we you know we we're doing well what do we do with these results the school you know it's great our kids are going are doing better for ma in the in the national averages one of the things we do to keep an eye out we expect are our students to be better than the state and national average you can continue to go through the you know you guys can look he's going to go through all the c t s and when you get to science kevin stop you're going to see that that we are we're better than the state s students some of the questions they might struggle with we get from different reports some areas some suggestions from the college board that we talk about with our classroom teachers and it doesn't fit into our instructions it is just do you know within departments as well as as a whole faculty the other thing i want to show you with the peak so just hold for a second here kevin what you see on the left are all the a p tests we gave it is a ton of data there this is also be in your report if you really want to pore over it but i would like to highlight some so if you hit the you see a big arrow pop up i want to highlight biology and what i really want you to show you is two thousand and twelve we were a little bit below the vermont average and a little bit above the national average two thousand and thirteen we exploded to a much a much higher level was also the year some of the testing started to change that the test itself changed our teacher was a teacher with more of a believer that students need to learn how to apply biology as twice a year they have boot camp and it's you know i just really want to show you that it if it works and it it works because bucky puts the time in that students are willing to put the time in and it it's something that you know next year we have right now anyway we'll see how many make it we you know we have sixty nine students who signed up for english twelve a p for next year so i want to point out the two u s history the u s and world history in their very different courses the u s histories in this last year of being sort of that fact based short answer with a cup database questions the world history is more of a theme course we're above we know we do very well in the u s history course be switching over the next two i want to point out or two that we struggle that will blow in physics in spanish language i know that physics is the most difficult i think if you look there you'll see it's the lowest why are we struggling so much are students not prepared mathematically for it are they're splitting the physics course into a physics b of a physics c track next year we're going to be doing the physics be our teachers going to the a p institute in st johnsbury this summer to get some more training in spanish language is something i'm hoping m i l will will address the a mile program which is the middlebury interactive program  one of the struggles for us in the spanish language has been for the speaking and listening it's actually one of the only a p tests that it's administering minister at the high school you have to take it on a computer you have to have the microphone and you have to listen and speak  and it's it's been one that not many of our students who probably have less than ten taken a year but as you look over time it is one that we don't do quite as well so those are those are a couple that you know in when my son was in high school it was always said that someone whose first language was english is never going to get above a four but if you ever look at years here so we haven't really had a group of students has taken the a p test yet i don't think that had from kindergarten through eighth grade and then into ninth grade was taking the  haven't had a critical mass that's taken the a p test so they're not that age yet because the age that they can receive especially verbal knowledge in a foreign language investigated whether the textbook is the best available and most accessible we actually are looking at that this year for coming out of the institute with the new the new course we want to try to get a different textbook  or reduced lunch and things like that simply get a better handle on whether we're serving that particular talk relation well and also whether the overall numbers are influenced by that from the report we get from the s a t folks if they break this all down for us  think as i recall the other attempt there so so there's a there's a pretty significant differential between our group in the minors a whole group is that is any portion of that  difference really attributable to a different percentage of the population having being in a certain s e s words that have you looked at that i think one could make that argument  we have less s e s students you know percentage wise and then other school districts we are one of the top former school districts in the s a t s it's a it's a i haven't necessarily broken down the data to make it but you know like our students who pursue higher education which this test is kind of geared towards is still not high enough and i just found that kind of interesting as i'm thinking about that and i'm wondering also if other just drop to you to go you know to me i'm not sure i understand i want to make sure i understand the question i was making an observation i think it's a question and the observation is that we're doing so well you know we feel like so we're going for the middle school we try to mix it up a little bit and report out show you students from fifth grade to eighth grade and how they did you know what the mean was over same course students march over that four year period of time you're looking at a nine skill score point increase a cohort of seventy three three scaled points to be a significant kids did you know kneecaps one two three or four for being with distinction and i wanted you to be or to be able to look at the young people in the building is are we moving kids you know even though you're getting skilled score growth are you moving kids to a better proficiency and no purple line on the far right hand side which is thirty four so that group of young people came into the building in fifth grade  fifteen out of the seventy three were proficient with distinction and eighth grade this year in the fall thirty four young people were proficient with distinction so even though you saw that growth lined up but we're really moving kids a lot of kids to be much stronger readers and you know we took the number of ones you know kids that are substantially below below proficiency we haft that number eleven to sex and the same with kids that were almost meaning the standard eleven to five so and you know any questions on the next side is mathematics ghana you know a little different curve here what this really represents is in mathematics young people camel's hump or making one years or growth and one year's time that makes sense the next slide and you'll see that same trend is that the state of vermont also in the next slide began is that you know are we moving kids through proficiency ranges and we are seeing a slight change from  to for kids that are almost mean the standard you know three kids moved and we are seeing you know kids that would have three category moving to a for the for category gauri but certainly not like we saw in reading and you know the population of young people that received the one hundred fifty fifth grade word is consistent after four years in the building so you know we're looking at the math program and can talk about that i have not seen not for the kneecap i have not i'm not seeing anything like that they do wonder they do it well yeah i would take you know some obviously focus and some time i think it probably would be worthwhile i there was any correlation between how students did on the kneecap and their success in algebra one and interestingly enough there was threes and fours but a better predictor was the  and the high school is having you know the feedback from the high school is those not double has not met more kids or less prepared for algebra and you know they're they don't have an increase in the kids repeating algebra in ninth grade so yeah you know our internal day data would be you know really positive for the kneecap data is you slap which is perplexing about  have been around long enough so i you know probably six years ago we had twenty students taken algebra and now we have you know we doubled the more than double that number and kids are being successful to vote which is where we want to go so you know a lot of that i think has to do with the instruction camels focus on it doesn't necessarily show up and some of the kneecap but it does mean that it but but it actually does when you look at the groups too so we struggle with students you know specifically that are living in that are economically disadvantaged really particularly in mathematics and i think oh well you know there's some of the c's around that part of it is there they do hadn't read more and they have to write more than necessarily they have to do mathematics just on a daily basis just to glean information so i think we need more math and we need to be better at differentiating it and and we're we're we're working on it is it has been a hard nut to crack to be honest with you we're we've gotten better data but we don't generally look at it that indicates which elementary school the students came into even though they're taking the eighth grade you cats ok and then and and i also the last year for that grade of kneecaps as well are going to hear for so looking because it's interesting that our trend mirrors vermont's trends so you might just think that the whole everyone as a whole is we're not we haven't moved the way we do math instruction but then again we're going to be having another assessment tool so it might be better see what happens prepare the board we're going to see our scores go down the way you know when you take a new assessment that it's going to happen so our proficiency rates are going to go down everyone's identify kids that that are out on both that that are in the achievement gap that are in that area some good news you know a lot of times it's just the basic need to think like us today we just got a grant for a thousand dollars for off for after school funding just for some snacks after school for kids and can apply to kind of meet that need top to help them to the you know fed and ready to learn a little bit more at the end of the day so excited about  that present my scores a little bit differently those are the scale scores at the top and the bottom you'll see to the end math there were twenty four from fifth grade eighth grade twenty four students went up in their scores at least one proficiency point so either went from one  have really shown a lot of growth in that area are our score at the end there is around fifty eight scale score again up much higher than the state average of you know a lot of work that's been going on there repetition improves scores up to a point but taking practice s a t is good for x many points in the aggregate final i hope is that we had best back to being beta tested this year but i hope when the real thing comes around next year there will be heavy preparation and every other string pulled to get the best possible scores from our students to avoid being an identified school be a good thing with the exception of jericho because they want to look at their kneecaps scores and one more time to look at some of the professional development they've done we try to become a pilot we have been under hills turf underhill id and for pilot school but i agree i think we want to give our students the best chance to be successful and one of the ways you do that is through doing some practice testing doing some release tasks having kids take some sample tests and that will that will you know you're right it will reach a ceiling but there have been some you know some solid studies that it doesn't it can improve the profession to rates you know between ten and fifteen percent if it's done his comment was that's not a real let's nap shot of what i can actually do so he felt that by not doing that perhaps work he was going to see where he actually was as a student i agree we want to see our scores out we don't want to be an identified school but are we artificially changing the those numbers to make our scores look good and i'm sure everybody else is doing it now are they but i feel like the way the studying set up and by using a book that they go book of i said to questions kind of outline this like how to go through it in a much for like a longer test setting and choice tests in general i think it's very difficult to compose a multiple choice test that isn't ambiguous i know sometimes i run across them in different circumstances here and there and i'll look at the test myself i think i haven't looked at one that was a third grade standard test of whatever and i found the questions to be ambiguous i found like there were either no right answers or two right answers and and i think that that when students are confronted with something like that it's obviously not necessarily an indication of their knowledge so i guess i would hope that we don't come to a point of letting the tests rule our minds too much i think i mean has anybody done a correlation between students that they got in certain areas of say s a t s course when they were in high school and where their careers were ten years later you know has anybody done anything like that i made maybe there is yeah because that would be interesting to look at to there are some high stakes tests namely professional licensing tests yet where there's that where there's a lot of data on that and for example if you want to become a lawyer you take a multiple choice test where you also take an essay for sure spring sports have kind of gotten full underway now some teams that are doing particularly well probably girls across teams on field and therefore i know and they just had a really big game last night and beat south burlington and over time we have our spring sport couture coming up the end of the month as well as our kind of wrap up session for  student government to your house as one last meeting where we'll kind of create a base for them to start off next year and some ideas that they'll be able to work forward on starting off next year friends in the finance committee in the entire board and the whole school community for all the hard work that they did put in to prepare a revised budget to work as hard as they could to get information out to the public and to encourage folks to vote there is a big difference i think between the results that happened in march and the results that happened in may it's nearly two to one margin so i just wanted to show that to the board and thank everybody involved including the principals who put a lot of hard work and effort  hey were they were very noticeable and that was appreciated every one of just again thank the community for their support and at the same observation i think that what came out for the revolt was how the different groups all work together the community supporters the board the teachers everybody was behind it and i think that really did make a big big difference in the re so that was very good couple others observations i had was even i thought it was a very civil debate all the way through whether people agreed or disagreed with us the comments  were thoughtful that i read on front page form and the folks that came to our meetings and spoke again very thoughtful i thought that that level of discourse was really nice to see some things you know we'll have a budget we do have to think about and not wait until next october to get going again is there people asked the question how can you be more creative and do things differently because you can't continue to do what we're doing and expect the costs to go down in order to level off i don't think it's going to happen so i think it's important that everyone think how we can do things differently how can we be creative that question was asked specifically by one person at the last budget meeting so we do need to think about that i mean the rate of increase i mean even on the finance committee it is unsustainable over a long period of time the tax rates to go up in the way they've gone up i mean i as a resident of bolton i know in two years my taxes have gone up almost a thousand dollars and that's a big jump so we do need to think about things and i think that it would be helpful to have the curriculum committee in the finance committee meet early next fall to start a discussion to think about costs and curriculum and what it how it all comes together look at all of the offerings that we have and we continue to do everything that we like to do and have some serious discussions around that i think it's also because it came up a few times i think it's important to look at all the co curricular activities and people people one question that comes up is what does it cost to run this sport and what does it cost to run this co curricular activities in that's a hearty answer to come up with but again i think between now and next fall we need to think about that a little bit what is the per person per hour per participant cost for these different sports in these different extracurricular activit had a very nice piece on front page form the day before they got some positive response from people that read it michael that something's up earlier so i think think the committee for their work judy had a nice young thank you  share with you i won't go into all the details but i did want to talk to you a little bit about governance and the house on april thirtieth did approve each eighty three which was a governance bill between forty five and fifty five school districts out of supervisory unions that now exist the existing school this those school districts would have had one tax rate that would have been governed by a single board and they would have had a single budget they also in the bill they talked about what would happen for districts that self aligned in those that don't and they did keep the incentives in for school districts that are in the process of looking at mergers up until two thousand and seventeen  forwarded their own bill out of that committee i do not know where that stands at this time i haven't read their bill it looks very very different then and age eighty three big chunks of it are voluntary it does increase some of the incentives for districts that do merge and it does it does have some language in there that to support that property tax legislation so this is something that can and the finance committee talked about at our informational meeting but the bill had the house had passed a bill that set the the homestead rate for residents at ninety eight cents right now what has come out of the senate finance committee is as a one dollar which is two cents more on that's a cent less than th not then the rate that we were using when we prepared our original budget and so that will have an influence on tax rates if something different comes out of a conference committee than the number that we have used th money to lower the tax rate the senate is not in favor of this and so they are in the process of trying i think to come to some sort of a compromise before the end of the session but i do not believe they're there  yet one other thing this doesn't necessarily hit mansfield but it does to many of our to the districts and chin and he says the excess spending threshold what they are the senate has a bill th t that would tie the threshold to the rate of inflation instead of the previous year's average spending this change would would have could have a significant effect and i think that could have an effect on more than one of our school districts unless you know unless and i'm not saying this is i think it's a reason to do it one of the reasons unless we have a merge system the other thing i wanted to share with you we talked a little bit about this at there's two things i want to share the first is the teacher retirement health care benefit there is a proposal that would that would basically  employer sesame of approximately eight thousand dollars for teachers that are not vested in the system or that are new to the system this is an employer cost and it will a annual it's not a one time cost and it will increase over time according to the proposal based on inflation so they're estimating in f y sixteen that it would cost it would cost about an universal preschool for the last several years but there was a bill that passed passed the senate in the house that would create universal preschool the governor said he will sign it and offer at least ten hours of instruction for thirty five weeks for any preschool of jubal students ages three to five the state is going to reimburse qualified providers and public providers both private and public  the expansion is going to cause estimated to cost about nine point six million dollars i think that's in the first year of implementation the law will go into effect july one two thousand and fifteen if it signed by the governor which i believe it will be you know i think it is it's a very solid bill and and in the long run good for mamma but i'm not sure how they're going to pay for it i don't i there have been no details of how they're going to pay for it today so there's a lot going on in montpelier certainly from now until saturday eight on governance and still on property tax rate it's not mandatory but parents everybody will have equal access so if you want to take advantage of it you will be able to but not say have to just i hope everybody understands that we passed our budget and it really doesn't matter whether it's a forest you know ninety eight cents or a dollar we still have a budget but you may be asked does that you have to go back and make more cuts and that's not the way it works we have a budget we have what's in there stays there the difference will be that people's property taxes will be higher than they anticipated because the local share goes that if i threw away in that benefit both retirement and health care and retirement are benefits that are not bargained locally but were but were adopted through the legislature and the state treasurer for the last two years has been arguing that there needs to be something to address this because of a growing underfunding enlist in the state  teachers retirement fund because that was the sole source of revenues to fund health care for teachers and retirement and they are on a statewide level there was a negotiated resolution that did involve the state teachers association the state treasurer and some other stakeholders the as i understand the room on school boards association position they they supported it with the higher percentage of for the their teacher retirement you know that that's their salary but part of it is their benefits as well and i don't think there's resolution on whether what i read today looks like  school based programs or private providers ye both like there are quite a number of these things that and it's not just issues about schools it's also true like with cell towers and other some certain other issues that th ere are regulations being passed that we will do this or that by us and some date to be the mechanism to do it and the money to do it isn't  and it ends up falling upon the local communities and and i i think that i think we need some more accountability in the legislature about some of these probably preaching to the choir but that this is something that does concern me that all these things sound really nice and we can go on talk about we need this and we need that but  the and you know if you go over there and visit the places the crazy house that they are there is so much going on and there are so many interests and so many bills and so much stuff and it's just overwhelming i don't know how they can even function over there it's so difficult  but that is a concern that i have been and where where we struggle to pass our budget as ideas and then we have increased responsibilities coming upon us and no particular way to fund it it's just going to fall back on the walk community stand and i don't know where the end of that is that is taking a fairly active  so probably by the gate the goal is by the end of june and then i'm out and you know you know we're we're looking at something with a we don't have a we're going to have a perfect fit for the position right now so we're going to look at some other with massachusetts i mean as far as this particular area that's growing here the reason i ask is because you look at college catalogs which i'm happy to in these days they're still tied to the carnegie what we expected were students and somebody units of this and so many years and i just wondered if there's attention given to coordinating those two ways of doing things have the and i'm blanking on it it's the document that explains your grading system that they got a good profile yeah that the guys department gives to the college that has to explain you know connect the new well you know i'm just hopeful that this also i mean might my feelings about that are that that's the ideal thing would be that this would not only benefit by it with benefit students across courses that are more advanced or at the college level or independent studies that those people could be accommodated in this kind of system as well drafting a set of articles now our next step in the process is to decide whether to formally present articles for review by the local school boards and although statutorily this board is not a forming board for the merger it's all the elementary school boards i believe it is the intent of the committee to present them formally to this board as well and to request comments and it is also our intent if they are adopted to also go through a process of formally soliciting more public comment course of have public comment at every meeting it's been a lively topic but i think we're going to see if we're going to be able to reach out to folks in the more formal matter and so these decisions will be made i think at our next meeting on may nineteenth at four thirty at the central office and what's driving us right now is we are aware given the various potential timelines that if this is to be presented to to the voters in november given all the reviews that have to occur by local school boards input from lead the agency of education and the state board of education that we're now running up against the deadline you have to make a decision one way or another and i expect that decision will be made at that had had in terms of the conversation and the contributions and i'm really really pleased that we have the shape that the articles are taking especially with the addition of our introduction and our  preamble and and great suggestions are coming from all the different towns and i just i just see so much of a spirit of really working together to get something out that's going to be meaningful that's going to really move our whole s u forward so i'm really excited to start those community conversations cross community and continue the dialogue that we've been having amending the words more or two million one hundred eighty thousand two hundred fifty one dollars seventy nine cents there is no question that the words we w