Vote: Roosevelt School Improvement Plan

Transcript (~11 min @ 32:44)

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▶ 32:21 Speaker 3: Thank you. Good evening and welcome to Educational Programs and Personnel. Um, we have a bunch of things on our agenda, and I'm gonna move the, um, order around a tiny bit. First, if we can do the Roosevelt School, um, improvement plan draft and take a vote on that. And then after that we're gonna do the winter waiver, um, and then we'll get to the MCA results. Um, the first two things we need to take a vote on and the MCAS results will just be discussing. So, Ms. Cruz, thank you for being here. It's late. We appreciate all that you're doing every day for the Roosevelt Ravens and the larger community.

▶ 33:01 Speaker 6: Welcome. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here as a humble representative of the community. Um, I'm really proud to serve the 367 students and our amazing staff of educators, paraprofessionals, our custodians, our, um, amazing admin assistant who keeps me in line every single day, um, our nurse. So I'm really proud to be here and represent them. Um, so our overarching goal, um, for our accelerated improvement plan, while it is just a one year plan, I feel as though it really is a two year plan, if you will, is to cultivate an inclusive, welcoming and equitable learning environment where all, all of our stakeholders feel a genuine sense of belonging, thereby leading to literacy growth for a hundred percent of our learning learners. And when I say all of our stakeholders, I mean all of our stakeholders, I mean our students, our staff, our families, our community members, because when we feel a sense of belonging, when we feel a sense that we truly are one community, we want to be here, we want to support our learners, we feel comfortable being ourselves, we feel comfortable, um, being vulnerable, asking for help supporting one another, um, that truly does need to happen for us to nurture the whole child. Um, this work really, I believe, started last year in my first year as principal when, um, my goal was not only to make it through the year and survive, which I'm glad to say I did, um, but it really did come down to trying to, um, establish a sense of belonging. Because when children feel as though they belong, they wanna be at school. So we've been, along with just Patty trying to improve our attendance. Um, we have really revamped our PBIS program. We, uh, totally changed our acronym from Raven, which only 17% of our community, including staff members, knew what the acronym Raven stood for. Um, I'm not going to test my three parents that are here, so you can rest assured I'm not gonna ask. Um, but we changed to the three Rs because we want our students to live and breathe what it means to be a Roosevelt raven. We are respectful, we are responsible, and we are ready to learn. Um, and so in the past year, we've implemented, um, assemblies, um, our students are really taking pride and ownership in being Roosevelt Ravens. So that has really been, you know, step one. Um, we brought the T back to the PTO, I'm proud to say, um, in past years, the T had been nowhere to be seen. Um, I'm happy to say that we have a PTO liaison that regularly participates in our PTO. Um, our PTO has partnered really, really closely with our teachers now. Um, and I feel as though we have much more of a partnership, um, which helps us to really dig into this plan, um, in terms of building that sense of belonging so that we can focus on our goal of really digging in to increasing our students' potential for literacy growth. Um, the theory of action is that if we systemically cultivate an inclusive culture of belonging amongst all of our stakeholders, while implementing high fidelity, culturally responsive literacy instruction and proactively dismantling systemic barriers based on timely data, then student engagement will surge non-academic barriers will diminish, and adult collective efficacy will increase so that the intentional connection between culture and instruction results in a hundred percent literacy growth for every single learner in sustained equitable outcomes. And so our focus this year, while it's been a little bit clunky, because we've had a lot of change, a lot of reduction in staff, um, we've had some changes in leadership, um, a reduction in, um, we once upon a time had a full-time assistant principal and we went down to a halftime assistant principal along with, um, half of a special education coordinator. Um, we reduced our classroom size. So we're, uh, we no longer have the luxury of instructional coaches, so we're really still adjusting. Um, so we're, we're working with what we have and trying to create a culture around data analysis and getting comfortable with the routine of that data analysis. And I think one of the things that we've had to do is, um, really have some

▶ 38:38 Speaker 6: conversations about what data meetings have been in the past, um, and what we don't want them to be anymore, what we want them to be now, and who they need to be about, um, and why we need them to be completely about students and focused on students. So we've been having a lot of those conversations. Um, I'm hoping to establish a data team, um, and establish a more of a formal six week data cycle with that team in addition to the data cycles that we have within the building already with our, with our grade level teams. Um, but you have that all in your packet. Um, in addition to that, um, our educators this year since we've moved into using IXL from, um, using i-Ready, um, our educators are becoming more proficient with IXL. And so the goal is for our educators to use it much more strategically to identify student skill gaps and implement targeted interventions and to track progress towards grade level mastery, fully integrate IXL into daily and weekly instructional decision making to ensure interventions are precise, aligned to student needs and measurable. Um, and the reason why I think that this is so incredibly important is because while we have, um, many of our students really performing very, very well, there's some really major discrepancies, um, between all of our learners and our subgroups, namely our multilingual learners and our special education students, um, and also our students that would be qualifying for free and reduced lunch if we were still doing that. So does anybody have any questions?

▶ 40:42 Speaker 3: Thank you for that overview. Really appreciate it. Um, yes, this is a very comprehensive plan, and just one comment is that it's fine if you have it for two years, and I'm encouraging through, um, Ms. Veto and through this, uh, superintendent to just have those benchmark data points. So like next year for all the plans to be like, okay, we're shooting for this percentage, we're shooting for this decrease, or this increase in, you know, but this is such a good roadmap. Thank you. Any questions, comments from the committee? Yes, Mr. Driscoll.

▶ 41:15 Margaret Raymond Driscoll: Uh, I just wanted to say thank you for a lot of hard work, and I know, um, we all recognize and appreciate that nobody starts at ground zero and we all stand on others' shoulders. So, um, I just wanted to remember with great fondness and appreciation long term, um, administrative assistant. And prior to that lunch lady, Evelyn Lovett, who was with the Roosevelt community, um, just, she just loved the Roosevelt family so much. We lost her two weeks ago, but she was incredibly dedicated to the Roosevelt community with her head and her whole heart. And we know that you'll continue that leg, uh, legacy, um, in her honor and on your own. So thank you.

▶ 42:01 Speaker 3: Absolutely. Thank you. Mm-hmm. Thank you very much. Any comments or questions from the com, the rest of the committee?

▶ 42:10 Speaker 3: Thank you for all the work that you've put into this and we ap we really appreciate it, and we look forward to see what comes next. And we hope, Hey, Thomas, you. Oh, sorry. Oh, I'm so sorry. No, go aheads. Okay. That's

▶ 42:18 Speaker 2: Last minute, last minute hand raise there. Um, thank you as well for the, the report. And I think one thing that's evident is the importance of the tools that we offer IXL being the tool we're offering now. Um, and I, I think it's, it's great how you've kind of structured into two different ways of how you're implementing it. There's the, the kind of background of what is the structure of reviewing these things, and then what is the structure in the classroom. Um, the one thing I I, it's more of a comment than a question. I, I think it's, it's, um, it important for for us to remember that over the last few years we've gone through a lot of reductions in our ability to provide the curriculum and appropriate tools in the classroom. So now I think we have a period of consistency where we can hopefully for a few years be able to use tools like IXL and understand their impact. And I think that's one thing to reflect on, maybe as we're going through the plan is, um, give us feedback about if that's the right tool, if there are more tools that we need. Uh, I think we have some financial flexibility built into the way that the override is structured for a few years to make sure that we're able to have those conversations again and not be so focused on what are we cutting next year to make the budget work. Um, so I think that's a really important takeaway from, from looking at the tools that you're presenting to us as, as how you're gonna implement it in the school.

▶ 43:29 Speaker 3: Thank you. Thank you. Do you do everyone motion to approve? Yes. Being here. Oh, thank you. A motion to approve made by, okay. Second. Okay. All in favor? Okay. That motion was made by Ms. McAndrew and second by mr. And that is seven in favor. Thank you Ms. Cruz for Thank you. This accelerated improvement plan. Moving on to our second item, which will be the winter waiver. That's for, um, JV hockey, for girls hockey as well as the boys hockey. Um, and we don't have Mr.