(object banging) - I now call this meeting the School Board of Independent SchoolDistrict 624 to order. Before we begin, I justwanna read something and we'll see if we do this every meeting. The mission of the White BearLake Area School District, the community at the forefront of educational excellence,honoring our legacy and courageously building the future is to ensure each studentrealizes the unique talents and abilities and makesmeaningful contributions with local and global impact through a vital system of systems, distinguished by students who design and create their own future. A culture that respectsdiverse people and ideas, safe and nurturing andinspiring experiences, exceptional staff and familiescommitted to student success, abundant engaged community partners. And that is our district mission. So to ground us in that,I read it to begin. And my goal would be thatbefore every meeting, we can allow one boardmember to read that. And with that said, I'm gonna ask the clerk to call the role. - Arcand.- Here. - Daniels here. - Skaar.- Here. - Streiff Oji.- Here. - Thompson.- Here. - All right, our first discussion item is B1, Central Middle School. Let y'all come up, welcome. - Thank you for having us tonight. We are really excited to have a moment justto brag about Central. For those of you whohaven't met Len Elvin, I asked him to come with me tonight. He is our associate principal and has been a reallyimportant part of this work. And then I also just wannaacknowledge that Ali Losey, Kelly Murrow and Shelley Johnson, who work in the building also came to support us in this process. So as we were thinkingabout how we present at the end of the year versus how we present atthe beginning of the year, thought I would take a little bit of time just to talk about themiddle school experience and what it's like tobe in a middle school and to work in a middle school. And here's what I know to be true. Because we have all attended school, we bring long held beliefsabout middle school shaped by our ownexperiences and memories. However, truly understanding and supporting middle school students is more complex thanthose experiences alone. Middle school is a time of rapid change and growth as students learnto balance new privileges and responsibilities, whilebecoming more independent. Today we will give you aglimpse into the complexity of the work we do at Central Middle School to build a community alignedwith our school mission. Our school mission has many similar itemsto the district mission. And a few things that Ijust wanted to highlight that we always come back to with this is we're always talking about how are we being equitable, safe and supportive for students. How are we creating a culturewhere people are open-minded, they have integrity, empathy, and respect for each other that we cultivate student agency and joy. I think joy in today's world is a really important place to just pause. How are we providing andmodeling joy for students and that we are in partnership. In education, we talk alot about relationships and we're all about relationships. But at Central, we really tryto take it one step further and say, how are we allreally in community together? And how are we teachingkids who are ages 11 to 14 to be in community together? - The middle school student, every time I tell somebodyI work in the middle school, they pat me on the back and be like, whew, thankyou for your service. I say, I'm not in the military, I just work in the middle school. But. (people laughing) So there are, you know, some misconceptions aboutmiddle school students. Some of them are the studentsare mean, rude and defiant. Middle school students areemotional and hormonal. The students care only aboutfriends and peer influences. And students can't think critically about complex topics and ideas. And the one misconceptionthat really stands out is the grades don't matter. You know, at some point in time, some of these may have been true, but the one about the grades don't matter, they might not matter as toimpact if you get into a college or not, but they definitelymatter what the skills and the habits that you're building. You know, the foundation. And we know how importantthe foundation is for trying to build something up. And then they also matter in the sense to help build confidence and provide areas ofstrength, areas of growth. So grades not matter, that's, you know, one of amisconception that's out there. But it's really, it is a misconception because the things thatthey're doing in middle school, academically, socially, they really do matterin like the foundation and building the kids up. The truths, middle school students' brains are in a period ofrapid growth and change. Middle school students strugglewith executive functioning. Middle school students care deeply about fairness and justice. Middle school students push boundaries, take risks as they learn independence. Middle school students are self-conscious and feel like everyone is watching them. Middle school studentswant adult connections. And middle school studentsare not mini adults. They'll tell you they are,but we know that they're not. But I mean, one truth that's not there is that middle schoolstudents wanna succeed. They want to do well academically. And it talks about that adult connection. They want good relationships with the adults in the building, the students in the building, they want to feel that sense of joy that she talked about and that love and just being successful and being, putting their mind to a task and being able to complete it. - Besides understanding thestudents, there's a lot of work that goes into being amiddle school teacher. I started my work as amiddle school teacher and I've chosen to be amiddle school administrator because I love working in middle school and I love working withmiddle school teachers. We have focused a lot this yearon our collective efficacy. And teacher collectiveefficacy is the belief that teachers working together can positively impact student performance. And I've said to my teachersrepeatedly, your work matters. There's too many narrativesout in the public that are negative about teachers, negative about the work that we do. And I always remind myself,I don't have to do this work, I get to do this work. And so I am so proud of the way that our staff comes togetherto support each other in service of students. With that this yearwe've had three focuses that have really guided our work. Really talking with students about their purpose for learning. Why are you here, whyare you in middle school? Why does it matter? When we do that, students buy in and then talking aboutthe quality of questioning and student status and thosereally go hand in hand. How are we asking students questions to deepen their thinking? And how are we we lifting their voices and helping them to learn and to ask questions of each other? We choose to see their strengths before their struggles, which doesn't mean that we don't see the struggle, but we know that when webuild on student strengths, we will increase their confidence and we choose to give them aclear purpose and direction. We wanna make this alittle bit visible for you. 'cause often you likehear about these things in the abstract and teacher actions have great impact on student achievement. I took the opportunity tojust talk with the teachers and I asked them two questions. The first question I asked was, what have you gotten better at this year? And what has that donefor student learning? And I wanna bring, youcan read the things here. These are a summary ofcommon themes that showed up, but I wanna bring someof their voices to light. One language arts teacher said, I've gotten better at questioning, putting more back on students. Students have been pushed to respond at a higher level to text. We are reading in class andhelp others with responses. Our tech ed teachersaid, I'd like to think I've gotten better at getting my students to understand what they're learning has real life connections. I feel that this buy-in from students has improved their learning. Another teacher said, I'vealways prioritized relationships, but this year I've prioritized getting to know students even more by having conversations for a few minutes at thestart and end of class. This has allowed me to show students how much I care about them personally. A social studies teacher said, enhancing student voice in the classroom, students have been ableto make their voices heard in our classroom community and this has allowed them tobecome better critical thinkers and to see themselves in our world. I appreciate we have ouradministrative assistant in our student supportcenter and she supports all of our counselorsand our social worker and our school psych. So she sees a lot ofkids when they come in and they might be heightened emotionally. They're having some sort of concern. And she said, I feel like my patience and problem solving skillshave improved as I've worked with smaller and largergroups of middle schoolers, teaching them step-by-step techniques towards reaching a goal because she is the face that they first see when they come in and she helps them to beable to problem solve. And then one of our specialeducation teachers said, "I feel like I've grown in my ability to ask inquiry questions thathelp students push themselves and to think for themselves and apply math concepts innew skills they're learning." And that this continues to be an area that she wants to grow and develop. Especially being ableto provide opportunities for all students throughout the school. The second question Isaid is, if you did this and this was the learning that you had, what are you actually most proud of? Because what I've learnedabout the teacher psyche and especially at thistime of the year is, is we care really deeply about kids and we're always reflective and we'll say, yep, wedid this really well, but I'm still not good enough at this. I still need to do better here. So you're constantly workingthrough that cycle of like, what else can I do and how can I give more and more and more? And I really just wantedto hear from teachers, just pause and recognize,what are you really proud of? And one teacher said, I'm most proud of implementing a newcurriculum with fidelity and getting student feedback, voice and choice to makethis curriculum even better for students next year. I'm proud of celebratingstudents on a personal level. It's rewarding to watch them light up when I can put it on display and make their learning public and they can reallycelebrate who they are. I am proud of partneringwith families, teachers and students to provide eightdifferent groups this year in topics of mindfulness,a girl's leadership group, test anxiety, impulsecontrol, and family change. Our counselors are proud of earning the RAMP designation from ASCA. And I just wanna pause for asecond to acknowledge this. Central school counselingprogram has been identified and recognized as a ASCA model program by the American SchoolCounselor Association. Central is one of 12 schools in Minnesota to receive this recognition this year and one of 208 in the country. There are fewer than 2000 schools with this recognition nationwide. It requires evidence of a data informedschool counseling program that's aligned with the national model for school counseling. This includes evidence of direct and indirect services tostudents, program planning that incorporates ASCA student standards and improved outcomes as a result of the school counseling program. We also had teachers say,I'm proud of how my students support each other in middle school, where they support each other. They make concerted effortsto include their peers and are mindful of greeting each other and encouraging each other's success. I wish that more adults, quite honestly in the world would pause to do that for each other. I'm really proud thatwe've created a community of middle school students where they can do this for each other. - Student and family voice.- Oh sorry. - It's okay, some student voice, they talked about supportive environment and learning, variousinstructional methods. Students prefer fun games forlearning, hands-on projects and group work, partner choice, bear time, studentsenjoy choice activities such as grade level tournaments, gym time, homework and study time. And sometimes they justlike to be in the space with their friends and they can just chill and not do anything and not have any rules or anything to go back and just sit back and have 20 minutes tothemselves just to be teenagers. Students appreciate thefive minute passing time and the warning bell tohelp manage their time. We've been creating new clubs and talking with studentsabout different things that they are interested in after school. So we have continued to offera wide variety of clubs, after school activities andfun events like assemblies, after school parties and our snack bar. A couple of directquotes for some students that they just talked about onthe day to day in the school and things that help themfeel supported and success. I like when adults in theschool know me as a person. They care about me without giving up. 'Cause middle school isthe land of mistakes. Kids make mistakes all the time, but being able to not give up on them and really support them. And then another studentsaid, treat them with respect and then also provide supportand a sense of belonging. And we use that with someof our clubs well too. Just trying to createspaces for people to have some support and somebelonging within our space. Some family voice, what we're doing well, communication and engagement. Some families appreciate the communication including daily and weekly emails. Teacher communicationregarding assignments and tests, proactive teacher reach out about issues or positive feedback and communication with boththe parents and the students. Student activities and support,teaching and curriculum. The staff and environment,we're really trying to build on some of thethings that we are doing well or families enjoying becausewe always want to make a welcoming space that families are interested in coming into the building to our different events. So we're always trying to get feedback and get information from families or things that we can offer to increase just the overallengagement within the families to get them into our space. Areas for improvement, studentbehavior and accountability. Communication and information access, enrichment and academic structure, programming and wellness. So the communication and information is really totry to find a happy medium because some sixth grade families who just come into middle school, they want all of theemails, all of the calls and then some families who arein the eighth grade are like, I've been talking to you for three years, like I know who you are, I don't. So just trying to find thathappy medium, that space that we can get everybody the information that they need in a timely manner. And student behavior and accountability. We really work to try to createpartnerships with families. No, I talked about the mistakes that will be happening in middle school, but some small, some big. But we always try to work with families to help to talk with themthrough those situations and figure out a solutionthat works for everybody. But sometimes there aresome difficult conversations that we have to have with families, but just that communication and that partnershiphelp us make it through some of those tougher conversations. - A few things that we havedone based on the feedback, it mentioned the RAMP designation, we are also participating with Avid, we are doing a teacher and student agency survey andI just wanna give a shout out. We've had 25 career guest speakers in to talk with ourAVID students this year. And they are people that range anywhere from graduating directly from high school and going into the workforce, to people who have advanced degrees. And so across variety of different jobopportunities, we've partnered with the White Bear Lake Police Department with their net smartsinternet safety presentation. We've had a partnershipwith Career Pathways and hosted a eighth grade career fair. By the end of the year, every student at Centralwill have received a positive postcard from a staff member acknowledging a way that they have contributed to the school or where we have seen their growth. And then several other, youknow, opportunities as well. And with that we have some results. And so we have some datathat backs this up as well. - Our sense of belonging, a 9.6% growth. So we asked the question,I feel like I belong. And then a 9.6% growth to this year to I feel like I belong in my community. So that's something we'rereally trying to build on and create a safe space for students to feel like they belong. A sense of respect, 12.3% growth from 2025 to end 2025 compared to 2024. So it says I feel socially accepted and then this year, I feel valued and respected in my school community. And then a 19.4% growth in caring adults. If I had something on my mind, my teacher would carefully listen to me compared to there's at least one adult in the school I can talkto who cares about me. So there are just, it'sbeen growth in those, these questions that we askstudents about just that space that we're trying to createof a warm, safe environment that kids definitely feel like they belong and that they're supported. - I believe that whenstudents have physical and psychological safety, theyfeel a sense of belonging. They feel like they'rea part of a community and we've seen that wehave had growth in that, that in turn then leads to a space where students are ableto take academic risks and to challenge themselves. This is our MCA reading data. I know MCAs are important, I know how important theyare to the community. And as a mom of two children, I also know that my kids are more thanjust one data point in time. And as I've said to mystaff, we have to be able to tell the story behind this data. And so as I look at 23, 24 versus 24, 25, our sixth grade has remainedrelatively flat and our seventh and eighth grade have continued to grow. I believe a huge piece of that is because how we are working to develop community within the school and how we're helping kids to see themselves be a part of the school. We see this in both reading and we see this in math for students. Am I satisfied with these scores? Absolutely not. But do I know thatthere's more to the story? Absolutely. As I think about movingforward, I really wanna continue to think about the student experience and the sense of belonging. Creating places forstudents to be physically and psychologically safe. And as we are thinkingabout our continued work, we'll continue to dosome of the same things that we have done throughout the year. And one thing I asked my staff today 'cause we were with them, Isaid, as you have reflected and we were doing some self-assessment based on the teacher evaluation. What is one area of strength that you have and what's one area that you think we need to grow next year? And it doesn't have tobe a point of weakness, it can be a point of strengththat we can build on. And I went through all of those Post-its, and interesting to me 'cause where people and staff are feeling the strongest is in their classroomenvironment and culture. And that's what we're seeing in our data and places that they say,hey, we really need support and we wanna continue togrow is in our assessment and in how do we continue to further engage studentsin their academics. So that's a little bitabout a day in the life of middle school, questions. - [Speaker] Well thank you. We can open the floorto questions, go ahead. - Thanks for the report, was great. Really like hearing aboutCentral Middle School. I spent many years at Central myself. I love the building, I love the school, I love that age group, like you, I just, I found my fit there. So with all the newconstruction and the new spaces and the new cafeteria and all those things, how has that impacted theyear four students overall? I mean, you know, I knowit's a long projection and how it impacts, but just what you'reseeing this first year with all that new space. - I am so grateful to have the space. My first year, we actually had a classroom in the media center. We were so packed, we wereall on top of each other. And when kids are justall on top of each other, there can be a lot of like tension. And just having space has been fantastic, to be able to have kidshave space to spread out. Having one side of thebuilding for sixth grade has really helped to smooth the transition and giving them just sortof their own little house and their own little home to be able to transitioninto middle school and then having seventh andeighth grade on the other side. Our new cafeteria isabsolutely phenomenal. We can have threelunches in the cafeteria. We have 325 to 350 studentsthat are in and out and they know how to handlethose rituals and routines and they absolutely loveall of the outdoor spaces and the new gym spaces. Middle school studentslove to move and be active. So being able to have a variety of those spaces has been great. I also think I justwanna thank the community because when we invest in our kids and our kids have seen these spaces, they know how valuedthey are in the community and how much the community values them and we take time to remindthem of that as well. - Just one other question, whenyou're comparing sixth grade to sixth grade last year and this year? Seventh, seventh, eighth, eighth. Those are different groupsthough, each year, right? So it was last year sixth graders, this year sixth graders. - Correct. - So there's that too. That kind of factors into test scores. - Absolutely. - It's a different group. - Absolutely, it's adifferent group each year. And so we will take timesometimes to look at it by cohort, like what does it looklike from that sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade? And then sometimes wealso look at it by grade because sometimes we'llnotice, gosh, there's a pattern of something that's happening and what can we learn fromour sixth grade teachers or gosh, eighth grade's reallymaking gains for our kids. What can we learn so we canfigure out what's happening in the system to support kids. - Thank you. - Okay, thank you, other questions? - So thank you for sharingabout Central Middle School and looking at some of the data, your 19 point gain in caring adults and kids that feel thatthey have caring adults is really commendable, actually, also with the sense of belonging and growth in middle school, that's huge. So I really appreciate you sharing that and the focus that youhave on the whole child and not just that academic score and then yeah, just really appreciate the whole child picture and the work that you all are doing to really make sure kids feel safe and willing to take risksso that they can gain and grow academically as well. - Thanks, thank you. - All right, Mr. Skaar. - Thank you. Thank you for thepresentation, appreciate it. And when you were, earlier in your presentation you mentioned that some people werelike down on teachers and I know I read a WallStreet Journal article that showed teachers satisfaction level was going down, trending downand turnover was going up. This is nationally, I'm not talking aboutthis particular district. Can you add any color to that comment that you just mentioned? I'm interested in that. - 100%, I absolutely can. Like you say, you've read that article. I think if you're on socialmedia you can find, you know, comments on social media feeds. I think when sometimes there are, sometimes there's misconceptions about what's actually happening in school. I think teacher turnover, we are consistently askingteachers to do more and more and more and know the kids, right? And it's a really, really complex job. And I wanted to take this opportunity to say it's also a jobthat's really worthy. It's a job where are highly skilled and they're highly trained professionals. These are people who havegraduate level degrees, who have studied what itmeans to be a learner. And I wanna disruptsometimes the narrative that is out there in theworld about what it means to be an educator or to be in education and to bring that forward. And my hope today was really to exemplify also what is their voice. Here are the things thatare actually happening, so that we as all leaders and members in this communitycan step out in the community and say, actually when I hearsomebody saying something, here's what I know ishappening at Central. Here's what teachers are doing at Central, here are some of thestrengths that they have. Because I think it takes all of us to bring that narrative forward and I just want people toreally value the educators and to really value themiddle school students. There's lots of misconceptionsabout middle school students and they're really importantpart of our community. - Thank you, you know, Ihave an idea, you know, I was talking with ateacher from the district, he's retired now, he wasretiring a couple years ago. He was I think a fifth grade teacher and he went into the doctor, you know, he went into like urgent care emergency and the doctor was his fifth grade student and he told him what an impact he had because his kid was having problems and he took him aside,talked to him, coached him up and I thought it was a really good story. So those stories are really helpful, I think could be helpful, if you guys think it's worth it. But I think when youhear the success stories of a teacher that had such asignificant impact on a kid, you know, and they remember it, it's kind of important. How many kids from our middle school go to White Bear Lake High School? Is it 90%, 80%? - I am not gonna havethe exact number on that, but I would say themajority of our students transition from eighth grade to ninth grade at the high school. - But we don't have a percentage. - I am not gonna quote a number because I don't have that and I'd wanna be accuratewith you on that. - I think it'd be helpful because that's kind of, when students transition to a different district or go to private schools, it's like at theelementary, it's at the end of junior high, you know what I mean? That kind of thing. So I think that's a goodmetric for us to look at. What's our capacity at the middle school, how many do we have enrolledat the middle school and at Central and then what'sour capacity, do you know? - Yeah, I have about 958 students. And it's about evenacross all three grades and it looks to be almost theexact same number next year. And really proud of the fact that our students have stayed and we've had some studentsthat have come back also from, you know, other either online or charter options. And the building can hold more than that given the expansion of the building. - So you have capacity to grow. - Absolutely. - Let me see if I can understand, oh, the disciplinary trends, the DRR trends we heardfrom the high school that I think on April 13th that their trend was like 40% down and their attendance went up. So we're saying that maybethat's a direct corollary. How is that, do you guys know off the top of your head? - Yep, I follow discipline all the time. I would say philosophically I believe that if kids aren't inschool, they aren't learning and if they aren't inclass, they aren't learning. As Mr Van said, we reallywork in partnership to be able to problem solve because what we do know to be true is middle schoolersare gonna make mistakes and so we're gonna work withthem through those mistakes. Over the course of the years that I have been here, our out of school suspensionshave continued to drop and have been amongst thelowest in the district and our attendance rates have increased. And so we have seen that and now we've really seenthese also big jumps. Not only our kids in school and know that when they makemistakes they have a space where they're gonna be held accountable and they have to learn andthey have to repair the harm but they're also gonnabe valued for themselves and be able to overcome those mistakes because there are caring adults and they're going to be,also, when they make mistakes with each other, theadults are gonna help them to learn how do you solve those problems? And then we've seen growth inour academics because of that. - Thank you, and then whenyou're looking at those charts, you had it divided into one, two, three, four, what does that mean? What are the one, two, three, four mean? - Sure they're two different surveys. So we just looked at like whatare some correlational data. One was our bar survey that wegave at the end of last year and one was our studentexperience survey this year. And so it is from something where it goes from, you know, most agree, somewhat agree, somewhatdisagree to least. And so it's in next year. - So number four would bewhere they strongly agree? - Correct. - Okay, and that's a good metric to track. So the trend line forthose that strongly agree, that's kind of where you want to be. So when that goes up, that's a good thing comparatively to the other categories, I would just based on mypast experience with that. I was looking at the MCA scores and, you know, when you lookat, as I've said before, you gotta look at the trend. The trend is up inseventh and eighth grade and that's a good thing, as opposed to looking at theraw scores, the trend is good, it's flat in the sixth grade. Have you guys delineated from the scores based on which elementary school they came from? I mean is it one schooldelivers higher results in sixth grade versusanother elementary school? How many elementaryschools feed into Central? - The schools thatprimarily feed into Central are Otter Lake, Oneka,North Star and Lincoln. We have a few kids that come from Mitoska, some from Birch and acouple from Lakeaires. But I have not dug intowhich elementary school, what I have dug into islooking at our data to say, what are we doing? Because what we know is that our kids are coming in fifth grade and sometimes there's beena dip in seventh grade from our sixth to seventh grade. I've also dug further into the data because what we've shared here is who are our studentsthat meet or exceed. And I absolutely want studentsto always meet or exceed, but what I do know is that about seven, if I include the kids whoare partially proficient, we're at about 75%. And here's what partiallyproficient means on the MCA. It means that they havesome level of learning but it's up and down. So maybe they haven't masteredit as deeply as possible yet. And middle school is atime of that rapid change. And what I know about ourMinnesota State standards is a lot of them are cyclical and so they're gonna havethat repeated practice. And so we wanna look atwho's met and exceeded. We also really wannadig into who's partial and what do we know and what do we have todo better in the system to support them to bump them back up? - Okay, thank you. - [Speaker 2] Thank you. - All right, Ms. Thompson. - First thanks for the presentation. You guys always do such a good job. One thought I was thinking of just kind of on the sixth grade data is they're transitioningfrom elementary school where they made it to fifth grade, right? You're the oldest kids inschool, you're like the ones that all the other kids are looking up to. So there's this sense of maybeempowerment in the students. So like I made it to fifth grade, I'm almost done now,I'm gonna be a middle. Then they get into middle school and now they're back tokind of starting over in the social aspects of school, right? Like now you're the youngest kids in the school and you're in middle school. It's a whole different world. So I'm wondering if a lot of it could be transitional basedimpacts on their ability to really dig into the work. 'Cause they're in thiswhole new environment and they're learning how to navigate a middle school socially, there's all kinds of things happening. So while we can say thatthey're not just hormonal, they are going througha lot of change, right? And so that may be an impact. And as they finally get into eighth grade, it's like they've made it,they're used to the school now, they're used to the systems, they're used to how things work and they get back to that level again, right? Then they go off to high school and now they're in ninth grade and it's kind of a similar cycle. I feel that we kind of see that in the data when we look at that. - I think that aligns toour sixth grade family saying we would likecontinued and more support and how do we help our studentstransition to middle school? - Yeah, so I think a lot of the questions you're asking and youknow, how do you feel? Are you feeling valued? Are you making thoseconnections with adults? And I think that's all very helpful because it can help them to have somebody to help them go throughthose transitions, right? And feel that they'resupposed to be there, right? And that it's not so scary and nervous. And I had the great honor and pleasure of taking part inthe teacher of the interview, the teacher of theinterview process recently. And our teachers, well A,they're just amazing human beings and I'm so thankful for them. But you hear a lot of thisstory of an elementary teacher who made a relationship witha student in elementary school who is now in high schooland is still reaching out and communicating with that teacher because that teacherwas their person, right? And those connections are so important and it's oftentimes withstudents who have extra baggage that they're bringing to school every day that we don't see, 'causeit's not a notebook or it's lived experiences that they have outside of our school. So I just, all the work and everything that's inhere is really showing what we're doing here in thedistrict to try to address all of those things thatimpact our students. So I'm just thankful for it. And while yes, we alwayswant them to do better and to improve, I've noticed that all the things we're impacting to help remove those systemic barriers are having impacts in our schools. So I just wanna say thank you for that. - [Speaker 2] You're welcome. - All right, well thank you very much. - Thank you.- And we're just proud that our students havean opportunity to learn to make decisions, fail,recover, and move on because that's so importantas they start navigating and they're stuckbetween the child's world and the adult world and thatin between is so important that you play a vital role. So thank you for doing that. - [Speaker 2] Thank you.- Thank you. - All right, we're gonnamove on to discussion B2, Otter Lake Elementary. Welcome Ms. Nelson. - [Nelson] All right, hi,good evening everyone. So Otter Lake is one of the elementaries that feeds into Central. So I guess it's a match made tonight. All right, so tonight I'm gonna focus on our priorities. Just a big overview of Otter Lake, a lot on our academic goals, some really cool student experience things that we've done, some ofwhich you've witnessed, signage outside that was mentioned at the last board meeting. It did not survive thatstorm of last weekend, but students got to bring themhome and it was really cute because they were like, I'mgonna hang this on my door. And it's messages that saidlike, believe in yourself, shine today, don't give up. So super cool, and then what's next? So Otter Lake. So at Otter Lake we arecurrently at over 500 students. We're at 72% white students,18% free and reduced. And then 25% of our populationis special education. We have a huge staff thatis so incredibly amazing and they have over 500 years of combined teaching experience. Some of the most seniorteachers in the district live at Otter and we'reso incredibly happy that they're there, continuing to lead and be mentors for new teachers coming in with as much excitement as they have the firstyear that they started. So programming wise, we have five specialeducation cluster programs. So what that means isstudents are identified at needing a really high level of service and they can come fromanywhere across the district and they'll be bused toOtter to be serviced there. And then we of course have our Spanish dual language program. So this is me reallybragging for a second, but last year we went througha really extensive process as a staff and a parent and student community tobecome a school of excellence. And so the process reallywas that we had to collect extensive data around our academics. We had to fill out extensive rubrics to see in multiple categories that was identified bythe Minnesota Association of Elementary School principals to say, if you do all thesethings, you do them really well, you're a school of excellence, knowing that everything's a process and not everyone's perfect. You also had a highlightgaps that you might have and what your plan was goingto be to address those gaps. And so I call it theOtter Lake Master thesis. I think it's literally70 pages, super proud. And then in the fall of this year, we were awarded a School of Excellence and so had a big community celebration, also celebrated the openingof our brand new playground that the students andfamilies got to help design. So just so much to celebrateto kick off the year. And there's me showingoff some of our awards, bringing about Otterat the MESPA Institute. So here is our Otter LakeElementary priorities. You can see our mission isover there on this side, but what we really focus on honestly is this whole targeted area in the middle. And so ensuring that academicsuccess of each student. And in order to do that we have to, as Catherine and Van mentioned, we have to make sure that they belong, they feel cared for, they feel safe. That's where those true academicscan really start to shine. So their experience matters, their family engagement matters, making sure we look ateverything through a lens of equity matters. And of course our staffwellbeing really matters. People need to enjoy coming to work. There can be some really hard days and you know, I can tell youin our cluster programming, there can be somereally, really hard days. And in the end, people come back and start over new each day. They love and care for thestudents so incredibly much and just love our families. So I wanted to do just alittle comparison data. So we do a lot of tours at Otter Lake. And Otter Lake issituated in a unique spot where families have somechoice, where they tell me, yeah, I see a White Bear bus drive pass, but I also see aCentennial bus drive pass. Or I also know that myneighbor goes to Mounds View. So these are the schools wherefamilies really could choose that is very near our boundary area. And these are straight from MDE, these are MCA scores and you can see that OtterLake, I brag about Otter Lake, I think it's the best place on earth, but really it can showthrough our data as well that our students are achieving at a really high level on MCA scores. And our attendance is actually, I think even higher this year. So really proud of that. Always working and striving to make sure we're notleaving anyone behind and that we know the storyfor every single student who is not achieving at therate that we want them to. But whenever I give thetours, I say, I'm biased. I think Otter is the best, but I would challenge you tofind a better elementary school and most of those families come. It's one of those things where you can look at the data points when you walk in the building. You can feel that you belong. It doesn't matter ifyou're student or family or coming new to the building. So then just a little bit about our academic goals for this year. So that is that 80% of studentswill demonstrate low risk as measured by FastBridge and then that 95% of studentsmeet their IEP goals. We do have all of our students take theFastBridge assessment, and that is to use as a data point for us because that really is what this is. I'm gonna show you ourmid-year data point. It's a dipstick, it's a one time, here's how they're doingit on this particular day. And it gives us reallygreat data for all students, even students who maybe wouldnot take the MCA, right? Maybe that they would take the MTAS and just getting data in a different way. But just as a reminder thatFastBridge is a monitoring tool, it's a screener andthat it is really going to be looking at individual skills. It's to help us create groups for students so we know if they need enrichment, if they need intervention,are they on grade level? it's important data in that way. Whereas the MCA is studentstake all of those things and put them togetherto take the MCA test, which is a much more summative test. All right, so you cansee for kindergarten, our English section, sections,excuse me, I just have it where it's gonna show fall and then winter, you can seethat our kindergartners came in right around the 50% mark and made tremendous growthinto the winter screener. Know that this isobviously really old data I'm actually showing you. So this winter screeneris given in January, right when we come backfrom the winter break, we're gonna be givingthe spring screener here at the very end of May. So who knows when I come back next year, I'll share that data with you too. But huge, tremendous growth and this is our SpanishDual Immersion Program. Students coming in really high. And this is in Spanish. And I kind of referred to this before, but how it works is allkindergartners are required to take an English screener. Then the Spanish immersion students also take Spanish screeners because that is their targeted language that they're gonna be learning. So that is the language in which we want to progress, monitor over time to see gaps that they may have. We also will be keepingtrack of the English portion, but in kindergarten, really the majority of their day is in Spanish. There's minimal English instruction. So we would not continuallyassess them in English and we would not anticipate huge growth because they're getting30 minutes a day only. Okay, all right. And so our first grade here, you can see that when kiddos came intofirst grade, I'll tell you, this group of first graders ended their kindergartenat around 94% low risk. They came back in and had quite a dip. And so working superhard to make some growth, I did take a peek at their data just to see like where are thekiddos that were kind of, oops, on the bubble. And six students have alreadymet their spring growth goal that were in the winterhigh risk category. So like I said, this iskind of lagging data for us, just given the timing of my presentation, but making some growth. Here in second grade, again making tremendous growth. You can see from 75% to 88%, third grade started out at80% and had a slight dip. I am confident that thatwill rebound quite nicely based on all the assessmentsI've seen since this data. Students working super hard,same with fourth grade, came in really high, hadjust a little bit of a dip and they're working reallyhard, doing a great job now. And then kind of thesame with fifth grade, still our low risk category is really something to be proud of, given this kind of just midway checkpoint. And I just wanted tonote on here, you know, how we do look at datatoo is we don't just look at high risk, low risk, we look at multiple different categories. So in between this, there's students who are just like on theMCA, like a partially meets and some of them are one point away, it just happened to be,but they're so close, we are confident they will be low risk to end the school year. Some of our action items that have helped usreach our academic goals is we follow a really strictinstructional schedule. We work hard to make sure thatour students are receiving all of their core subjectareas for the amount of time that's allotted and thatevery single student is receiving the tier one instruction. So that's the instructionthat every student gets. Even though we have a really high special education population, we're very careful about when students are getting pulled forspecialized services and really trying to beas inclusive as possible. We have a reallystructured what I need time and MTSS process where we'rereviewing data every six weeks and carefully considering what skills students will be working on. And we use flexible grouping and so students mayhave a different teacher during that time so that theycan really narrow their focus on what they're working on. We've spent a lot of time thisyear practicing and reviewing and refreshing the letters learning and different and instructional strategies that they learned intheir letters learning. And really now taking our CKLA curriculum with their letters learning to make the curriculumcome even more to life. A strong focus on our team collaboration. Last year we had started a really robust parent volunteer programthat is still going strong. I know some of you have been at Otter and have volunteered,read books, et cetera. This year, we also had students from the high school reach out to us and that is the photo thatyou can see on the slide. They had come to Otter last year to help volunteer at our schoolcarnival and they loved it. And so these two young men said, yeah, we have this new thing where we can do studentgroups on Wednesdays at the high school and we would love to see if students would like to come with us backto Otter and volunteer. I was like, whoa, and this wasin the spring of last year. I thought, okay, that sounds good. I didn't really know whatwould come out of it, but you can see a really largegroup came on Wednesdays. They had their own little name badges, they would check in, theywere assigned classrooms. And really the goal, much like our parentvolunteers is we wanted them to work with students in whatever it was they were doing during that time. So nothing special, it wasn'tgonna be drop everything. Now we're just gonna play a game because our high schoolvolunteers are here. So if they were doingsomething with literacy, the high school kidswere sitting next to them doing literacy or helping with math or playing the math game. Some of them hadspecialists during that time and they were really excited. So they got to play the ukulele in gym and all those things too. So that was a reallysuccessful experiment I'll say, 'cause we weren't surehow it was gonna work out. But they took it very seriously. They did a training, theysigned a code of ethics with us and of course the elementarykids think they're celebrities and want them to come every day. The other thing thatwe worked on this year as a staff is learning walks. And I'm sure you've heard about that over the course of this year with some buildings tryingout different things. But essentially what it was,was we together as a staff, we defined what we felt avision for student learning was. So that is different than our mission. The mission is what we ensure, we are going to ensure students are gonna beable to do X, Y, and Z. A vision for student learning is what is the student experience,what does it look like, sound like, feel like in the classroom? And then what would a teacher do to create a condition to make that happen? Once we narrowed that focus down, we had two focus areas this year. One on student engagement, so active participationand meaning making. And then we also focus on assessment and students constructing learning goals and then tracking theirprogress towards those goals. These are just a couple of snapshots, but what we did was oncewe had defined those areas, created some look fors, teams were able to go into each other's classroom and watch each other'sclassrooms in action. Again, really focused onwhat are students doing and then what is a teacherdoing to make that happen? It was so powerful because we would go intoa classroom one day, the next day we would gointo that teacher's classroom that was an observerand they would already be putting into action something they saw that were like, that was a great idea. I can't believe I've taughtnext to you for 20 years. I never saw you teach before. I can't believe I didn'tknow you did that. So really right away replicating that. And I think a change of culturein terms of allowing people to come into classrooms isthat we are really focused on where do we wannabe is the ideal state. And then wherever we'reat is where we're at. But then we're just gonna takea baby step to move forward. What's the small tweak wecan make in our system, in our routine, in our instruction that will get us to the next step, knowing that we're not gonnabe able all just jump there. So those have gone really well. We did two cycles of learning walks. One was just within their own team as we got used to the process. And then the next timearound, I allowed teachers to choose like what grade level or if there was a specific teacher they wanted to do a learning walk with and then myself, our instructional coach and then the teacher would dothat and then have a debrief. So a lot of learning tookplace this year at Otter, I am excited to see ourMCA reading results. As you know, we don'tget that until far later, which is such a bummer 'cause you know, a third of the students who take it will be on their way toCentral Middle School. But we are really confident in the work that we've done this yearand we're just really excited to see that play out. So for student experience, we do a lot of different things at Otter. So we have, there's afew pictures on here. We do bear awards whereteachers can give students, it's a bear award really recognizing something amazing they're doing. And then once a month we draw and each grade level has three students. They can choose a prize or eat with myself and my building assistant, Molly Franta, and then bring a friendand you would be shocked how many kids want to eatlunch with me and Miss Franta. It's a lot, so it's really exciting. We also have a reallybig read-a-thon event with bringing community readers in. This is our second time that we've had the Black Student Union come and give an assembly. So just so many fun things. The other thing is we'vehad a year long theme of kindness, so Otters for Others, and this was all teacher driven. So two teachers put together, it's like a mini curriculum, each month had a differenttheme related to kindness and it really startedwith kindness to yourself and wellness, branchesout to your classmates, to our school, andfinally to the community and world, which iswhat you saw on display outside of Otter with the signage. With that, they do kindnessjournals every other week. Each student has a little journal and there's prompts that they write in. And then they also have buddy classrooms. And with those buddyclassrooms, there's events and challenges all related to kindness. With the last Buddy challengebeing that we were able to secure some donations and they got to purchasea present, if you will, for their buddy class relatedto something that they did with their challenges and students. I can't even explain toyou how excited they were to pick out what they wanted to purchase for their buddy class. And they're just soexcited to give it to them. The Post Office was like, you guys are not myfavorite people right now. There's so many packages coming to Otter. But students were coming up to me and like begging to get more money because they wanted togive more to their classes. So really amazing. And then we have a really large student ambassadors program at Otter Lake. It's nearly all fourth and fifth graders. It's a service orientated group where there are studentambassador mentors that come in. Is anyone a mentor? I know there's some mentors in this room, but they come in once a month and they'll work with students on, maybe they'll be creatingbirthday bags for Solid Ground. So it's collecting donations and then putting the bags together to have a little birthday party. So cake mix, cards, things like that. And everything is around service. There's a day of service that's coming up the last week of school that all fourth and fifthgraders participate in. And right now we're in themiddle of a big diaper drive and one of the many activitiesthey'll do on that day is actually when youdonate to the food shelf, they like you to pair things down or if you don't, they will for you. They don't just give outfull boxes of things, but they'll package them downto make it more manageable and to go to more families. So really excited about that. And then just really focused on doing so many funthings in the classroom. So one of the pictures upthere eating the chicken leg. Fourth grade had a medieval unit in CKLA. And so for lunch one day, theyworked with our food service and food service made aspecialized lunch for them, which would be what theywould've eaten back then. A chicken leg, it was the funniest thing. Kids dressed up, theythought it was the best. And then we really try to do a lot of community events once amonth, whether it's PTA sponsored or we sponsored at the schoollevel, so a community dinner. We did a game night with Nashke Games and that is AmericanIndian Games, Tanya Flowers is actually in this photo, Ithink this was her second day of work, but also she is anacquaintance of Nashke games. So families came in, theyhad a community dinner and then they got to learn andplay Native American games. It was a blast. So yeah, just trying to do things to bring community together. If you've been to Otter, we'rereally spread out building and so you could go a long time without seeing people in another wing. And the way, you know,elementary school is designed, They all have separatelunches, separate recess. They might not ever really seethe older and younger kids. So we have to create those opportunities. And we do that by some ofthe things I just mentioned. I didn't put our studentexperience score on there, but I think we're right at like 98% of students feeling loved,cared for and safe at school. We'll give our springscore here in just a bit, but future opportunities. So we are actually goingto be starting a new special education clusterprogram at Otter Lake. We will roll Spanish dualimmersion up to first grade. So we'll have kindergartenand first grade. I didn't put this on here, but we're gonna be adding anadditional preschool program. The Tamarack preschool programis just wildly popular. I think it filled in likeone minute or something. And so we'll have three preschoolrooms at Otter next year we're gonna be implementingnew math curriculum. And then we reallystarted this last spring thinking how do we wantstudents to set their own goal to monitor their own learning? And we started small because that's actuallyan interesting task given grade levels. So for example, secondgrade tracked spelling. But what we would reallylike is to expand that, to be thinking moreindividually like a student making their own goal and tracking it. Because we know when you set a goal and track it, you'regoing to see improvement. It's a great way to modelfor our students doing it. And so we're really gonna lean into that even more next year. And then of course thisis our Otter Lake chant that all of our students,we say it every single day. It's adorable. I just met a preschooler this last week who had never met me in person. They've met me in person many times. My hair was up, but they're like, I only ever see you on the TV. And I was like, okay, yes, celebrity. All right, so with thatI'll take questions. - Well, thank you, I justhave a quick question about the FastBridge. I know that each year they take it, but as they go on, the rigor increases, so that also affects the scores, right? - Yeah, and actually I'm really glad that you brought that up. So they take it three times a year and that is mandated bythe state of Minnesota. When they take it in the fall, it's not a review from last year. They're already, youknow, jumping up a little. But fall the winter is a really big jump for every single grade. And then winter to spring,it still increases. Not as big of a jumpas from fall to winter, but it is significant howmuch harder it gets, yes. - [Speaker] Okay. - Thanks. - Ms. Streiff Oji? - [Speaker 2] So can you share,like you talked about CKLA and aligning that withthe letters training, there's lots of questions thatI hear and get about that. How are you going about doingthat to deepen the knowledge and skills of your teachers? - So the letters learning really, I came from an avid school. We're not an avid school, but many of the strategiesare just high impact, best practice teaching strategies, maybe with a differentlabel, might be labeled avid, might be labeled letters. It's very similar. So when we have ourprofessional development, I model all of those. And so what I do is wemight be reading an article on anything, but we'regonna use a strategy like marking the text, like pre-reading and we're gonna work throughthat strategy together. And then I also then have them write and document like, okay,this strategy is called this. How might you use this in your classroom? How have you used this in your classroom? Doing some brainstorming. But you know, when youstart a new curriculum, it's a heavy lift. It's a lot and it's a lot of new learning. And so many of the strategiesare things people have done their whole careers that mayhave just taken a back seat as they got used to the new curriculum. Now we're in year three, there's a lot more comfortability around integrating these strategies again. And I think that we willsee our scores raised because of that. - Thank you. And I love that you're modelingit for your teachers also. And then when you get your data, can you give us some examplesof what you do with the data? - Oh, sure. So we have really structured data meetings that we do by grade level. That includes all of the special services that might be included. Our school psych, our social worker, grade level team members. And we have one interventionist and then our instructional coach. And like when we kind ofstart fresh with a new batch of FastBridge screeners,we are looking to see where have kids landed, who is in the red, we call it the red. So that is the high riskcategory and why are they there? And then we go up to yellow, same thing. Any student that's in red or yellow is gonna be putin an intervention group, whether it's in theclassroom with a teacher doing that flexible grouping or with our intervention teacher. We continue to progress monitorthat data then each week and then at the end of six weeks, that's a round of intervention. We'll review that progress monitoring data to see if students can exit intervention or if they need to have it strengthened, maybe they are flat or maybe they dipped. That actually helps us identify if students may need areferral to special education. You know, students comeinto elementary school and it's part of ourresponsibility as educators to ensure that we are finding students who may have a learning disability or they will continue to fail their whole entire school career because they do justneed something different. So we repeat that processover and over and over, quarterly we review ourbuilding data as well. Much like Catherine said,today we were with staff and we did data meetings all together in the library andpeople could move around and ask questions, put students in groups one last time for the year. And then we also really reflected on where are we at asa building this year? Where do we wanna focus next year? What worked, we did thestoplights, so what works so well? What do we wanna continue butthat needs some refinement and what do we thinkwe can just stop doing? Of course the stop doinglist is like nothing, which is kind of, I thinkit's every educator's curse. Like no, we can keep trying more things and not wanting to let anything go. But, so I think that'swhat you're looking for. - Yeah, thank you so much. - Yep. - Other questions? - One's a comment, one's a question. I love the idea of your learning walks and the, you know, the teachers are benefitingfrom those and it's great. And then with the preschool Tamarack, do the kids then go overto Tamarack from Otter? Is that when you sayit's Tamarack preschool? - [Nelson] So we partner with Tamarack and now two of our preschool classes will be outdoor experiences. So really very similar toTamarack but on Otter's property. - Okay. - They do go over to Tamarack too, but it's not on site. And then we do have one preschool that's a Spanish exposure, for people who are interested in that. - [Speaker 2] Yep, great, thank you. - [Speaker] Other questions, Mr. Skaar? - [Skaar] Thank you for the presentation. Congratulations on winningSchool of Excellence. Did you like get a new caror something for winning it? - I should have, it was a lot of work. - [Skaar] I agree.- Yeah. Well we got a great bannerand a really cool plaque. - Okay, well that's good. Hey, you know, on the18% free and reduced, is that a meaningful statistic anymore given where we are in Minnesota with that? - To be honest, I don'tthink it's accurate. You know, especially atthe elementary level, we ask families to fill it out but we ask very generally, we're not gonna ask any specific families. But with, you know, freelunch and breakfast, there isn't as much incentive, you know, once you get into secondary,there's reduction for fees for after school activities. We just don't have thatat the elementary level. I would say I think it'smuch higher than that just based on experience and also based on families that are seeking out additional resources. We have a partnership with the food shelf for food packs on the weekends and so we can't make afamily fill out the form. But we'll still service families and make sure that theyhave all the resources that they need. - So there's probablyother ways to measure that that are better. - Yeah, I think it's hard, you know, it's a very private thing, if families are struggling financially, it's great when they trust the school and reach out for additional support. But we are really protectiveof that information and just really hold it with a lot of care because it takes a lot to askfor that level of support. So I don't know that there'sa great measure to be honest. I think it would maybe have to be something at a higherlevel that would say, we're gonna count this in a different way now that breakfast andlunch are free, but. - All right, thank you. Also, I appreciate you benchmarking against our surrounding districts and you know, we're doingwell holding our own and actually doing better. And I would encourageall of the principals across the district tobenchmark like you have and my friend from Matoska has, and was the last one, I can'tremember if I left them out, I apologize for that. On FastBridge, I sense that that is avery meaningful statistic. You would agree with that? - Oh yeah, yeah. We use that data. It is a significant data pointI would say it's not the only data point we use in those data meetings, but it is a main one. We also use CKLA assessmentswhen it comes to literacy in partnership with that. And then there's another assessment we do called Words Reading and Isolation. We don't put any of that, youknow, data out public facing. But all three of those data points are gonna be used to help determine if they need an intervention group and what skill they're gonna work on. - [Skaar] Would you sayFastBridge is more reliable than the CKLA one? - Well, FastBridge is nationally normed, so that I would say is important. CKLA is norm within our building. I think that they both hold a purpose and they both have a place, which is why it's really important to use it all together. - All right, thank you. So one thing on the what I need, the kids that say their grandparentsneed more money, I wanna meet those kids. (person laughing) So what would be likethe number one compliment that you get from parentsregarding your school and then like what'sthe number one complaint that you have to feel? - That's a really, really great question. I would say the number one compliment is just how good it feelsto be at Otter Lake. Families in general are very, very happy with how we really focuson the whole child. We try to make it fun while also holding really high academic expectations and really high justexpectations in general when it comes to behavior and attendance, I would say a complaint. I think over time there'sbeen some traditions that you know, used to be long standing and since over the yearscurriculum has changed, standards have changed and things that people held really dear. For example, every gradelevel used to go to Tamarack. That was a really meaningfulpartnership and Tamarack and Otter worked togetherto create curriculum that aligned with standards. Since then, things have shifted. So now only half thegrades go to Tamarack. But a cool thing is the othergrades go to someplace else to still have a field trip experience that aligns with their standards. So I think it's not like a complaint, like I'm gonna pull my kid out of Otter. I really wanted them to do that thing. But I think just over time,if people have had students that Otter for many years and we do have families thathave a number of students that have gone through,they'll be like, yeah, I remember when my oldest did that, but yeah, it's cool that my youngest gets to do this instead. So I think it's more of likejust changing with the times and longing for some ofthose old traditional field trips and things like that. - All right, thank you. - Okay, Thompson. - Well when looking at the results for the kindergartenSpanish right from the fall to the winter and seeing, you know, it's a pretty significant drop. But I would imagine asyou were mentioning, the rigor is different andit's a whole new language. - [Nelson] Right. - So like when you weretesting in the fall, is it just like basic knowledgeof like, you know, Hola, like more simple uses because they haven't dug into the work yet and then by the time they get to winter, they're probably trying tolike speak a sentence or? - Yep, just like all ofour fast word screeners, they do start off, you know, I don't even wanna call it easy. It's hard for the kids todo those screeners always. A lot of the students in ourSpanish immersion program, you know, even on the English screener, screened very high in the fall. When it's in kindergartenit is not, you know, expecting the world of them. But really it's looking at them, they've had no teaching. They take the fall screener before school even starts in August. So it's really just a benchmark. But then, you know fromthere in the winter screener, yes it's definitely trying to gauge where students are atbased on the teaching and learning up to that point and become significantly more rigorous with expectations, yeah. - And then are theyonly taking the Spanish, like are they doing it inSpanish only or both, Spanish? - Nope, so it used to be required that they would do both by the state and they changed that actually right before we started our program. And we were so grateful because assessments inkindergarten take a very long time. They're done one-on-one orin order to get to do them. And so if we were having to do both, it would take a lot of instruction time, which is why we're not going to do that. But really, we aremonitoring the language, their target languagethat they're learning, which is Spanish because ifthey needed intervention, it would be in Spanish. I'll just highlight thatif there is a student that is really struggling, we have given them theEnglish fast word screener to see like where are they at because it is still ourresponsibility to find students who might have a learningdisorder or disability and we don't want that language piece or instruction to get in the way of that. So we take that into accountwhen we're looking at the data. But for most students,they're just getting used to having their entire day be in Spanish where they don't understand all of it but they are moving and grooving with it. - Yeah, thank you for that. And then just, it's not really a question, but having the student, the high school studentscome into the school, I just absolutely lovethat for several reasons. One, hopefully some of thembecome teachers, right? Like that's our hope. And then it also meets some of our strategic planning, 'cause I took part in both ofthe strategic plan processes and in the last one I wasin the fourth category, which was we will establishhealthy vital engagement with our entire community. Which I think that's one of the things we discussed in there is like how can we getour high school students to be engaged in our middle and elementary studentlearning experiences? Because I think it helps them, elementary kids love it whenthe high schoolers come in and walk through at the end of the year when they're grad, right? Like oh yeah, because they look up to them and it's the someday that's gonna be me, even though it's many years away, that is something that they look up to. So I think that when they'repartnering together like that, the learning that's happening and just the building ofrelationships is probably fantastic and I would love to see it. - Yeah, it's really, really cool. And just the focus that it'snot just like we're gonna have fun with them, but like tosee the high school students be students, is really powerful. Like oh they have to read too, yep. - Well 'cause it hits, I meanit really hits all of them but it hits the secondone that will promote, encourage and supportstudents' personal learning experiences and aspirations. Right, so we're getting several of them tied into that experiencethat they're having and to see how many you had engaged, that's really wonderful and I hope that we can continue that. And have that happen inour other schools as well. So thank you. - [Nelson] You're welcome. - All right, well thank you very much and even though the signs are gone, every time I go by I am gonna sparkle. - [Speaker 3] Good, sothat's what we're about. High impact, Otter Lake. - Thank you so much. - Okay, we're gonna moveon to discussion item B3, high school winter and springactivities update, welcome. - Thank you. Hi Chair Arcand, members of the board, I'd like to first introduce Taylor Turvet. She's our assistant activities director, she's gonna present for us tonight. I also wanna send theregrets from Brian Peloquin who had a family emergency tonight. So I'm gonna co-present and really be here to answerany questions with Taylor. So welcome Taylor. - [Taylor] Awesome, thank you'all so much. So on behalf of the activities office, I was just gonna give a quickoverview of our winter sports and highlight some of thethings we have coming up in the spring activities office as well. So this is just a rundownof our, who's in our office, who's working with ourstudents, our student athletes. We actually recently hired a new activities financeclerk, Mac leverty. So she's been a great addition and really our goal isto help shape students through the unique power of sports, music, activities and at least get one or at least have them involvedin one thing that they love. So if 80% of our students in White Bear Lake Area High School can find one thing that brings them joy, that's our goal right now. And the way we kind of measure it, whether or not that'shappening is through buckets. Like if they're having fun, if they're growing in their skills or in their sport, if they'relearning lifelong lessons as well, building relationships,purpose and culture. So those are kind of the sixbuckets that we really hope to bring to life for our students. So just to kind of jump into some things that brought joy to all of us. First of all, we had a Winter Spirit Week. The first week of January wereally kicked off the new year with a fire and ice theme and there were two differentteams, Bonfire and Ice Castle. There was dress up dates and we with a pep fest at the end of the week and a big winter dance. It was really fun. Mr. Res actually also lip synced to a song from the the Frozen movie. So yeah, he had a great time but it just really was a greatway to kind of, you know, get some spirits high and having a good timein January when sometimes it can feel, you know,like a long winter here. So in the sports world of our office we have 11MSHSL sanctioned sports that we offer in the winter and then the One Act Play is a a sanctioned performingart that we have as well. So I'm just gonna give youa a little bit of a overview for all of those different offerings. First we have the adaptedfloor hockey team. We have 15 participants with that crew and they didn't win that many games but they had a lot of fun. I don't know if you've evergotten to see one of them, one of those games played, but that's really an excellent group. We have a lot of teacher coachesinvolved with them as well. So they do a great job. Our boys swim and dive teamhas increased participation, so they started with 25last year, they're up to 30. There's been some continued growth there, which is really great to see. And we even had a stay qualifier, Benedict Hoefer, in the 200 freestyle. So really big congratulations to him and to coach Jake for all the growth that's going on in that program. Alpine skiing, we hadsome state qualifiers, as well on the boy sidewe have 14 participants and the girls had 16, they practiced really closely together. And then we had two boys and Josie Guidinger the girls side qualify for State, Cooper Feirn and Josie, this was their secondyear in a row qualifying. So excellent to see them return there. And then the Nordic ski side, those programs are really booming too with boys having 23 participants,girls at the 22 mark and they also practicereally closely together. So it was a better year as far as snow goes,compared to last year. So they were all really happy about that. A lot of success inour gymnastics program. As far as the participants go, we had 14, which is a healthy number given the facilities for this group. And for the first time in 21 years, the entire team qualifiedfor the state tournament, which was really excellent. We've had individuals qualify on their own but this was the first yearthat the entire team qualified so that was really great to see them at Roy Wilkins Auditorium. We also still had a coupleindividuals, Mira McQuay and Grace Mueller, theyqualified as individuals as well and we're only graduating one senior so that's gonna be an impressivegroup to keep your eye on. And Sara was also the coach of the year, so she's just doing excellentwork in her second year as the head coach. Cheer, the competitive cheerleading team is incredible as well. That's not a MSHSL sanctioned sport but we treat them as avarsity sport in our office. They have 16 varsity competitors,also a huge feeder program with 32 in the middleschool and elementary. So much so that we'readding a JV group next year, which is really excitingto continue that growth. And they still have areally big state tournament. It's not run by MSHSL but they do a greatjob in their own right. We finished second inthe Game Day Competition and then third in what'scalled the traditional ones. So that was a really greatshowing for the girls there and they got to qualify for nationals. They went down to Florida to compete and earn third place in gameday competition there as well. We had another Minnesota coach of the Year, coach Bre Sherrick. So this was her firstyear as our head coach and she's just fabulous to work with. The girls really love her. So I'm excited to see all that she'll continueto bring for the program. On the hockey side, it's been really fun to get to know the hockeyculture at White Bear Lake, in the high school. Our girls numbers Ithink are really healthy on the boys side too, but girls hockey is kindof on a downward trend as far as participationgoes across the state. But here we're really healthy. We had over 40 girls try out, we kept 37, they finished eight 17 and one, but we had a Miss Hockey finalist and Maddie Lee, she alsoearned her 100th career point. So she was an incredible player moving on to play in college at St. Cloud. Our goaltender Macy reached1,000 plus career save. So she had a a great year. She saves a lot of shots and has been wonderful just as a junior. And then on the boys side,it was a heartbreaking end of the season, but theyfinished 13, 12 and three but seven of those losseswere one goal losses. So I mean that speaks for itself. That's a really competitive,really talented group. They advance all the way tothe section championship game and that's what I was saying,it's a heartbreaking loss to Gentry to drop tothem in the championship, but they only graduated a handful of guys and we're expecting them to come back and be a really strong program too. So I dunno if any of you went to go see the section final at, but that was a packed house and really great energy at that event. In the girls basketball scene, that's historically been areally successful program. They have a younger crew this year, but they still finished 10 and17, they had 39 participants. It was great to welcome some of the middle schoolersup into the program too. So that helped build those numbers. We were still able to field four teams. The boys side, numbers are booming. 53 guys, they had over 70 tryout too, but just due to facilities, and there's not that manyschools with over five teams. So we made some cuts there. They finished nine and 18 but another milestonewas had by Colin Piper. He reached the 1000 point club. So there was a lot of highlightsfor that group as well. Our wrestling programhad a lot of success. So girls wrestling right now is a partnership emerging sport is what the high school league calls it. So they still put on astate tournament for them, but they don't have likea girls team tournament. They have individual opportunities and we qualified four girls to participate at the state tournament. So with 11 on the entire team, four out of 11 going is pretty excellent and I would say 11 is actually more than a lot of our peer schools, the numbers are pretty healthy and we keep going up from seven last year. So that's really excitingto see the growth there. And then our senior Jinet Demanou, she finished second overallin her weight class. So that was really an incredible feat. She also medaled last year, so she's the first girl from White Bear Lake AreaHigh School to medal at state and now to have medal twice. The boys side, thenumbers are huge with 43 and they practice really closely together between the boys and the girls. So that's a health, a healthy partnership. And we had another statequalifier on the boys side, Indiana Kane, he's just a ninth grader so we expect big things fromhim to continue on as well. All right, and that's just a snippet or some highlights from our sports, but we have a ton of other offerings as far as performingarts and fine arts goes. So the One Act Play is anMSHSL sponsored activity. And this year we performed The Curious Incident ofthe Dog in the Nighttime, and I also saw that our techdirector Morgan is back there. So I just wanna give him ashout out, he was excellent. They finished first overallin the subsection final. The performance was incredible,sadly we went over to, and the stage was a little different, so the setup got kind of funky and they ended up getting DQed, but really just because of the setup time, otherwise they would've won. So that was a bummer, but itwas an amazing performance. We had 13 performers, seven crew members, and then the two directors. So shout out again, to Morgan in the back and to Braylin, who's our director. This year we offered a spring musical, as opposed to just astudent led performance. So "Dear Evan Hansen" wasthe musical this year. This was the first year in a while we've done a spring musical. We always have the big fallone, which is excellent. But this was a really opportunity to be the first everhigh school in the nation with the performing rightsfor Dear Evan Hansen. So it was like too good to pass up. We ended up selling over 2000 tickets and it was such a bigdeal to get the rights that we were sponsored on Fox Nine. So I actually have a clip of that to show you in a moment here. But it was an amazing production and again, just really putWhite Bear Lake Area High School on the map nationally. And then we have a lot ofother activities going on. So Speech had a coupleof state qualifiers, three national qualifiers. DECA was a newer emergingprogram in our school. So we had a state champion in the entry level interview event. Brooklyn Brown is a 10th grader,which is incredible for her and for that program's growth. And then the big musicevent for us in the winter is the SEC musical festival. So Mounds View hosted that,this year we send 70 band kids, 37 choir and 35 orchestra kids to go tour a weekend event to work with famous artists and conductors and just really got to havean amazing experience there. At the end of that, there'san opportunity for them to get asked to performin the honors concert. So we had 10 band kids take part in that. 14 choir kids and then seven orchestra kids were asked to participate in the honors concert. Overall we have over 70 coaches and directors in our winterprograms that we partner with. And so it was just an incredibleyear working with them. And to give you kind of a little highlight of our Dear Evan Hansen video, I think if we were a littlebit hesitant about the audio, so, shout out again toMorgan here for the help. - [Speaker] Just wannamake sure this is on. Okay, good. Wait, before you playuntil I get back there. - [Speaker 4] You wannaturn the captioning on? - Thank you. - [Speaker] Okay, we're good. - [Speaker 3] Oops, are we still good? Okay. (upbeat music) - So that was just a little snippet of what was played on Fox Nine and the amazing performancethat those students and our tech crew put on. So we can send the fullFox Nine interview too. But that was just a little preview of the whole performance there. Just some final activity highlights and other data for you all to note. Our pride here at WhiteBear Lake Area High School and our community has just been something that I've been really taken aback by. And the number of people that show up for our events is amazing to see. So we have student passesthat allow our students to get into our competitions for free. Over 2,000 students of the2,700 have downloaded those, which means they're showing up for events. We also have adult seasonpasses that can be purchased. So we had 651 of those sold and then 210 senior passes were sold to. But as far as individual game sales go, we are selling over two12,000 competition tickets. So people are really showed out for our winter sports, Cinderella, oh 4,151 tickets were soldfor those performances. So many of those weresold out or packed houses. We also use Hudl for manyof our broadcasting games. So almost 9,000 streams came from those. So people are watchingall around the Twin Cities and family can watch all aroundthe country or world even. And then our local SCCTV broadcasts at least 10 competitions as well. So those are really nice broadcasts that they put on for us every season. Again, the Boys HockeySection Championship was a really big highlight. We sold out the 31,000 seatsin Aldrich Arena there. And we're just continuing tohighlight our student athletes, our activities, all of our programs as many ways as possible. As you probably know, oneof the best ways to do that right now is through social media. So we try to partner with thesports photography classes and some of our student classes to highlight through those platforms. So that's been a fun partnership as well. So that's kind of the recapof our activities office and everything that we'vebeen up to this winter. We also launched 11 springsports that are sanctioned by the MSHSL. We also are really excited to have added girls flagfootball this spring. So that's taking off around the state. Over 100 teams arecompeting with that group. Right now it's run by the NFL or the Minnesota Vikings arereally kind of championing it. But we're really excitedabout where it's gonna go. We're actually hosting ourfirst home games this weekend. I know some folks in theroom are gonna attend. So those are on Sundays. But that's been a really funaddition to our programming. And then other activities that go on a springfishing, ultimate Frisbee and trap shooting are allother non MSHSL sanctioned activities that we reallysupport seriously in our office. - Thank you. - Yeah. - I just thank you and your group because one of the thingswe don't talk enough about is the career readiness skills these athletes and theseparticipants learn, they learn to fail, they learn to get up, they learn to try again, they learn to be successful,they have to work as a team, they have to communicate no matter if they're onthe field or on the stage. It's so important thatthey learn these skills. Plus it builds ownership of the building. They wanna be there becauseit's now their building. And that's really important,so I want to thank you. I do wanna mention of spring sport, I had the opportunity the other day to go to the boys track meet. - Oh yeah.- Oh my goodness. How well that track meetwas run was incredible. - [Speaker 3] Yeah, those areserious productions for sure. - So I mean, and I wasjust really impressed how well it ran and howquickly they got through and did a great job. So keep up the great work and I'm gonna open itup for other questions. - I don't have a question,but again, a comment. I went to the robotics tournamentat Marucci at the U of M. It was fabulous. I learned so much about robotics, which I knew nothing about really. I mean, I've heard about it for many years and it was really greatto see the participation of the students. And then I was so impressed. There were students that came back that were in roboticsyears ago that come back and mentor and help the team and then volunteers from Medtronics and different organizations that come back and work with the teams onSaturdays and after school. And it was just reallyfun and really impressive and very exciting. If you ever get a chanceto go, it's great. I'd encourage anyone to go. - Yeah, yeah, we have two robotics coaches that we work with out ofour office and over 30 kids that were involved in thatgroup in the high school. I know the middle schoolis a really robust program with robotics too, so. - Yeah, right. There were some eighth graders there too. - [Speaker 4] I bet. - In the competition. - Yep. - It's great. - Thank you. - Other questions, Ms. Thompson? - Don't really questions, just comments. It's fantastic to see this because as chair Arcand said, it's just another way for our students to learn how to work togetherand to overcome challenges and to build strength and endurance and all of those wonderful things. And I had the wonderful pleasure of going and watching the"Dear Evan Hansen" performance. And I had to keep reminding myself that these were high school students that I was watching perform, 'cause it was justphenomenal performances. And there were a lot oftears in the audience by all people that were there. Not just women who seemedto be a little tailored as more emotional, butthere were men crying. There were people who, andit seemed like certain parts of the performance or the subject matter hit them at that moment. And then you would notice thatpeople would get emotional and just the raving of everybody that was there of how wonderful it was. Truly remarkable. And then just a highlightfor me that I thought all of our students who have won and do the work, it's amazing. But the DECA student, for a 10th grader to win in an interviewing event, I mean, I just thinkthat is pretty special and I'm looking forwardto seeing where she goes as well as all the other students who have done so well, and flag football. With the kids that I workwith it, everybody is like, I wanna sign up for flag football, I wanna play flag football. So it's exciting to seethat that's a new sport and I'm sure it's gonnahave, it's gonna grow. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, you'llhave to come check out our girls team at some point. And thank you for visiting the Dear Evan Hansen performance. - It was wonderful. - And I did see the Fox Nine interview and the student was in the interview. - [Speaker 4] Yeah. - And how long did theyhave to get that together? 'Cause it wasn't a planned. - Right, it was a little bit short notice and Morgan could correct me if I'm wrong, but it was under fiveweek turnaround time. And usually it's at least a six to eight week is the ideal situation for a musical production. - You would have no idea. It was fantastic, so thank you. - Thank you. - Right, Mr. Skaar. - Thank you for thepresentation and your enthusiasm and command of the details of the program is really impressive. So thanks. We hosted a speech event, maybe it was a month and a half ago. Two months ago, I waswondering how that went and how the facilities, you know, what kind of comments didwe get back from the people that we were hosting? - Yeah, yeah, that was a great event. I was here on Saturday for that. Our facilities are incredible. So I just like to take amoment to recognize that. And I know I wasn't hereworking in the district when everything was beingbuilt or being funded for, but wow, we are so lucky. We were able to have actually a volleyball tournament going on. So there were, it's likeover 20 volleyball teams here in the youth program. And we had the state or this big speech event with teams from all around the state. So the facilities were beingused in every square area. There was also a performancefrom the Lions Club going on in the performing artsside of the building. So the fact that we had the, first of all, the parking and the capabilities to have three huge eventsgoing on simultaneously in every square inch of the building was pretty incredible. And there were no complaints. We had a lot of signage to direct people towardsthe right doors and whatnot. But yeah, that was a really special day just to see every square inchof the school being used. - Do you think it'd beworthwhile to survey folks that are at the events, just, you know, kind of what their experience is. Maybe ask them like three orfour questions real quick. Something like that. That might be helpful. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, Ithink that's a great idea. - So you have a activities finance clerk, does that finance clerk, does that person report,does that have a dotted line of reporting to the district finance or what's the reportingrelationship there? - [Speaker 4] Yeah, she reportsdirectly to Brian Peloquin, the director of activities, but she works really closely with the district finance office as well. - Okay, thank you, thanks. - [Speaker 4] Yeah, thank you. - Anything else? Well, I guess thank you for everything you're doing, and go Bears. - Go Bears, thank you all. - Thank you. - Okay, we're gonna go on to our next discussion item B4, Elementary multi-ageupdates, come on down. - Members of the board, I'mgonna introduce myself here with me and I have a statementthat I wanted to read and then we'll get into our presentation. So as you know, Jen Babich, director of Teaching and learning. Carrie Kruismark, whoyou've seen recently, principal at LakeairesElementary, Julian Stanky, who you've seen recently at Birch Lake. And then Lori Moser at Oneka. I don't normally dothis, but I really wanted to make sure I got my thoughts out and succinctly as we makesure we have enough time to talk through everything. But I wanted to take a moment just to ground us in this decision 'cause it is very complexas we think about multi-age. So I'd like to take a moment to ground us in how decisions like this are made. Because clarity about our process matters, especially when thereare strong perspectives. At the center of every decision we make is our responsibilityfor student outcomes. That responsibility is sharedacross teachers, principals, and district leadership. And it guides how wedesign learning experiences for students each day. Each year, staffing decisionsare made at the building level based on student needs, enrollment, the professional judgment of the principal within clear districtexpectations and support. This is a comprehensive and often complex process that requires balancing enrollment, academic and social emotional needs, programming and thestrengths of our staff. Multi-age classrooms are not a mandate. They're one of severalstrategies principals may use when aligning staffingto best serve students. These decisions are not one size fits all. In some cases, that meanssingle grade classrooms and in others it may meanmulti-age structures. Multi-age classrooms arealso not new to our system. We have used them indifferent contexts over time and we have learnedfrom those experiences, both what has worked well and where stronger supports are needed. What is different now isthe level of intentionality, alignment and system-widesupport being put in place to ensure they areimplemented thoughtfully and effectively for students. We have heard fromfamilies, including some who are also educators, and wetake that feedback seriously. Families care deeply abouttheir children's experiences and that perspective matters. At the same time, thesedecisions are being implemented across multiple buildings, with leaders moving forwardbased on their specific context and the needs within their schools. Staffing is one of the most complex responsibilities we hold. In a system like ours, with elementary schools varying in size with uneven grade level cohort sizes, that complexity requires thoughtful, flexible approaches rather thana single standardized model. Our role at the districtlevel is to provide clarity, expectation, and support. Our principal's role is to lead, while making informeddecisions within that framework for their students, staff, and community. As district leaders, we alsolead alongside our principals to ensure the conditions, alignment and supports are in place forthis work to be successful. This evening you will heardirectly from principals who will share more context about how they arrived at their decisions, the plans we have in placeto support students and staff and where we are in the process. I want to take a moment tothank our principals and staff. This work has requiredthoughtful collaboration, professional courage, and a deep commitment to doingwhat is right for students. Collaboration acrossnine elementary schools is not easy work. It requires time, trust, and a willingness to workthrough different perspectives in service of a stronger system. You'll see that some of ourprinciples are presenting today and many others are in the audience, that reflects the levelof shared ownership and commitment to thiswork across our system. I'm deeply grateful for their leadership, their willingness to engagein this level of collaboration and the care they continueto demonstrate for students, staff and families. When we create space forbuilding level decision making, we create the conditions forleaders to respond thoughtfully to their communities whilestaying aligned to our system. Limiting leaders to a single approach, regardless of context,would reduce their ability to make responsive decisionsthat best serve students. Our focus remains on strong instruction, thoughtful leadership and decisions made as close to students as possible. Thank you. So as we start, thisteam worked really hard, so I just wanna make sure and shift, but I'm connecting and really wanting to focus on how does this alignto our strategic plan. And we've had some goodquestions from people. And so we have four tacticsand when we think about when or four strategies, we will create and sustain a safe, equitable and nurturing environment,you'll hear from principals. But this is about consistentclass sizes across our system. We have had class sizes, we have ranges. And if we didn't do multi-age,we might have classes well below the target class size and well above the target class size. And so this really is aboutbalancing those class sizes, ensuring a consistent student experience regardless of school or cohort size. And then really working onthose strong relationships and a sense of belonging that you've heard fromAngie at Otter Lakes, Catherine at Central, andour focus as a district. Thinking about, I'm gonna skip around a little bit 'causereally they're the highlight, not me, but we'll promote, encourage, and support students' personal learning. This really allows for more flexible, responsive instruction as we think about meeting the needs of our fourth and fifth graders. We wanna maintain gradelevel expectations. And you'll hear that, ensuringall students are supported towards readiness formiddle school and beyond. And then I think the one I wanna land on and finalize is really thinking about how we continuously transform. We have had educators leaninginto multi-age for many years. We have a school that'sbuilt around multi-age and we've supported it the best we can in terms of when you think about them more as a reactive structure. And this proactive support is really built on continuously improving. And how can we bettersupport our educators, students and families fora stronger experience. So with that, I'll shift to my colleagues. - [Speaker 6] All right,thank you for having us. So here's just a few piecesaround our multi age classrooms. So seven of our nine elementaries are gonna go to multi age for next year. Maka and Otter, they are gonna stay where they're at rightnow and make that shift in the future due to those other programs that they're implementing currently. So how did we get here? Like Dr. Gillespie shared, we do have both currentlysingle grade level and multi-grade level classrooms, and multi-age classroom, excuse me, with varying levels of educator support. And we have class sizes thatexceed the district average because of the relative size of our neighborhood elementary schools, despite educator to student ratios remaining consistent year over year. And so schools that areimplementing multi-age are doing so to support greater stability and consistency in our class sizes, recognizing naturalvariations in student cohorts, that again speaks to thosesometimes extremely large cohorts or extremely small cohorts that create the smaller class sizes or the very big class sizes, especially felt at the smaller buildings. And then all schools will remain aligned to the same district expectations for high quality instructionand student experience. - [Speaker 7] So when we think about, you know, what we've been doing building and what we've learned, all our elementaries havebeen doing multi-age, at some point over the years successfully, but in different ways. So through these experiences, we know that we are gonna be ableto take these experiences and the variety of styles and we can strengthenfrom those experiences, our approach across our system and apply to what we'regonna be doing in the future. And next slide. So then with this system wide approach allows us to bring some more clarity. Obviously we're gonna bedoing a lot of more work and some of that work has already started, but a unified multi-age approach improves support for both our students and our teachers of course. Grades four and fivespecifically were chosen or paired because theirstandards in those grades and the assessments just havea lot of natural alignment, which is an important part of what we were looking at, which just made like a lot of common sense when we were looking at this opportunity. And then educators will coverall the core subject areas in these grade levels,following the state standards as we should, for both those grade levels. And then thinking about that student and staff experience, whichis a key important part of what we think about forour students and our staff. Building strong relationships and communities in themulti-age classroom environment is an important piece. Multi-age can bring peermentoring opportunities and leadership opportunitiesfor the students. That might be the older students or maybe it's the more mature students, maybe age doesn't necessarily matter and teachers can have routines and norms established early in the year if they have those looping opportunities in their classrooms. And incorporate those things right away. Having done this for fouryears in my building, I can tell you those teacherslove that day one, day two, those kids that they've had, day one man, they're just flowing and going. They don't have to teacha lot of the things. And the rest of the kidsare just, they absorb and learn through osmosis and those are things that you just can't, time is of the essence. So some of those little things are magic and the staff experienceis one of unification amongst colleagues thatthey get to work with. And not just one or twoteachers on a grade level, but it's all teachers. And not just my building, butit's at Julian's building. At Dan's building at NorthStar, at Birch, at Otter, or not Otter, sorry, butat North Star, at Oneka. Every building it's a unity of educators doing this together. We often say we are better together. This is, we are better together. - All right, so how arewe preparing to do this? So we are, Julian, myself and Jen Babish and I are co-facilitating the design team. So the design team is made up of, you know, classroom teachers, some of our SPED educators, specialists, interventionists, ML teachers. And we have started, our firstmeeting was on April 13th and we met and we talked and looked at a lot of research, you know, grounded in this work,this multi-age programming, not just at four or five, but you know, across, you know, k, you know, all the way through high school, you know, to like start, you know, and grounding ourself in the work and what does that looklike, what does that mean, you know, for us as wego forward with this. And then looking forward to,you know, like our meetings that we are currently having,you know, we are looking at you know, building that framework and then going forward, you know, with what that will looklike when we get to June where we can actually do somededicated curriculum writing where, you know, any four orfive teacher can join that or a specialist or SPED or ML intervention to reallylook at what it will look like. Here's what you are teaching, here's what these curriculumplans, unit plans look like. And then, oh, go back. I didn't finish everything, sorry. And then looking at alsoprofessional development, you know, for our four or five teachers and thinking of, you know, we've had a great community of practice, you know, for each grade level and department, you know, throughout, you know, the last couple years. So making sure that we have, you know, that dedicated next year forour four or five teachers. And then looking at what we can do beyond just communities of practice, but also more, you know, like detailed or professional development for our four or five teachersthroughout the school year. Not just at our communities of practice, but how we do that maybe atthe building level as well. And then how we are communicating and how we have communicated. So as soon as we knewwe made this decision, you know, we communicated with staff first and then we sent it outto our incoming third and then our currentfourth grade families, you know, just to share whatwas going to be happening for the next year. We've also communicatedwith our PTOs or PTAs and had, you know, conversations there and then stakeholders. So last week we had our systemsaccountability committee and we talked about itthere with our teaching and learning department, our other fourth and fifth grade teachers, we continue to get information from them. Like just today when we hadour communities of practice, we gathered more information,you know, from them, you know, to help guide our work. And we took that and actually use it today in some of the things that we worked on. And then also from all of our teachers and staff who are going tohave some kind of touchpoint with our fourth and fifth grade students. So they're specialists, ML teachers, and then any studentsupport staff in sped. So then creating that common language using that guaranteed and viable, we have that already developed. But then how does thisfour five fit with that? And do we have to make some,you know, like differences in how we look at what four five is compared to what everything else is. But knowing that, we have to align that with our already establishedguarantee from the curriculum for instructional expectations,which then will help create that consistency among all nine of our elementary schools. Because that is like themost probably important and impactful thing thatwe can do is to have that consistent experiencefor all our fourth and fifth grade kids acrossall our elementaries. - [Speaker 5] We didn'thave a question, sorry. - Thank you. - We turn that on, thank you. I just had a couple of questions to share and I hope I'm not playing gotcha 'cause that's not my intention. One of the things we do knowthat the number one thing for success for this to happen is to have teachers on board and trained. How have you gone aboutgetting teacher buy-in to make sure that they'reon board to do this? - Yeah, I can talk a littlebit about how we started and then they can talk more. But we've worked reallyclosely with Tiffany, the union president, to really gauge, the past two rounds of negotiations, we do interest based bargaining,so where it might not be a topic that is contract related. We talked about the supports that we have, knowing that multi-age has been here and it's been a discussion onhow can we best support that. So in terms of the system level, really keeping close to her, talking through things at ourprofessional learning council. But you guys would be ableto talk about her specifics. - And each time Tiffanyhas also sent out a survey, you know, to just our design team as well. And then getting feedback andgathering that from our fourth and fifth grade teachershas been really impactful to help us and guide us with, you know, like what else our teachers need and then also supplyingthem with talking points or, you know, like a summaryof the work that we did, you know, each time that we've met. - Okay, I just have oneother quick question is how are you addressing the concerns of parents,especially fourth grade parents or third grade coming intofourth grade who are concerned that their students is gonna struggle and get further behind? Can you talk about how you let them know how they won't and howwe can deal with that? - Have you guys heard from parents? - I haven't heard, I'veonly heard from one, but it had nothing todo with like curriculum and, you know, assessmentor anything like that. So, so far I have not had any. - So having done this forfour years at Lakeaires, and not that there aren't parent concerns for that specific question,every question I've taken has usually been somethingcompletely different. And I don't wanna disregardthat type of question, but usually questions are usually around like the age thing andwe talk through that. Or sometimes questions have come up, things that I've tried tothink through like, okay, what kind of questions could come to me? And usually when you get asked something, there's something thatyou could never predict. It's like, my son is in thisclassroom and their lunch and recess doesn't matchup with their friends. And it actually had nothingto do with multi-age, it was just magic of the schedule and schedules are a nightmare. And it, you know, or it was, what are my chances of myson having this teacher? Well, it has nothing to do with multi-age. Typical, like, well, you know, but they had an older childthat had that teacher. So maybe that's just me at Lakeaires, and I've been blessed notto have too many things. But a lot of it is aboutjust any questions, please come ask and ask and ask. Making sure, and same with the teachers. I've always said, if you hear anything, let's, you know, reach out orhave me, you know, notify me so I can reach out proactively. I don't wanna have aparent not reaching out. I'd rather like, hey, I heard that maybe you were wondering something. Let me be proactive and just like, let's have a conversation, rather than stewing over something. But I have not had very many in four years and everything that has come up has been a good conversation, so. - All right, thank you. I'm gonna turn it over tothe rest, Ms. Streiff Oji. - Yeah, so I multi-agedfor 10 years as a teacher and I was at a school within a school that was multi-age, all multi-age. And I know about thebenefits of multi aging. There are many and I also acknowledge that it's late right now. And so it's a short timefor people to get ready. So my questions are around, do you anticipatestudents changing classes when you talked about getting them ready for like middle school, is that something that you anticipate, changing classes and teachers that wouldtake on different subjects? Have you even gotten therewith your design team or? - No, so you're talking about like maybe departmentalizationlike within? - [Streiff Oji] Yep. - That is something that our design team isdefinitely looking at, but we haven't landed on, you know, like what was best for kids just yet. But it's something that, yep. - Thank you. When you talk aboutdedicated curriculum writing time for educators, but it's voluntary. So what does that look likefor those that choose not to, which I'm gathering most will not because they wanna be prepared. And then when they dothat, will the curriculum and pacing look the same atthe various schools as they? - Yeah, great question. So part of it is this is howwe would do curriculum writing with any new standards or new instructionalmaterials that we would get. And so the design team,I wanna just point out that we have broken upinto working groups. And so the design team is able to choose if they wanna work oncurriculum assessment and development, student experience specifically with our specialist. And so as we think about art and music and PE, what may that look like? Also, we're focusing onthe student experience as we think about SEL field trips, fifth grade graduation, allof those important moments that maybe fourth gradehas and fifth grade has. And so one of the things that we're doing specifically with thecurriculum assessment and PD group is we're really looking to see first, the standards, and then how do we ensure that students are gonna beproficient in both fourth and fifth grade by the endof that academic school year. And so we start with that base and then we're looking ateach content area separately. And so we have a mathgroup, we have a literacy or ELA group, social studies and science we'll be doing next. And so we have two morededicated half days that our design team ismeeting to work through that. And then we have ourvoluntary two days in June. And so what happens iswe have kind of the group that's able to meet and wants to meet and does kind of front loading that work before the summer starts. So then when we start the school year, then we can get everyone immersed and looking at what that scopeand sequence may look like. And then we have thoseintentional communities of practice throughout the year where grade level teamsare meeting specifically to look at how are things going, what are things we need maybe need to take a note of thatmaybe didn't go so well for next time that we can improve. And so we have both kindof that front loading for those that are able to, and then everyone's able to kind of look at it over the summer. But then knowing wehave an intentional work that we grade levelsmeet throughout the year to be able to tweak things and to give feedbackso that we can improve that student experience. - Great, thank you. I just know that it stretcheskids in a lot of ways, beautiful ways, socialemotionally, academically, the ongoing, if you can havethe same teacher for two years, it's lovely over time. I actually was a product of four, five, six so three grade levels and I know it can be done and I think it's muchmore of a real life model. So I'm excited to see where it goes and excited to see that you're doing it across the district and not in isolation because it's really difficult for teachers that are trying to do itin isolation, so thank you. - Thank you, other questions, Mr. Skaar? - Yes, I would ask, is this gonna be a topicon the May 11th meeting where we have the benefit of public forum so we can hear fromparents and families or no? - [Speaker] Well they cancome and talk about it. - But this presentation and discussion won't be on the May 11th. - [Speaker] I'm notsure at this point, but. - I would suggest thatwe have it on there. How was this decision made? Who made this decision,how did it bubble up? - The principals made the decision. So every year they get an allocation for staffing in theirbuildings based on enrollment, that staffing allocation hasn't changed. And then they decide,each year, some of them have had to do multi-ageclassrooms to be able to stay within those classroom sizes. And so then together inpartnership with teaching and learning staff,they decided to do that. - Okay, thank you. This seems to be a significant decision, a significant change. And you know, from whatI've heard from parents, they've used the term blindsided by this and also at least one indicated that there was a potential that they would leave the district and go to a different district,which is concerning to me because this decision could have enrollment impacts. And right now, enrollment issomething we're all keen on to make sure that ournumbers grow to the level that we expected whenwe passed the referendum and spent $400 million on our facility. So that highly sensitive to that because as we all know, enrollmenttranslates into funding. So I just wonder, withthe significance of this and the significance ofthe decision and you know, and I hear the processthat you went through, but it seems like it was notenough to educate parents and families on thischange, the impacts to it. And I would also suggest that something thissignificant as a change should be made at the board level, as opposed to individual schools. And I think it should come to, I think this decisionshould come to the board to deliberate and discuss. - [Speaker] I'm sorry, Imay make sure you were done. - Yeah, I'm done, thank you. - Has everybody had a chance that wants to talk before I start over? Okay, go ahead Daniels. - Yeah, so really it wasn'treally a financial decision, it was more about balancing class sizes and keeping within our parameters and giving some flexibility to buildings as they do staffing. And I do remember years ago when we had very, very large class sizes, I mean very large, in the 30s and upper 30s in elementary. And that caused a lot of parents and a lot of familiesto leave the district. So I appreciate that you're trying to stay within thoseparameters that we had by being flexible in creating this. And then my question is, when you've done research, and I know Chris has alluded to this, that there are somebenefits to this in the data that tells us that cross ageclassrooms are beneficial. Can you just speak to oneor two of those things that you've researched or seen? I happen to read, like we had a guest at our house last weekend and they brought a paperfrom Winona, Minnesota and it had a whole frontpage article on the benefits of cross age classrooms. And I should probably get acopy and and send it around, but they've been doing it, they just started last year I think and they had many wonderfulthings to say about it. But I just wondered what you could tell us about you know, whatyou've read or researched. Chris kind of alluded tosome of the stretching and some of the role modelingand things like that. - Sure, yep, yep, so wealluded to some of those things with the student experience. I think looking at the research, both if it's single gradelevel or multi-grade or multi-age, therereally is a status quo, I would say as we lookat academic achievement, it really matters moreabout supporting teachers and having consistency with our planning and support that's gonna have the impact. The research does say though, with the social emotional learning of having a multi-age class, they really see benefits inboth students that are in fourth and fifth grade or whatever the younger, the older students that they're seeing that they're really achieving at a higher level when itcomes to leadership, mentoring. You know, you're really raising the bar for all students in that area. And so, you know, we're really focusing our efforts on supportingour educators to be able to have a consistent multi-age experience for kids across the district. And then really focusing in on what is that student experience and how can they havethose, you know, moments that they would have in fourth grade or those field tripsthat are really important or fifth grade, fifth grade graduation, those kinds of things. So our intention with the design team is really to focus in on student experience,professional development for our teachers,curriculum writing and yeah. Is there anything elseanyone else wants to add? - No, that was good and I'm assured that you're gonna be likelooking at it measuring and reflecting and all of that. I mean I obviously you're getting, we're at the base, we'rejust getting going but. There'll be time forteachers to do some of the, I mean with their teams but also individually someextra time for them too. - Yes, yep, so part of the agreement with the teacher union alsois that we would support them with curriculum writing hours above and beyond whatwe would normally give as just, we know it's an extra lift to getting things up and running and to be able to supportthem that way as well. - Yeah. 'cause I think if youwere end of one in a second or third grade classroom or in a building, it would be difficult but now you're gonna have the support of the entire district,all the seven elementaries. Yeah, great. - Thank you. - That's all I have. - All right, Ms. Thompson? - A couple things Iguess, I think, you know, change is hard for peopleto come on board with and I have to say I had somequestions myself about this, but the more research I did and the more questions I asked, the more I am starting tosee the benefit to this and it is happening in other areas where they are having benefitsfrom this and in the world we live in a multi-age environmentevery day of our lives. So when kids start in daycare,they're in a classroom with the infants and thenas some of them get older, they go into a classroomwith other, right? And it's a multi-age class and it's all the way untilthey get into kindergarten or well into kindergarten, 'cause even preschool isa mixed age classroom. And then we keep them separateduntil middle school starts to kind of have some crossover, like if students are inchoir or other things. And then high school, we know our kids are in multi-age classroomsso we're already doing that. And in Lincoln we have ourGifted Services Program where those students are third, fourth and fifth graders altogether. And that has been goingon for several years and has had amazing success and we have third gradersin that classroom, right? And people are buying into that and they want their kidsto be in that program if they qualify for it. So I think, and that shows that our gifted students aredoing these things, right? So why shouldn't all of our kids have the opportunity to do that? It's an equity issue and it also allows like thementoring program, right? So we think about the high schools who went and mentored at Otter and the younger kids look up to them, it's the same thing in fourthand fifth grade, right? The fifth graders are the big kids, they're gonna be the ones. And so everybody alwayslooks up to that group. So this I think is alsoanother way to allow them to learn from eachother, to grow together. The older kids can help the younger kids kind of come along in those things. Some of my questions are, are we gonna loop this? 'Cause that is another thing that I like, I met somebody at one of my first nationalschool board conferences I went to who, it was ona school board in Illinois and she did her dissertationon Cuba's literacy rates. And so she went and actuallylived in Cuba a couple times while she was buildingand collecting her data for several months. And the main thing she found that was the key successthere was that they loop, so their kids start in kindergarten and they graduate schoolwith the same teacher that they start with andthat builds a relationship and it allows them to formthat like bond with each other. So they are they, you know, I mean you think a Cuba and people are like they have a higher, I don't know if it's today,this was many years ago, they have a higher literacyrate than we do, right? And usually you think thatthey'd be behind but they're not. And a lot of it has to do with the way that they loop their students and it's also they're very good to their educators intheir in the country. But I guess so like I think there would be a benefitto looping these students so they stay in the sameclassroom with the same teacher if that's a possibility thatwe could make that work. In the teacher of the year interviews, many of our teachers talked about wishing that they could loop with their students. And when we've had that happenwhere students are put back with the teacher becausemaybe they're struggling or they have other things and they built that bond, we allow them to be with that sameteacher and it helps them or teachers have actually asked to go to the next grade level so they can go with those students, right? And I think that has areally a great benefit to doing this. And these kinds of things are happening all throughout theworld in other countries where we often look and we go, well we should be more like them. Well this is our opportunityto see if this is a great way to help our students success. And it is a big ask for our educators. So I definitely don't wanna dismiss that. And it's a big ask for them. In the past we've done things where we've given some timelike you know this is coming but it's maybe a year away and this is like we'redoing this in the fall. So I'm a little nervous about that and hoping that, I'm sureyou guys are doing this and getting the teacher buy-in and I would just say sinceyou've notified families that everybody knows this is happening, if they have an elementary age kid, I personally in my emails and I check my spamand I check everything, I've only had three emails so far on this. Not to say that maybe we won't get more coming down the road, but you know, I wouldthink if it was something that families were super concerned about, we would hear from them becausewe always hear from them when they have a concern aboutsomething that we're doing that really impacts theirlife or their family or their student's education. So I'm excited to see where this goes and you know, if wehave, I guess a question like so which school asan example for people who kind of aren't maybe stillgetting on board with this. So if we have a classroom in Oneka that has 32 students in it, but maybe at Birch we have a classroom with 20 students in it. Now this will allow us to even that out across the board so that no student is in a classroom wherewe have 31 students, 'cause that is not helpfulfor all of our students or the teacher in that classroom. So maybe if you could justspeak a little bit to that piece 'cause I think while it'skind of mentioned in here, it's not very specific. - So I did the calculation just broad. So right now if we didn't multi-age, we'd have uneven enrollment. The lows would be 19 to 21 students with highs of 30 plus students. And that can require pullingstaff from other areas right now because we're able to multi-age, it's also allowed them to keep grades K through three within those class targets. And sometimes that can cause one of them to bump up if you're eveningout a bigger class on fifth and then it really can result in the same inconsistency in a school. So one of our schools,if they didn't multi-age, would have 20 per class in fourth grade and 31 per class in fifth grade. Just as an example. - Comment. - Thank you, I don'thave any other questions. - Mr.Skaar, you think you had a question? - Thank you. Did you look at any studies that showed that the combination would bedetrimental to student success and family concerns? Any studies that you looked at? - [Speaker 5] Not thatI looked at, no, no. - So would it be safe to saythat we have confirmation bias that we made a decision and we're looking for studiesthat confirm the decision. We didn't look at other studies that possibly would be detrimental. - [Speaker 6] Were therestudies that you found that said they would be de detrimental? - So perhaps there's noneout there that are, okay. - I think most studies out there show that it's the teacher impact and that would prevent anynegative learning issues that the teachers overcome that, that was the few studies I read said that, that that's the biggest part, the training and the teacher involvement and that's the major factorthat will prevent that. - Okay, thanks for the answer. I had one other thing just for the board. You know, we have a lot of challenges with, you know, academics, enrollment. I mean is this just another change? You know, it seems wealready have like a fire hose that's coming at us. Is this just another change that can potentially derail us, would be a question for the board and that's why I would like to have this on the next board agenda,to discuss this more and actually talk more about how we solicited parents' input on this and family input on this. The other thing is, I don'tknow if I would use Cuba as an example, it's acommunist dictatorship that imprisons political prisoners and they can't even runtheir electricity grid. So I don't think that's agood benchmark, thank you. - [Speaker] All right, I know Ms. Daniels had a question or comment. - So I think all questions from parents and community are important. So even if we get three or four emails, the questions, you know, are important and I think we have thecapacity to answer them all. And I would encourage parents or community members towatch this work study is gonna be, you know, thevideo will be on our webpage. Do we have to replicateit in another meeting? I don't think so. I think this is a great presentation. This would get some discussion going and they could get a lot of their questions answeredif they watch this. And they certainly,community members can come to work studies justlike any other meeting. And then if they watch it,they'd be prepared maybe to then publicly if they had questions, call their principals or an administrator. And I would encourageboard members to do that, which I do as a generalpractice when I have questions and I think it's an expectationthat when I have questions or other board members orcommunity people have questions, there are resources to get those answers. And so I would say please,if you have questions that are not answered thatyou don't have answer to, to call your principals,call an administrator, call somebody that can, you know, help you figure those answers out because your questions are important. All questions are important, but my feeling is no, we don't have to redo the presentation, but we can have people watch it and then, you know,and also ask questions. - I thank you, any. Did you have something? - Yeah, I just wanna say, you spoke to how the decisions were made. You spoke to how the principals lookedat complex problem solving and worked together to make this happen. And I trust ouradministrators in the district to do what's best for our kids. So I feel like that isa management decision and not a governing decision. And we are a board thatshould be governing and not trying to tell youall how to do your jobs. - I think one thing thatmaybe is getting missed a little bit is how difficultthese decisions are. And we have had multi-age andwe're trying to do it better and we have varying sizes of elementaries and so it is frustrating for staff, frustrating for parentsto have class sizes that are below the targetsbut well above the targets. And they're well above the targets in a sense that if you have to allocate an FTE there to make it, then they're really small. But it does pinch otherparts of our classes. But this has been a reallyintentional decision because fourth and fifth gradestandards are very similar. So for example, the team's diving in, but the lexile level that's tested for fourth grade reading on the MCA and fifth grade reading isthe exact same lexile range. And so we have unitplans for fourth grade. We have unit plans for fifth grade. If for example, Birch Lakewould have to multi-age, if we weren't doingthis, Birch Lake teachers and Julian would have tofigure out how to multi-age with two separate unit plans. Carrie's team who's beenwonderful working for years, they didn't have the supports that is what we're used to 'cause it's really hard as a system to support one certain area. And so this really isallowing us, but fourth and fifth grade was selected purposefully on the alignment of standards, which I'm not trying to minimize at all. It is hard, and theparents we've heard from, it has been more from one school. I partner with the principalswhen they have questions, people often arefrustrated at the district. I get that, that'scommunication, that's hard. And so it really is best tostart with the principals. I just sat in a phone call with another, with Brian at the principal there. We partner really closely, but it is each principal really, this is not an easy decision. Staffing is really hard and no one's complaining,it's been like that forever because we're trying tobe fiscally responsible with the resources we have and we have been able tomaintain our class ratio and staffing for many years. It has not changed sinceI've been in this role for six years and these guyshave made really difficult decisions within that time. - Thank you, I have one request. I know you talked about the research that you looked at. If you could send it, not anything else, I just love reading it, I'm sorry. You know, I'm not the kindof being a curriculum person, I love to go through it and read it and if, if it's okay Ican share it with the rest of the board if they wanna look at it, but I just like reading it. - [Speaker 3] Absolutely. - I would just say, or I don't know if we're, if you know Tiffany was waving at me. I don't know. She can't talk. - [Speaker] She's not a speaker. - Okay. - [Speaker] You can speak toher afterwards if you'd like. But right now, unfortunately that with therules, we don't do that. - I thought the whole boardwould benefit from whatever she was saying. All right, thank you. - I was gonna say the same thing, but I guess my thing then would be that these decisions are made because funding in publicschools is lacking. And it has been ever sinceI've been on the board and long before that. And it is not keeping pace with inflation. It is causing ourdistricts to have to make these kinds of decisions because we don't have the proper funding. I still think this is a good thing because I think this is the way that things will move in thefuture is we're gonna start seeing more and more of this because it is beneficial to the students. And I'm really hopeful thatthat's what we can show down the road as we moveinto this transition. But if people are upset abouthaving to make this move because we can't affordto hire more teachers to ensure that all of ourschools have lower class sizes, then I just ask our community members to advocate with their representatives and those who make these decisionsat the legislative level. And in federally, reallythe federal government does not participate in public education in a way that they shouldfinancially participate. They leave it up to us states to do it. And then, I mean, we couldgo into all the other nitty gritty of it, but that is where people really shouldstart advocating if they think this is something that they don't like. Because we can only do what we can do with the resources we have. And so thank you for makingthis very tough decision and having to dig in and do this right now because I'm hopeful that itwill show a great success. And, you know, that's what happens when we have to do these kinds of things. - Just one last thing, our total funding in this school district has exceeded inflationfor the last 20 years. That's just a fact, thank you. - All right, and that's disputed. So we'll just leave it at that. I want to thank you forcoming in, you know what? I know this wasn't easy and I really appreciate you that I was throwing questions out there and you're able to answerand they're more, you know, please don't understandthat was outta curiosity and I've heard thingsand looked at things. Keep doing what you're doingbecause at the end of the day, the reason you're doingit is because our children and that's what we make our decisions based on, to provide our children the skills they need to be successful. And we want every child to be successful to grow and be able to reach for the stars that anything they wanna do. So I want to thank you for that. Have a good day. - [Speaker 3] Thank you, thanks a lot. - Appreciate it. Ah, we're finally to the part,we are at the adjournment. Can I get a motion to adjourn? - So moved.- Okay, by Daniels a second. - Second. - All in favor of say aye. - [All] Aye. - Opposed. Thank you very much, we are now adjourned.