The Instructional Subcommittee convened on Tuesday, June 7, 2022, to discuss and vote on several curriculum proposals and receive updates. Key discussions included the adoption of new Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and English as a Second Language (ESL) curricula, an update on the Lexia reading program, and an update on the social studies curriculum. The committee voted to favorably refer the SEL and ESL curricula to the full committee. The SEL curriculum discussion focused on replacing the current "Choose Love" program, which was deemed insufficient for secondary students, with the evidence-based "Violence Prevention Program" (VPP) and "Upstanders" curriculum. These new programs, costing $140,000 for the first year, aim to improve conflict resolution and pro-social behaviors, particularly in grades 6-12. Concerns were raised about the consistency of discipline across schools and the feasibility of implementing the new curriculum with fidelity in large high school advisory groups. The ESL curriculum proposal sought to replace the outdated "Edge" program with "Time Zones" for ESL 1 and "Impact" for ESL 2 and 3, along with supplementary materials like "Frames for Fluency" and a "Finish Line" subscription, to provide culturally and linguistically relevant materials across six middle and K-8 schools. This initiative also included free training for teachers. The Lexia update detailed the implementation of "Core5" for elementary grades and "PowerUp" for secondary at-risk students. Data showed significant student progress when the programs were used consistently, but highlighted inconsistencies in usage across schools, particularly at the secondary level. Committee members expressed frustration over the lack of uniform implementation despite clear evidence of the programs' effectiveness. The social studies update outlined plans to pilot new elementary curricula ("History Alive," "Open Social Studies," "Massachusetts Our Home") and the ongoing search for a textbook for the 8th-grade civics course. The committee also noted the success of the Generation Citizen program and the need for AP Human Geography and AP US History books at Durfee High School due to increased demand. A request was made for an update on the dual language program.
AI-generated summary. May contain errors. Watch the video to verify.
Education
Public / Other
okay okay calling to order tuesday june 7th 2022 instructional subcommittee to order uh deb local miss dragon here ms slattery here ms pereira here
0:21pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay pursuant to the open meeting law any person may make an audio or video recording of this public meeting or may transmit the meeting to any medium attendees are therefore advised that such recordings or transmissions are
0:50being made whether perceived or unperceived by those present and are deemed acknowledged and permissible all right first discussion on citizens input is there any extensions no citizens input at this time thank you uh first discussion number three uh discussion and vote to refer the sel curriculum all right thank you um yeah so um i you all should have a presentation as well too that we've
1:30shared with everyone so i apologize that wasn't found earlier this presentation in addition to the one that you have but you want to make sure you have us follow along with us so we started back in november um our clt we had written in a mental health we put in for the sel mental health grant um one of the things we were really looking at is our sale curriculum and choose love as
1:51it from this has been looking at um how it was working and we really looked at our contact data speaking to our principals and school counselors as well too just for some input into what our current fdl curriculum um and then um so we were really looking at um curriculum that we had a focus on really conflict conflict resolution increasing pro-social behaviors as well to really looking at what did this school year
2:29look like for us when we started to take our conflict amongst our students in particular the middle school and high school level and just really lacking some of that those social skills needing to be taught quite a bit so we're looking at curriculum that would do a lot of that but really appropriate for that secondary level um so we we researched the castle website and really looking at um where's their where's
2:54their curriculum that we'll touch upon those topics that we really wanted to focus on in particular in an urban dish district that focuses on teaching kids how do you how do you how do you resolve conflict or how do you negotiate frustrations and emotions and um and really create leadership out of our our out of our students yeah so um again in our review with with choose love which
3:23we initially brought on board for our k-12 curriculum it's one of the only k-12 curriculum that we thought was very important to unify the district um but also looking at the needs coming back from covet as claudius said we really wanted to look at something that explicitly taught some skills especially within conflict resolution and when we did you know our review early on we found that choose love on its own
3:47uh maybe did not do uh the best job to give the skills that we felt that they needed so this year we kind of put some curriculum together by doing some research um on our own and uh doing some additional advisory lessons on some of the social skills some of the conflict resolution and engagement skills uh but looking forward to to next year we're looking at a full secondary seo curriculum
4:13and some of the things that we were really looking for because on castle's website they have a lot of different uh curriculums some are evidence-based some are going through the process but we really wanted something that was evidence-based both for middle and high school because we still felt it was important to have that kind of like through line a similar curriculum as students are going for example from 7th
4:34to 8th to 9th to 10th because that's really where we found looking at our data a lot of the conflict a lot of um the peer uh conflict was happening um in our schools and that those grade seven eight nine ten kind of that age range um we also wanted uh to make sure that something was culturally relevant and meaningful for all of our students and that in addition to just the curriculum
5:00itself when we were looking at at pieces we wanted to have kind of a comprehensive training or coaching model since we're looking to use this as a tier one kind of advisory curriculum meaning that teachers would be delivering the content too so we wanted to make sure kind of like that definitely our school um counselors and our sacs and our administrators are training but also they have the ability
5:22to train the teachers and the teachers get some coaching too when they're delivering some of the lessons through advisory so one of the key things we looked at castle ranks programs in three ways promising sel support and sel select is the highest so we wanted to look at programs that were sel select those were ones that have been proven over research based studies that have impact and
5:50have increased advocacy so you can see in order for a curriculum to be rated uh select by castle uh there has to be improved positive social behavior reduce problem behavior reduce the emotion distressed improve school connectedness improve school climate those are some of the things that castle is looking at the other piece i think that we are looking at is would a curriculum just be
6:14standalone and advisory or were there some opportunities to integrate into the curriculum whether that be social studies english so that kind of marrying of academic and sel skills together so ideally when we did our review we wanted to look at curriculums that did both um so we looked at a couple different curriculums uh and one curriculum really stood out and that's the one that you
6:39have before you the leadership program violence prevention program one of the things that we found when we were doing our review is that most of the curriculums were either research based k to eight k to six so only grade six and there was very few curriculums that were uh evidence based or research based at the both middle and high school level so one of the things we liked about the
7:04leadership program and the violence prevention program was that not only was it developmentally appropriate for middle and high not only did they have a curriculum for grades 6 to 12 but through various research-based studies it's improved uh evidence based in grades 6 through 10 for improved outcomes they also have a comprehensive training and coaching available with their program both in person and virtual
7:31the program is culturally red relevant and it's really uh it's based around leadership skills so it frames everything in like developing skills versus deficit uh which we like and it also uh not only has the standalone lessons but opportunities for extensions and outreach and collaborations with different subjects so our findings uh there was one program really above and beyond the rest
7:59so uh the vpp program you can see on the next on the next slide it does have the uh it does show the improved ability to manage conflicts find resolutions build resilience including bullying and violence improve conflict resolution skills improve peer support behavior improve school community behavior and and so on and those were a lot of the key pieces that we were looking at from our data that we needed to support
8:22students especially during the return uh to decode it is this new the vpp uh it's been around for about 20 years uh it's been in new york city a lot of southern states uh how long do we have troops with chooselab we've had it for four years i believe correct just started yeah are we getting rid of no so we're still going to continue because a lot of our school counselors
8:48they've worked a lot to really create lessons um around choose love and the four pillars we've we love those four pillars and it's something that we've been using quite a bit we still can use those lessons that we've had but they weren't many lessons i think each grade level there was like seven lessons per pillar which wasn't enough so we needed something that was really going to
9:10add some a lot more substance so schools could still use some of the choose love curriculum that's there um in addition to this here so we don't have to get rid of that
9:29so what we had done was we had introduced um the program and everything we had from the program um first the sel team met with the personnel from the leadership just to hear a little bit more about them um hear more of what they had to offer their language capacity and all of that so we liked what we had what what they presented we then um in april we presented all the information to our school counselors
9:56school adjustment counselors in our guidance department as well too as well as the principals at the secondary levels ask for some feedback from them so the feedback we received was was was pretty good i mean it was i don't we didn't receive anything negative at all they really liked what they had what they what they've seen um question yeah was it was the feedback in person was it done response email it was
10:23both so i had met with the high school school adjustment counselors and i had shared with them all everything that i had had and asked for their feedback during our check-in meeting so that was in carson in addition to some emails as well too and then after what we had we were gonna meet with a leadership team for the second time i invited um i invited everyone in the middle school level who
10:47wanted to be part of this this meeting with them so we had one representative from the middle school and from the high school from my department from drew's department who sat in to be part of our meeting with the leadership team as well to just really to ask some more questions and to gather their input after that meeting as well too yeah so i mean the feedback that we got
11:12both in person and also be it we asked also via email to a wider audience um mostly positively yeah it was almost all it was positive they really liked the i think the focus on some of the conflict resolution skills and the way um as you can see in some of the manuals it kind of briefly overviews the different topics i think was really relevant to what was going on in the schools this year
11:39that was the feedback that we got so i can go on with our presentation with with um the core values is empowering students to succeed um and it gives a shifting away from um the way they feel about themselves students who are isolated in their schools and communities they lack the motivation to achieve in the classroom so we really liked everything that it stood for within their core values in
12:04really empowering students to be leaders in many ways so they have the middle school the finance prevention program curriculum where their components are into introduction to the leadership affirmation cooperation the vision and imagination and conflict management and then there's a project for all at the end of the middle school and the high school there's a work project that comes out of all of
12:28this which i'm so excited when i was reading about it and to potentially see it as well too um and when we look at the high school curriculum what they're looking at is introduction to the leadership self-concept group dynamics the vision and imagination and conflict management and social responsibility so we really like that as well too within that leadership program there's another
12:55curriculum as well too which is an upstanders curriculum um that curriculum is a bullying curriculum we were looking to purchase that one as well to for our middle and high school which it's about empowering upstanders it's a curriculum that seeks to prevent bullying by focusing on the role of witnesses to believe and that curriculum contains the three components in 15 lessons which is the introduction lex lessons
13:25outstanders skill building lessons and then upstandard campaign lessons which is all to tackle bullying which one is that quote in the upstander let's call it empowerment it should be i printed out the packet in there which is this is a little one here that's right because i didn't see this all right that's right and if you look at the back of it it gives you the description of what their curriculum looks like um
13:58so this program the delivery content style is built to resonate with racially ethnically culturally religiously and ability diverse students which we like that as well too the strategies for working with bias and youth action projects and opportunities are designed to support students understanding of their role as active and contributing product productive members of the community questions
14:29i'm sorry we have to roll out yeah so um just a little a little bit about the draft potential rollout of what a new curriculum would look like um knowing that a lot of planning has to go out into an initiative that to go well for you know seven schools grade six through twelve uh so what i would really uh want to do is spend some time in june and july meeting with the vpp
14:53um with our leadership team as well as some school-based representatives and really talk about the role of what are our key initiatives goals objectives how are the trainings going to go when do we need coaching etc both for the vpp and the upstanders curriculum and also how they fit together it's almost like helping us develop a scope and sequence for what year one would look like
15:17then in august they would come on on site during the admin institute and all of the counselors and vps and administrators would be trained so that they would be knowledgeable and could help at the school level uh train um the teachers as well we'd also want to invite or have if there's any teacher leaders who want to want to be part of school the school-based implementation team we want to have them trained as
15:44well so they could serve as resources uh for their colleagues at their school too then in august when we're back and at the beginning of september we would you know train and kind of roll out the curriculum so teachers understood the curriculum felt comfortable with the curriculum and then we would begin the curriculum probably in later september or early october curriculum will be sequenced out
16:09until uh june we'd also have um some points during like either our pd days or our other days during the school year kind of mid-year checkpoints where vpp would talk with schools and the district about the roll out there's any course correction that needed any additional resources that we need to really make an impactful kind of first year kind of rollout they would help us work on that
16:34plan for the entire year as well so that would be kind of like the draft or rollout plan for year one and then on the on the left side you see uh the projected cost for year one all of the curriculum and materials not only like a digital copy but a teacher manual and also student booklets which we like because it cuts down on some of the the prep work that it might take a
17:00teacher or someone else organizing materials it all comes kind of has one pack it's also translated into spanish and they're working on portuguese as well for translations for the student and then also for the training and uh sorry and uh professional development um just uh the august institute the coaching throughout the year the mid-year checkpoint uh those would be the cost to that um yeah we're looking to
17:32use the the mental health grant funds that we had allocated for contractual services uh to support payment for this curriculum after year one the costs are only associated with professional development or trainings that we would want to do since we would own the curriculum or they do have like other curriculums that we could purchase that add-on at that time thank you presentation are there any other
18:03questions any questions before i die yes so what is the current status of what's happened current last couple years related to this type of program but what is our status currently is in the 6th to 12th grade so in all the middle schools they have the advisory period the choose love curriculum is being rolled out in all of the middle schools throughout i mean all of our schools in addition to that they've the school
18:34adjustment counselors have even done their own research and really looking at what is going on in their buildings and what type of lessons do they need to bring in to to to build on the on the curriculum as well too for advisory but again like i said with the choose love they're still doing them but there was there was only a certain amount of lessons for the whole entire year but they're
18:59still rolling them out at the high school there's been no advisory so they weren't rolling it out at the high school but they were at the middle school and they still actively do so how about like uh sel groups at the high school what do we have data on if any of these things are happening and across the high school grades like what are they you know i honestly don't know but we don't get
19:21any reports on every student is you know getting a group through which grades or is it just non-existent so there are groups at the high school um i don't have the list of all the groups that are at the high school but we could definitely get that for you um i i can't speak to that yeah we can give you information about that yeah my question is along the lines of what is
19:43it how are we currently embedding these type of lessons across all of our grades that's all i don't mean the answer today per se but um several years ago whenever choose love came in we never got a presentation i don't believe it was sort of like this thing's gonna we're gonna choose love everybody's you know in a name it seems like everybody's just happy and everybody's gonna choose love and all
20:05the problems are going to go away that's how it honestly came out to me as just looking at it not knowing what the details of it are what is it going to be implemented with fidelity and at the same time in my personal opinion the behaviors have been skyrocketing so i'm like what is going on here because the behaviors are going through the roof i'm not sure the discipline's happening at all i don't you know
20:29i got my own opinion on that but then it's like what we're using choose love it almost seems like very odd so i'm certainly open to what this is but i think if we don't acknowledge what where we currently are last several years and if it's nowhere just it's nowhere like it's just a fact of this is what it so um i'm trying to put you on the spot we
20:50can we can get you information on choose love on in the friday email there is discipline going on in every single school i think that there's all different levels of behavior happening i don't think anybody can deny that so um we're saying we need something else because we do have to have a consistent curriculum that we are working with all students in regards to that this is going to supplement choose love what we
21:21we already have in place but that's not enough and we need to do more work with our students with self-regulation with working with peer resolution all of that stuff so um you know i i yeah we need more yeah i hear you and i'm supportive of it where i brought up the discipline it was mentioned earlier that some of the reason why we looked at it was looked at disciplined data and they're
21:42like i personally don't think that the school committee has gotten enough uh bicycle discipline data and to look at the and not specifically like what child because but that's not enough but i think it is enough for you to look at what is happening across the district now i know for a fact that this something's happening in his school gives a certain consequence and a certain level of
22:07order and discipline and expectation your school might be different my school might be different that can't happen in my opinion so the best programming we buy if we don't correct the other issues i think we're just going to be you know treading water here uh so when i asked about that and the discipline data i do think we need to take a deep dive into what does it look like for discipline
22:29but to conduct policies the those type of things so i think we need to have future meetings about what does it mean what it doesn't mean and we need to be consistent as a superintendent sick if we don't have consistency of use that's going to be a problem so my last question is on who is going to run all of these lessons and how are we going to implement it with fidelity
22:51across all these grades so the way we see it is this will be running an advisory in the middle school and at the high school level as well too by teachers is it daily everybody has an advisory group so everybody it's with you yeah so yeah counselors will have an advisory teacher don't have an advisory um so they will all kind of roll out this curriculum which is why where
23:13we felt it it would be prudent for us to spend a lot of time on our rollout plan and training to make sure that you know it is rolled out with fidelity and also what the the progress monitoring is or like the fault follower to make sure that the lessons are being implemented the same by school and everyone's on a similar timeline uh things like that okay i i think i would caution you that
23:40i'm not so sure as one member that the advisory is what we're saying it is with an effective block of time organized advisory can't be everything to everybody so one time we'll hear it's what i need and then they you know it can't be all things so as we roll this out i think you got to be honest with yourself i was at the meeting when mr dimara said and i agree with them that
24:06running an advisory type of program for 2300 students is almost impossible and it's impossible this year but if i was being honest i would say it's almost impossible going forward it's it's almost not worth it it's just too many students it's too many moving parts so i would just caution you that just saying it's going to be done an advisor is very well they're in the middle of building
24:32an advisory uh uh period at the high school yeah we're saying that i agree not it hasn't been consistent with everything that we're doing so we're trying to put a system in place where we utilize that time correctly if we're going to implement this program during advisory we need to have measures in place to make sure that it is being implemented across the district elementary there's morning meeting
24:58that's where they're doing a lot of their work and in secondary it's advisory we've had the period advisory time but we haven't utilized that time as efficiently as we need to and this will help us to structure that time better i'm not going to guarantee you anything but we know it needs to be better it's yeah yeah and i i agree and the what i think has to happen i think when
25:24you look at whatever you present to us on the data for what's been happening currently i think we're just putting out fires a lot instead of actually proactively having these groups so we have very qualified adjustment counselors guidance counselors and the roles of both it can't be just be well the adjustment counselor does all the heavy lifting and the guidance counselor does that which i
25:44think happens in almost every school i think it's got to be if everybody's a counselor then they should be able to run these things in the classroom without other side so just keep an open mind would be my suggestion but i do think that it makes sense but just thinking about the high school so if everybody's an advisor let's say there's 2 300 students in advisory everybody's going to get
26:06i don't know you said 10th grade but i'm assuming you mean the whole school so if it's 2 300 students for an advisory for a half an hour let's say period if you divide that by 20 students in the class 25 students in a class how many people were going to get actually get trained to run these at that time effectively with fidelity across the whole that's basically your whole staff
26:25well that's what the plan is is to have like when i was there when i was the principal i had an advisory group i had 15 kids in my advisory group every this is a school-wide we're going to implement school-wide so everybody's going to be trained and everybody's going to the smaller the group the more effective that advisor will be so you want to create groups between 10 and 12 students so that you
26:48can have those conversations and that it can be effective it's a it's a hard lift that's what i'm saying so you're going to end up having 150 people 200 people that have to be trained in believing this fidelity to use it i'm saying that's a tall water that's all i'm suggesting i am supportive so we're glad are you thank you you had mentioned you were looking at a curriculum that you could take sel and
27:13cross it over to academics what does that look like so so it's really looking at what it would what is what is it the lesson that they're teaching right can they if they're doing a history lesson can they incorporate like what was going on in that history event that was similar to the the character trait that they're trying to teach the kids so it's like that um really looking at is there a
27:38book that they're reading in english what is the character going through what are some of the struggles how could you incorporate what some of the lessons um that they're teaching from the leadership program and incorporating using the same language using the same idea and just so that way you're you're weaving a lot of those teachings throughout the whole entire day so it's not just living in one class or one one
28:02so it's not hopefully living an advisory correct it's going to be to a kind of skill planted there and then it's going to grow kind of all over again that's why it's important that all staff are trained to trust so we're all using the same language now as far as the curriculum goes is there leeway for say advisors to sort of maybe focus a little bit more on this or a little bit
28:26more on that based on the needs because i disagree slightly with mr ikea in that sometimes in my opinion just my opinion that discipline can't necessarily look the same everywhere we go because we're dealing with different scholars in different situations and what would work for one scholar may not work for another and even though it should look similar and i'd like to think administrators across the district
28:53are you know thinking similar to each other in regards to discipline but i think it's important that there's a little leeway in flexibility in making sure that we're serving the needs of the students that are directly in front of us let's say in an advisory that's always the role and the goal and sometimes we like when i would like to rp as well too you always work with this you know if
29:18you have a certain population as part of your advisory group you're going to make sure that your planning and your delivery is going to meet what the students needs in front of you so there's always going to be that room for that i do have a couple questions so one is is how much of this is on this curriculum focuses on relationship building so it's all about being a leader right
29:44it's all about being a leader and being able to resolve conflict which is all about relationships right how to navigate frustrations and identify feelings and emotions i wish i had brought in so last time i met the superintendent i had lesson plans that i even showed her and they're really about like finding out who you are right and what you see as a leader what you see you in your community as well too so
30:10it's not just about an individual it's about the individual and their community their individual in the school so it's a lot about relationships right which i appreciate so my follow-up to that is we we also have katie brown in place correct so is this something that is just going to overlap katie brown program is it the same content is it so this is different than katie brown night and day very
30:36violence and relationships this is about being a leader okay and we're resolving conflict with peers and other people around you which is me look different than okay i just didn't know if there was a lot of that that was going on overlap or okay um i just want to circle back to the timetable of training i was coughing sorry i apologize but um just the timetable on training and i know we're
31:00ready to we want to be ready to implement right put it through the beginning of school but did i hear that the last training was in august the first uh so the administrators would all get trained during the uh the admin institute which is the first week of august so that we're thinking like your counselor's guidance and adjustment your vice principles your department heads and deans and principles so that the leaders
31:26of the building before the staff comes back from the summer have an understanding of the curriculum and the methodologies because each lesson follows kind of a standard where there's a warm-up then there's discussion then there's an activity then there's kind of like debriefing so understand it's kind of like the scope and sequence and we're hoping that uh some teacher leader type leaders who are interested
31:49in being kind of like school-based implementation supports would also be trained so that when the the staff comes back at the end of august and throughout the month of september one of the focuses of the schools will be to train the staff and make sure that they feel comfortable um and then have a launch either at the end of september and october is that i guess that's where i was confused i'm sorry i thought we
32:16were launching right when school started a lot of the beginning of the school we want to work on those those lessons around the advisory need to be about forming relationships getting to know the students so that's why it's not right at the beginning because it needs to be about building relationships with your students first and foremost yeah right okay yeah and that's kind of like our
32:35draft what we think now and then some of the coach coaching over the summer will help us would help us fine tune it make sure like that you know obviously realistic and we're hitting specific goals and then we would have like a finalized timeline right i know we're winding down at the i mean the end of the year but when will our teachers be aware that they have this opportunity to be
32:58you know to be trained a little more in depth than is that we're hoping after this approach after this yeah we're gonna go and reach out and say we're super excited who wants to be on board with us through this journey because i'm excited for this i have no other questions just yet just following up on the discipline piece when you look at it in my view personally sixth grade let's say so
33:25you're talking six through 12. if students don't understand in sixth grade that all of the little things that they do are going to be addressed such as put your hands on somebody else hitting somebody else whatever that's what i'm talking about with fidelity i don't think there's anybody in this room that's willing to stake their relic their reputation on the fact that we're doing that type of stuff with
33:46fidelity across the district we're not beating people up over it it's just a fact so in sixth grade for instance we have to start if we're gonna do this like the program is called violence prevention program if kids aren't getting the idea that in sixth grade it's not okay to put your hands on somebody and they get away with it and they get away with it and they get away
34:01with it the school gets out of control then we've got bigger problems so we're not taking care of the small things the bigger things happen now they go to seventh grade now we go to eight and it just keeps on escalating so when i say that type of stuff we can look at the data and i'm gonna keep on pushing to analyze the data because i'm telling you with is 100 certainty in my colleagues
34:19and the rest of the committee if we looked at all of the conduct referrals some are not even in the computer the same effective way so we can hardly you're going to present us data that's not going to be accurate unless we go to other means but at the same time we it's not the same so all i'm asking for is to really take a look at this because i think that's what's going to ultimately change
34:42so that a student can actually reflect on being the leader and whatever all these things sound good but if the kid's out of control thinks he can treat people like crap hit people do these other things they're not going to get to that point in an advisory with somebody so i just think it we need to come in a little and more intensely with that doesn't mean you're going to suspend everybody i
35:04think people in this district don't understand that you don't have to suspend everybody every time you get a referral but we need the data we need to know kevin's acting up kevin did this kevin did that call the parents said you know so it really has to stop there so i'm not looking for you all to go back out and suspend 100 000 people you know but just understand that that's where i'm
35:22coming from with it and i think the data will bear it out if we looked at it a little more so thank you for your presentation i yield one more thing i mean i understand what he's saying but i i mean on a daily basis uh mr aggia i think there's behaviors of all levels we all know that right and i don't necessarily agree then that they're not being addressed but because that they're happening so frequently
35:47i think we'd have to move to policy and each each individual school has to follow the policy if you want to start it the the nitty-gritty and the the pushing and the shoving and does that need to be a policy for the hands-on student or is it does it have to be a fight you know i think we have to we do have a discipline policy right what we're hearing is that there needs to be
36:10consistent implementation of that but there is there is we we have to so we may have to revisit the discipline policy but there is a discipline policy in the district i mean if we have to revisit it we will revisit it and put a group together like we did years ago to review it i mean last time we spoke the policy uh we were talking about in-school suspension and that was
36:36i think a year and a half ago and that was never really brought up again so i mean i'd be interested in in getting some more data on on on consistency in in data inputting and communication and all of it so um i'll leave with that anything okay let's move forward too oh yeah
37:13yes thank you
37:31so discussion and vote for the esl curriculum is it um
37:50good afternoon i do not have a powerpoint presentation for you but you do have a one pager with titles of the resources the schools involved and the actual cost and some notes so i'm here to present a request for esl curriculum for middle school and just to set uh to set it up for you uh when i joined the district six years ago the previous um director had purchased edge
38:29uh two years ago so when i joined the district that was the curriculum that we were working with uh reviewing it and observing uh what we saw is that one it's not culturally and linguistically relevant so we needed to revisit that as well as in terms of age appropriateness representation of our students you know even physically as well as the fact that it is really not uh culturally appropriate so and really
39:06there was very low interest from the students in terms of engagement so it's very inconsistently used the two department the two coordinators from for the department uh did work with the teachers in creating lesson plans uh in plc so the former who is now a principal and the current coordinator as well but it's been very inconsistent in 2020 we extended the the foundational programs for uh that has
39:40been housed historically housed at talbot we extended to middle to cass and morton and so now 2021 we had sixth grade and then seventh grade and next year eighth grade and we doubt a consistent curriculum so and we do know our students are transient and so they'll be going from terrible to more than because with different with different curriculums so um i came to then the assistant
40:08superintendent points and requested that we put together a curriculum committee which was approved and so agavrath who is the k-8 esl coordinator with a team from ela department head uh esl coach and esl teachers uh really vetted uh at least three programs and uh implementing them so prior to implementing them they use the rubric at this from the state the state the content rubric that the state uses and
40:49adding some components of esl because that is not a an esl rubric and using that then they had certain teachers implemented them and then they had a feedback to the google to a google form in which they chose they decided which ones to choose um and we know we've been struggling in the district with an sl curriculum so fi you know ultimately they chose time zones uh what we're going to do next year we
41:19uh in the past we've only had esl one esl two next year all three buildings are going to have esl three so for esl one they chose time zones and then for esl two and three they show impact uh and that's from same age so that would be replacing edge and then have consistent materials across buildings which is easier to monitor as well as uh products you know progress monitoring kids products
41:49so that's that in terms of substituting edge with time zones and impact can answer questions so the first the second box says three middle schools henry lloyd doran and rpa so we have three middle schools cast morton uh tallwood and then we're looking at the k-8 schools as well henry lord and doran and of course we have esl students in our campaign it's blank though we just you have three up top and then you have
42:21three middle schools on the second box but it's blank so i think you're counting the three middle schools as doran a taliban more and it just does it doesn't articulate it here so that's why it looks like as if the three middles yeah see i think it's showing the three middle schools and i'm thinking that could have meant henry lord doran i got you so that when you write three middle
42:48schools you mean all the other three so this is six actual schools yes yeah that makes sense yeah just a little confusing okay so i'll just explain why the other ones are getting extra because it's quite difficult and don't have this is for me mainstream the the impact is for sei mainstream so they do have mainstream students in six eight else do we don't have foundational does that make sense yeah we don't have
43:16foundation in those two schools but they would not have right but in talking with the principals they are going to schedule a block for esl three which is for those students in mainstream classrooms so they would be awesome if if this goes to the full committee if you put that uh clear so esl one is the three schools esl two will be just so that it you might just have to make
43:39another box but i think tell us a little clearer powerpoint together and find it three levels of yourself okay so that's that's what we're looking at uh they are it comes with free training so we're thinking of doing the training uh sometimes we not in september once everybody has been hired we don't want to be doing training uh prior to making sure all the the teachers that would probably ultimately
44:05be using it so we're thinking of doing the trainings at the beginning of september and then roll it out uh we then looked as well at frames for fluency which is a newcomers kit we do have something identical for elementary we don't have for a middle school and it's a standalone program so for those very very recent arrivals but also it could be something that teachers could use to extend language with higher level
44:38students you know let's say you'd be looking at this kind of a a certain topic and then these cards you know vocabulary cards and functions and forms card charts that interrelates they know how to use the language function with grammar so then you know we can uh we can use it standing alone with that so that's a newcomer skit for all three middle schools and that's the three middle school stalwart cuss in
45:04morton because we don't have a foundation at henry in durham and then we we just as a supplementary material we it's an online program for as a supplier for libraries library subscriptions and it's a it's a an account with a 100 free students accounts so one teacher with 103 students account so it has text lessons it's all by themes supported with grammar and you know things like that and then
45:47finally we are asking for a one-year subscription to finish line that's also just for the mainstream that's a practice for the accesses that happens in january so teachers you know they tried both paper hard copy as well as online the teachers went read online just because that's the format that the the students take the test it's a accesses an online test so we decided that we would try it online for one
46:13minute subscription and then if it's something that we see that it's actually healing some results we would perhaps ask to renew the subscription all of this is based on data access data where we see that we are struggling and there's been very a lot of ton of inconsistencies between buildings even within buildings implementation not having a curriculum across the district so i think kids deserve it and uh and
46:44that's the work any questions any questions is that again so the uh i know we just approved a live sum for the curriculum for one is the wonders one there's yes and this is i'm guessing a supplement it's not no one is yesterday's elementary and this is middle school but i thought we had didn't we pay for wonders across the whole district materials for the teachers to also have their own materials
47:17so they don't have that same thing in middle school so right now you either have where you said edge right now we have edge which like i said it's really not called basically appropriate for that kids when when so we've been implementing that for a couple of years without like so i came in it had been purchased didn't want to just make the decision to get rid of it kind of looked at it
47:44on my own trying to support the teachers and then we added positions and when we had a position really had the coordinates sitting with the teachers at plc's and going all this training and it's still really not it's it's not appropriate yeah that just concerns me that we purchased something that was inappropriate like i'd like to dig back to how that even happened that was eight years ago i
48:07think right six or eight correct so you know the field has changed the discipline has changed but also it was done eight years ago so in the lens that was looked at it was probably not i'm not sure but yeah i wouldn't say it was inappropriate i would say at that time that's that was the curriculum that they thought was the best curriculum correct eight years later we're finding that the needs are different and we're
48:32looking for something different but um you know the word inappropriate isn't it like i mean that's what got me yeah like thinking like okay if it's inappropriate then why have we been doing it like if you're buying something that's not servicing the needs of our kids once you know why you're going to hear my english my esl gonna come through i did not mean i'm inappropriate but
48:52that's why i wasn't it's not appropriate with the circumstances that you have today the research has changed our research has changed absolutely our students yeah so the um i'm assuming you agree with this as far as wanting us to implement it um i know we talked about the budget meaning getting some data on certain things and i'm not in my head remembering getting it um but if we could just like circle back and
49:23see if it's something that i missed what i want to get is to try to see like what is we're spending a lot of money on these services and what are we getting for that money is i want to try to get it in a clear if somebody told me you spent a lot of money you voted all a bunch of stuff what are you getting for that a couple page document i'm really not
49:46so april i'm sorry on april 18th i believe i did submit a report that the school community had requested was with the staffing you asked for data on staffing staffing and mobile departments it was about the um it was identification yeah like i think we were under identifying over identifying so if you could just follow back up because we get so much stuff what i'm looking for here with this curriculum is where
50:13are we going to be in several years like what are we spending all this money for and what are the results going to be a projection a three-year projection maybe well i think it's an uh what the way i look at it as one member is where are we currently at we're not doing well right now right so we want academic data access so we say okay here's what's happened for the last
50:37this is one of the things i think i that we didn't necessarily get was like the amount of money has gone way up where are we now with the results so we we can keep on saying we do this in photo all the time we keep on saying spend a lot more money we never get the results that we're looking for and that we don't have a regular system of that's all i'm not
50:58i don't i just know we're not doing as well as we've we should be that's why we're trying these different things but i'm not very comfortable with explaining that if anybody ever asked me out in the public what is it i i can just say well i own a lot more staff that's basically what i have to tell them so staff and programs you know we're not yes so that's all i'm just looking for
51:19whether it's and if it's an admission that the data is just indicating that it's flat or not good so be it then we've got to figure out an action plan to make the data better to make those services better that's all that's good so without anyo thank you my questions were answered so yeah thank you very much motion and refer favorably second on the table all right a little pulled up
51:58discussion and vote to refer some separate core curriculum good evening everyone uh thank you for having this before you tonight um upon my entry to the district we identified uh you know several years ago that this was a need we look to really try and move this forward throughout pandemic we definitely hit some roadblocks in terms of timing and engagement however this year we had excellent engagement by
52:25our teachers and our joint liberty union management group to preview both curriculums um before you and i brought deb defalco who has been one of our amazing teachers over at henry lord uh for quite some time and now he's been serving in administrators capacity which is a huge asset to the program but i brought deb just to talk a little bit about her experience and why this curriculum is so needed
52:50throughout all populations hi um i've been excuse me i've been teaching with the ast population in fall river for 15 years this is my first year as an administrator we have never had a curriculum for our children we've always made our own materials we've used teachers and teachers we have there are different websites that we can get materials from for children with autism we have used our own data systems that we've
53:29created ourselves they don't transfer year to year when you aren't consistent classroom to classroom classroom so when kids get to eighth grade then that teacher doesn't have any meaningful data from kindergarten all the way through this curriculum the style of fitzgerald curriculum that we have all looked at is amazing it's curriculum based on state standards it has a pre-assessment in each area of instruction the
54:03elementary level has 11 areas of instruction with 170 possible iep goals in a gold bank the secondary has 11 areas of instruction with 150 possible iep goals what's really wonderful about that is everything we do at the intensive level is based on the kids ieps when you do that pre-assessment that gives us their current level of performance that current level of performance drives us writing their ips
54:39we're not just pulling things out of a hat trying to figure out what goal are we going to write next that's what's happening with a lot of new teachers in particular they don't know how to write an iep they don't know how to pick a goal what's going to come next this system this program does it for them it is totally follows the standards it sequentially builds upon the skills from the standard
55:11it comes with the data system it comes with progress monitoring it comes with all that tells them exactly when to do the next skill when to go back it uses discrete trial tj that's where i was going with that discrete trial teaching is exactly what we use now which is um evidence-based instruction for our children so it is everything that we do but it will be standardized throughout the program thank you
55:45so we originally started this process in looking at core curriculums for our asd and our community-based population we originally had thought we were going to go with one curriculum k through 12.
55:56what actually happened was through the feedback sessions we identified that really the style of fitzgerald was way more appropriate for our k-8 asd population and that attainment was going to better meet the needs of our community-based students in k-12 both really do present high-quality highly modified curriculums for our students whether it's with a significant focus on transitional skills when we're
56:19getting to the middle and high school levels one of the pieces we got through our feedback process when we brought in these curriculum providers we had them do about six demos then we also uh recorded two of those sessions for teachers who weren't able to make the virtual sessions also sent them out for feedback and also went through a survey process to ensure that we were you know we were reading the room right and
56:43knowing what they really wanted to move forward with when we got our survey results this is what we came up with in looking at the order for these two um i think one of the one of the things you know in setting a teacher up for failure is when we don't give them the core curriculum and tools that we need and especially when we have been in such a a really turbulent year i think we're
57:06going to have a lot of new teachers throughout our schools and this is going to be a way really to get them on the right foot set them up for success and i'll say our bcbas and cluster coordinators are very excited really to support this process to ensure that high quality instruction and curriculum is implemented in all these classrooms the training aspect it's done you're going to be
57:33you know what we're going to put in once we get approved and it goes to the full committee and they vote to really uh you know move forward with the purchase to get in that part but okay all of our schools are going to have dedicated time prior to the start of school to really get familiar with the curriculum look at developing scope and sequences so that they know how to also
57:51bring in some of their supplement materials as well both programs both have supplements but they don't have a pore so they're going to have to kind of work those in between derpy's actually already started the process on working on a silver scope and sequence for next year they had some old attainment products previously um so they are really already starting this work our cluster coordinators and bcba's
58:16are going to be the leads on this process on developing our teachers and helping them really get familiar with the curriculum and guiding them through that process you mentioned the style of fitzgerald aspect that it's going to basically help the teachers with the ip i assume that's going to save a lot of time for the teachers as well correct in an immense amount of time okay and i think when we have these
58:44very challenging classrooms where teachers are already you know probably putting in you know eight to ten hours a day and then right and then try and then going home like trying to create curriculum materials tracking behavior synthesizing data we need to be able to give them these tools to take some things off their plate so that they stay here right and they feel supported and they know
59:08how to move forward in their work are you any questions so i agree we need it i've worked here i've known sort of the struggle the um i'm assuming that other places that are have high functioning programs are using something similar yep so part of part of the initial research process was i reached out to some of our neighboring districts who have very similar in number of populations that we do um and
59:39these along with a few others were made in terms of recommendations we went through our initial review these were the two that would move forward to go before our groups and as we know to kind of initially we thought we were going with one curriculum but we got the feedback we decided to go with the two because really being that starla fitzgerald is aba based it's gonna be way better to meet
59:59the needs k to eight of flies over and henry lord um compared to attainment from the rest of the district yeah so i definitely think it is needed um the supports are there i just worry when it's a checklist a lot of times if there's a checklist it's an easier just let's just do it but they need to be individualized and i know when we have quality individuals that are you know they're
1:00:24going to individualize that iep and the services for the kids it just i caution that if it becomes a checklist sometimes it can be too easy to do rather than to dig into the data to get into the nitty-gritty especially with the children that we're dealing with so i think it's going to help us in the end because right now we don't have anything so it's better than nothing and then i guess we'll go
1:00:45you know either year by year or whatever implement this review is and hopefully but i definitely think the resources need to be we're putting the people in place now we need this uh you know i think to add to it um you had mentioned about the joint management group do you have anything that you could send us on relative to that any minutes or anything like of you don't have to say now but if you
1:01:10have anything that articulates it because i don't know all the questions of what people i'm sure at those meetings there was questions from the practitioners that were you know a little more appointed than what i could come up with but if you have any info in minutes or whatever i've seen some of the other giant management minutes we don't get those on a regular basis but then we use the result as something
1:01:33that we should make a decision on so i like to see the background so i can dig into it and say okay this is what mike said and kevin pushed back but mike had a good answer but you know whatever just i think any of that will help us as the full committee you know to do it but i definitely do think it's neat it's needed to put the resources in for this
1:01:50population of students so thank you for bringing it vote and i'm well my last thing is i'm sure this is in the um welcome report of some type of yeah you know we talk about in the special ed subcommittee about the recommendations and checking those off so we'll be having a meeting soon to go over the bigger picture with the folks on that committee but i think this will check off a lot of boxes
1:02:12on what that report said we needed so thank you
1:02:31thank you
1:02:42next is 3.4 update on lexia oh
1:02:58so we sent a one pager that explained the program i think on friday just to give you some background on a program that we're moving into our hopefully moving into our second year using here in fall river and so my goal today is just to give you an update as to how implementation has gone over the past year both at the elementary level and then at the secondary level
1:03:23so um lexia has been around for a very long time i think it was developed in 1984.
1:03:28we were kids back then um and so the program itself is an adaptive blending learning program where students take a diagnostic assessment and then they're placed in the program at the level um in which they test um this program core5 that i'm speaking of first the elementary program is for all students and so the reason i mention that is because when we speak of the secondary program it's different
1:03:57so this is for all students and it complements our core instruction students work in different um different areas um with regard to basic early literacy skills that include phonological awareness phonics structural analysis fluency vocabulary and comprehension and so it's the five essential components of literacy that they're working in um the program itself is research and evidence based
1:04:26so as students work their way through the program it's fairly independent to begin with when students are flagged as having difficulty with a specific unit teachers um see that in the data that students have been flagged and they can pull a lesson right from the program itself to administer with that child or with a group of students who have a similar profile even if students haven't been flagged
1:04:52yet for that particular lesson but the teachers know their students well enough to know that even a preview is going to support um particular students so after the lesson um students are given um a skill builder so they're completing a worksheet type thing that asks them to now apply what they just learned in that small group and then students go on the computer and they complete that lesson if they do
1:05:21that successfully they move on in the program but if they don't the cycle begins again and so there is um teacher intervention that happens within the program it's not just left up to a computer to solve the problem um so if you look at the slide that's titled 20 21 22 lexia core 5 usage i should have numbered these in some way you'll see that we have a wide range of usage that's happening in the city
1:05:53and so when students are placed in the program and they diagnose where students are struggling students are given a minute target that minute target can be anywhere from 20 minutes a week to 90 minutes a week depending on the level of need of the child um if students are meeting those usage targets i want to explain these three categories to you the first one is meeting new meeting usage
1:06:21those are students who have used the program for 20 weeks or more and who have met their you said their weekly usage target at least 50 of the time the category that's highlighted in yellow are students who um have used the program for a minute for a minimum of 20 weeks but did not meet the usage target for 50 of the time so that's the differentiator between those two categories
1:06:54so the green is that they have met the usage target 50 or more of the time in the yellow is that they have not our students who are in the not meeting usage are students who either have not used the program at all or have not met the 20 week minimum in order to move into a different category okay on the next slide the usage category by grade this is showing you exactly that
1:07:26what percent of our students are using on the program and falling into the three categories the meeting usage is the cobalt loop the not meeting usage is the um lighter blue and partial year which is less than 20 weeks are the kids that are in gray so as you can see by this bar graph the majority um the highest usage is in grades k to three yep and there's a
1:07:55reason for that and k to three the usage um they want kids to be on about 60 minutes that's the cap but in grades four and five it can go up to 80 minutes and so if i'm a fourth or fifth grade teacher and i'm departmentalized and i have 60 to 90 minutes with my kids i have to find time within that very short period of time to um put kids on a program for quite a
1:08:21substantial amount of time do do mine am i not seeing the elementary as yeah it starts at sixth grade on us yeah oh my god we only have power up i thought maybe it was just games i was i was trying out so oh you were trying real like until i hit that i saw
1:08:45i don't know what happened i just print it and but it's it's been remembered do you want to print it out try and i'll just keep going i would keep going don't let me interrupt you i'm just sorry when i was saying it's kate at 12.
1:09:03every grade has one of these graphs right so um i'm focused on just core five which is different than the um program that's used in grade six as well should i project would that be the best i have we have okay good nervous yeah they would just extend
1:09:32all right you're throwing me now that was good he was on it and then all of a sudden it's gone we're back all right good freaking out that's where all right yes so pre-k just to explain that a little bit um in the best way that i can not being really involved in the pre-k work that kristen's been doing um pre-k just started roll out um mid-year kristen had done some research around
1:09:56other districts that were using the program successfully um and they decided that they were going to do it with a very small population of students in pre-k and they started later in the year okay so in this graph you can clearly see that k to three um there are more students who are meeting the usage targets and more students that are using the program so on the next slide titled progress
1:10:21during the oops sorry progress during the 21-22 school year there are two session bar graphs the one on the left is showing the students in fall river that are not meeting usage or fall into the partially meeting usage which are again those kids that didn't reach that 50 usage target and on the right those are the students who are meeting usage and so um at the beginning so the slide highlights the progress of
1:10:54our 1900 students that are meeting their usage target as compared to the kids that are not meeting those ushers targets so in the beginning of the year focusing on the meeting usage on the right hand side only 20 of our kids were working at or above grade level and now our most recent data is showing that 68 are working in the program at the at or above grade level as defined by the program
1:11:21um and we've also had a decrease in the percentage of students that are working two plus grade levels below and so those are the kids that are in the dark gray we had 44 of our students working at two plus grade levels below at the beginning of the year and now according to the program i want to stress that because i didn't define the um these targets um we're at 11 and so that's pretty significant when
1:11:52you look at the bar graphs on the left hand side as compared to the right hand side with the percent of students that are working in or above grade level and so the blue boxes so i think what this highlights for us is that when students are using the program as intended by the minutes goal you can see a significant difference in how they're performing with the grade level material
1:12:19and so in speaking with alexia support group they said that this data is pretty typical um for a first year they actually thought in some of our schools we were outperforming like what a typical district would be doing as far as usage minutes which you can see on the slide with the they are um and so this is from zero to 100 as far as minutes um in school and so you can
1:12:44see there's a pretty wide range of um the average number of minutes that a school is um using the program and so there are three schools that are started those are our three highest minute you um highest schools meeting their usage minutes and so in speaking with them and thinking about what we've done at the district level to make that happen um but specifically with those starred
1:13:14historic examples they have challenges that are running in their buildings so they have lexia challenges um spencer borden has alexia alexiosaurus that visits classrooms and kids get to read to it they designate a certain time in their day where kids are using lexi it's almost like stop and drop it and use lexi in your classroom there's a lot of data tracking happening on the part of students so students
1:13:40tracking the data conferencing with the teacher and goal setting and then they've built in teacher routines and expectations and those buildings that are showing that it's at making a difference in those um in what students are producing and so the first step is to get those minutes in right because if they're not using the program we're not going to see the growth that we want to be happening
1:14:04again on that right hand side bar graph um and then to shift to more of usage goals and so productivity so our kids completing the units that we would expect them to be completing in a certain minute time span of four minutes i think four to seven minutes um and so we've done a lot of work in schools they've done a ton of work for on rn we've done a ton of work a lot
1:14:29of public sharing of data across schools um sharing what schools are doing in our finale every week so that practices start to spread and we've seen that starting to happen across the district on the next slide where it says all student progress in core 5 the first start slide this is one of the schools that had a star on the um on the number line and again it's just showing that when
1:14:58the minutes are um being met we're seeing significant growth and so you can see that on the next three slides um those are the three schools that were started should i move into power up with the secondary or do you want to do question and answer for um of course yeah yeah so when you if i was to ask what was the expectation given at the start of the school year for all
1:15:27schools was there like a memo sent out or something to say the expectation is an hour a day what backup documents can you give to say that what the expectations were yeah so um schools were given schools each have their own um professional development contact from the company and so they've met with that they have x what is it four meetings a month a year they have four meetings in school
1:15:50schedule those and that person's job so this is outside of district support that person's job is to do impact reviews and set them up do professional development with teachers on our end we have communicated consistently both in the memo in person meeting with coaches i've done a lot of work with my ela coaches to support and how to support teachers in using core5 effectively um does that
1:16:17answer your question not really all right absolutely so it's like a simplified version of what everything you said makes sense so what my frustration is as our results are not there is expectations in my opinion and fidelity yeah i keep saying it to every single thing we've had at the curriculum the technology thing like as you're talking i'm getting more aggravated no not just because it's very clear if anybody
1:16:45looks at this information and says if you do x y z yeah you will get positive results yeah that's what you just told right right so i'm saying to myself well when the hell is going on here right where if i'm a principal of a school i get a chance to not do it but you're a principal and you do no yes i understand so so i'm like wait a
1:17:05minute here if like i'm going to ask for the data like individually sure because it's just truth and advertising and we talked about the technology committee of having dashboards where everybody it's got to be clear yeah but we are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on stuff that's not used now you're saying very clearly that if you do this it's almost like you're saying you know yeah
1:17:28if you go buy five scratch tickets you're going to win on six or five of them yeah why would i not do it like so i'm not going to ask too many questions because i'll probably say that i think i can answer your original question though about um the clarity around minutes expected the thing that's difficult about that is that they are the minutes expected of a child is individualized based on the um
1:17:49diagnostic assessment and so for me to say 60 minutes for each child um i wouldn't say would ever hurt a child because they just keep moving forward but you might be a child who's working at or above grade level and you only need 20 minutes and so that's why that data dashboard really is hugely important to know are kids progressing in the actual program itself um and then are you seeing the results
1:18:14when they're outside of the program um but i do understand what you're saying and i can definitely give you more data to show who's using it who's not using it um so i think it's the message so i think that's what you're referring to the message that everybody needs to i think that part of the issue or the inconsistency is that people are struggling to give up that time right because kids depends on school
1:18:40depends on the class that's in front of you they see other needs taking priority over saying okay now you're going to take that lexia time that's why we see that in consistency but after getting that data running through a year then we can say listen but we know this is research-based we know it's evidence-based we have evidence in our own district and that's something that we need to prioritize but i think that
1:19:04that's that decision that pull people feeling conflicted okay i'm going to give up direct instruction time so that i can put give time for students to be on the computer i agree with you so my question was what is this oh sorry sorry sorry kevin no just uh i hear what you're saying i think and i think you can understand my frustration because it will be to anybody that's watching the um the messaging
1:19:29i think has to be a little stronger of what's allowed and what's not allowed all for teacher autonomy and do this and that but as far as i'm concerned like teacher autonomy everybody can say that if a student isn't reading professionally by grade 2 it's just a predictor of problems going okay so then nobody gets the choice anymore to say we're going to do anything else but this because so now if i'm
1:19:53below grade level and stephanie is at grade level then the teacher's letting her do something different but i have to do that piece that individualized this is what we're going to do for every kid so that we get by grade three everybody's reading a grade level never mind the other ones are cool but that's the part that gets me is that and i think some of it is people try to be
1:20:12nice and you know we're trying to work with people and everybody the results are not there so if we just keep doing the same thing over and over well what's with 20 30 whatever it's going to go up we want 100 of the kids to get it exactly and then when they're using it with fidelity for that amount of time and it's not going up now it's another red flag oh wait a minute here what else
1:20:32is going on and we can do the intense so it's really not complicated in my mind but it certainly is frustrating to sit here and see the this type of uh very clear two plus two equals four that's what that i'm seeing here why are we not doing it so i would say that um during the principles meeting when we talked about scheduling um in april we said at that point that the
1:20:55expectation is that the there was a wind block in every single building and that during that wind block lexia is the um the tier two intervention to support students it's not to say that a child wouldn't receive go on to lexia and then also have a tier three intervention with a human um because we do know that a human is going to have a different impact than a program but you're right
1:21:19you're definitely right and sometimes if you have a five year in school four years at school everybody is afraid to say that we have to match kids up to their ability in some ways but i'm not afraid to say it because i think that's how we're going to get all the kids to move and we everybody wants to talk about just let's just deal with it we have to get everybody meeting by a certain level and
1:21:37i i think that's the key is just we can no longer keep doing things as we do instructionally the results aren't there and we we definitely need to change it so i just think if we can get the info by school um like basically this i i would say it's something like this um one of the schools is listed on here oh i did oh sorry i removed it
1:21:59but i think it will just help us to see and it's not to beat up any school but i think it we need to provide you the backup to say no this is what we're requiring so if you go back down and say you have to do this well the school committee's saying this is a policy that we're going to pay for this but we're going to use it so yeah
1:22:13thank you i think that goes across the board as well with every curriculum if if we're going to be paying off this this money and the superintendent wants a curriculum i think teachers have followed the curriculum um and if it's for uh we've made that very great greater outcomes and i i think that's the uh what the future holds as far as um you mentioned a couple times that each student has the individual times okay
1:22:40just kind of tell me how that is implemented like are the teachers timing it is it the computer program the computer will time it um and so students can actually look at their own dashboard it shows how much time they spent on the program it also shows how many units they've completed so students see it and then the teacher sees it as well so i know i'll mention school watson um has this students with a data
1:23:07tracking sheet um and students have to track their units it's less about minutes because they've been using lexia for probably four years they had it with their turnaround money so the teachers are very familiar with it they've changed some um some of the expectations this year with regards to usage student usage and teacher teacher usage because it really is about teachers being very aware of what students are
1:23:32doing on that program so that they can intervene appropriately thank you for that i yield mr my two questions were what are the barriers that are preventing this from being across i think you kind of answered that and then i was also going to ask what mimi just asked so when you wait till the end you have a lot less to say and i i want to i do agree with
1:23:52everything um that mr again was saying so i'm not going to go ahead and repeat on that but when you were talking about some students requiring 20 minutes when other students require 30 minutes are we seeing like funky data because of that so does it look like some schools are their usage is less because the students require less no no that's all yeah it's all set so if a child requires 20 minutes and they
1:24:16meet that 20 minutes if you're in that case yeah gotcha okay with that oh sorry i'm sorry i'm not last i thought it wasn't so wonders is uh k through five yes is that accurate yeah okay they're not doing the elixir because they're killing them that's the question and lexi is under the supplement supplement thank you that's all question mr aguiar so oh you're going to power up i didn't want to have that conversation
1:24:44well i was reading this i thought that's what you were going on so what as it went in here and uh have you not presented this yet okay sorry are you yeah you'll have plenty of questions now so power up is different than um than core5 because powerup is an intervention and it's meant only for at-risk students so where um that's why i mentioned earlier core5 is for all kids
1:25:11power up is for students who who are at risk requiring intervention um this particular intervention um again it adapts instruction um it's a diet they use a diagnostic their components that they work in our word study grammar and comprehension so only three different zones that they work in and again a proven program that's been around for quite a while so um i'm presenting out on data that um
1:25:43is fairly new to me because i had not looked at power up before um miss rabbit left and so i am i'm doing my best to present out what's happened here okay um and again it goes it okay so when you look at the same chart that we looked at for core five the one that has the yellow box on it you'll see that there are about 68 of our kids who had a
1:26:10partial year i just want to explain what that means with regard to power up um power up is just recently getting some traction in three different schools in the city morton talbot henry lord um and there's a couple of different reasons for that the schools have put in some structures and systems and set some really high expectations for usage um and i can i have a slide where i can
1:26:36kind of share out what they've done and just learning from reaching out and learning from them around what they they're doing differently as compared to what they did in the beginning of the year also in the partial usage category it's durfee the durfee freshman group and the reason for that is because um when i started working with miss finaco a couple of months ago we decided that we were going to assess the ninth
1:27:03graders so that we could set up a tight intervention for next year um as it's written in the turnaround plan and so we've assessed those students and i've gone over personally provided training to teachers on how to assess fluency um for the ninth grade teachers a couple of other grade levels joined in for the fun um and so right now we're set up for a win block that durfee is putting in their schedule
1:27:29for next year and so this data looks a little um deceiving in ways because there are only 56 kids that are actually meeting usage those 56 kids likely come from the three middle schools or the ell or on some separate classrooms at durfee and so very very low usage um what i would say is that if i were to hypothesize why this is the case i would say again like maria said it's a sense
1:28:02of urgency around the teachers um not wanting to give up the core content they have a lot to accomplish in a very short period of time especially in a departmentalized situation and in the um in power up if you're a child who needs this intervention you can have up to 120 minute goal for the year because they're trying to close very wide gaps in order to get kids up to grade level and so
1:28:30where do those 120 minutes come from um during the course of uh middle school or high school day and so and there's also the one-on-one as well or the small group yeah tutorial yeah if they're not meeting their exact expectations there's that additional time as well correctly yep and so and then again who does that and so they're at jerky for example they're going to have interventionists um joining their team
1:28:56and so that interventionist could be a person who supports that lexia um small group instruction um and so i just wanted to explain that this does look a little funky and that's the reason why i can't speak to what supports have gone into um into besides the power of supports that come from lexia i can't speak to what district supports have been given to the secondary schools around usage i just
1:29:24don't know the answer to that at this point um you can see on the next slide the usage category by grade that there it there are some students in sixth seventh and eighth grade who are using the program and again if you die dig a little bit deeper those students are the majority of those students come from henry lord morton and talbot so on the next slide the all students
1:29:49progress in power up this is looking at all students meaning all three categories and how they've progressed over the course of the year and on the next slide you see that same bar graph but for students the 56 students who are meeting usage and so you can see the significant difference and again it goes back to if we get the students on and they meet their required minutes we're going to see the progress that um
1:30:19that is expected of them so i think this shows exactly what mr aguirre was saying if we know this is the case then why is it not happening for all students that need this particular intervention um on the following slide in the last slide actually it just there are just some highlights that have come out of the data and i wanted to share out some of the things that we've learned and
1:30:44that we can spread as we move into next year while i when i am supporting secondary ela um and so i did reach out to henry lord talbot and morton to find out what was going on over there and why the uptick and so some of the things that i heard um are things like they're not expecting just the ela teacher to take part in this sometimes it's happening in the tech
1:31:07time sometimes it's happening in the wind block sometimes it's happening in social studies in ela that humanities world there's a level of accountability on the part of um of the teacher so uh administrators and support staff are looking at lesson plans and um walking through classrooms to support teachers in any way that they can are morning announcements on this lexia leader board like who is meeting them
1:31:34and their minutes and who's you know who is meeting them and it's highlighting those students and again like extra professional development um on the part of both the lexia team and the school-based team to um help teachers better understand the why of lexia which i was speaking to dr carley earlier i feel like that's what's missing in secondary if i were guessing teachers i in even fourth and fifth grade
1:32:01honestly teachers don't understand the why and the research behind the program um in order to say this is worth the time for our kiddos right now lexiera is doing um i i've been in contact with alexa about doing an impact study how are our kids doing are kids that are meeting their minutes um how are they doing on other assessments are we seeing that transfer over to um something that's less personalized
1:32:34any questions no i mean just comment it's we all know that you learn to read and then read to learn so i understand that teachers may feel the need to address time to other subject matters that are also very important but the reality is if they stood you know they they use the curriculum the way they should be using the curriculum that's going to help us in the long run with comprehension in in all subject areas
1:33:06so yeah that's something i again i agree with that mr again was saying earlier i'm sure not speaking for uh for everybody here but i think we all agree there needs to be a focus on making sure everybody's on the same page because clearly the numbers are showing it's benefiting you know our students i don't have any questions though so thank you this last slide was for the k-12 both presentations yeah so this was
1:33:34like a combined one when you write 91 percent of meeting usage students it's not just these 56 kids it's the correct other ones and then basically it's highlighting exactly what you were saying yes because i see k the two skills of working on some k to 2 foundations on cadence is that k through two grades like a different what does that mean so you could be a high school student who falls into what they're calling a
1:34:02k-2 zone which is a little tricky so when we assess some of our students i had done some fluency assessments with one in the school to um show as a video for the teachers that i was training and so i was assessing students and recording it um and i happened to record a little boy that i don't know a ninth grade student so he was um he was my chart one of my target
1:34:28students in addition to that he took the lexia power up he was disfluent but not disfluent to the point that i was like holy moly um and his comprehension was mediocre but he was able to tell me general understanding of the passage that he write to me when he took the lexia placement test he fell into the two zone for um anemic awareness and so there are some like
1:34:51when i looked at it i thought how could this boy be in this particular um category and so you know i i questioned some of that data around the phonemic awareness with the with the big kids um and so yeah but it's catered to doesn't necessarily mean it's only children in canada too right about the skills basically you know okay so it's obviously the same i'd have a lot of the same thoughts
1:35:17we need to just do uh absolutely we need to focus on instruction a little bit more in this district in my opinion and uh you know i have my own thoughts on how we we can sort of get there with a leadership model that's going to focus on this but you ask like oh somebody said what are you doing in my mind if i had a child that was in need of reading and i'm in
1:35:37whatever grade it is i would expect the school district to say you're going into a class intervention class whatever it's called i don't really care what the parent says i don't care what anybody says you need this skill you are going into that class and i think we're so afraid to just do that well i think that's the purpose of the wind block right and if we're saying everyone will have a wind block and what
1:36:00i need is lexia to support me then that's what i should be doing um and that's what the expectation is as we move forward everyone consistently has this block of time um call it what you want win skills it doesn't matter but the expectation is if i'm a kid that's flagged as needing this in the middle school i better be on it because it's it's working right so we have a wind
1:36:21block where i can go play volleyball well i could go to this we need to make that decision to say no like i think sometimes we get into this oh we can't say no to somebody yeah but we can't say no this is mandated but we're going to be stuck with y'all we're going to be stuck with the results because we're going to come on you're like sure what are you doing i think people need to
1:36:36just be told this is what we you know have the wind block we also talked about was going to be the earlier presentation that's where we're going to do this other stuff like you know uh advisory wind blocks this and that like we can't use that time six different ways right so it's the wind block is that synonymous at that turf wind blocking advisory uh no i mean it they're i think that it's divided up
1:37:03into different days yeah i don't i think that i think it might be that wind block doesn't run every day right okay i think that's the thing some days would be advisory some days if you ask me the priority from this school committee member this needs to be the priority so the wind block this like even that violence prevention thing sounded great this would trump that in my opinion so i
1:37:28just think it's and i said it right out i think it's going to be a hard thing to implement that therefore high school with 2 300 students and this can't just be well if we can pull the wind block off for 2 300 students like i'm just thinking of a high school schedule and i work in high school if i had this data on my children i'd be saying no this is your intervention
1:37:48class three times a week this is what you're doing because we need you to get to grade level and this and that's like you need to schedule it and use our resources to put a person in that room to teach that class that's just that's just my two cents on it but um i do appreciate that the data's just gonna keep on like asking more questions but i think it's important for us to see
1:38:10we're gonna do it and it has to be with fidelity across the board so with that ideal
1:38:26i would say we should bring this to the full committee myself well the contract's going to the committee anyway for a year or two so but i do think that this is a valuable maybe like now that we've got some questions convinced that maybe have to have the data broken down accordingly but maybe like condense it so that the full committee just that's just my suggestion that we as a school committee and i've been
1:38:50here for a long time haven't pushed for this kind of thing so i appreciate superintendent bringing this forward these conversations are good conversations but the full committee should get a couple pager on this is what it is and then the chair's gonna report out on what right happened but if i wasn't at the meeting i don't happen to watch it this is important so thank you thank you thank you thanks
1:39:13all right so we're not going to motion to refer we're just going to get it i think she's going to put it on just on that what you're going to put on my channel okay uh next obviously uh 0.05 discussion social studies curriculum update okay update on social studies so um this past spring um we started looking at materials for the elementary grades and social studies grades three to five basic
1:39:42essentially social studies at the elementary level has there's been very little over the past 15 years it's not just a full river um that was that was like this many districts across the state basically um focused on ela and math over the past 15 years and social studies got short shrift so we're looking now to um purchase or to implement curriculum that will basically improve literacy
1:40:12and improve social studies content so this past spring um we highlight we um we asked teachers and ela coaches we had 25 approximately 25 volunteers to review two sets of curricular materials and give us their opinion we use the rubric from the massachusetts studies textbook review that was shared with us by desi and basically they've looked at two different sets and their opinions
1:40:49they basically liked both of them and there was things they didn't like with with with them as well so what we're going to do for next year and we're meeting about it is to ask teachers to pilot some units from each of these curricular um resources and to see which one we'll we'll eventually choose so um we will be piloting in grades three four and five one of the curricular units is history
1:41:22alive it's popular throughout the state in certain districts another one for grades four three four and five is an open social studies curriculum it was developed by people at boston university and it's a free curriculum and it's used by boston public schools at the moment and they like it so they're the two main curriculums for grades four and five history alive and open social studies
1:41:51at grade three there's a popular textbook that's used by many districts throughout the state and a lot of our teachers have expressed that they like it also and that's massachusetts our home we had that back in the 2000s grade three history yeah grade three is local history grade 4 is north american geography and grade 5 is u.s history so for middle school the focus has been on the new civics
1:42:25course which is in grade 8 and on friday as you know we had a project students from all the middle schools presented their projects at government center was a lot of fun this was our first year that all the middle schools were created projects to to um to submit to generation citizen the morning went very well the projects that were selected ended up going up to boston yesterday and it was a statewide event in boston
1:43:02at the kennedy institute it was a great morning it was very well organized students from all over the state were there it was a great opportunity there were some middle school students there was high school students and they presented and then they listened to speakers as well and generation citizen then awarded prizes to those projects that they they thought merida winning one of our teachers received an award
1:43:37he received an award as the change maker um um teacher for the state he's a new teacher at henry lord yep jared hatch and it was quite an honor for him to be selected so great job um we are also in the process of reviewing textbooks for grade eight um there is no textbook they were given when we when we started this course four years ago we purchased we the people
1:44:11they're a group out of boston um they're they're they have like a curricular resource it's not enough for teachers last year we had a committee take a look at the different textbooks that were available out there and the one they liked the most was out of print and it's by pearson learning so a lot of these textbook companies have basically been caught off guard with the you know rush to purchase books
1:44:38over the past couple of years so they said that they will have a textbook ready for us in the fall to review so hopefully by springtime we will know what textbooks we want to purchase for grade 8 and we can move forward for the 23 24 school year for next year also we're going to be renewing our contract with generation citizen at this point it's really not a contract it's just it's
1:45:06well it is a contract but it's it's very little money it's about two thousand dollars every year that we've worked with them the cost has gone down because our needs for support have also decreased um generation citizen is the action civics project organization they are at this point i think pretty much across the country they started out at brown university we basically were one of the first
1:45:38communities or districts in the state to get on board with them this is our fourth year with generation citizen um the first two years it was morton and talbot that were involved and we expanded it then covert got in the way last year it was um through zoom and this year was the first year that all five eighth grade schools our schools with eight great classes participated in the program
1:46:07their goal of course as i mentioned is for us to become sustainable they offer pd they offer curricular resources they've been excellent with outreach communication they really have been a great organization and students love the project they love doing the project it's a 10 week project that we do in the spring and then for high school this past year 9th graders were introduced to pre-ap classes coursework
1:46:43getting them ready to take the apa exam the pre-ap curriculum is basically around the skills whereas the actual ap course itself is around content there's been a lot of interest a lot of students have taken the pre-ap course and next year then we'll go into the ap classes so durfee is requesting that they purchase ap human geography books and ap us history books to cope with the extra demand for these courses
1:47:18so that's photoshop thank you i have a question well comment a couple of questions what what i would like to see and that was a lot of writing i would like to have that uh like a document uh stating which like which grades are doing what what okay correct what they're using for the curriculum what classes are doing it what schools just i don't know so we can see it okay
1:47:43um i couldn't catch up like between history life open school studies uh third grade massage but then you said okay america this u.s history so just basically a you know a nice spreadsheet uh giving us those details um i'll yield for now so you you mentioned that the the civics course the eighth grade students they don't have currently have a textbook not something that's going to be worked on
1:48:11yes navigated this year for the following year so my question is what are they using now is this mimic throughout our eighth grade classes or is it i'm an eighth grade teacher i'm gonna use this material kevin's an eighth grade teacher in a different school he's going to use that material well they're all given copies of we the people which is a supplemental it's it's not really a t a
1:48:33textbook um i don't know if any of you are familiar with it they're an organization they've been around a while so they have that as a resource i civics has also done a lot a lot of work and a lot of our teachers use icivex icivix is an online program it's free it is aligned to the massachusetts framework the person who runs the massachusetts end of ice civics it's a national organization is david buchanan he was
1:49:04the head of literacy for mcas development for desi and now he's working there so they produce really good resources so teachers have access to that so basically teachers have access to a few different things and choosing what they are but it would be nice for them to have an actual textbook with a teacher edition and um you know workbooks or whatever and really good like different different
1:49:28types of primary resources that you'll get in a textbook correct yeah sure i agree okay assistance and consistency yeah yeah okay but then i yelled so i i think that that's oh is that here's the question that eighth grade doesn't only have civics though right don't they nope that's it that's the whole so they've morphed the other six and seven so six all the topics we got moved a couple years ago with the realignment
1:49:53yeah the scope and sequence so grade six is world geography and ancient history one then grade seven is world geography in ancient history two our focus is mainly on asian history and then on eighth grade is just civics but there is like an extensive framework of learning standards for civics um and the action civics by generation citizen is the last 10 weeks of the school year basically i mean they get a lot of um
1:50:26um grounding in in you know the framework of this country you know the institutions foundation supreme court cases and then they go into the action civics project that's just a small part of the whole year can you i don't want to see the whole curriculum because that's probably too extensive but if we can give a top level of what does the scope and sequence look like i'm just curious to see because
1:50:49it's probably more than civics when you hear civics it's only yeah it's probably more extensive but if you get to send that to us i'm just curious but i do support all the ap stuff makes makes a lot of sense and um all i would say is if the money for the textbooks next year maybe we should purchase that and the spring you know some may have them ready yeah you're saying if they come up with
1:51:13a textbook in november yeah like presented now like don't wait until yeah in order to see what i mean because so i i do appreciate and i agree with uh miss laravey on the one page or two page or whatever it is to summarize yeah sorry i wrote that up at the kennedy institute yesterday morning on my laptop it's okay no no no but i think it's more than just this
1:51:32as a whole for social studies i've said this in the other meetings too i think we need to make all of the departments as robust as we can knowing that some take more priority but the more that we present like this is our framework of what we expect for social studies it's going to let people know we're taking it a little more serious than just like a push a push
1:51:51inside so yeah just an fyi um you know the framework is new well it's relatively new we came out in 2018 and um the fordham institute out of dc is think tank reviews all the frameworks and what kids are learning across the country and massachusetts has was one of three or four i believe states that got a's for their new civics curriculum they said it's an excellent curriculum thank you very much on to new business
1:52:22i mean business i have won a new business which i meant to ask in the esl presentation just get a update on the dual language program i will include that on fridays yeah just like to know you know and the obstacles and successes how the teachers felt stuff like that but anything else we're going to do a second one favorite all right hi thank you do you want to take this water back in