing for the last five years from our current strategic plan, being able to help accelerate some of the behaviors and focus areas that we've been doing on third grade reading but being able to spotlight specifically, hey, we can pull out second grade.

We can do that.

And what would we be doing in prioritizing that, reporting it out, monitoring it, but also if we know at the heart of the ask is disruption.

So disrupting the 35% and disrupting it as early as possible is what we all have that shared interest.

So it was a yes and was our intent on presenting this option to you.

Well, I can, this is still the first goal, so I can, we're not etching anything into stone tablets today.

So he can keep thinking.

Director Mizrahi.

I think the one area where Dr. Hart's presentation gave me pause is on that second versus third grade question.

You don't want to be measuring before things really diverge and then if we are wildly successful in second grade but then see that that gap still grows in third grade we're you know we've targeted the wrong thing so um yeah i i think that the draft goal is very well thought out and i'm also intrigued by the alternative so i don't have a definite thought today but um but it's good to see both

Team do you all understand where what President Rankin is driving it and what.

OK because I want to make sure we capture that in any of our responses.

OK I just want to.

I wonder if this is just a wondering if we might be kind of I think what's missing for me in some of the interims is how we and maybe we're just not there yet but have we identified root causes to barriers to achieving literacy and numeracy in third grade.

And should we, thinking about your root cause question, should we be seeing those in, like, I...

I just see four different of the same measurement, which maybe those are indicators.

And maybe I'm just getting too far ahead, because now I'm wondering, well, so if we're monitoring interim of the percentage of first grade, what happens in response to that?

So maybe I'm just going to the next part, which is the strategy part.

But so basically we're saying you know if the top line is third or second that staff is saying that they believe that these measures on the way to that will be indicators of success or not.

And eventually when we get to the strategy part we would be seeing identification of root cause of different groups of students that may be further from that.

I think this is a really important moment right now because this is the architecture of what we're trying to convey.

And so if there's more clarity that we can provide right now, let's do it.

I know we're capturing where President Rankin's going, but this is...

this is the methodology, this is the strategy that you're seeing for us to be able to try to provide those early interventions along the way and we need to be able to articulate that in a very sequential way.

So if there's other thinking on that, I think this is a really important moment because this is how our other goal when we're talking about math is constructed as well.

So, if you have some other things to add, please, Cashel.

Sure, I'd be happy to.

So, Director Rankin, you made the arc of what we were trying to illustrate in this goal, right?

So, our thinking is that the first grade proficiency can help us understand at a really early intervention, right?

or warning, right, that Dr. Jones said and then feeds into second grade and then feeds into the second grade with a little bit of a nuance around that accelerated growth piece that then all feed into that third grade measure and also remember that many of the Council of Great City Schools districts use that third grade as a top line measure.

So then we can do district to district comparison and such.

There's that to keep in mind.

But that pathway certainly is what we were trying to get at in this alternative.

And it is just that, an alternative, right?

So anyway, thank you for making that connection.

And Dr. Jones, thanks for kind of pausing everyone to say, hey, that architecture is what we were trying to articulate.

Well, I'm also thinking about the time, that if the top line goal is at the end of five years, the students who are first graders in the first interim like we're basically that's the same cohort of students which also kind of makes me wonder what about the kids that are not in that cohort because if we measure if one year we measure first grade the next year we measure second grade the next year measure third grade those are that same or we would be measuring first grade each year yeah okay

This microphone's giving me fits.

But yes, we could probably do both, right?

We would measure every year is kind of the thinking, and then we could look at those same kids over time, especially if we stick with the same metrics, which is an opportunity we didn't have at the onset of the last strategic plan.

Did you want to say something?

This is good as far as I'm concerned, but move on to the next.

Any other questions?

Okay.

So I want to now focus on alternative to around grade five math proficiency.

And in elementary mathematics, the board may also considering focus on fifth grade math proficiency.

This is a critical milestone year also like third grade for proficiency and foundational math skills.

And so math proficiency tends to be slightly higher than ELA in third grade, but it declines more sharply for our older students from fifth grade onwards.

So again, Dr. Perkins or Ms. Toner, speak to the nature of this.

Thank you, Dr. Jones.

Just to add on in the yes and theme that we also agree that a strong start in math is critical.

But we wanted to point out that the fifth grade we think is the stronger thing to look at.

To Director Mizrahi's point, that's the divergence, if you will, that we're starting to see at that range.

And to Dr. Hart's earlier point, we're really trying to build out that trajectory because of his excellent point about success in high school and that test-taking pattern that I think DIRECTOR SARJU ALLUDED TO IN THE HIGH SCHOOL DATA IS BUILT IN THE K-8 PIECE.

SO THAT'S WHY WE'RE MOVING IT TO THE FIFTH GRADE PIECE AND I APPRECIATE AS ALWAYS DRAFTING OFF THE PREVIOUS CONVERSATION, THE INTERIMS ARE MEANT TO REALLY TALK ABOUT THAT PROGRESSION AND TRACKING HOW STRONG THE FOUNDATION IS IN MATH IN THIRD GRADE, FOURTH GRADE, SO THAT WHEN WE GET TO THAT FIFTH GRADE NUMBER, WE'RE WELL AHEAD OF THE GAME IN TRACKING THOSE COHORTS AND WHETHER THEY'RE ON TRACK FOR MATH.

SO THAT'S WHY WE'RE ASKING FOR THAT ALTERNATIVE.

AND I'LL PAUSE THERE.

and turn it back to Dr. Jones.

Yeah, and Dr. Hart, since you started all this mess, feel free to jump in at any point in time.

I appreciate it.

So alternative three, and this is grade seven math proficiency.

And so while the board did not draft a middle school goal, ongoing student needs assessment continued to surface CONTINUE TO SURFACE CRITICAL CHALLENGES IN MIDDLE SCHOOL MATH WHICH DIRECTLY IMPACTS READINESS FOR COURSE WORK THAT WILL REQUIRE CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS IN HIGH SCHOOL.

SO HOPEFULLY YOU'RE SEEING THIS PROGRESSION.

SO WE THEREFORE OFFER THE BOARD ANOTHER CONSIDERATION WHICH WOULD BE TO ADD A MIDDLE SCHOOL MATHEMATIC GOAL FOCUSING ON 7TH GRADE MATH PROFICIENCY WHILE CAPTURING A BROADER SET OF INTERIMS THAT CAPTURE THE MIDDLE SCHOOL MATH EXPERIENCE.

So we recognize that this is similar to our goal, our current goal in third grade.

And while we have not met our current targets, we believe there's significant merit in the goal and assessment tools that we currently have in place.

And we've seen some promising gains here, but we also recognize that we would need to monitor our efforts earlier, which the interim goals do.

And we need to shift our strategy and adult behavior in some of these areas in order to see accelerated progress.

So back to you, Dr. Perkins.

Yeah, just to highlight the interims are really what's different and really trying to get at this idea of building the strong foundation.

LOOKING SPECIFICALLY NOT ONLY AT MAP ASSESSMENTS BUT NOW WE HAVE A PERCENTAGE OF STUDENTS WHO ARE DOING WELL IN SIXTH GRADE ON COURSE DATA AND REALLY TRYING TO SEE THAT EARLY INDICATOR ABOUT WHETHER THEY'RE MAKING THE TRANSITION TO MIDDLE SCHOOL IN A STRONG WAY.

ALL WITH THE IDEA AS DR. JONES SAID THAT WE'RE BUILDING THE STRONG FOUNDATION SO THAT THEY CAN ACHIEVE AT HIGH LEVELS TO DR. HART'S POINT IN HIGH SCHOOL AND BEYOND.

AND WITH THAT, DR. JONES.

SO QUICK NOTE.

PLEASE.

I think there's a typo.

In the blue long, it says the percentage of third graders scoring proficient, but the top line goal is seven.

Are you trying to tell us something else there?

Okay, all right.

I mean, you could have been trying to tell us something, but you gotta just say what it is and not ask us to figure it out.

Good catch.

We're just telling you we're not perfect.

OK, SO AS YOU SEE THIS, LET'S ASK THOSE SET OF QUESTIONS AGAIN AROUND IS THIS INTERPRETATION OF THE DRAFT GOAL IN ALIGNMENT WITH THE COMMUNITY'S VISIONS AND VALUES AND THE BOARD'S THINKING AND HAS THE BOARD'S THINKING CHANGED SINCE REGARDING THESE GOALS IN LIGHT OF THE STUDENT NEEDS ANALYSIS?

SO PLEASE.

DIRECTORS.

Director's top.

Don't know exactly what I'm gonna say here.

So I guess just a quick foundational question.

And maybe this is a question for you President Rankin.

Are we thinking like oh it's this interim goal or this goal where there's math and literacy proficiency combined and or we pick one of these alternatives in third grade reading or fifth grade math or seventh grade math or we pick all three of them come with?

And I guess what would be the recommendation from our coach and from staff?

Yeah, I'd like some support from Dr. Hart on this.

I'm thinking we'll either do split them in math and ELA or combine them, but not have math, ELA, and a combined goal, if that's what you're asking.

But please.

Yes, that's my question.

I'll defer to your coach as well, but I would say the more specific you can be as a board, the better.

So if you've got a generic goal that combines multiple things, that's weaker than being as specific as possible about what you hope the district will accomplish.

We've got that similar to your car example.

We've got a car but maybe with one goal but it uses more gas so it doesn't go as far.

You got to get you put you create a gas guzzler and instead of trying to say yes we'll be specific.

So yeah.

And then I guess this is a question for our staff.

Are you a recommendation between one math goal or two math goals.

And is it what what are their thinking between just between fifth and seventh.

There's strength in having fifth and seventh, to be clear.

And that's partly why in the seventh you'll see the interim that includes a fifth grade piece.

I just want one point to Director Rankin's earlier point that I made.

It's a big deal which goals that you set on behalf of the community.

So the piece that I think Dr. Hart referenced is we do need to be judicious in how many goals.

So I think I won't speak on behalf of Dr. Jones, but we've had conversations about leaning towards just one.

so that we can truly be focused.

But that's something for you to decide, obviously.

Yes, and even the proposal of an alternative addition to a seventh grade math goal, we debated whether we brought that forward.

We just don't want to dilute that gas in several different cars.

So I think there's a, we're open and we just, we really, I think today's goal is to hear your feedback around where you all want us to really focus and then we can distill down a response to you.

Director Tom the last thing is I'm just extremely impressed with this and I see it all fitting together and I see us very shortly.

You know progress monitoring on these on these goals.

So thank you all for this awesome work.

Nothing.

No, the only thing I want to say, and this could also just be a comment for the end, but I'm concerned about having too many goals.

I was a huge proponent of having one goal, like just one goal.

I'm like really hardcore about that.

And I see that's not going to happen, and I can accept that.

But having four goals feels, it's like the, I mean, it's the other side of the coin of having a combined goal.

where there's not enough specificity.

And I'm afraid that we will not.

I did watch that video that was provided to us about the four disciplines of execution and how important it is to prioritize.

So I just want to put in a pitch for having as few goals as possible.

What goals would you pick?

As you're looking at this information just off the cuff right now, how would you narrow this down?

I mean, it's possible that none of these are the right goals.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I don't know.

And that's where I would really look to staff as the education experts to say, If we had to pick two goals only, what would be the ones that would give us the most information and that would address our deepest concerns?

And I think we're really clear about what our deepest concerns are, which are that we have the same population of kids who have been failed generationally.

So even while there are, you know, that most of the kids in our district are performing better than the rest of the state, that has also been true for a long time.

And what has...

equally been true for a long time is that the same kids have been failed.

So what goals do we need to set in order to address the lack of change there?

So I don't know because I'm not an education expert, but I would want us to move in that direction.

So two things come to mind.

Strong start is fast start is really important and sustaining that.

As we've heard from Dr. Hart today, how we start is kind of how we finish.

And so if we were to just focus in on where do we want to have our emphasis, I'd say it's in the early start.

That would bind us, however, to making sure that we have supports all the way through.

And so the progress monitoring, the strategy would have to be that you all would have to hold us accountable to making sure we had supports that were relevant, meaningful, timely, all the way through.

So when we get to those places like third grade and reading and fifth grade and math, they're on the right trajectory so that we're not slipping back.

And so if we had to pick one goal, I'd say in the front.

I think our life ready goals that we're going to talk about here in a minute are strong.

They're powerful.

But I think if we're not on it at the beginning, then we're going to have a challenge at the end.

One thing I'll just say that when we were developing the Life Ready goal, and I know we were in the group talking about one goal, I guess I had envisioned that if you're Life Ready, you're ready to graduate, then you know how to read and you are proficient on all of these tasks.

And that 35 whatever percent of students, while we might be specifically tracking and targeting them, that the entire system is supporting them to be ready at the end.

And of course, realistically, I know that it's hard to achieve in a five year time span, because we're talking about entire system.

reform probably and that's a lot of adults and human change involved in that and so I think for me what would be helpful is to understand kind of Maybe this is our overarching goal for 10 years or 15 years, right?

How can we break up five-year chunks so that we're getting to that whole system life readiness within a generation or less?

So are you saying, Director Clark, how would we have to set up now in order to have a strategic plan in 10 to 15 years that could just have one goal?

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way to think about it.

We could set a longer term vision statement AND THEN HAVE THE GOALS AND GUARDRAILS THAT, YOU KNOW, FUTURE BOARDS MIGHT CHANGE IT ALL.

BUT HAVE THAT KIND OF FURTHER AWAY.

THIS IS WHAT WE WANT AND HOPE FOR ALL STUDENTS OF SEATTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.

AND WHERE WE ARE RIGHT NOW, THESE ARE THE SHORTER TERM THINGS THAT AS REPRESENTATIVES OF THE COMMUNITY, WE'RE DIRECTING THE DISTRICT TO FOCUS ON THE MOST TO GET CLOSER TO THAT.

That sounds like what I was thinking.

And I guess since I'm not the education expert, like being able to, and I know that we'll be doing root cause analysis.

None of this is like perfect science.

But knowing kind of what the best practice is on where to start.

Yeah.

SO THAT WE CAN MEET THAT LONGER-TERM GOAL?

IS IT FOCUSING ONLY ON KINDERGARTEN AND FIRST GRADE OR IN MATH AND LITERACY AND THEN CHANGING THAT UP IN FIVE YEARS?

I GUESS THAT'S THE KIND OF GUIDANCE THAT I WOULD BE HELPFUL TO HAVE FROM STAFF.

AND I THINK RELATED TO THAT, JUST WHAT WE'VE JUST BEEN TALKING TO YOU RIGHT NOW, I'm leaning strongly away from having a third, fifth, and seventh grade top line.

That seems like really kind of dispersing our focus.

I mean, all those things are important, and you all will still be looking at those, especially in terms of a graduation or a life-ready goal.

But in terms of...

My interpretation of what we heard really strongly from community was they wanted a strong foundation.

They wanted students to have access to support services early.

That when a kid has a disability, when a kid is learning another language, when they're living in poverty, It doesn't take until they get to seventh grade for someone to be like, hey, it kind of seems like you could use a little extra attention.

I don't know if everybody else, maybe I'm remembering it differently months later, but I feel like in our reflection of what we heard from community, I would...

LEAN TOWARDS HAVING MAYBE TWO EARLY GOALS, A MATH GOAL AND A LITERACY GOAL, IF IT SEEMS TOO CONFLATED TO HAVE THEM TOGETHER.

IF WE AGREE THAT MATH AND LITERACY ARE THE BEST INDICATORS OF FUTURE ACADEMIC PREPAREDNESS.

MAYBE ACTUALLY MATH AND LITERACY ARE JUST THINGS THAT ARE MEASURED BY THE STATE AND THEY DON'T ACTUALLY HELP US KNOW WHETHER OR NOT STUDENTS ARE PREPARED.

I HOPE WE'RE NOT ALL WRONG.

LOTS OF PEOPLE MEASURE MATH AND LITERACY AND SEEM TO AGREE THAT THOSE ARE IMPORTANT FACTORS.

BUT RATHER THAN SPLIT MATH ON MULTIPLE TIMES FOR AT THE BOARD LEVEL LOOKING AT IT, I WOULD be happier to think about just thinking about what we heard from the community, making sure that those foundational pieces are in place in the early years to set them up for future success.

And then also what I feel like we heard so clearly is that, and like really clearly, like across so many different groups, is that when students graduate from Seattle Public Schools, our community wants them to know what they're gonna do next and know what steps to take.

that is how I felt we heard the kind of collective definition of readiness was that when you graduate you know what you want to do next and you're prepared to take action towards that whatever it is that you have had the foundational education the tools and support to know what's next for you whether it be college career I just want to get out of my grandma's house, whatever it is that they're ready to do whatever the next thing is.

So I like the maybe two early and one graduation.

Not that we're leaving out middle schoolers, because obviously that's still part of it.

But I feel like looking at math across multiple grades is going to diffuse our intention, maybe.

I'm fine with that.

I think that all makes sense.

My confusion and we haven't even heard it about it heard it yet is the preparedness goal because it seems like then I mean, the literacy goal and the math goal could fit into that as well, but then we start, it seems like we compound so much that, I guess it's just how we structure it, and how do we want to structure it?

Because I agree with you when I say, when we did the community listening sessions, the thing we heard most was, I want my kid, when they leave SPS, to be ready to go out in the world, whether it's enrolled somewhere, employed somewhere, they know what they're going to do next, and they have the skills to be able to do it.

I say that, and I really like the clarity of the literacy and the math goals right there, because I see them and I understand that they are a foundational building block.

So it's sort of just a, how do we structure this?

Because those two goals are wrapped up in that larger goal as well, or they can be separate in some way.

So if I could just offer a connection.

I believe no matter where we land, it's going to be so important for us to have a clear theory of action about what we're in service of.

So if it is third grade reading, it's in service of college and career readiness at some point.

If it's fifth grade math or seventh grade math or something different, but if it's math, how is it specifically in service of what Dr. Hart has mentioned to all of us tonight is about college and career readiness in ninth grade.

So getting our students prepared is a clear theory of action that we can develop and will develop.

I think one of the assurances that we can say from our staff, our side of this equation, is that we will have problems of practice that we want to always solve and create theories of action that create strategies that we want to try on and be able to report back on and see how well they're doing or not doing and change course as appropriate.

Regardless, I think that's just good practice as a system from central office to buildings to the classroom.

And so I think one of the things that I'm specifically encouraged by is no matter where we ultimately land, I believe we can build on what's already been happening with curriculum embedded assessments.

uh...

being clear among all of us uh...

through from the school board down to the classroom about specifically what we're paying attention to and why uh...

is will be built on a clear theory of action so director top i believe we can make those connections but we have to be really clear of how third grade isn't just third grade in isolation how it's directly connected Ultimately they do want us a student graduates Seattle Public Schools and goes off into college our career.

So you all didn't ask me, but I think we need a 2038 goal.

Those are the kindergartners that will be in effect by the time we set these goals in motion.

So a 13 year strategic plan.

In other words, I think we're onto something.

I think there's a vision that President Rankin talked about that we need to set.

And I think it's a matter of us picking a path, whether we have a strong start and or a strong finish.

And I think we're hearing maybe take out the middle THE MIDDLE SCHOOL STUFF AND JUST GET REALLY FOCUSED ON QUICK START, STRONG START, AND A STRONG FINISH.

OKAY.

SO LET'S JUMP INTO SOME LIFE READY GOALS.

AND THIS SHOULD BE EMBODY THE BOARD'S VISION FOR A STRONG FINISH.

AND THE BOARD DRAFTED A GOAL WITH THE INTEREST OF INCREASING THE PERCENTAGE OF GRADUATES WHO HAVE SUCCESSFULLY CREATED and implemented a personalized educational career path by 2030. So I'm going to kick this over to Dr. Perkins for some interpretation of this.

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity.

So Director Rankin, the idea of know what you want to do and be prepared to do it.

So I think what was clear from the draft goal that you proposed was really getting to enhance our supports for knowing what you want to do, enhancing the High School and Beyond Plan, enhancing the reflection that we asked students to do, but we could do a better job in making it more reflective.

So the idea is that...

They would do that through the High School and Beyond Plan, and also there's a nod towards and be prepared to do it by making sure that there's some focus that they've had, either through an internship opportunity, a subject area of interest, or dual coursework pathway, that they have some pathway that they've started working on.

So that's our interpretation of your current draft, and we went a step beyond that with the alternative, but I'll...

I'll pause there.

And just in terms of the interims, it's just making sure that we have things looking at ninth grade, 10th grade, and 11th grade to make sure students are on those paths.

so as we think about the alternative this is a life ready diploma plus pathway and so it pushes us a little bit when it comes to life ready by proposing that we create what i'm calling again diploma plus uh...

this encourages the district to create more opportunities for personalization while at the same time making sure we're focused on readiness for post-secondary success We can design high school around rigorous pathways that go beyond basic graduation requirements and truly prepare and support students for whatever they choose in their future based on their personal interests and goals.

And back to you, Dr. Perkins.

So once again, I want to repeat Director Inks.

Know what you want to do and be prepared.

And so in this Diploma Plus idea, the plus idea feels necessary to ensure the preparedness.

Right now, we are a system that relies statewide too much on waivers.

We see too many students who graduate who don't go into college level credit courses.

They have to take remediation.

And there's also just some CTE exposure, but not an in-depth experience.

So the plus idea is that we know, based on data that we have, that if students get to a higher level, and we've identified four potential pathways in STEM and humanities, arts, and social sciences, career and technical education, and dual language.

And I just want to note that humanities could and would include ethnic studies and black studies as one of those pieces.

But within that, we wouldn't just have students complete coursework, but we'd get to that higher bar that we saw in Dr. Hart's presentation of actually earning the college credit in those areas, or completing a more rigorous internship in CTE, or reaching a level that does predict true preparedness.

And so we're trying to, we take your guidance very seriously in terms of making sure that High School and Beyond Plan piece is there, that they know what they want to do, and this is to make sure they're actually prepared to take steps and potentially have multiple pathways that they could be prepared for.

Can I just add one quick data note because what's interesting is we did apply some just draft criteria.

And when we ran those numbers for the class of 2023, that 35% that Dr. Hart was talking about is sort of comes to life again.

And so our graduation rates don't reflect that because of waivers and other things like that.

So just wanted to be mindful of this is a little bit more commensurate with that, the other data trends that we're seeing.

ALL RIGHT, SO LET'S ASK THE QUESTION AGAIN, DOES THIS REFLECT THE COMMUNITY'S VISION AND VALUES AND THE BOARD'S THINKING AND HAS THE BOARD'S THINKING CHANGED IN LIGHT OF THE STUDENT NEEDS ANALYSIS?

WHO WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK FIRST?

So going from the High School and Beyond plan to Diploma Plus, adding some more rigor to it.

I was having a side conversation.

Can you repeat what you just said?

No, I was just framing it.

We're going from the High School and Beyond plan to Diploma Plus, which has more rigor.

I think that makes sense to me.

I think the problem with the high school and beyond plan that we identified earlier on was that it was too easy to just check that box.

Yeah.

Well so I wonder because the THE GOAL ISN'T THAT THEY COMPLETE THE PLAN.

THE GOAL IS THAT THEY CAN DEMONSTRATE READINESS.

AS MAY BE EVIDENCED BY COMPLETING THE PLAN.

I'M AFRAID THE WAY IT'S WORDED RIGHT NOW, THAT THE GOAL IS COMPLETE THIS FORM.

AS OPPOSED TO DEMONSTRATE THAT YOU HAVE BEEN PREPARED BY OUR SYSTEM.

I MEAN, THAT'S LIKE A

We share that.

I mean, I don't think you called on me, but.

I don't know.

I'm just like wondering about, like, I guess tell me more about the wording of this because what I don't want the goal to be is before you graduate, fill out this form.

Yeah.

So, Caleb, will you speak to what Diploma Plus is versus high school and beyond plan and just kind of make a distinction?

So, the idea of the plus is to go back to those four areas, STEM, humanities, CTE, and dual language.

That there's a higher bar than the state graduation requirements that we're proposing.

That you actually have to take and pass a certain, either an IB or AP test.

You have to earn college level credit, not just take the class that, again, Dr. Hart pointed out.

That we're doing a phenomenal job at getting many, many more students into those classes.

They're passing at a basic level, but they're not necessarily getting the college credit.

So it's raising the bar on all those points, because those are the things that are correlated with being able to enter college and take college credit classes right away.

Those are the things that are correlated with being able to be competitive in post-secondary opportunities.

So that's STEM and humanities.

Dual language connects to the seal of biliteracy, as well as other things that we have, advanced courses in world languages, and CTE.

is this idea that, you know, Brian Day, our director, has been working on this.

You don't just take the classes, but you go on a particular pathway.

You engage in a rigorous internship that we think we can define and really clarify what that means so that you're prepared.

How do we, so here's my other concern is that I think what we heard from community was much more open.

Yes.

Then this feels like how do we not track students towards you're a welder, you're a college student, you're this, you're that.

And they are on a track and they can't get off of it.

I thought I was going to be a psychology major.

I switched to theater.

I have a master of fine arts, and I was a theater designer for a period of time, and I'm a school board director.

So, Caleb, talk about the difference between pathways and tracking, if you would.

So I guess, how do we prepare students to do whatever it is they might want to do, not to be fixed?

Of course, yeah.

First of all, if you look at the research, an 18-year-old's brain development does not lead to knowing what they want to do.

However, what we know is that we can help them think about their interests and help guide and direct them through something like this Diploma Plus.

It's very rarely do kids, when they graduate in June, know exactly what they wanna do.

Some do and some end up pursuing that.

I have one in my family, you know who that is.

He's been on this track since he was in fifth grade and now he's doing it.

But I know very few kids like that.

And so I think we need to be thinking about, Our words are important.

And so asking them this question, what do you want to do?

Ask me right now, what do I want to do?

Because I haven't gotten there yet.

I will, but I haven't gotten there yet.

And so I want us to be realistic in this diploma plus orientation that we're asking kids the right questions so that that form that they're filling out can actually be like a guide, something that if they're getting their first job out of high school and they're not ready for college yet or they're not ready for technical training, what might be that job?

that would interest them that they could get as they graduate.

And so I don't want to narrow it.

We do this thing like, well, what do you want to be when you grow up?

We start asking kids that at a very young age.

And we're like, oh, firefighter or police officer.

I was going to say, we don't have that many veterinarians and marine biologists, but that's what everybody says, or a firefighter.

Right, right.

I was just going to add that it seems like kind of the goal is, because I totally agree with Michelle, very few people know what they want to do at that age.

But I think the goal can be creating ALLOWING STUDENTS TO GRADUATE WITH AS MANY OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE TO THEM AS POSSIBLE.

IN OTHER WORDS, NOT HAVING CLOSED THE DOOR ON THINGS.

I DON'T KNOW HOW TO PHRASE THAT AS A GOAL.

BUT IT'S BASICALLY JUST ABOUT LIKE I TALKED TO MY OWN HIGH SCHOOL KID ABOUT THIS.

YOU'RE ELIMINATING OPTIONS FOR YOURSELF RIGHT NOW BY FAILING ALL THOSE CLASSES.

and so I think that's really what it's about like just keeping as many options open as possible and again not sure how to articulate that as a goal but well I think something too about something as

I don't want to create another impossible thing for kids to complete.

What I think we want is to put the pressure on the system to ensure that students are being supported, not on students to, here's another thing you may or may not be able to complete that is a barrier to graduation.

So I think that, I mean, not that I think, not that that's what I believe you're trying to do, but I guess how do we, something about how it's worded right now

I guess I saw this so I agree like we the education system that creates the access to opportunity.

That's what that's what we do here.

Right.

Education creates access to opportunity.

I don't want, this shouldn't be like, oh, okay, after high school they've decided what they're going to do.

What I interpreted this more as meaning is they knew what their next step was.

What they wanted, like, not, I've made this decision and now I'm going to forever be on this track or I'm going to, these are my interests, but just...

My next step is this.

And I've got that down, and this has provided me the opportunity to do that next step.

I feel like that really summarizes what I think we heard from the community.

Yeah, exactly that.

You don't have to know what you're going to do forever, but when you graduate, what we heard from our community was they don't want kids going, well...

I don't know what I'm doing next.

I'm not in high school anymore.

What am I going to do?

Or they say, oh, man, I really want to do xyz, but I'm not in any way prepared to pursue that.

Yeah.

So our policy 0030, ensuring educational and racial equity, speaks to having multiple pathways to success.

And so we want to, and I was asking Dr. Perkins to maybe make a distinction between tracking and pathways because we really want to be strong on the pathways.

We don't want to be, we don't want to force people into things when they're not ready.

But if they choose a pathway, we need to be ready to receive them and show them supports along the way.

And so this is consistent with that.

with our policy 0030. So that's how we see it in terms of what we're trying to set up.

But if it doesn't speak to the things that you all said around people not being ready to make those choices, we certainly don't want to track people.

We want to make sure that there's wide opportunities as we go forward.

But if you all have something to add to that, please do.

Yeah, just briefly.

I mean, I strongly agree in all the points.

And the design is going to be critical.

So in the American system, we allow students a much longer runway before they have to be locked in, as opposed to lots of other systems.

So I just want to, we embrace that.

So first of all, the idea is that the Diploma Plus options would be available to all students throughout their high school careers, and potentially they could pursue multiple.

That's one thing.

The other thing is that some of the design, we are having tracking right now with the state pathways.

And so one idea that gets into the weeds a little bit, but the CTE pathway would require you, if you don't get a specific credential or multiple credentials, something really rigorous, you would need to complete some aspect of the ELA or math pathway so that you wouldn't be locked into this.

Because that's one of the things that we're seeing right now is that people are still checking the box, getting to the diploma, and not necessarily ensuring they're ready for something.

And so that's the spirit of it, but the design is critical.

So I'm noticing that it's after 7.30 and we have guardrails.

I'm going to phone a friend and ask our coach, AJ, if you're there, can you chime in and give us a suggestion for next steps?

Should we schedule a separate session?

Let me just say, I'm not in any way suggesting we continue right now.

We're going to end the meeting.

My question is, what is the best way to proceed with next steps?

My impulse would be, we find another time to schedule to come back together.

We probably won't have the benefit of having Dr. Hart here with us.

But to go through the guardrails, is there a recommended way to, like should we all?

look at them and come with different suggestions to make it more expedient or what's the best way to do that?

If I could just do a quick pitch and summary is for the guardrails, no matter what is decided here, what all of us could do is be able to go look at the guardrails, be able to see the adult behaviors we're trying to influence based on what we heard you say.

We offered some options that they're directly connected to the goals that came before it.

SO NO MATTER WHAT IS DECIDED HERE, I BELIEVE THE GUARD RAILS, SOME OF OUR CONVERSATIONS ALREADY HIT AROUND THE HIGH SCHOOL BEYOND PLANNING AS AN EXAMPLE, ETHNIC STUDIES AS ANOTHER EXAMPLE.

SO I THINK WHATEVER WE DECIDE TO DO HERE, WE CAN BE FLEXIBLE, BUT ALSO I THINK YOU WOULD SEE AN EASY READ WITH THE GUARD RAILS HERE OF BEING DIRECTLY CONNECTED TO WHAT EVERYTHING YOU'VE ALREADY HEARD.

Um, so I don't, I don't know if you want to text AJ.

I don't, not sure if he came on.

He was about to.

Oh, he did.

Yeah.

Oh.

AJ, my question is if staff has enough from us on feedback on the goals to continue to focus in on what they're going to be or another set of recommendations maybe.

And then if the best next step for guardrails is simply to schedule another time together, what you would advise?

So first, I want to certainly show appreciation to the staff for the work that they've done to set you all up for success with the next steps here.

And remind the board that the final decision of the goals and guardrails does rest with you all.

And so it is appropriate that you pull on resources from your community, which is what you did at your first gathering, to pull on deeper resources from your staff, which is what you're doing at this gathering, And I certainly agree that you should not be in decision-making mode tonight.

You've just received a lot of new information.

It's appropriate to take time to digest that.

So it does suggest that you're going to need to come back at a subsequent meeting to make some decisions based on what you heard tonight.

At the next meeting, I'd recommend that you immediately take up goals and try to get to completion on goals.

If the to the extent to the Superintendent has heard any measure of consensus this evening and wants to make any modifications to his recommendations is certainly welcome to do so.

That would be a benefit to the board.

But ultimately, it is the board's call and only the board's call of what will the goals be.

At the next meeting, then, I recommend that you pivot from an exploration pose, which is where you've been tonight, which was appropriate, and into a decision-making pose.

Show up with proposals of here is the exact language based on what we heard from the community and now what we've heard from our staff.

Here is the exact language of what I recommend.

And then in terms of the facilitation of it, whether that's you or whether you want us to assist with that, the nature of the facilitation should be anyone who wants to share a specific language recommendation, the floor is open for that.

I would not recommend having another session that is exploratory like it was this evening where it's just Kind of let's think through and talk about it.

Tonight's generative conversation was intended to serve that purpose.

Your next meeting should move into decision making, which means people need to bring final language recommendations.

And then after you land on goals, then I'd address guardrails, but I would prioritize goals first.

Sounds good, thank you.

Doctor Jones has a question for you.

Thank You AJ what would you advise as staffs role to support the board at this point so we will do our interpretation of what our synthesis rather of what the board said but then how do we use that information how do we make that a value to the board what suggestions do you have

So you've heard from the board a lot of feedback this evening based on the presentation you've made.

If you feel like you heard a consensus or you and your team feel like there are some modifications that will help the board get closer to the finish line, certainly bring that back in the same fashion as you did this evening.

I think that's been a huge aid to the board for them to hear staff's reflections on this.

And so if you have ideas, uh super didn't bring those uh just in general staff just remember not to get um uh too wet to any of your own ideas it's ultimately the board's call but I think they will benefit heavily from hearing any ideas you all have that are modifications based on this evening's dialogue thank you

THANK YOU SO MUCH, AJ.

I THINK DIRECTOR BRICKS HAS ONE QUICK QUESTION AND THEN I'M GOING TO CLOSE THIS OUT.

I'M SORRY TO GO BACK TO THIS

Overview.

No, I mean, I realize we're going back.

But I'm noticing that Native kids are listed in the demographics, but then they don't appear anywhere in the racial groups.

Oops.

Good thing there's no water in that.

For all of the academic...

So we have like Asian, black, Hispanic, multiracial, white, but we don't have native kids broken out.

And I'm just wondering how that happened.

Go ahead.

I was just gonna, I asked a very similar question earlier, and I guess it was just for, it's included in the appendix, and I don't think we have a copy of that yet, but my understanding was that it was to help, go ahead, Dr. Ray.

I was going to say, I don't know if you got the full set of slides, but there's, I have them here.

I don't know if you got them, but in the full set of slides.

If you scroll on the board meeting posting with materials, if you scroll through, you get to appendix.

IT'S AT THE VERY END OF THE PACKET.

SO WHAT WE DID WAS SUMMARIZE FOR THE PURPOSE OF 40 MINUTES.

WE SUMMARIZED KIND OF THE KEY AREAS TO SHARE.

BUT THE DETAILED DATA FOR ALL, EVERY SINGLE STUDENT GROUP ARE ALL INDEPENDENT.

SO I'M LOOKING AT, FOR EXAMPLE, THIS IS THE PATHWAYS, WHICH IS SAT, ALL STUDENTS, NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS.

Students who are furthest from economic justice, African American males, free and reduced by homeless, all of the categories that you typically will see are all here.

They're just in, they're behind the first 44 slides.

And it says, I'll show you, it says appendix additional slides, and then right behind that is all the detailed information.

Okay, that's great.

Thank you.

I did not, I didn't see that.

Though, I guess I'm just wondering what would be the reason for not including them here, like on this?

Because in the presentation to include, it would have been 148 slides.

Well, I just mean like as another, like just as another bar.

because they couldn't all fit on one slide so there's actually a chart that looks just like that that is in the appendix that was another slide so it was a separate slide it included English language learners because we're putting two years worth of data on there together so we could have done it but it would have been overwhelming on one slide to put all of these two groups so we've got them on separate slides but to not keep duplicating the same information we put it in an appendix So you'll see here it says appendix additional charts by various student groups.

I can turn to that exact same chart and I've got, so here I've got all students and race and then here I've got African American males free and reduced price lunch, homeless, et cetera.

Then we've also got English language learners, black, Hispanic, free and reduced price lunch.

There's lots of additional information back here.

Okay, yeah, that's great.

Yeah, I just, again, I'm not trying to belabor the point, but just, were there other ethnic groups that were left off of these main slides?

It's not that they're main slides.

All we did was...

pull up slides to share a specific kind of idea.

That's all we did.

We weren't trying to exclude anyone.

We weren't trying to...

Right.

No, no, no.

I'm not trying to ascribe intention at all, to be clear.

I'm just trying to understand.

It was just that we couldn't get through all hundred and some slides in 40 minutes.

OK.

I also add that sometimes our groups of students are so small, we suppress the information.

And it might not.

Yes, that's true.

And we might not have shared it, because once it gets to such a small group, it's too easy to identify individual students.

So that might not be included in the data.

And you can see that on any dashboard across the country, national, professional, that at a certain point, we just don't release that data, because it's too easy to identify the students.

So that could also be the in-size group was just too small.

that is correct i also know that um that native kids get under counted in our district which is also a problem yeah i so i can appreciate that it's in the appendix but optically it looks like they're a footnote and you need a magnifying glass to look at them and again it's not about intent but we got a sign hanging right here but yet yeah And we've got, we do the land acknowledgement.

Like we have these things and I'm thinking about some of my, what I call native siblings who might be on this call or who might watch this.

It doesn't feel good.

And I think we need to acknowledge that maybe we need to think of a different way because now we've done this and the optics are the optics.

We don't get to explain them.

And for me, it actually doesn't feel good.

It's not about intent.

RIGHT?

THIS IS ABOUT IMPACT.

SO IF I MAY?

YES, YOU MAY, DR. HART.

WE DID NOT EXCLUDE THEM EVEN IN THE UPFRONT SLIDES.

SO FOR EXAMPLE, IF YOU LOOK AT SLIDE, THIS IS SLIDE NUMBER EIGHT, WE CREATED ANOTHER CATEGORY, AND IT'S BECAUSE THOSE STUDENTS ARE .8% OF YOUR OVERALL POPULATION, SO YOU'LL SEE ON THE SCREEN, We said that this information includes American Indian and Pacific Islander.

We also, and I called them out when I was actually making the presentation, that they are 71% impoverished.

I shared that with you directly.

So we didn't exclude them.

We included them as part of our overall conversation and made sure that we indicated that they THEY ARE A GROUP THAT IF YOU TARGET ECONOMICALLY DISADVANTAGED STUDENTS, YOU WOULD ENCOMPASS THOSE INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS AS WELL.

SO WE DIDN'T EXCLUDE THEM, BUT RATHER THAN, AGAIN, ADDING, AND THIS WAS OUR CHOICE, NOT THE DISTRICT'S CHOICE.

IT WAS OUR CHOICE TO SAY, HOW DO WE BEST SHARE THE IDEA, THE BROADER IDEA WITH YOU WITHOUT LISTING EVERY SINGLE 100 and some odd charts that we have on all of your students.

So we didn't exclude them, but we didn't call them out separately as we went through the process in the broader conversation.

I appreciate that explanation, and I'm still going to stand by what I said and hope that next time we can actually do honor.

For those of you who may not be able to see, I'm African-American.

And I have been a footnote.

I have been left off and left out.

And it doesn't feel good, even if that wasn't the intent.

And I'm just making my statement.

It may not change, but I feel really passionate about this, considering where we live and how...

we at least pretend to be in community with our American Indian Alaska native.

It feels like it's a pretend when we've got to explain why you don't see a bar graph for yourself.

Totally respect that you can't have, you know, you'd have, the sheets of paper would be this big, right?

It would be a big old sheet of paper.

And I just think that there's a,

i want to consider how we could visually include them like we did everybody else that's that's my request one suggestion that i might have is that we eliminate um maybe titles graph titles and other elements of the slide on the left side of the slide deck so that we can actually have a bigger graph that shows all of the demographics on one slide.

Yeah, I was going to say, honestly, it could be as easy as just scooting that line over a little bit and just having one more bar for Native kids.

I mean, that's all.

Because I do really agree with Michelle's point about we have the sign hanging above our dais, and we do the land acknowledgment, and then we're not representing these kids.

And I know they're in the appendix.

I know that.

So, and again, like totally accept the explanation and still just in the future, I think that's important.

Can I just make one footnote, if you don't mind?

So we actually did give the Council of Great City Schools all of our data.

And so they, of course, have race, ethnicity, which is per the normal federal seven rules.

But we also gave them flags for our priority student groups.

Those were our African-American boys, our students of color for just our native students, our homeless students.

So there are a series of graphs where you actually see American Indian, and I know that the neighboring could be better, but it says American Indian, African American males or black males, students of color for traditional justice.

So we just didn't have a chance to sync up with Ray, Dr. Hart beforehand to say, actually, those are the priority groups that we would actually prefer you make more visible.

That was our fault not to make that more clear.

Oh, and by the way, that flag that we gave them is our any Native American flag.

So that's inclusive of all students who are Native or have a tribal affiliation, irrespective of how they're categorized for the federal seven rules.

So it's a much larger group, about 1,200 students or more, than if we're just using the fed seven.

So we're cognizant of these issues, and it's our job to make sure that that gets visualized in the future.

Is this, is it on?

Since we're talking about this a little bit more than when I brought it up earlier, I just wanted to call out also as I'm looking, had a chance to look through some of the appendix slides, there's also a lot more detail that was gone into on students with disabilities, and I also feel that that's another population of students that that we really don't do justice for and don't spend enough time talking about and focusing on.

I wonder if maybe instead of thinking of the appendix, that that's actually the complete set of slides.

It is.

And what we received was the abbreviated that left some people out.

And I apologize, I didn't realize, but we were prepared to go answer any questions that you may have had in the complete set of slides as well.

So if you had questions, we would have just gone to those slides, answered them, posted them, As a matter of fact, the very next slide after this one does include those groups, which is why we included and why I shared that.

So you see it does include all those same groups, and we created a process for all of those same groups as well.

So we wanted to make sure we were inclusive of everyone, just cognizant of time.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, thank you.

Everyone in the room, everyone at the table, thank you, Dr. Hart, for joining us and for the work of your team and council to put this information together for us.

And thank you to our staff for your thoughtfulness and collaboration.

And of course, Superintendent Jones and the board and the staff.

And just, yes, thank you to everybody.

Thank you to AJ for joining us.

And there being no further business before the board, This meeting is adjourned at 7.56pm.