Board of Education Teaching, Learning and Community (tlc) Committee - Regular Meeting

Good evening, everyone. I'd like to call the Teaching and Learning Committee meeting to order. It's Tuesday, September 8th, 2026. The time is 6.30 exactly. So tonight's meeting is going to be focused on the teaching and learning team presenting on end of the year data. And so I'm going to turn it over to Ms. Baldotti and her team to begin the presentation. Good evening, Ms. Bildati.

Good evening Ms. Foy and all members of the Board of Education. I'm excited to be here tonight. I'm going to share my screen and we'll dive right in. I know you all had an opportunity to hopefully review the draft presentation that was sent last Tuesday to give you enough time to kind of digest a whole lot of data and I will let you know that that was a draft and so In response to some questions that we received from board members, we've actually added a few more slides, but we're not going to go over all of the slides. There are several appendices that are also available for you to review at your leisure of much more detailed school level demographic data. I am joined by some members of our community partners, specifically Lindsay Golding from RISE and other members of senior leadership who are here really in response to some of the questions that we received while I... do the bulk of the work around preparing the data for the board. Scott Clayton and Lisa Sabah-Price are much more involved at the building level with attendance teams and can speak much more to the actions of those teams. So they are here as well as we dive into the attendance data. So we are going to cover three big buckets of data this evening. Our ninth grade on track data from last year, Our academic internal data, our universal screener from iReady that we use for both ELA and math grades K to 8. And our attendance data. That is the data that is available from the state at this time. It's finalized. It's finalized. public. And so we'll review all of those. Just as a preview for October, in case anyone is very anxious, we will be sharing more data in another large presentation that will cover all the state required assessments. So that's the Lost Links assessment, the SAT day for our high school students, the Smarter Balanced assessment that is given grades three through eight, and the science assessment, the NGSS that is given in grades three, five, I mean, 5, 8, and 11, excuse me, 5, 8, and 11. So we will share all the results from that data next month. So that's another set of sort of end-of-year performance data that we will share. But this evening, we are going to dive right in, and we're going to start with our on-track data. So I'm actually going to turn it over to Lindsay.

Thanks, Amy. Good evening. I am so happy to be here. I am Lindsay Golding. I am a network manager with the Connecticut Rise Network. And just a little background about the Connecticut Rise Network. We are an education nonprofit who this year we are working with over 60 high schools across 33 districts. over eight states and more than 35,000 students. And we work with schools to focus on creating the conditions and capacities to ensure that all of our ninth grade students successfully transition to and through high school. And then we also work with our post-secondary students and school leaders to prepare all students to access and succeed in their chosen pathway. So that's a little background of the Connecticut Rise Network. And thank you, Amy, for being the host here. So yes. Just an overview of our 25-26 partnership goals. And so specifically for our on-track work with ninth grade, we were working together to increase the share of ninth graders, successfully navigating through their first year of high school, and then through the post-secondary lens, increasing the number of graduates prepared to pursue their post-secondary plan. Specifically, our objectives for last year for OnTrack were to support both high schools in adopting and then also strengthening conditions to promote OnTrack achievement and then strengthening the middle to high school transitions. Through our post-secondary access work, we partner with, again, both high schools to ensure students successfully identify post-secondary plans and were able to complete and access the milestones necessary to achieve their chosen goal. We also worked with district personnel to promote alignment across the district's high school strategy, and then also through our data-driven Work, we also worked with district and then school personnel to build school capacity around using the RISE data hub. So a little bit of just to wanted to name that this particular sharing of data from the end of the year is an analysis. And here's a couple of things that it does do. It is a study of our on track rates over time as experienced by different subgroups of students. It's not isolating causality. It is showing improvement over time. but it's not offering a commentary on district and school policy. Okay, so let's dig in. Here we're seeing our grade nine academic outcomes and our pass rates for our student Oh, our student subjects, sorry, for English, mathematics and science and social studies. And what you can see here is that across all of our subjects, every content area has seen an increase in pass rates. So for English, year over year, we saw a five percentage point increase. increase. As far as mathematics, we saw a seven percentage point increase. Science was a five point increase. And then also our social studies was an eight percentage point increase. So this really just shows that our grade nine academic outcomes were improved substantially over the last two years, just regardless of the schedule structure, but specifically last year saw the biggest jumps. Now onto our subgroups and looking at those pass rates as well, we know that they have also improved. And so every student subgroup in this graphic shows that has improved their performance. So these are on-track rates and they have increased for many of our students subgroups, all of the students subgroups here following the schedule changes. And so specifically year over year, You can see with our students with disability, they experienced a seven percentage point increase. And our multilingual learners, that was a 10 percentage point increase. Our black and African-American students showed a double digit increase, again, like 17 percentage points. Our Latine students experienced that 12 percentage point increase. Our white students, 1 percentage point. And our Asian students experienced a 7 percentage point increase. So this includes all ninth graders at both West Hill and at Stanford High School. Not only did we see an increase in on-track rates and pass rates, we saw a decrease in the amount of students that ended the year at risk. And so you can see year over year on-track rates saw a 21 percentage point increase. But more notably, we saw that our almost on-track students saw a decrease of 12 percentage points, and then our off-track students saw a decrease of 9 percentage points. And so that historically has been very challenging to move with such record numbers. This is a look at our Stanford Public Schools Grade 9 on-track rates across our network. And you can see here the two dark blue lines are West Hill and Stanford High School. Left, you can see the 24-25 network on-track rates. And these are our core network schools. And you can see that both of the blue lines were pretty average considering the rest of our network. But specifically last year, we see that both West Hill and Stanford were able to level up their performance and their student achievement, considering where the rest of the network was as well, which is very promising. Our last slide or one of our last slides here is gonna show our pass rates and they increased across all grade levels. And so we looked at specifically grade nine earlier, all grade nine students, but this is a window into our core subject pass rates. And we see that they have increased year over year in all grade levels. So you see in the nine through 12, and then you see at the very end, all grades. So our ninth graders has experienced that six percentage point increase in all of their core subjects. For grade 10, we saw three percentage point increase, and for grade 11 was two percentage points, grade 12, one percentage points, which is, if you know those grade 12, those seniors, that's something they really celebrate there. And then also all grades, we saw a three percentage point increase. And so the work and the outcome here is very promising of all the hard work and dedication over the last few years with the RISE partnership. And we are excited to also get off the ground this year with some new and improved goals and objectives.

Thank you, Lindsay. I'm going to now move into iReady, and we'll talk about the performance of our students in grades K-8. Before I do that, I'm just going to give a couple of reminders about iReady. So again, we use this assessment as our universal screener, so it's given to students first. three times a year in grades K through eight, beginning of year, middle of year, and end of year. Our window actually opened today for our beginning of year. So in the next couple of weeks, all of our students will be assessed in both reading and math to give their current grade teachers a baseline. And of course, they also have access to how students performed over the last several years, but they'll be very interested to see how their classes of students are faring this year. This is the assessment that we use to help teachers group children in their classroom for small group instruction. It's the data that we use to provide, to determine which students need additional supports, interventions potentially. It's also used to determine which intervention program might be used. Is it a phonics-based issue? Is it a language issue? Is it a comprehension issue? That helps us determine if we're going to pull students out, what intervention do they need? So this information helps us do that. It helps us monitor the progress of our students. It helps us set goals for students and with parents. So our upcoming October conferences is an opportunity for parents to sit with teachers and set goals for their children. And it's an opportunity for students to set goals for themselves with their teachers. And I think that's pretty much it. It is not a tool that we use to issue grades to students. So it's not a grading tool. It's really an instructional tool for teachers. Oh, I know the other last thing. One of the other things is we use it for students for their personalized instruction. So students have an opportunity to use what's called MyPath, which is their personalized instruction. It's right on their learning level. So they can do some independent skill work that the teacher monitors and make sure that they're passing lessons. And if there's a need to stop and reteach or teach something to students, they're reviewing that data on a regular basis. So it gives us a lot of great information information for all of our students in both reading and math. So I'll dive right into some of the data. This is last year's data. So the 25-26 school year. This is how our students performed from beginning of the year. So again, that early September through the end of the year. So our testing usually ends right at the beginning of June. And this is how our students performed at each grade level from beginning of the year until the end of the year. So nice growth at each grade level. Also of note is the reduction of our students who are are behind below standards. You can see that as well at each grade level, a really nice reduction in the red. And so that is a testament to all the hard work that our teachers and our interventionists and specialists are doing in our classrooms every day under the leadership of their administrators. And this is the same information for reading for our middle school students. Again, we do see growth at every grade level, as well as a reduction in our students who are below standards. Just taking a look at Stanford compared to the state and the national scores. So the national scores represent all the students across the country that use I-Ready, which is millions of students. It's also comparing us to Connecticut and all the students within our own state that take the I-Ready assessment, which is many, many districts. And then, of course, here in Stanford. And what you can see here is that our growth is more significant than the state over the last, compared to last year. So we have more growth here in Stanford where the state has been relatively flat and the national scores have been relatively flat as well. And also we've had a stronger reduction in our students performing below standards. So again, movement, positive movement at both ends of the spectrum. This is just a three-year comparison of EOI data from 2024. So kind of comparing apples to apples, although it's not the exact same cohort of students, because obviously we have students leave eighth grade and go into ninth grade. We have new students coming in every year to kindergarten, but the bulk of the cohort is the same. And we do see, again, some nice growth in the last three years. This is three years of growth from EOI 2024 right up to EOI of 2026. With, again, a really strong reduction, you know, a third of our students down to a quarter of our students. That's significant progress in our students that are demonstrating below standard achievement. And this is in direct response to a question submitted by Ms. Foy. So thank you for submitting those questions. She was very curious about the impact when students are chronically absent, which we will talk about in the final section of this presentation. But just to highlight what we see when students are chronically absent. So you can see the bar graph all the way to the left shows all of our students in K-8 and their performance from beginning of year to end of year. Then you can see in the middle are students who are chronically absent. So that is missing 10% or more of the school year. And you can see the growth there. And then you can see when we take those students who were not chronically absent out of the all students category, that's the bar graphs on the far right, you can see how students who are coming to school at least more than 90% of the time are faring compared to those who are missing 10% or more of the school year. So it's pretty significant in reading. And certainly, you know, attendance has an impact on student achievement. And so that's a really important thing to pull out. And that's something certainly that our schools are looking at, at the school level and at the classroom level, grade level. Moving on to math. We have very similar slides. We're just switching to math. Math is blue at the top. Just to orient yourself to the math scores. Again, seeing significant growth at every single grade level. And again, a reduction in students performing below standards by the end of the school year. So nice growth across all the grade levels in elementary school. And then moving to our middle schools. Also, you can see some some very nice growth and a reduction in the students that are below grade level. Comparing our math scores to national scores, Connecticut scores, and here in Stanford, again, we see similar patterns as we did with the reading, where we are sort of outpacing our growth. We haven't caught up yet, but if we stay on this trajectory, we will, and that is our goal for sure, is to be where the state is. And national averages are. So we're getting there. We've done a nice job, again, in the last three years of closing that gap between where our students are performing and students across the state and across the country are performing in math. And here, again, is that three-year comparison. Similar to the reading, we do see nice growth over the last three years and a reduction in our students who are below. So very similar, a little bit different numbers, but same patterns we're seeing really across both reading and math. And again, let's just take a look at those students who are not coming to school on a regular basis or as regularly as we would like them to. We can see on the far left when we all of our students. So this is all students in grades K to eight and how they're doing from beginning of the school year till the end of the school year. Then we have in the middle are students who are chronically absent. And just to give you sort of an end for that number, it's about 1,050 students. So that's a lot of students. And while we are gonna have some celebrations around attendance, it's still a lot of students who are not coming to school every day as much as we would like. And then you can just see in math, for those students who are coming on a much more regular basis, they're significantly outperforming their peers that are not coming to school every day. And certainly there are much fewer students below standard when they're coming to school on a regular basis. Okay, we're going to head into some attendance and chronic absenteeism data. This is something that we focus on in our school improvement plans and our district strategic improvement plan. And there are specific outcome measures that we have in those plans, each school and as a district. So, of course, we're looking to improve our average daily attendance. We're looking to decrease the percentage of students who are chronically absent. So, again, we want students in school every day and also decrease the percentage of truant students. And just as a reminder, we do have some definitions here because it is hard to keep track of all of these terms. So average daily attendance is simply the percentage of students that are in school on any given day. And they are marked present if they spend at least half of the day in school. So if a student comes late because they had a dentist appointment, they come to school at 10 o'clock, they are still marked present for the day because they're there for half of the day, at least half of the day. Chronically absent, again, are students that are missing for any reason 10% or more of the school year. So if they're enrolled for the whole 180 days, that's 18 or more school days that students are missing if they're chronically absent. And then truant is one that people sometimes get confused, but that's when a student has four unexcused absences in a month or 10 unexcused absences in a school year. So that's another attendance metric that we follow, that the state follows, that we track and that we're looking, obviously, to decrease that number each year. So taking a look at the data, this is comparing Stanford to the state. We see our average daily attendance continuing to rise. So this is a five-year trend. COVID now has dropped off of these graphs because we typically look at five years. So we are, you know, we ticked up a little bit. We're at almost the 93% mark on daily attendance, which is pretty strong. You can see where we are compared to the state. And we're creeping up there very nicely. So the state sets a goal for us of 95%. So we are working towards reaching that goal. And then our chronic absentee rates, we see those going in the right direction. In the opposite direction, they are decreasing. And they hit a peak that 21, 22 school year, not only in Stanford, but across the state was the peak chronic absenteeism rate. that we've seen, you know, probably since we've been tracking chronic absenteeism in the last few decades. It was the peak year across the state. I think I was on a webinar today. The state, too, is seeing similar trends where we're kind of reaching pre-COVID numbers as we had below 20% for the first time since COVID, which is very exciting. That's a testament to a lot of the hard work that you will hear about in just a few moments. So very exciting. So our truancy rate also is creeping back down. We're very excited about this as well. So again, that peak in 21-22 when we see a steady decrease and a nice goal for us to get that below 20% for next year as well would be amazing. So we are working on that. And then just taking a look at absenteeism when we look at our high-need students. So again, high-need students are students that are identified as a multilingual learner, a student with a disability, or a student who qualifies for the free or reduced lunch meal program. And we see that high needs students both within the state and within Stanford have higher rates of chronic absenteeism. The good news is, is that it is ticking down. But we continue to see our high needs students having more being more chronically absent more frequently than our students who are non high needs students. And so that's an area of focus for us and some of the work that you'll hear about in a few moments. But definitely some positive trends there as well in terms of reductions in the last five years. And then just quickly looking at our demographic groups, all of our demographic groups for race and ethnicity, we see decreases in chronic absenteeism across the board. Our Asian students here have decreased a little over 5%. Our Black students in the last few years, almost 8%. we have our Hispanic and Latino students, also a reduction, although we still see higher rates of chronic absenteeism in our Hispanic students. So that's an area of focus for our district work and our school-based work around attendance and our white students. So everyone is ticking down in the right direction, but still work to do with some of our subgroup areas, especially. And so now I'm going to turn it over to Lisa, who's going to just share a little bit about some of the strategies that we're using in our elementary schools with our attendance teams.

Good evening, everyone. Happy to be here tonight and talk about this work. It's something actually very near and dear to my heart. It's something I really focused heavily on when I was a building principal. We have most of the elementary schools meet weekly. Some of them do we meet bi-monthly or monthly, but most of them meet weekly. The attendance committee is made up of the social worker, sometimes a psychologist. the parent facilitator, the nurse usually joins but isn't there unless it's a student that we need to reference, and then administration and MTSS. And we run a report every week. We look student by student. We start from day one. Who hasn't come to school? Is it a student that we're worried about? Let's reach out to the family, find out where they are. And then there's a whole system of communication with the families trying to educate and just structure the importance of them coming, the student coming to school. The big thing is the stories themselves. You can have somebody that hits chronically absent right away because the family's gone on vacation and but comes to school every other day. I mean, every the rest of the year. But you can also have somebody that's chronically absent because they miss a day. every week, and those are the students that we really have to pay attention to, find out what's going on, and definitely do outreach with the families. We do work with Juan. at Juan Pesmino in family engagement to focus leap visits and different home visits. And we also work with community partners. But I think the most important thing that I can say is that at the very bottom, the last bullet, teachers are the first point of contact with families. And we usually have them reach out to the student or the family first. We have Parent Square now where it's two-way communication with the families to find out what's going on, where are they, okay, will they be back tomorrow, et cetera. So we are really, really working very hard at all the levels, but especially the elementary levels with the importance of getting students to school every day. And you saw those numbers. It makes a huge difference on academics when they're there every day.

Thank you, Lisa. And I'm going to turn it over to Scott to talk a little bit about the middle and high schools.

So Lisa and I have very similar expectations of our attendance teams. That's something that we've talked about previously in terms of our expectations for the regularity of building attendance teams. Middle school level, and you'll see at the high school level, made up of the same staff members, nurses, school counselors, school psychologists, social workers. And the expectation is that they are meeting on at least a monthly basis to review the particular data related to student absences. I have made it a goal of mine. I've met with nearly every principal, I think, at least two or three times already. And talking about attendance is part of that dialogue. I will say that, you know, we've already identified students who are chronically absent because the 10 percent is a rolling number. And in response to one of the questions that I think was was submitted ahead of time, like, is there a trigger? Is there some kind of early warning system? And yes, there is. Every building, every day, two staff members, usually the principal or at least a member of the administrative team and a member of the office staff, receives an email. indicating the number of students who are chronically absent uh and the number of students who are truant either 10 days unexcused or four days of unexcused absent in a calendar month so as you can imagine you know we are uh you know this is it's september 8th and and we already have some some kiddos who have four unexcused absences so there's no fancy report that needs to be you know clicked on 17 times that the the principal or the designee simply signs into this um Data Integrity Service is actually called Elevate Data. We've partnered with them for going back to when I was a principal. And it's an automatic report that's generated on a regular and ongoing basis. And that helps inform our work. The building signs in and gets that necessary information and can obviously partner with, like Lisa said, with Juan and the Welcome Center, who is the liaison partner. for LEAP home visitors or here to help. Another person that I have found a great deal of success with working with has been Susan Lauria with Youth Services. Although I believe she has changed titles in some capacity, she still will work with Lisa and I with attendance. You'll see also in there, there is a daily notification that goes out to middle schools for unexcused absences. Transitioning on to high school, very similar makeup for the role of the attendance team. A change this year in which you'll see that There are new and updated high school attendance policy regulations. The high school administrative teams worked collaboratively with each other and with me. We spent several hours over the summer putting together a new set of regulations given the changes in the high school schedule. One of the biggest changes here in enforcement and getting kids to school and having parents be aware of when their children are absent, unexcused absence. Today was the first day that Parents Square sent out a period by period notification. So in our old system, the notification went out at six o'clock at night that Scott missed all his classes today unexcused. Well, that doesn't do a parent much good at six o'clock at night. Now we have it set to, and this is one of the benefits of ParentSquare, our new communication platform. It's a period by period notification. So between 15 and 20 minutes after the teacher takes attendance, a notification for unexcused absences Parents get a text, an email and a phone call to alert them that their child is is unexcused absence absent from class. And honestly, as a dad, I value that. I would seriously get a message that letting me know that one of my high schoolers missed class and I could in real time. Number one, find out where the child is. Why aren't you in your advisory class or where are you? And number two, if there was a dentist appointment, I could communicate with my cell phone or an email, a note to the attendance clerk at the school informing them, oh, you know, Scott has a dentist appointment. He'll be in 10 o'clock. And with the state law excusing the first nine absences, that text message is the is the excusal of the particular that that absence. So you no longer have to, you know, I mean, the high school still have the Google form that they're using. But a parent in real time can use their technology to submit the attendance notification. You can also take a picture of attendance note. or what the dentist may give you. And so that should hopefully close some of the communication loop that we have or we have experienced with parents in maintaining an accurate record of student attendance. And, you know, might it be a little frustrating to get a notification every single period of the day that your child is out? It might be. But that also starts a good conversation between parents and guardians about the importance of going to school and getting to class. And we saw from Amy's data that she prepared, you know, Kids can't learn if they're not in school. So that is sort of a summary of what we're doing in the high school and middle school to increase our rates of attendance, decrease chronic absenteeism and truancy.

And sorry, just to jump back in again, Scott mentioned Susan Loria and together in his previous role, we worked with her, but We have monthly or every other month attendance meetings with our various teams and we share best practices. Basically, we share data and best practices so that when one of the schools has a great tracker, which is, for example, what we did last year, we shared that with everyone, a blank one, so that they could have that same level of detail. in their tracking. So not only are we doing things individually, but we're also doing things across the systems with our teams.

And another piece of consistent, not to belabor the point here, one piece of data that Lisa and I both monitor, and a lot of it's, you know, there's an accountability piece. We can monitor in real time where or what where attendance is and is not being taken. There's some simple reporting diagnostics that we can look up and show that, you know, building X or building Y hasn't submitted attendance yet. Because that's enough, you know, there's a lot that goes on in a day, but the importance of maintaining an accurate record of who is in our building at all time is important. So there's a few nuanced reports that we both run and look at on a daily basis to inform us of that.

All right. Thank you both so much. That was really, really helpful. The last thing I'm just going to share this evening before I just highlight some of the things in the appendices is we have a real sort of, I would say, renewed focus. We're always focused on data, but this year we decided for our August DLT, which is our district leadership team, that we would spend a good part of the day one agenda on looking at data, making sure people had logins to their data, knowing how to access data. And we created for them a monthly data planner that I wanted to show you. You all will get this presentation updated. You'll be able to click on all of these links, but this is obviously a blank one. So you're not gonna see it all filled in because each school, we gave each school a copy for their school and they are actively working on it. But this is the first few months of school so far. And we gave them all of the things that they could be looking at over the summer in terms of data that's available to them. And there is endless data out there for them on various platforms, EdSight, EdSight Secure, The CRT, which is our centralized reporting system, which is where Smarter Balanced scores and Lost Link scores live before they're unembargoed and made available to the public. We can go in earlier and look at them almost in real time with our students. We have PowerSchool. We have the Rise Hub, as Lindsay mentioned, which is a tremendous database for our high schools to use. And so we reviewed this with folks and we created what we felt were some very helpful questions. questions that they should or could be asking as they're looking at the data, digging into demographic data, grade level data, teacher level. You know, for AP scores, are there AP teachers that are knocking it out of the park and their kids are just doing so, so well every year? Who are those teachers? We want to celebrate them. We want to, you know, diagnostically figure out what they're doing so we can replicate the great work that we're seeing. So that is a really exciting opportunity. I think, monthly planner that we laid out for principals. The feedback was really tremendous. And the goal now, we have principal meetings. We actually have elementary tomorrow. We have secondary on Thursday. We will be digging into September. And just as September is a little bit of a lighter data month as we get back to school. As I mentioned, we're just starting our baseline. But there are data points that they can and should be looking at And so, again, we help lay it out for them. This is for them to use their no-shows. Who has not come to school yet? Who's on top of that? Who is running that report? Who's following up with those families? Attendance, student attendance, as Scott and Lisa just mentioned, right from day one, we need to make sure that students are attending each and every day. So really paying attention to that. Okay. Grade recording. We have an MOA with our high school teachers that they are to be inputting grades every two weeks. Someone needs to be monitoring that and making sure that if teachers need support in getting those grades in, we're able to support them. Tracking completion rates for iReady. So as we're using and administering iReady, are we going to be done before the window closes? Because Amy does not want to have to extend the window because you're not done. And so all of those kinds of things. So we'll be working through this with our principals on a monthly basis to, again, support them, make sure they know how to access the reports that are relevant, make sure that they have access to everything, active logins, because these things change with two-factor authentication. Some of this stuff's harder to get into probably than the state secrets, but making sure that they do know how to access or they have someone on their team that is the point person. And so you do see person responsible. And the really key point of this is for them to identify action steps. So it's great to know what your data is, and that is super important. It's a great first step. But the most important thing is that they are developing action steps, steps that they're going to take as a school community when they see scores that you know, they're wondering about or scores that are not where they would like them to be or scores for a certain group of students where they would not like them to be. And so also areas to celebrate, as I mentioned, you know, calling out teachers who are getting tremendous results every year. You know, all of their students hit their stretch growth every year on Rye Ready. What is that particular teacher doing? So this is the work that we are really focused on. This will also is directly aligned to their school improvement plan. So doing this sort of work in this kind of playground here will really help them build their school improvement plans, which they'll be working on really as soon as that BOI data is all collected. And so we're really excited about this. The buildings were very excited about this. They were excited to be given some time to do some of this work together as school teams at DLT. And as I said, we will continue to revisit this on a monthly basis. And by the end of the year, they'll have this whole portfolio of data for their students. And, you know, hopefully we'll continue to see the trends that we're seeing in terms of growth in all of the areas that we shared with you this evening. So I think that is... The end that I wanted to share. I just there are five appendices A through E here in this presentation. There's some overall district demographic data. Just as a reminder, not all of our schools are exactly the same in terms of demographics, so that's in there for you. There is additional on track data by school. There's additional I ready data both for ELA and math by school by different demographic groups, so you can take a look at that. And then there's also additional chronic absentee and attendance data by school. So there's a lot more school level data in there for you to digest again at your leisure or when you can't sleep or whenever it is that you have time to do that. And as always, we are here to answer questions and help you with any of the data. If there's something that you need more information about or something that you're just not understanding what a particular slide is, you are more than welcome to reach out and send an email to Dr. Talley and I, and we will definitely get back to you and clarify any of that information.

Thank you so much, Amy. This is a lot of really great information to put together in this presentation. And so thank you so much. Thank you, Lindsay, also for the hard work for your team. And then also thank you so much, Lisa and Scott as well. We know the work that goes into this and I'm very excited about the planners. I thought that that was, I love to see the data and most especially to see the piece about action steps. I think that that is always a great way to reflect. And then, like you said, being able to share best practices also is really good. I am going to... open it up to committee members if there are any follow-up questions from the presentation. I know that there were questions that were sent ahead of time. Thank you so much for answering my question, Amy. I appreciate that. And for seeing the slide also, that was great. But if there were any follow-up questions, I will open it up to any of our TLC committee members Anyone wants to raise their hand. Dr. Hammond.

Thank you. And thank you for answering some of those questions that I sent in because I sent them in a little late and I apologize. you know, I, I'm looking at the attendance and, and we can have all the data in the world and the action steps on paper and, and our school improvement plans, but bottom line, we want our kids in school, in classes, learning. And so I guess my bigger question is, um, the, um, non-government organizations, SPEF, DOMAS. I believe there's a lot happening too with those as far as helping kids. I'm just looking at the elementary schools. It looks like seven out of 10 of them that I saw listed are high needs. And these are tough. I'm telling you, these... principals and staff the teaching team and the staff that are supporting them have a lot of work simply because of the high needs youngsters um and i'm just talking elementary what are we doing in that sense with the non you know with spef with domus to really reach out to these families um are there home visits to help get our those our kids into school to help families um You know, and will you maybe be addressing that? Because so much of that is just getting them into school and getting them motivated and excited. And I'm not worried about that side because I know we have a great team making that happen. But what are some of the other support structures? Do we need to consider this in the budget in the future in how we are helping our youngsters? Because we do not want any of our kids to fail, and especially if they're not in school.

So, Dr. Hammond, this is Adrian Talley, Superintendent. I'm gonna just speak briefly on this because, and we can come back to another meeting with regards to a more detailed response. There are things that are being done by the various organizations. In the two months that I've been here, I think I've met with every one of those organizations. and it has been quite illuminating to hear all of the things that they are doing. Additionally, we have done our own work with regards to this. We have a grant, and I am not going to ask Dr. Fernandez to talk about this at this point in time because we can talk about this at a future meeting with regards to everything that is being done specifically to your question about home visits. We are doing home visits. We are doing, we have hired people to do this work. So we'll save that for another presentation if that's okay with you.

Well, because I tie so much of it into success and achievement when we have them in school.

I would agree. I agree 100%. As the slide shows, if children are in school, they're going to do better. And so it's a two-way street with regards to children being in school. And staff can only do so much. But luckily, we have other people who are doing that. And so again, we can present on all the things that are being done specifically. There's a grant we have received that helps us do some of that work. So rather than give a shallow answer, let us provide you with more information on another presentation if that's reasonable.

Thank you. Any other committee members?

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize, Dr. Hemingway, you were still gone. Go ahead. Well, no, that's okay. I mean, I could be here all night, but I don't, you know, I think it was a very thorough presentation. You know, I'm looking at iReady. It is... you know, you read the reviews on it. There are a lot of lawsuits out there from different states. You know, it's not probably the best. It's more of a crude screener. That's why they're changing their name from diagnostic to inform, I think, this following year. But they, you know, they fail to give performance instructional data to the degree that maybe other programs? Is it something we maybe need to look at? Because even when you look at the SBAC scores and watching the you know, correlation of all the kids that are above and learning, it's still not correlating well to the SBAC. And so is it the best program that we can be using? And do we need to also possibly look at I-Ready and say, are there better programs out there? Because I hear right from the kids and they're they're bored. You know, some of them you hear the same instructions over or, you know, a variety of things. But that would be my question. We've been using it for three years now. Amy, is it something that, you know, would be part of a discussion or is it a are we doing it for simply financial reasons, picking this type of program? Because it seems to not get a lot of good press out there nationally.

Dr. Hammond, before Ms. Beldowney speaks, I just want to talk a little bit about the lawsuit that you mentioned.

Not one.

There's several. Well, let me just put it out this way. The lawsuit is not about the diagnostic part of the test at all. It is questions have been raised regarding data being shared that parents didn't have permission to share.

That's a federal one. I'm not talking that.

Let me finish, please. Thank you. So it's a lawsuit. Nothing has been found anyone guilty. So everything is everybody is innocent until proven otherwise. So I don't think we really should bring that forward. There are several different assessments that are out there. I ready is one done by many different school systems across the country. NWEA is another one. Star is the third one. None of those are going to be tied directly to any state assessment, but the companies will do a correlation to all of those. And I'll let Ms. Baldotti talk about that now.

If I can find my unmute button, there we go. My cursor always disappears. Yes, so iReady, Curriculum Associates, who owns iReady, does a correlation study. There is, you know, it's highly correlated, the students' iReady scores with their Smarter Balanced Assessment scores. They continue to refine that research every single year. It's also something that at middle of year, we can access that in the iReady website. hub. Teachers can see that information for their students. It's a predictor of how they'll do on Smarter Balance. And so, you know, just we chose iReady through a committee of folks that included many, many, many teachers who were dying for something better than what we were using previously, which was the Lexile and Quantile, which gave little to no information without a tremendous amount of work on the part of teachers to dig deeply individually into each student. iReady gives them at their fingertips sometimes maybe more information than they can even handle, and that's why we have my team, we have Scott and Lisa, we have MTSS coaches that support teachers in finding the most relevant, the most important information for both math and ELA that they can use instructionally in their classrooms. And so anecdotally, the feedback I hear from teachers is that they actually love iReady. I don't know that many students who love any assessment. So, I mean, I love students. I love their feedback, but I don't listen to most 12-year-olds when they grumble about taking an assessment because, you know, but I think we can also, I think there's more work to do as a district around the culture that we have with assessment. So adults set the tone for assessment, right? And so if I'm a teacher and I am like, guys, this is our moment, we can show everybody what we can do. And this is going to help me as your teacher for the entire school year. And we're going to set goals together. And this is going to be amazing. And I that could have a tremendous effect on the kinds of information that we're getting from students and the kind of performance that we're getting from students rather than standing up. And I'm not saying anyone does this, but says, oh, today's already testing. All right, just do the best you can and we'll get it over with and then we'll move on to something more important, right? I mean, there's a way to, and we do a lot of work with teachers. Every year we do a proctoring workshop, reminding teachers how to set the tone in your classroom to get the optimal results. Cause that really, really is important. And, you know, I think the plan this year is really to talk to schools about ways to sort of shift that culture, create some healthy, you know, competition, celebrate the students that demonstrate the most progress for the year, highlight those students, create a bulletin board, put those students' names on it, right? There are lots of things that we can do to sort of take away the, oh, it's already testing again, right? I get it. It's... It's something that we have to do. But if it's presented and done in the right way, it really is really strong information for teachers to help guide their instruction. We're pretty pleased with iReady.

Yeah. I wasn't talking about the federal lawsuit, but I'm just saying, are we choosing the best diagnostic assessment? And if it is at this point, that's good. I want public to know that. And of course, every teacher is going to do our best to say, we want to see where you're at and let's move forward. But my concern is we're still fairly flat in you know, and it looks like we're off the charts as far as success. But then when you apply it to the SBAC or the SAT, you know, as we progressively walk through, you know, move through each grade, we're not, are we getting the bang for our buck? That's all I'm asking. And I think that that's something that, you know, again, I want to be hopeful that we're headed in the right direction. I mean, it is increasing. So that's great sign. It's just that it's steady Eddie. It's not, you know, popping on us, but it just takes time. Absolutely. So those are the bigger questions because then it ties into curriculum and instruction. And in order to get that movement continuing to increase, um, you know, are we looking, do you take time as a team because you put some beautiful goals together, but then are we really moving the dial? I'm not satisfied with where we're at. I know we can do, you know, continue to do better. And that's where I think a lot of the parents and kids too are just, you know, we're being very hopeful and Dr. Talley will lead the team on this. But those are, they're harder questions to answer. Are we choosing the right curriculums? When you see math really dipping low and we're below state averages, we really do need to look at a little bit more internally and what's happening. But I understand you open the engine of a car. There's a lot of details that we're attending to. So those are the reasons I asked the question. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Hammond.

Ms. Koch, I see your hand.

Thanks, Julie. I did not submit this question ahead of time, so please feel free to email or just follow up at a different time whenever you think is appropriate, Dr. Talian team. But I had a question, and I was trying to find the slide on Diligent, but this platform is so weird. I can't find it. It's the slide where we're looking at... I want to say it was maybe iReady. And we're looking at the last two years of data, including this year, which would be three. And it went from 67 to 60 to 67. And there was a similar dip in that middle year across. Actually, it was reading. It was reading scores. And I'm just curious to understand that a little bit. I don't know if the team has any thoughts on it, but I'm wondering why that dip. or like even across the grade levels. Oops, sorry, mine. I don't know if you can pull it up, Amy. Yes.

I think that's- You're on mute, Amy. I found the slide with the 67, 60, 67. So this is actually the ninth grade on track data, which shows three years worth of data. Is that the right slide? This is not the high ready, but this is, yeah.

Yes, correct. This is on track date, excuse me. But yes, this is the slide I was looking at. And so I'm just curious, that middle year, it just makes me wonder, you know, what might be happening there with the ninth graders. And maybe along that same train of thought, they're in 10th grade now, if this happened last year, right? What does that look like now that they're in 10th grade? It's just the following.

Right. So I wouldn't have the 10th grade answer. So they would have been in 10th grade last year. Right. So I don't have that answer. What I what I can tell you about these three bars is that we had three different schedules. Right. In 23, 24, we ran an A, B, eight period schedule for one day for the next day, every other day for the entire year. In 24-25, we ran a seven-period schedule. Three long periods, three long periods with a skinny period at the end. In 25-26, we ran the hybrid schedule where most students, not all, but most students had four classes in the first semester, four classes in the second semester. And then some students who were in, again, performance-based classes, AP classes, IB classes, had those classes every other day for the entire year. So that's why we called it the hybrid because some classes were offered in a 4x4, some were offered in an AB. Three different schedules, I don't know. I know that the seven period with the skinny was the least popular, I will say, both in terms of teachers and students. I don't know if that has any reason to do with the dip. The other thing is that these are three different cohorts of ninth grade students. So different groups of students are different students, right? It's not the same kids. But I would have to... pull out the 10th graders and see where they are, that's the dip year that you're saying, the middle bar, those kids were in 10th grade last year, they're current 11th graders. So we can take a look at those students and see if there was any type of rebound. What I can tell you is the other slide that Lindsey shared when she shared her grade level data here is that more of our 10th graders you know, had core subject pass rates, you know, in last year than the year before. So to me, that is positive, right? There's a little potential rebound there, but I could dig in a little bit deeper, Gabby, and get you a better answer.

Sure. No, and I appreciate, again, did not pre-submit the question. So appreciate you kind of sharing some initial thoughts on that. Thank you.

Mm-hmm. All right. Well, thank you so much. If there are no additional questions for this evening, is there a motion to adjourn?

Oh, I'm so sorry. I just want to publicly thank Lindsay again. Lindsay was traveling all last week. She squeezed this into her travel and getting it all together. I was able to meet with her today. We have a lot of partners, and RISE really is a top-notch partner to Stanford Public Schools and has been for many years. So I just wanted to shout her and her whole team out, her data team, and Sam from RISE, who really, they really are very good partners to us and to our high schools. And I appreciate you being here tonight. Of course, I always appreciate Lisa and Scott, but I get to see you every day and I appreciate you every day. But Lindsay, I just wanted to publicly really say thank you so much for your positivity and your willingness to come on and present with us this evening. So thank you, Lindsay, and to the Rise Network.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Hoy.

It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate the partnership from Stanford and then specifically Amy. It's been so great to work so closely with you. But thank you all for having me.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Lindsay, for the data. And thank you for our partnership with our district. And thank you again, Ms. Baldotti and the whole team. And again, knowing how much work goes into this, I feel like this is a really great beginning and a start for our school year with such intentional focus on things that will really spell out what's going to be successful for our students for this year and moving forward. So thank you all. If there is no further business, motion to adjourn. Same as Koch. Second. I saw Mr. George's hand. And so that we will move forward. And so it is now 734. And that is the end of our TLC meeting for this evening. Thank you, everyone. Have a great night.