Strategy Overview (10 minutes)

Transcript (~18 min @ 18:00)

Speakers identified by voice; unnamed voices are numbered within this recording. Auto-caption text — verify against the video.

▶ 18:09 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: good evening and on our agenda this evening is the is an update on the strategy overview superintendent thank you um it's in blue red red was mid-year blue is end of year

▶ 18:23 Speaker 4: so you can see the progress we have been making a lot of the work this year has been on refining some of the things that we have developed over the past couple of years for personalized learning the scoring rubrics the use of common assessments the introduction of universal design for learning instructional strategies so a lot of the year was spent on refining that on those

▶ 18:52 Speaker 4: type of things a tremendous amount of time was spent at the elementary's with doing additional training in PBIS positive behavior intervention and strategies universal design for learning restorative justice and working on their

▶ 19:06 Speaker 4: tier two and tier three interventions things that I really want to push out here for you to notice is the work that the staff has been doing about meeting students needs in a variety of ways of course we welcome tinker and I have asked mr. Bolduc to bring tinker to meet all of you you know and tinker is a big

▶ 19:37 Speaker 4: hit as a therapy dog and really has made a difference for quite a few children that struggle some days to get through the day the other thing that I want to

▶ 19:45 Speaker 4: point out is when we first got here we wrote the DCAP we've totally revised it with input from the staff so that it has it incorporates all the changes we've been doing over the past several years teachers have the ability to make judgments based on their professional opinions their professional knowledge regarding students not every student in Melrose has to have an IEP or a 504 not every student has to have the same accommodations from class to class we trust our teachers to make those professional decisions that will help a child succeed whether it's a change in how they access learning or demonstrate learning if whether it's a change in this schedule the timing of a project we leave that to our teachers professional judgment and the new D camp will reflect

▶ 20:38 Speaker 4: that to a greater degree but our staff was already pretty good in implementing

▶ 20:45 Speaker 4: those type of accommodations the other thing that I want you to notice is we started a unified basketball with other districts it's been a big hit if you

▶ 20:58 Speaker 4: have not seen at least the videos it's just it's just a delight at both general ed and special ed students competing with teams from other other towns so

▶ 21:07 Speaker 4: that was another thing that we added again because our focus is on supporting all students and finding those strategies or systems that will enable us to do that the other most significant change that I want to discuss with you and it goes a little bit to the comments you heard earlier tonight we're shifting

▶ 21:31 Speaker 4: our focus on intervention from what is typically categorized by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as high needs groups those high needs groups were typically special ed low-income african-american Hispanic what

▶ 21:49 Speaker 4: am I leaving out I think that's about covers it you know ELL thank you to the

▶ 22:00 Speaker 4: more realistic designation of lowest 25% performance when you had those

▶ 22:09 Speaker 4: categories they either hyper accentuated certain groups that were really doing

▶ 22:13 Speaker 8: well or they missed other individual students who were struggling because we

▶ 22:17 Speaker 4: were focusing on that categorization with the new lowest 25% categorization you're really looking at your data you're saying okay which of our students in a particular class a particular grade are not performing as well as we want them to what are the things that we need to do to help them succeed so it really is a more inclusive model it is a more holistic model at the same time so that we are providing any student who's identified as needing interventions as to receive those interventions and opportunities so we are making that shift and you'll begin to hear more about that as the MCAS results come out

▶ 23:10 Speaker 5: questions for the superintendent thank you so this is an impressive body of of work it's always nice to take a look at this and try to think of all the moving parts throughout the year across all the different schools and teams you know with our beginning potential discussion about MCAS today and also the idea of using different types of data to see how we're making progress can you give us a little bit of an understanding of how you determine who is in that lowest 25% quadrant and how you measure progress based on data so

▶ 23:57 Speaker 4: two things happen first of all quite frankly Jesse identifies your lowest 25% so but they used they have a couple of sources those of you who are not familiar with EWIS. EWIS has been in effect about five, six years, John? Early Warning Intervention System, where based on a number of factors that they know from our sims, they identify, it's a mathematical calculation, given this child's background, they may be at risk. So EWIS is one source of the information and of course the MCAS scores are the other source more importantly again to the conversation around MCAS Melrose does a lot of its own assessing and data analysis you know at the younger grades we do beginning of the year middle of the year into the year assessments we have common assessments at the middle in the high school our staff spends a lot of time analyzing it we use achievement series to analyze what the outcomes are on those common assessments to identify who's doing well who's not doing well you know where does our curriculum need some strengthening where does our instruction need some strengthening is there a pattern we're seeing among certain certain students on top of it we do the guidance department does a lot of

▶ 25:21 Speaker 4: report card analysis you know we don't wait till the end of the year so we're using a lot of local data to decide where those interventions should be and

▶ 25:31 Speaker 4: how do we deliver them we put in the flex box at the elementary secondary school specifically for that purpose to give our teachers time to work with students who needed it and other students to work on advanced projects or whatever they may have at the elementary schools they do it very they do it within the classroom because they send up set up tax task centers so when you walk in you may see the teacher working with a group of kids and I may say to the principal when I do my walkthroughs why is she working with that group of kids that may be kids who are struggling or it may be kids who are exceeding and somebody else is working the sped teacher may be in there or the OT or the PT may be in there working with the kids who are struggling and it's all based on

▶ 26:18 Speaker 4: the data we collect and we build off of and that that goes on all the time so that we're we're making sure that we're providing our kids with what we need I think the other thing that needs to be said is we've worked very hard to be an inclusive district and take down barriers as you know several years ago when we began to expand our AP courses we decided there should not be a prerequisite for AP because we felt any child who wanted to do the work and take the chance should do it personally as your superintendent I don't care if they get a one two three four or five I know US News and Reports does I don't because what I'm invested in is did the student stretch themselves did they get an idea what a college course is like and what will be expected of them we've begun to do the same thing with honors courses to some degrees we're having some conversations at the high school about should there be certain courses that are

▶ 27:21 Speaker 4: unleveled for reasons so that every child we don't have that situation where kids won't go into a certain course because it's not the right weighted rank again all these things are not just about equity and opportunity there are also about how do we make sure every student is getting the rigorous education they deserve and sometimes when you remove these misconceptions

▶ 27:51 Speaker 4: about leveling and everybody has to get a rigorous education because that's what the teacher believes in and that's what we believe in it happens without the stress of MCAS or things like that thank you so you mentioned in the under

▶ 28:09 Speaker 5: professional culture and community engagement the fourth column you mentioned about the monthly PD of in cultural competence that the teachers

▶ 28:22 Speaker 4: are attending right so again we're five years into providing a range of courses in cultural responsiveness social emotional learning inclusive practices and they're really all one when you think about it when you think about what you want when you wanted to build a system that has equity and opportunity you you look at anybody who may need some sort of accommodation or rethinking of the curriculum or rethinking of access so it's a again everybody is responsible for this day in day out it's not you know again you've heard me say this about SEL it's 903 we're going to have our SEL class now let's move on for the day it's something you do six and a half hours a day whether it's cultural responsiveness SEL or inclusive practices and we spent a lot of time offering our teachers training for that our cultural responsiveness is on class we over the years we've used different outside trainers we have a lot of our own people who have been trained a tremendous amount of our people have been trained in trauma-sensitive schools in the leap training that came from the state on poverty in schools so they train other students we have a person that we originally met through Metco who has been fine who provides a series of trainings for us every year in very tough topics around cultural responsiveness I was just doing some catch-up on the work today and one of them was I you know about the development of racial identity how does that occur I mean you know this is not lightweight stuff the other thing is

▶ 30:16 Speaker 4: what we did this year is I borrowed a document from another another state actually that is a very good guidance to all our administrators on how you check our resources to be culturally appropriate and there's a checklist in it and it's things questions to ask things to do and then when we went out to do our teacher searches one of the things I did is I gave the interview committees questions that they should be embedding in their questions along these lines so again you know it's stuff and stuff's the wrong word it's it becomes a

▶ 30:58 Speaker 4: daily mindset in a daily practice I won't lie to you I won't tell you why it's a hundred percent it's never a hundred percent is your PD Institute is

▶ 31:12 Speaker 4: it culture is it voluntary or mandatory it's voluntary right so how is your participation in that this year um i would say it depended on the course the the participation in the sel and the inclusive practices is very good um the the cultural responsiveness is a little bit harder those are tough conversations that people aren't always comfortable with but i would also say to you we're five years into it so you know it's one of those things that you keep chipping away at more and more people every year you reach and just from my own background working

▶ 31:42 Speaker 5: in schools oftentimes things are made voluntary so you have people being willing and able to have those tough conversations and if you try to force people to have those tough conversations when they're not ready it doesn't work well so there's a method to that it's not because you're trying to give the people time off you know so I just want to clarify that too is that that's there's actually a strategy in there and you know that when people volunteer

▶ 32:05 Speaker 4: to to participate in some sort of training they become you know we use the term early

▶ 32:12 Speaker 4: adopters and they begin to have the conversations with their circles you

▶ 32:21 Speaker 5: know it's that pebble analogy one other question I have is just and you mentioned that the restorative practices are really happening now at the high school they're beginning to be more and more adopted if you can can you offer any examples of how discipline has possibly changed or will change at a

▶ 32:37 Speaker 4: high school level suspension this year we engage in restorative practices

▶ 32:41 Speaker 4: you've got to be pretty egregious for us to suspend you so that's a big shift

▶ 32:49 Speaker 5: that's a big shift do you have any complaints over that sometimes the other

▶ 32:57 Speaker 4: parents are looking for a consequence and they want to know what happened to its student and as we all know it doesn't matter whether there was a consequence or restorative justice you can never discuss what happens to a student after a discipline situation so sometimes that's the frustration but I think that's not necessarily tied to the restorative practice it's just people well did you punish the person parents being protected we we in and right they

▶ 33:26 Speaker 4: are and I understand that and the high school administration has a very simple answer we dealt with it in accordance with our code of conduct thank you other

▶ 33:41 Speaker 9: questions or comments mr obromsky i'd just like to comment um i'm extremely impressed by the no suspension uh comment that's just off the charts that nobody's been suspended also earlier in the meeting uh with the change in the schedules with the times is just remarkable um the fact that toddies are down uh 40 was a 43 percent and 17 percent and uh just the uh general conversation that was just happening about what's happening in the schools like i think uh it started out as an mcas question but the uh the real things that happen in the schools is day to day and i think parents and kids have to be reminded not to emphasize the mcas test results all there for the educators to look at it's not something that any child should ever be judged on the things that that are happening day to day in the classroom, how the kids are interacting with one another, how the kids are interacting with the adults, the curriculum that's provided by the district, that's the real true signs of a good school district. The things that are happening extracurricular, I know the Roosevelt just did Aladdin, you had Mama Mia, amazing programs. So I just want to emphasize again, not to get stuck on the MCAS, the suspension thing just blew my mind. That's amazing, and they should be congratulated for that. That's fantastic. Thank you.

▶ 35:13 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: Other questions or comments? And I just wanted to applaud the digital portfolios. Oh, later in grades three to five, I think as you look down the road to higher education, that's where higher education is going, and I think seeing that alignment from relatively young students in our district is forward-thinking and positive. So thank you for that.

▶ 35:36 Speaker 6: You're better at it than the adults.

▶ 35:39 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: And so just by way of explanation for the community at large, this is a report to us. We receive it three times a year. This does not need a vote. So that concludes policy and planning. Thank you.

▶ 35:52 Speaker 1: Thank you, Ms. Driscoll. Next up, educational programs and personnel with Ms. DeSalle.