good evening everybody i'd like to call the regular meeting of the school committee of the town of foxborough to order today october twenty first two thousand and thirteen mrs there is unable to be with us tonight so i am filling in for mrs there and also mr yoo is not  able to be with us he had a family situation he had to attend to so we wish him the best and we will miss him tonight our agenda as always will start with any visitors followed by approval of minutes and then teaching and learning highlights and which will feature a review of the october eleventh professional development day that took place that dr burgess will lead us through and then highlight the seminar for massachusetts music of educators that  discussion about the superintendent's goals for two thousand and thirteen thousand and fourteen with ms benelli the next topic will be the fox republished schools growth plan for stem science technology engineering and mathematics stem and business technical will review the october first in rome an update and then we will take any other matters so do we have any visitors joining us that would like to be recognized at this time seeing none move to approval of minutes we have two sets of minutes before us we have some executive session meeting minutes from june seventeenth and so regular meeting minutes  from the october seventh regular meeting that friday we had a lot going on and the theme really for the day was focusing our work for student learning we've a lot of initiatives that have begun in the last year or two and we're really digging down into those initiatives and the day itself was filled with people coming into the district from outside of our district some of ours leaving and i just wanted to highlight a couple of things but then turn it over to  about one of the ones that we really want to highlight which is the music program so speaking from elementary elementary focused on math so you you heard recently of our curriculum review and some of the professional development recommendations so we really focused in the area of math with elementary together and then at the middle and high school as well in the middle school a particular area that we've implemented this year's the readers right workshop and spent a lot of time focusing on authentic literacy so there was a lot of work done with common assessments and writing prompts and really looking at that reader writers workshop and then taking that to the high school level where all high school teachers participated in a workshop that was presented by walter mitchell that was writing across the curriculum to the common core state standards which really is focusing on the authentic literacy so that was nice to have a colleague step forward and present t entire high school that takes a lot of planning and a lot of guts in order to do that really need to be quite honest and to have our activities for the day which were sponsored by d which is our local staff to mount it opportunities was for our nurses and for our music department as an example our nurses they've left the district and we're with nurses from many other districts around the this area and had a presentation from boston children's hospital that really looked at depression and youth and adults in traumatic brain injury so it's nice to be able to have something very specific and targeted at all of our nurses participated in that so when we have those opportunities for those low incidence groups that have something that's very targeted it really makes for great professional development and growth for the day and the music is no exception so for a number of years now we have  had other districts come to us because of our fabulous music program and our fabulous music educators and i'm going to invite kimmy to dolet to come forward she has some of the students with us that really made the day spectacular who are music educators from and they helped also to form their plans with the with the wellness staff to how they're going to make a difference with younger kids so we've really got them going with a lot of different connections that proud of so you may be hearing more about them so cammy just give you a little bit of background cammy did all of the organizational work for this mr paper you with mr piper came into a pipe when we started this five years ago all the organizational work was really done by bill russell who is a professor emerita said you asked him her stand pretty famous in the music education business and he's he's last year just couldn't continue like continue to he's been retired just twice emory this but this is something that we started five years ago with the hopes that we would keep it as a tradition and now it is such a wonderful tradition that people of the districts ask for all the time so as superintendent sometimes some other places and people will say are you still having that music thing because we are so this is really becoming much more than than we hoped for or maybe everything we hoped for so if you could just give us an overview of what the day was and why we have fabulous students here because i'm sure there are people home thinking well professional of develop day for teachers kids are home sleeping in what's the connection there very important so as we said this day you know was created really for music teachers to talk about the art of making music and the art of the profession and the creative spirit that goes along with that so you want to take a look at this this will show you some of the sessions that we have and you'll notice that they're not really technique base they're very for example techniques to develop their powers of imagination a very broad things to get the juices flowing he that's the purpose of the day the day starts off with a round table discussion with all the teachers clinicians joining together to speak about creativity and music education we then break out into a couple of sessions and then so you can just see those there but for the music education community it's it's a smaller community within a school district so it's really nice to have the opportunity to collaborate with music teachers from around the state and it this day has become almost like a like a ritual and like a sanctuary for music teachers to really come to and just have an opportunity to talk and share with each other so that for the music could communicate community it's really special a couple of quotes from the feedback sheets that we have i just would like to share with you all of them were very much appreciated thank you this day was very inspirational for us one person said i wish i could have attended more with more of the workshops i guess we'll just have to have more professional days them was a first time attendee and said that they will be attending every year now that i know about it this is a fabulous opportunity for music and for professional development and we thank you for including educators outside of  and then finally the part that ties into our students which really makes this a so meaningful for music education and community this person said first off bravo this is a great day ted and george were engaging realistic and very clear thank you in capitals for involving the kids it lends to seeing things in action and made it all more impactful great job so this leads us to our students so it's a really neutral benefit that we get our suite hire and we bring in these really outstanding clinicians that are nationally known to get to come in and we ask our students to join us as a lab groups and this year we use the string orchestra we also use some middle middle school band students and the junior jazz band and some of the other high school band students joined us and first of all bravo to them i think it speaks highly to our program that our students are willing to come in on their day off that's a friday before a long weekend and to to come and do that because they know that they're going to get a really outstanding experience and i also think this is really interesting but we had sixty three educators join us that day and that means the next day that they went back to school thousands of students across the state of massachusetts were directly impacted by their efforts so that that's huge it goes it goes beyond just us and it really spreads and then if you think about it it's spreads for years this knowledge is you know just flowing through so it's really fantastic so i asked them to speak about you know what did you take away from the day and what was it like for you to be among teachers while they're learning so when you take a turn tell us your name and what a great question for a freshman ok i'll start hi my become an adult and you have your own job and everything you still have to learn new skills and those new skills like seeing them as a student it made me feel more comfortable learning in general just learning new things it's like it's not just for young people it's for all different perspective and also getting opportunity to work with someone that is so high in the old when it's just like a really cool opportunity and i think that we all really like being tough on crime and just from a few hours remember talking mostly with these guys but with other people like those a lot of fun and i think that was really cool because i'm going so much that day and i went home and i told my parents about it i was like i had so much fun today and it was really cool to see that day it was five and it was inspirational minds alexa and i'm senior i took a many different things from this and it was very different things one of them was i felt more connected with instant change and not only with mr dooley but also the teachers that came you felt the change from when they were stressed self from when they just started and they relaxed more with rachel arbor who was against clinician and it was amazing for me to see because i want to go into music as a college degree and to see how the change can be so quickly done even in like a few hours was amazing for me to realize that was a great opportunity to play but to watch the other teachers to kind of like almost putting us on the same level for a minute and watching them be just as nervous to learn from us as we are to women from them so it was really probably more nervous isn't really inspirational to watch our teacher feel comfortable enough to do that in front of us and just kind of brought us closer to her and in addition to that it was also a really emotional educators from all over the street it was just a really unique opportunity so i think this speaks for itself and i mean it's the lessons learned on both ends were invaluable and as i said will from george murphy when can we truly might just school whose music educator in the book brookline mass public schools and i can relate to your being nervous because i usually just welcome people just pretty easy just  welcome to love you day here in foxboro this is the first year that the people asked slash forced me to be on the piano to really piano and i have to say i was intimidated by these people as well i even emailed cammy and fred harris like i'm totally out of my league and i was nervous like i have a test that i'm quite studied enough for but what was really great about it is how do you define success of music education and we talked a lot about that in the in the piano session and then as we were adjourning from the panel session to go into the breakout sessions where they had choice one of the audience members was walking with me and all the students were filing in the high school students the music the middle school students going to the room where they were going to help educators learn and i said oh here it is right here this is one of the way define success when kids are well into their day to come and help their teachers learning grow together in community and so it it really made me think a book i can read that in the book i should but here's a couple years ago i read a book that said about education that said that why is you know i said you cation sometimes feel so isolated because you're in a classroom by yourself as an adult and it talks about we get better by practicing in the presence of others which i think music educators understand better because it's a performance based department but when we say practice in the presence of others if you think about surgeons and lawyers they're in a courtroom they're in a they're in a an operating room and when they're practicing their craft there are other experts and colleagues ar them that are giving them sort of spot to spot feedback or after the fact to give them feedback about how they did in the court room or how they did during the surgery and as teachers we don't often practice in the presence of others so that's what we hope to do more and this was a day that certainly illustrated that so you're really important for them to do that so thank you if you do any questions for me here with kids i have a question yeah i know alexis said she wants to go into music i wonder if anyone else and alexa actually rachel barber clinician has works closely with the eastman school of music which is one of the best schools for music and spoke to alexa about applying and gave her some where i want to go as far as going on into college and applying to lots of colleges want to do for your degree and hopefully something afterwards but all the colleges that applied to are ones i've come in contact with i've talked about my music  basically like i mean all four years of my high school now and carrying over back to the r and four years there i mean it's it's all about commitment and about the leadership that you get out of band and orchestra and all of that is so important for colleges that  though i'm not going into i don't plan on going to music it's like it's been such a core aspect of my education so far so it's just it all kind of correlates in my opinion i'm not going into music bear i want to go into journalism but like jen said i definitely think that the music program has been such a big part of my life it's going to be weird not having it next year but yeah like learning leadership and learning how to be creative and just all the kids it's such a community of nice people and i feel like that's not really as known but i'm going to miss it when it's over know i definitely don't think i'm going to be a music major either but it's funny because i look at schools and i check to see if they have changed or groups fork a star if they have you know kind of club group sort of thing because i don't think i'll ever on a professional level but i definitely want to continue it i've made some of my best friends in the music program and even some of my not my best friends are people i love and i love talking to about music and others so i don't want to continue that part of my education really congratulations thank you maybe you want to come and live here more than welcome next year and i can tell what's more valuable listening to him in the student's describe the program or just listening to the students articulate so well and describe what you want to do and it's really a pleasure to have five seniors in front of us sometimes just listen to your comments so thank you we're going through and i just wanted to mention that there's a tremendous amount of planning that goes into this is you can imagine and cammy and dave piper both have spent and zorba am out of hours putting this together and making sure that the clinicians are top notch as you heard and when you look through all of she read a couple of the different quotes but throughout all of those evaluations you consistently see the word motivating and inspirational that comes out of all of those sixty three forms that came back from the participants so it was it was a great day but it was a lot of work and  i mean you can hear it i did notice one more thing because i know we've talked extensively about technology and they seem even brought dad into your subject matter they want to cloud based tools for music education was one of your breakout mine who was doing nonverbal communication was mass actually stayed for the whole breakout session it was fascinating to see because if you think about it this nonverbal communication in conducting and and in an ensemble performance was this was great because it shows what occurred ministration before it's the faculty which you know everything you know is it connected ok can any of this be brought into other subject matters especially for the students here that are not necessarily going to be music majors but faculty can show best practices for the subject matter is that these make sure going to other sever their ears i just don't know those or something i all students a lot of them to commit to doing it to help us out but we had over thirty workshops going on throughout the district you know your team play and so i think this lends itself certainly to having students they are not all of them do or maybe not maybe see what a broad array of topics you put together amy and if ever it was a question of what happens on those days for this is for you and i think i've said this before in the past p d days but this is really i think a great investment and our to focusing on the fish and sea in instruction in the english language arts developing teaching points re is right as workshops a really lasering in on exactly what we're going to focus you know her down the teaching we had an amazing had boy we had the kindergarten assessment teaching strategies gold which is the assessment data collection we're doing in kindergarten we had biology workshops my board training we had the two minute dip guys and fitness initiatives through the american heart association we had work on developing common formative assessments in the mentioned depression we had a counselor events just you know everything that you can imagine going on whatever was most the what was the highest priority for each department in the content area at this moment and they always said it or you've said before but i think it bears repeating that we do our professional development early in the year so that our teachers claim that knowledge directly into play in the classroom and to know and have the benefit of it throughout the school year and have our students have that that's good this is all you know to our students advantage into our teachers as lifelong  time but we probably won't do that because we do so much planning to have people come in to do workshops it's an important day for our learning plus my goal is yes that was an idea that we tried out one time but then to have it to have the professional development day the end of the year didn't work out so great so i don't know if it's an idea we would repeat but every idea is a good idea to try at least on utilizing so here we are with the overview part one you have a lot of information you pack it thinking these goal tonight is to try to hit on the high points and maybe the new way of looking at data that the department is encouraging and then taking individual questions and then we'll see what we are so you need to you aren't so we've you have a lot of data and i'm not going to go through every single data point that's in your packet because what you have is really showing our trends over time for each grade level and then also showing the same group of students over time as a as a cohort so i wanted to start off by giving you just some some statements really because the nitty gritty if you will will come at the next meeting when we di down a little bit further as long as my clicker works here so so one of the things we do look at we want to make sure that we're keeping pace obviously and more importantly  above the state average and we consistently do that and we do that in every and all seventeen test and in math and quite about the state average and many of those different areas when we look at grade ten that is the graduation requirement and math science and for our students so that is really an important one to look at it is the only think about that continuum of learning from from elementary it c there so when we look at our performance in math it has remained very strong where we're we're very proud of the work that our students and our educators do and we also look to see are we increasing the number of our students that move to advanced because we have students that score very high and so when you are starting to hit the ceiling in some aspects on some tests you want to see that continued growth if they're low proficient we want to look to see that we're moving them profession if their high proficiency that we're moving them over to advance because when they do all the calculations all of those things count so when we look at great ten the percentage of students and way increased for advanced by eight percent and then math by eleven percent when we look at the impasse and prior to grade ten we see consistent performance over time at the elementary level and the three which is actually reading and not called english language arts and then in grade four in fact i we want to look at the performance but keep in mind that it is a different test every single year they are different students every single year so in addition to looking at achievement it's very important that we look at growth we've been able to look at growth since about two thousand and eight with the students in grades four and about because it takes two years so we don't have growth percentiles for grade three but keep in mind that typical growth for the growth student growth percentile is between forty and sixty so we look at grade four there and our student growth percentile average over the last five years is fifty five which is really  that high growth because sixty and above is high when we look at grade five we see it on still in the typical but on the lower end of typical so we want to look at that percentage as well as our achievement and see where we've had consistent performance and if it's been in some cases kind of flat quite honestly what are the reasons and we're digging into that and have been over the last number of years when we look at the middle school we see that eighty percent of our students are proficiency or advanced so it's harder to have that higher growth when you're starting to hit that ceiling to have eighty percent of your students profession advanced that that's that's something that you know obviously we're proud of and we want to continue to make sure that we're looking at all of our students where they are so overall we're consistent over time in english language arts and our growth percentiles are on the typical to the higher levels but we do look at grade five and eight at those growth percentiles because they're not as high as some of the other grade levels and amy is that how does that compare with other others across the state do many people have eighty percent or more better prepared we have consistently outperformed the state when you look at each of those test for the number of proficiency in advance so we're higher there is fire is the target for growth percentile it's fifty one so when you see fifty five you see sixty you see those higher levels of growth that is getting into high growth and that's going to be able to give us something to look for as far as we are areas of focus can be depending on grade levels looking back to curriculum looking at other instruction some kind of given this global view and then we're going to look at how that student achievement kind of compares to growth here in a minute so when we look in the area of math a lot of work and spend it's put into me if you if you will when we look at the curriculum review that we've had the professional development the curriculum work that's been done because we really saw a lot of changes in this is the first year that the impasse is reflective completely of the two thousand and eleven curriculum frameworks last year we had a hybrid we had part of the old standards and part of the new this is the first year where all the standards that were tested are in the new framework so when we look at performance in grades three six and ten that's our greatest of performance this this year we saw an increase of the number of students scoring advanced at all of those levels as well and over the last five years there's consistent performance in grades three and four and we've seen gradual increases with students scoring advanced and proficient and then we're looking specifically where we see that consistent in those gradual increases what is the growth look like so we've seen that increase in the last three years and just here recently you had a fifty eight growth percentile and great for our so that is getting to that high growth area think performance for grades five six seven and eight again it's consistent over time when we look at grade six the last five years we have off i've years had over sixty percent so there really is a lot of work that takes place with all of the teachers that are at that level but we see a lot of the standards that and grade six to so to see that kind of performance with the the number of standards that are there and that's that's quite impressive as far as a grade eight thirty eight percent of our school students scored advanced one point we look there and we're continuing again there to see the increase in growth over the last three years with a seventy three percentile there so so high growth there so we're looking at the math we're seeing increased performance we're seeing higher growth each year i mean can i ask you a quick question do you put more emphasis on the growth rate versus the category where students perform it similar but different views we look at both because it's really important to see where a student begins and where they're going to go so if we see that they have really high performance quite honestly your growth is not going to be as high right now because it's you are compared against peers that are like your scores in the past but if we see someone that has not scored as high maybe they're at the needs improvement but their high needs improvement we want to see what kind of growth that they've had because that's going to tell us a lot it's not just the one indicator and so it's nice that the department of ed recognizes that because it was a different test it is different students every year so we need to look at where those students are and where we're taking them at the same time we look we tease out even within proficiency we have a lot of students that have moved from loper fish it to hyper fish from needs improvement low needs improvement to high needs improvement those are important games to look at as well i assume similarly your advice for parents who might be new to them cast would be to look at both their students growth in the category where they're performing yes absolutely look at your own student and then also look at your students they have a parent report that tells them where they are in relationship to their school in their district and it may be for instance at the middle school the school is the same as the district but look at the performance there look at where they are i know with my own daughter looking at hers and and she started to have her face dropped when she looked at it but then i showed her let's look at the growth percentile this is how much you've grown in two years let's also look at where the majority of all of your classmates are and when she looked at that because i think it's important to have that conversation with your students that she sees that i know i did learn a lot and i'm right there with the majority of my classmates and it really gave her that boost that she needed at the same time to talk about strengths in l a versus math or science we all have different strengths and areas of challenge so talk about that i guess that gave us opportunities for other conversations thank you in the area of science this one is the one that is challenging for us when we look at it because honestly we become frustrated because we look at the percentage of students that are scoring proficiency or higher and at grades five and eight we see that fifty six percent of them in grade five were proficiency are and grade eight forty two percent of them proficiency are higher however when we look at grade ten where it counts and where it's a graduation requirement you see a very different picture you see here that we had a fifteen percent increase from last year with our number of students scoring proficiency in advance which is a twenty two percent gain in the last five years we have ninety percent of our students here scoring proficiency or advanced and when you look at the number of advanced we have forty six percent of them that are advanced well that doesn't happen just in tenth grade it happens over time but there's also very big differences between the tests grade five and grade eight is over four different domains they're tested that test is a compilation of twenty five percent life physical earth and space and technology engineering those four domains are tested in grade five when you look at those standards that go along with those four domains the department i didn't all those and so did my sciences so forward very different sciences all four are tested below grade ten and when we look at those standards for what students should know and be able to do those are grouped in a span of scrapes three to five standards then we have the local autonomy to choose what standards will be emphasized and grade fat and grade six or grade three grade four so depending on when they take the fifth grade pass they're having to retain that knowledge from third grade through fourth grade before that assessment actually happens on tests and for different sciences same is true for eighth grade so when you look at our take so if in some other school system it's in eleventh grade you could take it live so it was a c only subject or course specific m p s exam but you could also take chemistry or you could take things i think it's tech engineering but nobody ever does a unix physics so there's you have the choice of three most high schools have their students take the bio exam whenever you take biology so as an example last year i believe we had forty six ninth graders that took the biology exam but the majority of them have that in tenth grade and i took that intent so whenever you have bio you take them in that counts as your science and guess graduation  number of a number of things are in place we have through the schedule at the middle school we have support for students at the same time we look at what's taking place with our curriculum and where meaning in ninth grade because they're now ninth graders so we look back at our performance in eighth grade and then we look at those individual standards and whether it's number sense or it's measurement or it's geometry so that's something that's important for even though they're now at the high school for those teachers to look back to see where our strengths and we are in areas that we may not be as strong within those different strands within math so to answer your question we have the ak lab here at the high school so that's available for students and a and math teachers also have afterschool sessions where they work with students so there's a number of other supports that are here at the high school want to continue before more questions you can stop me at any time this one is that chart that will show you that group of students over time which i think is important to look at because if you look at that d l a for example in gr so in two thousand and nine five years ago sixty five percent of them were proficiency in advance if we fast forward and look to see how did they do in eighth grade we've now moved that same group of students to eighty five percent proficiency or advanced when you look at grade seven five years ago we look at where they are and how much they have gained so that's just the cheeseman piece but it's looking at that same s students at ninety four percent a year ago this same for math so it really shows that it takes to two it's a village here and when you look at the science as an example fifty percent more we're talking about that can be frustrating you look at that same group of students when they take that one test biology two years later you've moved from fifty percent proficient or advanced to ninety percent of them are proficiency or advance and out of that ninety forty six percent of them work events and again just to keep in eighth grade the test is on four different science subject matters that have been spread over  tested every year once they start in third grade they're tested every year that is science certainly is more of a challenge because of the loss of time when it may be why you have a student who has done very well in science classes in six seventh and eighth grade and then perhaps has not achieved the same sort of result on their and test test that they had during their academic school year just your exam it may not reflect how they do on a regular one in the class and with the expectations from year to year even so you know i mean what is your candid comments reaction to this church i see that it shows that our students are growing i see that it shows us that in some areas we've remained stagnant in english language arts we've got some areas there where we have not seen as much movement as far as the it's piece and then also when we look at the growth percentiles at the same time is far is what are  the reasons for that we have a lot of different ideas that are there we're also keeping in mind that it is a test that has changed a little bit in the last several years with the new frameworks that have come through and what kids are being asked to do is very different and so adjusting to that to be able to stay consistent i think that's a really good thing at the same time and not to see that dip with those changes that are taking place when we look at the math i think that we've seen some really nice improvement there's a lot of work that's gone into math so when we look at the achievement and we look at the growth we're seeing kind of the effort that's been put into the air show there there's a couple of pockets where we're focusing our work point look at great five as an example we don't see as much growth there we talked a lot about that being the first year that it's a transition we look at the standards that are specific to grade five and what students are being asked to do so those are a lot of the things that you'll hear about at the next meeting but overall we're pleased with our students we're pleased with the work that's there we do see some areas that we would like to see grow more because it's been kind of the same for the last several years in particular but i think that in math we've seen some really nice improvements the  reason i ask is because the five cohort groups you've highlighted up there all show what appear to be pretty significant improvement are there some of their that if i look more closely i would see don't have the same level of growth as i why you had mixed comment you know i what i wanted to do when i circled those in particular the science i think kind of goes without pointing that out when you look at such a drastic change honestly most those you're going to see the growth you're going to see that kind of growth is far is the  drastic growth i don't think is any more drastic than the other ones that are up there i mean we can look at at grade three and it was sixty six percent and it's at eighty four by the time we win those kids are last year so you see those improvements there are some i mentioned before we've seen some can some stagnant score so if i look at grade three as an example and two thousand and eleven with that group of students when  you see it decline there but that's where we see a great five we're not seeing the growth as much as we are at other levels and we're not seeing the higher achievement there so where you do not see the increases are those same grades that we've identified that it's been stagnant now please because maturity of the students factor into so with this experience with taking the tests and they're getting older and to pass for graduation then to be that gets their attention is the bar is middle school overall versus elementary if i call it maturity as much as i would call it the more experience you have with the test taking format regardless of your learning you're going to know that that's why people take previous eighty's and and then take the actual one you can take the d p s eighty's a couple of times if you want so there is a there is a factor about the more use to the format and the expectation you get the better test taker you'll be rather than going you hold so i think it would maturity by color experience in that type of test taking format that's why there's been so much talk about the change to the park assessment because the format is going to be very very different so we're going to have to reset a bit and and teach kids how to take those kinds of tests where they'll be completely online for many students and where there will be an application aspect of those exams that we haven't seen so there's going to be a little bit of a reset in the testing format and we're going to have to get used to in t end help students know how do you do well in a test like that so i think that's part of it but like you said the test does change a little bit every year and there's been a little bit even in the math sometimes we're  have surprises as what's emphasize on this year's math test because they don't emphasize it to the same extent the year before the year after so for example if you see oh it's just take or something it's easy to find that if you take the students who are third graders in two thousand and nine and you just look diagonally down three four five six seven eight you see relatively steady growth so more and more kids are learning in becoming proficient in that so it's kind of a trajectory you expect if you take the same kids two thousand and nine third grade in mathematics and you can see that they are up a little down a little up a little up a little down a little so that the test shift a little bit so but it's how kids are adjusting those expectations and those standards as well so that the question change every year the kids change those kids are changing every year but that's more curious as to how the same group of kids do a little bit better than as a whole group seem to be challenge by it but the standards do change from didn't necessarily anticipated or had seen it so it really depends midway in many ways it's it's a it's in a test of the gelati you know in their thinking can they and so that's  why we we try to prepare students not for just recollection of facts but how do you approach a problem so do you have enough of a foundation that you can apply knowledge to a new question a new area and have your mind be resilient flexible enough to be able to think through that given what you do know and the other thing is just the degree of difficulty of test when you look at the particular standards for a grade level some grade levels have a lot more new standards that are introduced versus a particular grade level that may be and worth reinforcing and taking those same standards to a so a different level so you really have to think about what standards are at a particular grade level and then the degree of difficulty there so it for us it really becomes not necessarily about numbers but what can we learn from the results that we just got from this year what can we learn about individual students and where they might have some gaps what can we learn about our general curriculum and program and where we might have some strengths and where we might have some weak areas that we want to shore up so the next group of students performs well strongly in those standards or for subtopics and the other piece that plays into this our focus on our common informative assessments our own district developed assessments of the assessments that we've developed or like galileo we look at those as predictors of success for impasse because those are standards based assessments at the same time so that way along the way throughout the year we can go back to those areas who are starting to see that kids may be struggling so just as a reminder of the growth percentile that's really looking at the progress at the performance levels for students over time we do not have a growth percentile in science because it takes two consecutive years and where science is five eight and ten you are not able to have that number it gives us areas to be able to focus on for improvement for those students that may not be showing is high growth and then also our high achieving students what more can we do for them so this particular chart is showing all of our grade levels in english language arts and this is that zero to one hundred growth percentile and you have this in your packet and i just wanted to draw attention here to those two lines between forty and sixty that is typical growth between those two red lines anywhere to the right of that line is is heading towards high growth to the left would be heading toward lower growth so we can see that the majority of our grades the performance in l a is in that band of typical growth and then moving towards high growth so really the goal is to have both so if we look at that same chart you want to see our grade levels in that after upper right quadrant where it showing high growth and it's also showing high achievement so the majority of grades in a although i have said that we've remained somewhat stagnant in certain areas we also have high performance that's there so it's important to keep in mind where you are within the number of students of where they're scoring for the performance so if we could hopefully help people at home with clarity on this so the x axis going across shows the state through the average growth across the state so if you bubbles above that then you have a higher growth so we want to see where we are in each of the of the tests we have both so that when we say that we're above the state average for bro if you can see that we are going to be to the right of the vertical that's overachievement sorry that's our achievement going up above the line in the growth is i'm looking at the vertical and being to the right of it so that's what she's saying that we want to be above the performance and above the growth put you in the upper  is an excellent chart i used to love the bubble chart the prior chart and i think this one's better ok well it's our new just my personal but you know what this says is you know we're we're in the right direction for the vast majority which is really really good so if you say look at the bubble the tie is to the top we have very high achievement up there in that exam for example so in order to move that to the right it's going to be really difficult because if you already have if you already have so many students who are proficiency or advanced and that means you have a lot of kids in advanced as well it's harder it's going to be harder to show high rate of growth because you don't have much wiggle room so as that particular example right there that's ninety five percent of our kids our advanced and out of that fifty three percent of that ninety are advanced so you're hitting the the ceiling there which is it really is tremendous that's a pretty good news when we look at that same graph for math so again looking between forty and sixty we look to see the typical growth here we see one area here this is the grade five that i was mentioning before that we see not as high of growth as the other grades and then we have grades six and eight over in the high growth so if you look at that quadrant once again here here's your area where you want to be high growth how you achieve mit the majority there's all students right here if you look at th and then his far as those areas they're still within that typical growth that you're looking at again the higher percent they are with eighty eight percent of our kids being proficiency or advanced when it comes to grade ten when it counts and sixty six percent of them are advanced in sixty six eighty eight percent of those students there on the map so although they're in typical growth there you have to keep in mind that out of eighty eight percent of them sixty six percent of those students scored advanced  charts to look at point i wanted to try to visually look on the same page as the achievement and at the growth what does that look like because what we want to see is that we're improving each year in both areas wanted to see it visually and when i look at that top chart that you have here so this is grade four so the colors here are not as visible for you but i want to see with grade four over the last five years and my increasing my achievement and if i'm not going higher if i'm staying relatively the same what does my growth look like so i look down here to see if you see i have high growth here the same as when i look at grade ten this top line is where i want to see that we've increased each year which we have so that's the ninety five percent of kids that we were saying their position or advanced so when we look at them i'm looking down here at the growth percentile and although it wasn't the highest growth this year we were at the highest achievement but we still were close to sixty we're at fifty eight and a half percent growth so looking at that correlation between the two you can see kind  of the ups and downs but if i see a growth percentile that may be lower than i can look and see what are we increasing on the achievement so it's important to be able to look at both of those numbers and how they relate with each other and that's the department  that at the same time really focusing on where she achievement but also what have you done for the students as far as taking them from where they were and where we moved them i think the bottom  but it's what shows you pretty consistently for example is that it's much harder for students as a whole group as a coworker to show growth from grade four to five so we always ask ourselves what are the difference in the standards on this teach us what is it where is our curriculum so is that a it's so consistent that it's not individual to a personality of a group or skill set of a group so we start taking a look at the tests and how in depth they go with some of the standards or the new standards so it's just it's easier you can see for cohorts of students every single year to show much greater growth between five and six so that's one of the things we did ask ourselves why is that where did some factors that contribute that we control what is a factor is that we don't do that those are the kinds of things that make us ask this question have you looked at what the states curve is like for their merit i would guess it's a w also it would be interesting to compare it to yes it really is and when you  so when you look right there it at grade eight as an example so it's hard again to see that the number there but eighty five percent of the students are profession or advanced so the higher achievement understood at the lower growth there but at the same time yes the number of students from proficiency to advanced by seven percent there so it's all of these numbers that we look at but doesn't mean i was want to make sure it doesn't mean we accept that so we have a middle school as a huge initiative going this really hard hitting on readers writers workshop in grades five and six that really started a little bit last year but really took on full steam this year so we look at it not that we just accept well that's the way it's going to be but what can we impact that could change that  growth percentile so it'll be interesting to see what happens with this year's kids you know with with a little shift in how we're approaching english language arts instruction in grade five so that's sort of thing that we're very curious about so is there something we can do that would impact the growth the stew growth over time so we'll see and at the same time with what we're looking for the impact there is that content literacy standards for the new framework where all teachers are really working on attentive literacy so you're going to have that across curriculum that you haven't had as much emphasis in the past and so we let make a difference and so it's just the same thing for math looking at that correlation between where we were and in one you know over the last five years as far as achievement are we seeing that we're continuing to increase each year with the fifth grade with the sixth seventh think cetera and then looking at the correlation for the growth and again looking that between forty and sixty across that bay and that your typical growth so anything above sixty all of those that's high growth for those grades strength not only for the results seem to be consistent and in the right direction but also the rigor with which you analyze it and you have allies and we analyze as a district i think should help the public feel comfortable makes me as a parent feel comfortable so thank you for what you think and that and if and i think it's important to those pair of shorts that come home is a lot of information you know i think it's a big paper that folds there's a lot of explanation that's there but if parents have questions on those ask their ask their classroom teachers because that's something that they can easily go over with them if they have those questions a lot of it's really self explanatory but it's not if you are not familiar with looking at it when if my review recently have evolved thank you so much and what are my goals for this year so you can see that there are six goals that i put down for this year and i'll just briefly go through them and why i decided on them to only start with the second w insisting from last year if you remember my student learning goal from last year is a two year goal and what we did was we collected baseline data a year ago about where do we offer opportunities for advanced learning enrichment challenge and to increase  twenty percent at each level over two years so we worked a little bit on that last year we asked students what they wanted what would they be interested in that they felt would enrich them or challenge them more provide them with opportunities for vance learning so we are working on that so this coming june they'll be a measurement of that of that goal my first professional practice goal has to do with something we read this summer saw a little thing so we read for a professional reading this summer we read something for a mystery retreat and this was the book i picked this year is a professional reading for our entire mr team which includes department heads coordinators and other key people across the district in its current it's called focus elevating the essentials to radically improve student learning and this book for us was timely because even though it came out a couple of years ago not many years ago just a few with all the stuff we had going on last year with educator evaluation a lot of new things and a lot of new  changes the new initiatives that we've had that what this book really says to do is to focus on believe it or not simplicity clarity and priority so his advice is to take the three components of school success that all the research has really show if you work on those things really hard what we teach which is our curriculum that you hear a lot about through curricular review and review report such as amy presented to the team about mathematics at our last meeting how how we teach or what are our instructional methodology how do we introduce new concepts to kids that will stick that will help them become what and then the third thing that has been proven time after time after time is authentic literacy can students read write speak listen and express themselves and communicate efficiently up across all aspects of the curriculum which we call authentic literacy in all content areas so are they proficiency readers and writers of content and can they communicate about that because that's going to be really important in college and really important in life mehta what what you do so regardless of all the other nation if we have what really are we going to focus on i put the priority on and these three things are key and he makes the case that if we don't put it an intense focus on what we teach how we teach an authentic literacy that all else will be for naught because those that's the foundation of the building part of a solid educational program so actually this this did get pretty positive reviews this summer everybody felt it was really an important time and so we call this our year of of priority so our year of focus is what we're calling it so we're looking at everything we do and trying to be a little bit more leisure like and take away some things that maybe  anymore or maybe we can do less of so we actually asked ourselves three questions what should we do more of what should we do less of or stop doing and the third question was what else we need to think about and we collected everyone's ideas from the summer so i think my job as a superintendent is to keep our whole ministry team in the district focused on focus on simplicity clarity priority and those three components and so we started doing it through a ministry of team meetings through our professional golf workshops i talked about me at the mid cycle point middle of the year to report to you is what do i think we're doing well what i think i'm doing well and what are we working really hard on so i kept those words in mind when i was trying to formulate my goals go i want them to be meaningful i want them to be focused on the important work in the district not just things i think i should do or have to do so these are the things that i think of the important work of the district that are my responsibility so one is to develop and implement a growth plan for stem subjects which are science technology engineering  mathematics and for business and technical education in order to expand opportunities for students and to pursue new opportunities for community support for these endeavors so what i started last june is i met with the department heads who are pregnant  this in the high school ministry of team in june to have a preliminary conversation to see where we were and really to help me clarify and decide if this was going to be an area of focus for me next year this year we met in september again some of the things that we have put forward to develop career exploration field trips i'll just read of a few the senior projects as part of that to incorporate more stem pathways into career day to revamp hopefully a high school engineering course to investigate independent studies in stem xorn ships a lunch and learn program to have experts come in and talk to students and small snippets about what they do we were able to add the a p physics course this fall so different things and from those growth areas that are action steps if you will we then outlined last month opportunities for community support so this is going to become kind of a talking point document for me as i connect with businesses any kind of community agencies or any one community that would like to come and help us out with this cookie and what is it that we're asking for so for example how can we do that and the other component would be students who are in the science club they enter the science olympiad every year so can i reach out to people in the community or businesses to say is there someone who could command help us with the robotics piece because that's where that team lose points in the science olympiad so we need a little bit outside experts on that so here's some opportunities for community support and then we put contact people so that i give this out in the community like a leaflet and talk to people they would know they could take it back and think about it and know who to get in touch with that they could climb up to her so yes so this is fantastic very very much in the right direction i think opportunities for community support what's what have you thought about i invensys for example yes there are many other opportunities in the community that i think i could do that personal outreach for as the spokesperson if you will or the person who can maybe draw some people in that might maybe have been involved in the schools before certainly in a myriad of ways but i think that if we put this out through parent groups through any venue that we have really to communicate this is how we're trying to grow you're also going to hear me talk about a little bit more and we get  budget season so you as it is as a committee can discuss how you can support my growth plans so one of the reasons they took this one myself was because we get so many people working on stem if you think about the science departments  departments and it's the technical and business education people and we've also we also have a lot of teachers we've got a ministry does that all levels interested in this but it's really hard to push forward unless you have somebody leading it so i felt that were sort of right for me taking the responsibility to lead the whole growth plan and to develop it myself so anybody who has anything has my email address feel free to email me or call the office and say i heard you to explain the experience down i'm interested can you send me something whatever it is bruce is point how do we reach out to our alumni from fox for high school i mean i know we have people here who are gone on to do great things in robotics in other areas who are graduates from high school and might be very willing to come back and help their project do we keep track of any information well it's hard to keep personal contact information for graduate so we don't have a database for that nor do i know i mean i know some people to try to keep track of that and i think we're interested in that the future but even let's say your sophomore in college and you've left your email address sometimes they change that to so with this  of technology it can be really hard to maintain an accurate current database of graduates but i think that the people we could reach out to actually sometimes keep in charge in touch with faculty so i think there's a lot of ways that the word can get out but there are many things on this list you can see that we can do so that it's an internal focus with maybe a little bit more energy than has been in the past and same for business education for example we're really looking carefully to see whether we have our pathways identified for this is tech ed and for stem subjects and through actually through this meeting because i was taking this on as one of my goals what i discovered is that we used to have a pathways brochure if you will that the guidance department had and it actually i think the more recent one was most recent was two thousand and nine and it identified for students which courses relate to one another i don't really know why that stopped but when i said we need to create this summer enough one came my way doing the meeting so we still have one and it's actually really good so if we get there working on that now if we could reinvent that that's really important for kids you know we're interested in certain subjects but we're also trying to right so new information comes your way when so the one thing that i am not sure of that we're going to tackle is the teen is that for example if kids are interested in accounting what's the pathway that you could take a look to us for example if you're interested in marketing what opportunities do we have for you and  are there some areas that we don't have a complete pathway that's what we're they might or go to be a luncheon in two weeks i might bring isn't news with me but i believe joe kennedy is young so i don't want to maybe trip on that territory but i might go with a few and say can i come out so that's on my list as an outreach to beauty i like your lunch and learn idea through that's the high schools idea that i love that and the middle school wants it as well so good speakers could come in and spend some i'm going to major in the fence or prosecution mom and a prosecution ok so if they were to example say you know put out a schedule of lunch and learn and we were going to have a prosecuting attorney from the d a s office here on thursday november whatever any students interested in that could eat luncheons a table and learn which they do and confer when that be great so they w offer so that if a student like for me is that i would like this we could go to work speakers bureau and keep a pool of people because what whenever a situation comes up more than chasing after i feel like it would be good especially for like most of the seniors that you know going to college they don't know what they want to major in i feel like that's also really great for them right now and we've always said that sometimes you know what subjects you like but you don't know what career may be associated with it so if you know you like the sciences you might go to lunch once in learn sessions that  is that it is one of our district improvement goals another excellent and i won't belabor this one because we just talked about the technology plane going to be seeing it back at the next meeting but we have a new five year technology plan that you're going to be receiving an update on twice a year i'm going to together here fully monitoring and discussing the technology plan so that has to be important goal for me so you'll be seeing the improved version of the technology plan at the next meeting so while i'm talking about the technology plan rather than wait to other matters i wouldn't mind taking this opportunity to thank for people from the community that came forward and met with our central office team which is bill  and i think we actually may keep them in our wheel house for future remembers so that's an important goal for me and for the committee jointly the fifth goal is to expand outreach and communication to community groups and other constituents to build support for the public schools and it doesn't have to necessarily just relate to stemmons in others some other ways as well and to engage and interested parties and school district pools specifically my goal for this year is to conduct five new outreach activities so departments to ensure that the school budget addresses the needs of the district will also be cost effective so you can see that we're curious people are full of ideas about what we want to do to improve opportunity for students but we also want the same time to say are there any other areas that we could do things a little bit differently so that we can and accomplish some of our goals without necessarily always adding so that's what we're going to really focus on this year that's not to do this year is to all of our principals are going to try to have at least one goal this technology related and this is the one year since the tech means new that i am working hard on seeing if i can find a way to have all of our so i don't think we need to move anything around just know in advance that that's an area we're working on that we may spend a little bit more edgy on in ministry or professional development in the area of technology fishier kind of like in a bubble out for this year and then it would probably resume after that so we're looking at that issue but we also have some grant money we have some title to a grant money that is to be used for that purpose the ministry of actual development so we may look at cobbling some things together but we just started talking to me just sa specific activity around the new teacher evaluation system curiously enough i was going to keep a goal with that but it seemed to be unnecessary because we still have our implementation team this week the third year they will continue to meet we need twice a month we just thought last thursday and this would probably be the third year that that group states together so we have a dozen teachers and six administrators and in the first year we planned the for the rollout of the educator valuation tool last year we monitor the implementation will continue do it this year in year two and i think we'll be ok so we're still working out some glitches but i have to give our staff credit because it's still a lot of hard work but people it's people are just digging down and learning together and getting it getting the job done so i we didn't see anything and you so it felt that david asking me for input on the it just felt to me like i put to continue to support that there were some other things that i could well just to summarize you know there's a little something here for everyone i think you know simplicity clarity in priority authentic literacy advanced learning enrichment challenge growth plan for stem business technology plan review choisir new community outreach you know i i highly rated superintendent you know should have an aggressive plan right because you can do so much i think i would say the scouts the observations are comments your thoughts are you know are were i would say from fifth grade down to kindergarten kindergarten can be you know a little bit twenty seven so it's right in the ballpark as we do get a few more moments in first grade so that's kind of keeping so kindergarten through fifth you can see were it anywhere between one and two in two hundred pretty consistent numbers except for one group where basically they're within fifteen students so that seems to be pretty consistent but smaller then you'll see great six through twelve which run anywhere from two hundred two to twenty nine so we don't have wide variance in our class sizes but they seem to be staying the same is that as the groups interesting to see what happens next year for first grade because we typically do get more so for already when eighty seven will get into the one ninety s which is where the other groups are but probably nothing drastic so our population doesn't shift a lot just shi better opportunity and i can't imagine the need for that especially with all of the work you an amy and everyone else has done i think you know this whole meeting tonight has featured a lot of examples of a lot of very good things going on but if i read this in my reading your right to say that this doesn't show that students are leaving the district now i know that i mean a great great date for example says two hundred twenty two students in grade nine says two hundred twenty four so really finding that i don't know the number for last year but i will bring that back it would've been a good thing to grade the high school you well know the number for you know how many students leave to go to high school somewhere else and and there are rightly so families who choose a real this is really just education for their high school student in whatever reason they pick is one every family's to make their own decision we definitely believe in that but we have fewer than we should we have somewhere around fifteen seventeen students who may choose that i don't know what the number is but not a large percentage and in some times choose to send their child where they went to school so there's sometimes it's about legacy and sometimes it's about religion and sometimes it's about a sports team we might not offer so as a ride the reasons that people might feel that another high school is a is a better fit sometimes it relates to the size of the high school community although we're fairly medium sized high school so i can bring that number back if you would like that but we don't see large numbers of students going elsewhere in this with there will always be some and rightly so  so we're not losing children so that's wonderful you know so the dropout rate has to do with kids who enter a great night with a fourteen to a from the department that tracks a four year graduation rate in a five and how many students are we actually losing on the way and it's we have like a ninety nine percent retention rate so that just goes to show the work that high schools do is to really get to know every student and make sure that we don't have a child the focus right now on your your programs that we're offering only you know other opportunities in a smaller setting for students who you may have issues that they can't operate as efficiently as they would like to in the general population school so we have a lot of specialized programs that seem to be working as well so  twenty fifth of november which i'm perfectly fine meeting then our other option i guess could possibly be too i don't know and again we have to ask eighty if we could start our eighteen our meeting on the eighteenth perhaps half an hour earlier in order to accommodate the amount of information that i know we're going to have to go over given some of the topics we've already discussed today that will be presented in was just one thought or a thought you know the answer to give you a heads up lot of discussion but the new version of the checkpoint will be in there just to see if you have any remaining questions maybe it would be a meeting but it's doable because as you said the only other option if you want to stick to the monday meeting schedule is the last monday november and then you have the first monday  of people seriously are very kind of committed to the cycle and are pretty public so we can work out a family wise i would prefer to see a lot more long meeting on the eighteenth and we'll just make it as the two meeting things will be in school group plans in the cast i think those would be the big discussion items and it would make a long meeting but not impossibly long well and you indicated can discuss tina's idea of whether an earlier start makes any sense  tuesday the millicent around the joint meeting with the board of selectmen in the school committee to hear the revenue forecast for f y fifteen and that usually takes place on the night of selections meeting and now they are meeting here so it will be here on november twelfth tuesday and we have to have a time on the agenda yet but it's usually first up so i just say seven o'clock people should come and seven o'clock in the machine or otherwise and the open house at fox enjoyed myself as did you i was so excited when i i drove into the driveway and saw the amount of cars parked it's a great turnout and i get a lot of positive parent comments just nice to put a face with a name when you're high school students coming home before you get to the parent conferences in november to be able to know a little bit about the school and where you're going and of course we have a lot of students there helping out with directions with helping parents get their child schedule agree so thanks to the high school ministries right and the teachers were very excited there were parents that oftentimes don't come out that the chose to come out and to meet them so we should i actually would ways so it's filled with really inspiring movie people in the end they decide on their speakers and so c m is one of the fifty speakers at this friday saturday checks conference in his friday so we're waiting to see if there's a fine coming on friday it's eight am friday through eight pm saturday so it's a two day almost continuous speaker conference so if we can figure out the time that he's speaking we'd like to live stream it is so high school we're just not sure if it's during the school day seven since we're not having a meeting on november fourth i want to make sure i mention it it's a room to twenty six and this is open to everyone who has a child at the middle school who wants to learn more about the online resources our new now program so all they ask is that you are a sweet by november or two it's our turn now challenge at g mail dot com with your name your child's grade level and their math teacher i guess so they know how many people to expect but it sounds like a great opportunity for parents to learn about the now technology to learn about what's available online and how best to help their child so it's the other way there's an elementary math parent as well that's right  was coming out tonight about it unfortunate situation and a lot of school earlier today so i just want to say that our thoughts and prayers and wishes are with them as more information comes out ok motion to a