Vote: MVMMS School Improvement Plan

Transcript (~26 min @ 1:04:38)

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▶ 1:04:17 Speaker 2: Good evening. Thank you for the introduction. We have one agenda item tonight that we will need to vote on, and I'm very excited to bring in front of us Mr. Corrigan, who, through the superintendent, is going to explain the Melrose Veterans Memorial Middle School School Improvement Plan for this coming year. And we're very excited to have you here. Thank you for coming out in the summertime.

▶ 1:04:42 Speaker 8: Oh, no problem. My pleasure.

▶ 1:04:46 Speaker 2: Superintendent, would you like to kick us off?

▶ 1:04:47 Speaker 5: Sure. Yes. So, thank you, Mr. Corrigan, for being here, Deputy Superintendent of Secondary Schools. Really appreciate all the work that you have done with the site council this year. I am not sure that we've had a school improvement plan for the middle school for quite some time. So I really think that Mr. Corrigan and his team started from ground zero and really looked at our current district plan, and really looked at the needs of the middle school to develop this plan. So I will turn it over to you.

▶ 1:05:20 Speaker 4: You just stole my introduction. Oh, sorry. Yeah, no, it was a good setup. Ms. Connor, do you mind going back to the beginning of the... So. Go back. Yeah. Oh, wait a minute. Sorry. So, as Superintendent Berman said... No, you just go back a couple slides from where you were.

▶ 1:05:38 Speaker 7: All the good stuff is always in the appendix.

▶ 1:05:41 Speaker 4: Yeah. No, I know. These are appendix. I know you probably have the most questions about that. So yeah. So as far as our process, and I'll start. Do you mind just going back two or three more slides? I don't know if they've- This is the first ... other direction. Thanks. Keep going, keep going. I just want to give a shout-out to the... So I'm here tonight by myself, but obviously there were elected parent representatives as well as staff representatives who served with the committee with me and attended most of the meetings, contributed a ton. So I'll give a shout-out to them. Unfortunately, none of them could make it tonight, but I know every now wanted to come. The timing just didn't work. But they were awesome. I think I learned just as much from them about the community. I was new to the school this year. I won't repeat everything Ms. Berman said, but I kind of came into a situation where they didn't have an active plan. There hadn't been a full slate of meetings in the prior year, so we did look at it as starting from scratch. We also had a new template for our school improvement plans So this was an opportunity for me to start fresh with that. Can you go to the next slide? So, we held seven meetings, mostly virtual. We did have one in-person in the library. I said, "You got to come in the building and actually see the children." Most of them have kids in the school. Every meeting had some form of an update from the schools. I would tell them about assemblies, field trips, academic deadlines, things that are going on in the building. Closer to the end of the year, we started to talk about bringing teams back, what the schedule is going to look like, what's on the docket for curriculum and whatnot. So, they were a great sounding board for that as well. I forget sometimes when you ask parents these questions, they come back with really good, thoughtful questions and help my perspective of how I communicate as a leader. They were a great resource and really contributed a ton. So, our goal was to develop the school improvement plan, and we did that in multiple steps. We had sort of started with a general conversation. They weren't really as a group. I went into that first meeting a little nervous, and they were just like, "You set the agenda, tell us what you want to get accomplished, and we'll work toward that." Second meeting, we looked at a lot of data, historical academic data on the school, some current data. Most stuff that you guys have seen here in school committee, things like the IXL presentation, Manuel Acevedo, I had recently put on. I shared that with them. We looked at some attendance data. I was able to share some more granular data that my team looks at at the school. Obviously, did it in a very confidential way, and we just started brainstorming, obviously using the district plan as our guide. We looked at a few other sample documents, and we sort of came up with two goals. One was to set an academic and social emotional goal that was in line with the district goals. Two, we also wanted to gather some of our own data. I had some community members who do some of this stuff for work, and we really talked a lot about surveying. And we recognized that we wanted to give out some sort of a culture survey to the building, recognizing that we didn't really have a baseline for that because we hadn't given the exact survey in previous years. We looked at some of the wellness surveys that are distributed, including the one that the state distributes, the Youth Risk Behavior Survey that we're in talks about giving again next year as sort of a data point. And we had a few other historical data points over the last two years that we were able to look at. So, as you'll see at the end of this document, there's an appendix with most of those results. I did omit some of the parent responses just because a lot of them did name specific individuals and whatnot. The parent open responses. But I included all of the parent qualitative responses. We spent a whole meeting just looking at that parent data and having a conversation about what we could glean from it, recognizing it's imperfect, right? That we had 150 or so parents fill it out, and a school of 850 students, that's definitely not a fully representative sample. We recognize that. But we got a lot of our staff and almost all of our students did it in Prime, so we thought there was some validity to those results, and we helped use that to write our plan. I know the plan was shared with you in the packet. If you want to go to the next slide.

▶ 1:10:25 Speaker 9: We just roll with the district's goal of a year's worth of growth as

▶ 1:10:29 Speaker 4: we use IXL as a measurement. It's not the only measurement that we're going to use. Next year is engaging our students' academic growth, but it's a convenient one for us to have some conversations about. And then we looked at the attendance piece. We started a lot of work around attendance this year at the middle school. I learned a lot. I learned about how a middle school is different than high school, which it very much is. And some of the conversations that we're having with our 17 and 18-year-olds are just very different when you're dealing with a 12-year-old who's late to school, not necessarily-- There could be a variety of reasons that differ from why our older students are late. Often, our older students are just not coming on time, and it's more complicated with a lot of our younger students. Parents are dropping another student off. So we learned a lot, and we met today as a secondary leadership team for about two hours. Kind of did like a little mid, late summer, where are we at? Where are we at with building improvements, projects? Where are we at with our goals? How prepared are we for the start of the school year? How in line are we with each other with our goals? And we took another look at the attendance policy that's in the code of conduct, and I think it's really about how we plan to enact that and some of our conduct policies next year in the middle school versus revamping the ones that were already approved by you guys. So, if you go to the next slide. I'm not going to read through the entire document, but I do just want to highlight that we included some of those data points. I had the committee pick out some that they thought were the ones that resonated, that we had multiple conversations about, and they thought helped guide us. We tried to mark some interim measures of implementation, things that we could share with Superintendent Berman. She can share with you all, or Jason and I can share with you. These aren't things we're inventing for this document. I think I was very clear that we really want to make this something that we're actually going to execute on, and it's going to be part of what our bigger plans are anyway. And as you can see in our action steps, we really tried to capture-- I think, as a committee, we did a good job of capturing all the work that we've been discussing, whether it's here in the building with our staff, of accomplishing over the next two years. So, whether it's bringing the teams back, rebooting some of the prime stuff, rebooting some of the PBIS thing, adopting the new curriculum materials, continuously using data and benchmarking students, holding those SST meetings and IST meetings when needed. And just continually looking at our policies not just as how they're written, but how, as leaders and staff, we're implementing them effectively. So, yeah.

▶ 1:13:35 Speaker 4: So, I guess I'll open it up to questions, and I'm happy to respond to anything within the parameters of this that-- questions you have or thoughts. Yeah.

▶ 1:13:46 Speaker 2: Thank you very much- Yeah. No problem ... Mr. Corrigan. So, who would like to start the first round of discussions, questions?

▶ 1:13:57 Speaker 2: Go ahead, Miss.

▶ 1:13:58 Speaker 8: Thank you, Mr. Corrigan. This is great. I thought it was really detailed. One thing I was wondering, with it being a one-year plan, completion dates were two years out. Can you speak to that a little bit?

▶ 1:14:11 Speaker 4: Yeah. It's supposed to be a two-year plan. I'm sorry if that was marked incorrectly. It's great. I think our goal is to have that growth within one year. But all of the steps in here, we're anticipating working on over the next two years with our staff. So, though we will implement the new curriculum materials in English and math next year, we don't view that as a one-year plan and then we're going to move on the next year. We view that as something that's going to take multiple years to-- I think we're going to learn a lot. As I said, I already learned so much just being in the building more frequently this year. Yeah, so we really are looking at this as a two-year plan. Yeah. Okay. Great. But I think I'm kind of reserving the right to reset our goals next year. And we'll definitely communicate that with you all. Yeah.

▶ 1:14:59 Speaker 8: So ultimately, it will be multiple touchpoints next year- Yeah ... and the year after- Yeah ... and with a final summary in 2028. Correct.

▶ 1:15:08 Speaker 4: Awesome. Great. I think that's well-stated. And I'll be honest, again, I learned a lot this year. With a lot of these goals, I think we're going to learn and need to adjust at the end of the year. Mm-hmm. So, a lot of these steps.

▶ 1:15:23 Speaker 8: Thank you.

▶ 1:15:24 Speaker 4: Yeah. No, it's a good question.

▶ 1:15:26 Speaker 2: Thanks for catching that. Yeah. Yes, go ahead, Mr. Hartman.

▶ 1:15:29 Speaker 7: Thank you. And I'll connect with the point that Ms. Razotich actually made in the previous subcommittee meeting about the school site council, the planning process at the school level, building into our broader strategic planning process. I think that's a really good connection. I appreciate the work that's gone into this. Yeah. You've clearly got some great people at the table. You've got educators, your admin team, your parents, all connecting the dots and pulling together this plan. I appreciate that, how much work has gone into that. So, I think this is a great starting point for us to where we can feed it into district planning as well. So, that's really helpful. Looking at some of the specifics, I know that we've highlighted math in the past. We certainly see that element here, so I appreciate that being called out. One of the other elements that popped out to me was the 56% of staff number in there around believing protocols around discipline, school safety- Yeah ... and transitions are clear and followed. That kind of jumped out to me about that, and I wonder if you could speak just a little bit more to that, if there was any more feedback on that and-

▶ 1:16:30 Speaker 9: Yeah. I would say overall, I

▶ 1:16:33 Speaker 4: can confidently say the culture and climate of the building is improved, even with larger class sizes last year, no teams, the cuts that we had to make just to make things happen. There's areas of growth, I'm not going to lie. I think it was interesting when we actually wrote the survey, when we were working on the survey with the council, I got some staff feedback about some of the protocols around conduct incidents and whatnot, and immediately delivered that feedback to our team. So, I think though things are improved, we have some areas of growth, a lot of which you guys already were talking about today as far as parent communication around some disciplinary incidents, what do we share and what don't we share. You can even see it in some of the parent results that I didn't share just because they were so specific. There was one that a parent was saying there's fights in the hallways, and there isn't a lot of fights in the hallways. But there have been fights in the middle school hallway, and just as far as how we think, I think we've gotten pretty good at handling those situations. As far as communicating what those results are, and just the conversation y'all just had, just that in an appropriate way with all of our stakeholders, whether it's staff, support people, other students who may have been witness to it, and families, is an area that we're working on. Mm-hmm. So, I think that was part of our conversation today. It even boils down to how we are hiring a new assistant principal at the middle school. As a leadership team, what are our goals for that person next year? Michelle Suk has really stepped up as sort of a leader in a lot of areas, as well as sort of another decision-maker that collaborates with Jason and I, and I'm excited to bring Marissa Puccio on our conversation, who's got a lot of really good experience. So, just how can we function as a team to make sure that everyone's feeling good about the building? And I think overall they are, but I think there's some areas of growth, or not yet. I'm not going to hide that, so

▶ 1:18:48 Speaker 7: Well, thank you. Well, this is a very good starting point, and I think that specifically calling it out is important to- Yeah ... to have it as a- Yeah ... as a place to focus. So- So that's marked too. Yeah. Thank you.

▶ 1:18:57 Speaker 4: Thank you. And how can we like... I'm sorry to jump in. Go ahead. But we've got this AAA class now. We got teams back, right? We've had another year of scheduling. How can we leverage some of those things to make some of these gains as well? So-

▶ 1:19:12 Speaker 2: Thank you. Go ahead, Ms. Leah.

▶ 1:19:15 Speaker 3: Ms. Leah. Thank you so much for the database. So I think it was really helpful to see the survey data as well as the numbers- ... in the plan. And I think we all know that the plan is the first part and the implementation is the second. Mm-hmm. So I was hoping you could speak a little bit more to, you just mentioned now the teams, so with regard to strategy one, you mentioned reinstate the teams. I would love to hear a little more about how specifically, for all of the folks watching, Do teams support tier one and two instruction so that we can understand when we're investing in something like that, how that actually helps us implement this plan.

▶ 1:19:55 Speaker 4: Yeah. So last year we kind of stuck with what we knew as far as our student support process, and we used a very sort of high-level data process that involved an administrative team, counselors looking at student data, and then we'd identify individual students that we needed to have individual meetings for, and then pull a more intimate team. Last year we did not have common grade level blocks off, which we will next year. So every grade level's going to have a block off. Even eighth grade, who's not necessarily constructed in teams, we can hold individualized student support meetings and know that every single teacher's available that that student has-- Every single, sorry, team teacher is available, because there might be some other important people left out, but we can get the majority of their team together more easily next year. I think it's building in those habits of looking at student results and then planning. And I think one thing that we've been working on at the high school for 10 years, and that we're still working on, and is what do we offer, right? So what can we do in the classroom to help support those students? And part of that is getting those educators that time together to have those conversations, because now there's sort of a team around that kid. Because even if they're not on a team, they have a team of teachers, and now all those team of teachers can meet and they can discuss, and they can say, "All right, what can we implement at a classroom level?" Right? And then for me, it's like, what can we offer beyond that? So is there a pull-out service? So next year, we're very excited about that AAA class. That's an academic support executive function class for non-special ed kids. We've added a reading teacher. We have capacity for reading and I'm saying these things now, I'm worried that parents are going to come asking for-- We're hoping that our teams identify kids for these opportunities. But we have the opportunity to do reading intervention for students who don't necessarily have reading on their IP. I don't know if we've ever had that at the middle school. That's a- Mm-hmm ... tremendous gain. Our guidance counseling team has started taking on sort of a more-- And they've always done this, but we really have had conversations about how can we get these needier students who maybe don't have counseling on an IP or a counseling service listed somewhere, just more regular check-ins and support. And we are looking at the prime block and those times built into the day and the win block, how can we best utilize that? We actually don't have all the answers to this. So we have some ideas about how we want the teams to function around the student support process. But we've just actually, literally today during our secondary meeting, invited a bunch of staff leaders to our admin meeting on August 17th, or whenever it is, MTSS day- Mm-hmm ... to contribute to those conversations. We're hoping to make some decisions around that. But it really is just more concrete sort of team who's available to discuss, and for us, we're providing them with some more options if those classroom-based things aren't necessarily effective at moving the needle in whatever area the student is struggling in. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you.

▶ 1:23:33 Speaker 2: Yes, go ahead- May I make a comment? ... Superintendent. So,

▶ 1:23:34 Speaker 5: I just want to really just thank you for all of your work. I do think the team that has been built, the administrative team as well as the leaders and specifically the middle school staff, I think there's been a shift. And we talk a little bit about bringing teams back and putting that structure in place. And I used to call myself the scheduling queen, and now, I was proficient. I was almost exemplary, but Brian is exemplary. He's the king. I'll give you the crown. But he really has become-- Because you need the structures in place, right? So we bring back the teams. He's been able to create the common planning that becomes really necessary when you want teachers to collaborate, to work towards what's best for students. But also then you need to facilitate and guide what that time is used for. Yeah So set the expectations for what that needs to look like. So whether it's a student support team or maybe a 504 team meeting or an IEP team meeting, whatever that may be. So now the structures have been created. I think we've given some of the parameters around what those discussions should look like in these collaborative settings. And I think also in addition to the override funding, bringing back teams and some other things, we have some actual true interventions that we can put into place. Not only in the classroom with our tier one interventions and having-- We have some new curriculum coming down the pike. We have teachers who are excited to come back and have some smaller class sizes and some different pieces like that. But then we have, you mentioned some reading pieces that we've never been able to do. You've mentioned some executive functioning. For students who- do not have a diagnosed disability but are having some challenges. And that's really important because we have that second tier that we've been missing for a while, and that all comes with, again, the structures, the expectations, and I think we're hopeful we'll start to see really some changes in performance of our students, but specifically some of our subgroups who we have seen them not rise or accelerate at the same rate that some of our other students are doing. So thank you for all of your work on that.

▶ 1:25:44 Speaker 4: Yeah. We all have ideas. I think as a leadership team, we've been talking about them all summer, but we do really want to bring these two... And adding the STEM director back as well- ... we're hoping that Allie's going to have a great role in the math lab block that sixth and seventh graders will be, because that's where some of those math interventions are going to occur. So it is written kind of vaguely, in the actual plan, and that was sort of intentional because we want to collaborate as a team and learn from the educators what they think is going to work best as well. So hopefully next year when I'm sitting in front of you, I have sort of a more concrete answer about, all right, the sixth grade 6A gets together. These are the data points they're looking at. These are how they identify the kids. This is the first step where the kids go, and this is the second step where the kids go. We have a lot of that, but I can't sit here and tell you exactly what that's going to look like, but that's our goal.

▶ 1:26:40 Speaker 7: So...

▶ 1:26:42 Speaker 2: Well, there's the scheduling piece, and then there's also the evaluation piece, right? Yeah. So I think that that's a whole another conversation, but any other questions, comments for Mr. Corrigan? Yes, Mayor Jen, go ahead. Just a motion to-- Are we voting on this tonight? Yeah, we're going to vote on it. Yeah. Motion to approve. Okay. Thank you. Second. Seconded by many people. I'll give it to Mr. Kelley this time. I just want to make a couple comments, and then we'll vote. Thank you for all the work that you did in the last year. This is a whole new leadership model that was put together by our interim superintendent at the time, who then became our permanent superintendent. So there's been so much done in the last year, and I know from having my own child at the middle school that I think the middle school was stabilized again, through you and through your whole team of leaders over there. And then I think this plan with the community input is really, really strong. It's simple, it's data-based, and it gives you a very clear direction to go in on multiple levels with different subgroups. And, I was very curious about the attendance piece- Mm ... because 11.7% of students missing more than 10% of school days during the '24, '25 school year. So that was not this past year, but the year before- Yeah ... right? Yeah. But that's a lot of kids missing a lot of days. That's 18, 19 days a year for each one of those students that's there. So I don't know what this past year is going to look like in comparison. I don't know if it improved or not. I'm not going to ask you tonight, but I think I'm really glad you're paying attention to that. I'm also really glad that we're saying, "Let's get better," back to at least where we were before the pandemic, if not better. And those are really good goals to get to, and we can do it. We can do it. You guys can do it, and we believe in you, and it's a lot of work. So, I wish you all the best with it. And I don't know if there's anything you want to talk about related to attendance, because attendance and timeliness- ... is so important.

▶ 1:28:47 Speaker 4: The educators in the room know this is a national and a state trend, right? Mm-hmm. This is not a Melrose unique issue. The most chronically absent students, I'll say that, that's a statistic. We definitely improved in that. I can tell you, we've run attendance data. We're looking at it sort of in interim moments. I actually am interested to see, once we do all the state reporting, what's going to pop up on DESE's website for this year's stat. I think it's going to be better. Yeah. But I can tell you for certain, from all the month-to-month data that we look at, our most chronically absent students have improved. So as a high school person, I would always look at the incoming eighth graders, trying to identify those students who maybe had 50, 60, 70 absences in eighth grade. We're not retaining them, right? Right. And we have actually put plans in place for those students to get support over the summer and- Mm-hmm ... because that's a whole all night- Right ... having this conversation about retention and- Yeah ... and meeting benchmarks at the elementary and middle school level, which is at the high school level, we just say, "You're not graduating. You're not moving on. You're not earning credits." And it's very different at a middle school and at an elementary school, and it's in some ways more challenging to hold that line. So, I would say we've made significant gains in that realm of our most chronically absent students, and that was certainly a team effort this year from all stakeholders. So-

▶ 1:30:25 Speaker 2: So I'm very pleased with a lot of the systems that you brought down from the high school and are applying them to- Yeah ... the middle school, and the fact that you can also cross-pollinate between both schools. I think it's a really good model, and I'm very excited to see what you do over the next two years with the middle school's school improvement plan. So with that, we have a motion, we have a second, all in favor of supporting this plan. That passes unanimously, seven people enthusiastically voting yes. Thank you so much- Thank you ... Mr. Corrigan Thanks. Good to see everyone. Enjoy the rest of your summer. Yeah, you too.