there are a couple of concerts  recall last year we talk a lot about students dress and so we want to continue that work this year we're trying to continue the conversation with teachers we don't really great discussion with them how the faculty meeting last june and we hope to get another one with the teachers this year to talk about you know just to increase the amount of the dialogue between teachers and students you know what are some things that teachers we wish teachers could know about us as students and how can we make the school cost a little better  is not exact students that but the preparations for diversity week are sort of diversity be it was like a one week almost i guess you call the celebration during people last year where we brought attention to the  this year we're going centering trying to put together like a joint calendar we're teachers can put together put long term projects on it you know we're still flushing out the ideas but some like that we also want to continue our right to go with last year which was  because water teachers have been students a while and it's just like good to get that kind of experience and so those are some things we're looking towards doing this year and you know if you can find that there are gaps yeah you know so i think it was really interesting to like see the differences in from department to department and like what what students were receiving like what teachers saw they were given so like in social and you know good science there was a lot of copying of homework which would indicate that you know maybe the students didn't value the homework that not sure was like to robotics for them and it's just like that's a good suggestion for teachers that we like already or in math people found their homework was really useful to help them study obviously about this a little bit easier to do i probably traveled with about twenty or so veterans that are really received well by parents students teachers to music on it in support of prom recognition that was just something very  and the first speaker and is supported by the foundation for about one education and her name is glenn lyons and she speaks to families parents and teachers about anxiety and breaking the worry cycle  and she'll be speaking at seven pm et on one high school tomorrow night there is some child care available and there's a email address on the announcement that went out earlier i think yesterday if you're interested in that and she e mailed me again today to remind me that children ages twelve and up are invited to attend and she does have some messages for children as well as as parents so seven o'clock tomorrow at belmont high school and then there's a whole series of speakers that will  it has evolved into a lot of places where we are looking at as well as a board member we're looking at the financials of the last collaborative in looking at different ways that we can be helpful to dish good look at for folks at home we get flagged credits because we actually post the programs in our schools so so a lot of those actually have their own site where students go to and they have no buildings they have to pay rent to the other building or they have insurance but through our partnership with lab all the programs are within the membership schools and so this is kind of like our friends coming back to us through love birds which means if we had one hundred thousand dollars a lot of credits we could actually have our students go to the program for the year  extra time to prepare to figure out the achievement levels so that's part of what i'll talk about tonight and it's a two part presentation the first part is the new test and the results from that and the second part is the high school students still took the old test what they're calling the legacy and cast so and they still do have accountability so walk you through and if it anytime you have a question please stop me at that moment or ask at the end so first i started by trying to map out where we've been and you have in your what came in your packet was the memo that explains it with some attachments one of them being a list of sort of this historical view as well as looking into the future of the test  state test administration so it's been since the spring of two thousand and fourteen that all students took what is now called legacy and pass and then we started on the plan to transition to the park  test and then two years later that changed into well we want to create our own test and that's where we found ourselves in spring of two thousand and seventeen having our students take the next generation and casting grace three through eight it was on a you about how it will change in the future but this has as superthin a feel and said this shift deane lines in the sand means that it's very hard to get trend data  and it's also a challenge for our teachers and administrators because each test comes with its own set of testing guidelines and part of calls and requirements and when you are given a test on both paper and teachers and ministers and i'm really hopeful that we're going to stay on the path that they've put set forth now and trying to build some data that we can look at and learn from as well as have some stability and hopefully more efficient ways of delivery needs assessments so that we can do what's expected of us from the state and then get back to the teaching  a quick view of where we've been up through the twenty seventeen tested ministration which are the results i'm going to share with you today this next generation and casts does have different achievement levels which i'll explain to you in most grades and subjects the standards for each level are more rigorous than the legacy m cast dandridge and the test itself is more rigorous than the legacy m casts since our students took the part test however for the last two years i think the rigor of the test itself was less daunting for them because it's very similar to what they were taking in part so although it was kind of well not kind of it was challenging to to learn all those test protocols i think in the end it was better for our students to experience those tests and for our teachers to understand the kinds of synthesizing and thinking skills that students needed to brings us to the last bullet which is that for students in grades three through eight and schools that teach those students in districts that have those schools there is no accountability determination in twenty seventy provided that you met the minimum participation requirements that's ninety percent of all students have to take the test and then ninety percent of every subgroup that you have that's ten or more stews and we more than met all of those requirements and so we have  percent participation and it actually doesn't take much if you have a subgroup of fifteen students and everyone you know five students don't take it now then you're for even if it's just one small subgroup we're a i'm proud of is that the the way we approach assessing the students the state tests in belmont i think students don't students it's just part of the normal course of things and most families say ok of age and they go ahead and do it i think in some schools you have more families saying it like to opt out well in fact there is no such thing as opt out when it's a state test in your public school so you know if you had a town where a lot of people were saying you know i don't want my child to take this test well that town's probably level three now what does that mean in terms of what they have to do i don't think it really means all that much  frankly and everything will change a year from now because this year that we've just completed this twenty seven thousand results are the baseline for the new accountability which i don't know what that is yet because they're still working on the ship the sands will continue  so this just is a little bit about the different achievement levels on the left hand side here you see for legacy and cast we've had for many years advanced proficiency needs improvement and warning as our four levels slides are slides that actually the department of elementary secondary education used in webinars with districts to explain all of the changes and so and encouraging us to to borrow them and use them today to talk with with you and with other people who are watching from home one of the things set as i mentioned the new standards are more rigorous so the students who in the past would have been proficiency the percentage of students that would have been in the that doesn't mean the students learned less but that the test is test a different way as i said no i just this is my my gut tells me that that wasn't so much of an impact for our students and i'll show you the results in a little bit  this is a baseline year way back in one thousand nine hundred eight when the m cas first came out there was a similar effect of scores being low when the first test was first administered in districts understanding better what are the standards of our students being asked to demonstrate what they know on the standards and i suspect that will happen here as well as i said that the usually we have these results about a month sooner to share with you but this year we had there were groups of educators that worked on panels that spent time this summer setting the standards there they're really focused on this college and career ready it doesn't mean that a student in third grade is college and career ready but is on the trajectory as  they have mapped it out to be followed your career ready when they graduate from high school in some grades or subjects that are already seem to be seem to have standards that were higher are harder to achieve you won't see much of a difference but in others you will and i'll show you a picture of what that looks like so the other big difference with  achievement standards is that whereas with a legacy and casts they started out with just three grades in the eight at another grade or another subject and so the achievements us levels in standards were set at different times by different groups of people this was all grades all subjects at one time with people with an eye toward having a consistent approach to them so their stats th at explains how they are able to project and then show us the results that they the other thing that they were thinking about is one of their goals and when they were making these new sort of standards and cut scores for each level this is a think about well what do national and international test results look like and maybe is is one of those tests the national susman of educational progress and you can see that in massachusetts our students which who who do very well on this test first in the nation are tied for first in the read to grade eight i'm sorry grade ten the next seven bars are math grade three to grade ten and the last three are science and if you follow the lines the lines show you from grade to grade this is all one test year from grade to grade how many students were in the needs improvement or warning category and it sort of goes up it's harder it's like harder in grade four to get profession and then you go down to grade ten and there's a very small number that and it's it's this is replicated year after year so you have that on even sort of applications so what they really one of their goals was to even that out so you wouldn't  proficient for example in tenth grade is much lower than the score to get for fission and other  grades and that's something that as educators we've known for a long time i mean you you know when you look at the data year after year you see the same pattern over and over again you know ok so that's fourth grade that doesn't necessarily say how the students got a score in fifth grade but if what we really want to know is based on the standards for this grade and how is the student continuing to learn we do you do hope to see over time more kids in profession if fance but this level of change is isn't as helpful as it's nice for the student to receive report but if it if it's really masking something that we need to know that that's not helpful so now i'll show you some of our results and i'm looking at it from a district view so this is all of the english language arts results for grades three through eight compiled together on the left hand side you see we have seventy five percent in belmont meeting or exceeding the expectations and twenty five percent partially meeting or not meeting with many of those falling in the  state you have forty nine percent in the scene are meeting standards and then fifty one percent partially or not  for math you have similar numbers seventy eight percent are exceeding expectations and twenty two percent not with the bulk of those falling in the partially meeting that that will that will change over time that is schools these standards are more rigorous and the tests and appropriately so i believe and the tests test him in a way that the old and cast did not so i wish we didn't do as many tests as we do every year but i wouldn't want to abolish them either because i want all children not just children who get to go to school in our district to have the kind of teaching and learning that allows them to be in that green bar so that's why we need to thinking about it and the science and cass's in transition in two ways one it will turn into a different task called the next generation m p s and we're transitioning to new science standards the test that was given in twenty seventeen was still based on the old set of standards that were from two thousand and one and two thousand and six in two thousand and eighteen the test will be based on a combination of standards that are in both the old and the new frameworks and then in twenty nine thousand it will be all of the twenty sixteen seats so if they're transitioning to that new for twenty eighteen the science test will be on the computer as well so we'll learn about that as we approach the spring so these are our results for grades five and eight they're very similar to our results from last year i want to think just going to franc liz baker who've been working really hard to align to the new standards with their science units and supporting teachers to teach them with the delany and consistently and i think or so so when they're looking at the data so this is just really high love you know data when they think they can run reports that show i have analysis group by standards so they can see oh we need to work more on that our science stuff or what we need practice standards so it's both content and skills and how you approach the work out what does it mean to be a scientist for elementary school this is our second year and a lot of the initial work that jessica has done is to make adjustments to units that just needed to have some tweaking done to me to make it match the standards better and also creating from scratch units sometimes using materials that we had on hand and sometimes finding putting together herself and she and jess grant scranton who's our elementary science facilitator are amazing at figuring out ways to create things that are you know they say oh we bought this thing and we don't think it's very good to shake table so we're going to make our own and they come up with a creative way to make a shake table so kids can test their the earthquake proof of this of the structure they discreate it so they have they're both very clever and creative and also i have found ways to do things that are good for students and not that expensive but now we're getting to the part where there are some units that you have to buy because they aren't things that tells you how did your school how the students in your school perform compared to all other students across the state at similar great span school grades bands in both l a and math so you can see that all of our schools  elementary is in the middle school our students results are in the ninetieth ninety fifth ninety ninth percentile compared to all of the schools across the state that's what leads me to believe that well first of all that we have a really great curriculum and we have excellent teachers who provide instruction that help students learn at high levels and i also have that hunch that having taken the park they weren't so stunned by the kinds of questions they saw on the test last year i think there is a learning curve for the computer based testing and will continue to see that department of elementary and secondary education did say that they did some adjusting of scores based on  know they did not reveal their algorithm but that's what they said so overall our students did perform well on this test but not too well which is good because this is our baseline year so you wan have room for growth then and we'll see it's no longer no child left behind if everything succeeds and they've given us some glimpses of what that might include but it's really still a mystery  computer also science on computer the high school were main the same math and science all the legacy tests and on paper the year after twenty nineteen is when our high school students will take the next generation and casting grades ten for elaine math and on computer however note down below that's our current ninth grade students they have said that they will not use the new cut scores the new standards the more rigorous standards with the high school students until the twenty twenty one administration yes the tw twenty one administration meaning that students will take the more rigorous tests but they will use the lower scores to score proficient for two years i will will come back to the slide and see if that's where we land at that time because frankly it's a high stakes test for high school students they have to pass it to graduate and they haven't had any exposure to this kind of a test yet our ninth grade students last year is eighth graders took part this year is ninth graders will take the physics which is the old test and next year will take this next generation test hopefully we'll have some practice things that they can and the teachers will know what it's like before they take it in the spring but i've witnessed in the past where they haven't given you much of that in advance so if they're going to ha take the new test in twenty nineteen that gives us a year to to hopefully be prepared for that at least they're not going to raise the standards on the achievement level until two years after that at which time so that's our current seventh grade students will take the next generation and cas with a more rigorous allegedly at this time that will come back to th in the preparation students so we're very grateful to support that we got last year from the capital committee forty thousand dollars allowed us to buy more devices for this school for the middle school  the foundation for government education last year of wanted a grant to butler that actually they're going to test all grades on computer this spring because they have enough devices for that we have the i pads at the high school and i believe you can take the test and i pads but we'll have to see where that goes and what kind of keyboard or other things we need to have for that and we also last year the n i don't i don't think i don't recall anything and specifically that that you know i think there are some there's a level of stress for some students whether it's paper or computer i don't think this is a fake to the computer and we're lucky that although we have a pretty lean technology department they're very skilled at being present and fixing things higher to demonstrate that this is a very quick run through a p p i these are the seven measures that are included in the p p i your m cast scores your growth score as graduation and dropout rate and they the most current year most they give you a number up to one hundred students they look at the number for all students and the number for the high needs subgroup and the high needs subgroup is your english learners have a score of seventy five or above in terms of our achievement this slide shows the not the percentage of students who were proficiency for advanced for all students the numbers are quite high ninety eight percent ninety percent ninety seven put together all of those annual p p i you come up with eighty eight for your all students subgroup which is lower than we had the year before the year before our  school percentile as i show you there is similar to the achievement percentile it compares your students results to all other schools of the same grade span last year our school percentile is ninety three this year it's eighty six  when you when we look at the data and this principal of the high school has been working with director of student services and with the directors of the content areas english math and science as well as with special and special educators to have to really look at the data and try to understand what's going on here we see that it's and it's really the two groups of students who are not accessing the curriculum as they should be as well as they should be as well as we should support them to our students with disabilities and are economically disadvantaged students are english learners are actually doing quite well but it's these two subgroups where our students are meeting with less success and so that's an indication to us says the educators that we need to do some things differently so as i said the the working with teachers the special education teachers as well as the regular education teachers because it's a both and it's not something for the special educators exclusively to work on it's something for them to work on in collaboration with the regular ed teachers because in the classroom those teachers need to understand what are the accommodations and modifications they need to make so that the students can access the critic looking at our structures as well are are we providing in our learning centers the support students as well as we can when you look at the growth scores for the for these subgroups they're not as strong as they should be as well so the growth measure is how did this group of students compare with  all other students who scored at their level in the previous exam and we don't we see scores in the thirty's or forty's a high the average range of the moderate growth is between say forty and sixty so that's an indication to that that we're not providing the kind of instruction that helps to need to learn and grow compared to how other students who scored similarly to them did in the state so that's another indication that that's an area we need to work on we are committed as you know to making sure that each student is able to access the curriculum and and and learn at a high level with the supports necessary and so that's something that we're working on it will be ongoing and i will continue to provide you updates as i  so final couple of slides summary of all of the results as i said earlier a high percentage of our students matter exceeded the expectations on both our the next generation and casanova legacy  casts however if we still need to support our students all students to meet or exceed expectations and in addition to the students if the state measures the disabilities and disadvantaged economically disadvantaged we also as a district are looking closely at our african american black students performance and doing learning and working together to to see how we can better support their learning and that's an area that you can we continue to see in this year's data as well that the  to the people who work so hard to think regularly about how we can continue to do for instruction as we adopt new curriculum new ways of teaching students and really focusing through our social motional learning a lower number for for not you have to keep can prove and so for example and you so you earn points whether or not you do keep  the twenty sixteen c p i for the high needs subgroup at belmont high school in an english language arts was ninety seven point seven twenty seventeen was ninety five point eight so that went down so you get fewer points for the target was ninety nine point seven so part of it is that you're you're getting to that last bit that has to reach profession so it's not that you know it's it's a disaster but it is an indication and then this is why you would be looking to side with data data as well as all students that that there's a there's a population graduation it's not the know are are are things are is it really is there we actually got some extra credit points for reengaging students who had dropped out but it's that that last little bit and i suspect that just like there there resetting the the baseline in the accountability for the three freeway when they change the test they're going to have to do the same thing for a school and and way back when no child left behind or whatever came before and i can remember was put in place the goal was that every student would be for fish and by two thousand and fourteen and then want to reach twenty fourteen and we weren't there they changed it a little bit they got a waiver and they said ok so now you need to to cut that we're so so that's a small piece of what they do there's a lot there are a lot of great things you can do particularly with the google classroom and kids working together on you know sharing a google doc and writing together and that's one piece of what they do i would i would have to ask the principals to give me a sense of you know how what's the percentage maybe is it every day is it once a week is it twice a week it does depend on the grade and i suspect it does but even at the high school where the kids carry around device all the time there are times when i'm in classrooms i was in classrooms this week where there was an i pad inside because they were doing some discussion about something that was direct work in the classroom but also the important role of the directors in our critical needs at the elementary level for looking at the students and doing that work outside the classroom while teachers are doing the work clearly the curriculum folks are really and that work in the classroom and hopefully that makes the teacher's job easier because that supports coming in each day that a certain part of what can i worry about that someone else is helping them with so when they get into those professional development opportunities or those grade level meetings  visiting the viewing audience some of these lives because we're going to build of this presentation in the meeting that we go to this thursday night they'll actually have models that are going to be pretty models  this piece of the presentation really looked at how do we want to organizing inside a school to what we would have next to each other how do we want to organize teams at the middle school departments at the high school where we want to have next to each other how do you want to create that so as you look at this sheet remember we talked about this matrix that we're getting into long before we begin to get this kind of detail we said that on the left hand side you have grades nine to twelve and seven to twelve is how three figuration in across the top we have what if we just renovated that building how would that look for nine to twelve between twelve and seven to twelve what if we renovated in added to the building how would that look to support nine to twelve eight to twelve seven to twelve and if we just had all brand new construction what would that look like if we were going to have to do to a nine to twelve are how much of the old school of the high school would be taken down if we wore the renovated out and we're with that new addition to go and you know a lot of these cases they're using excited that these are kids include savings on the use of the high school but adding new it as we look at all of these options these are just need to get several levels of criteria to stories would be go by what is the green value of a building that has more area of a footprint and west of stories and how can we save energy in any way medications ollie don't work because we know it's nine to twelve you just get in to the building that without having space we're not we don't we don't fit there already so this whole hall will be you know not feasible  the school experience of the students in the building during the time of trouble obviously the shorter the structure period in the us movement the better for students the better for the cost which bridge readily here if you can build the school so we're all here with seven through twelve is the biggest building we could i wish we could make it easier this would be the upper school of the law school we are talking about separate entrances to the set of dialogue that if it is seven to twelve you would have to meetings the joint meeting that we had on thursday night i don't remember to have this information presented we will be meeting this thursday sixteen at a joint meeting where we will go to  details this is not for b p s athletic events or final performing arts events or graduation events but outside or anyone else is an outside renter that for holidays  contractually obligated holidays in the ask me contract that those read this will need to be charged double time as it is now for any hours outside of a custodian's regular forty hour shift  monday through saturday those those days are charged at a time and a half will want to have times that employees regulus salary for sundays that is double time the language in the that the amount that they're paid is more than the rates that we're charging to the outside when there's an users and sole we're recommending in requesting that the committee approve an incremental increase in those rates nineteen the not not all but some of the custodians i will leave rates at a time half or double time leaks will begin to exceed what those rates are and which would mean if we didn't make any change the bona public schools would be subsidising guage to increase the rates for time and a half which should be monday through saturday is from currently forty dollars an hour to forty five dollars an hour beginning in f y nineteen and for double time and holidays to increase that rate from fifty five dollars per hour to sixty dollars per hour and out of the reason we're bringing this to the attention of the community early in the year is so that once in rates are set we can begin to reach out to the groups using the space and plenty of time for them to be in to set their f y nine hundred budgets and their fees to their constituents league on in terms of the actual day schedule on holidays it's minimal i think we looked at the the permits we have this year i think there half are half a dozen events it's under three hundred it's like under three hundred dollars differential that you just for the holidays but it affects those three groups primarily in any other kind of one off groups that would use our space which is why we want to get ahead of everyone starting their b these the same minutes that the other some news are also conducting or do we take competing versions of what