we use it to make data driven decisions so this is very important work that we're heading into for the next two months almost. And then finally we continue to work to engage our community with Prop O. Our goal is really to make sure all of our community is very well informed as they head into April 7th to make their decision. We've had coffee conversations. We have one March 24th at the center of Clayton. We already had one. This will be our second one where any community member can come in and learn or ask questions. And then we've had Glenridge tours. We've already had one. We're having and we had one earlier today. I could not attend it but I know some board members went so we appreciate that. And I think that was the largest turnout we've had so far. We had like almost 12 community members coming and learning about the needs firsthand so that's good. And then school events are ongoing. We have a lot of parent teacher conferences this week so we're trying to be as visible as possible. Having tables set up information out there for anyone who has questions just to stop by and be well informed so that is our goal. So we will continue to do work on that. And then finally tonight we have two presentations. We have the social studies presentation where they're going to propose their long range goals for the social studies curriculum. Paul and Dr. Garganigo will be here and then we also have the tech study and so Luke and Milena will be presenting information about that. So it's going to be a fun filled evening. And now I'm going to transition right away to recognizing our own and I'm going to make it super official and I'm going to go to the mic and stand there because I've written out some stuff that I actually want to read tonight so I don't miss a step. So I'm going to walk over there. So hold tight. I'm assuming this is working so here we go. Okay. Good evening. Tonight we have a chance to recognize and thank our board of education for the time and dedication you give to our schools and community as part of the Missouri School Boards Association month. Serving on the board is a volunteer role and we know that takes a lot of your time thought and leadership. We're incredibly grateful for the ways you support our students staff and family. As you can see each of the buildings and the athletic department has like put a collection of items for you as just a small token of appreciation. So that's on behalf of all of us for you. And then also in your baskets there are cards that our students wrote and as tradition I always like to pick out a few and read them to you. So I have three that I'm going to read out to you. Adorable. Okay the first one it says Dear Clayton School Board member thank you for supporting students. You do a pretty good job. Keep keep at it. The next one. Thank you for supporting our schools helping with funds and supporting our education. I hope that you enjoy this card and you like all of my drawings. So you have illustrations and it says I don't know what you really do but without you my education would not be the same. You underlined push and make it better. And in parentheses it says do you get snacks. You do you do you do they do they do. And then the student says I have an awesome school district and school but you make it underlined even better. And so thank you for everything. And that happens every single day. I love school. Isn't that Frank. I know I love it. Just adorable. Okay. And the last one it says Dear School Board thank you for using up your personal time to keep this school alive. You help all of us learn you make a difference. Thank you again for keeping this school alive. So that is on behalf of the students. And then finally we not finally but the next we have a short video which is like two minutes just to show you our appreciation again on the screen. I think they're an organization that meets I believe on every other Tuesday. I have absolutely no idea. I think the school board like gives us all the materials we need for school. Maybe the board that votes on which teachers there have. I think they're inspiring in what to put in the school curriculum. I think that in their means they talk about how they can make the school district even better than it already is. But that might not be possible because I honestly think it's one of the best districts in Missouri. I would vote on giving every single class a pizza party every Friday. Swap weekends and school days. Making lunch food better. We all watch Harry Potter. Thank you Board of Education for all of the countless hours you put in to serve our Clayton students and our broader Clayton community. Thank you Board of Education for volunteering your time. We really appreciate the support of all of our Clayton students. We appreciate you. Thank you Dr. For your service on the board. I appreciate and love you dad. Happy board appreciation month. So again whether our students realize it or not you do an incredible amount of work behind the scenes to support this district and we are deeply grateful for your service. So a heartful thank you to each of you in your roles. Tonight also marks the final board meeting for Stacey Seawalk and Kim Hurst and I would remiss not to reflect on some of the progress our district has made during their time on the board. Stacey you joined the board in 2019 after many years of service to Clayton as both a parent and a community volunteer. As a former educator you consistently kept students at the center of every conversation and reminded us of our shared responsibility to ensure Clayton remains a place for everyone to grow as learners in head and heart. Kim you joined the board in 2020 though your commitment to Clayton began earlier through your service on the district's finance committee and your support of community efforts such as Prop E. Throughout your tenure as treasurer and vice president you remained a strong steward of the district's financial health and helped ensure our decisions were again grounded on what's best for our students. As a student who wrote a card a few years ago said thanks for taking care of the money. We appreciate you. Together you Stacey and Kim have helped lead Clayton through moments of both progress and challenge. Allow me to share some of those highlights. During our tenure alone or during my tenure alone with you you supported and guided the implementation of our strategic plan and the profile of the Clayton graduate soon to be called profile of the Clayton learner. Made important investments in safety and security, including the addition of a third school resource officer, the creation of a director of safety and security position and improvements in safety infrastructure across all of our buildings. You also supported the development of a wellness center, which is one of the one of a kind in the state of Missouri and a key resource to support our students mental health and well being. You helped guide the renovation of Clayton high school library, which has become a vibrant hub for all of our students and if you ask our students, it is the place to be. Your leadership also helped guide important policy work and long term planning, including the two year tech study that we are going to hear about later this evening. let's also recognize your impact on the fine arts through your support our programs continue to grow from new chamber orchestra and choir opportunities at why down to expanding choir and visual arts offerings at Clayton high school. And not to mention all of our theater programs that continue to engage students and both on stage and off stage. Your tenure has also been marked by significant academic progress in our classrooms you supported strong instruction first through expanded phonics in K five. rewrote rewritten elementary social studies curriculum and the adoption of K eight math resources. You strengthen students support systems through mtss and tools like at you climber while deepening our social emotional learning work around character strong. or with character strong and you championed innovation through partnerships like my side with wash you programs like amped and geometry and construction. and real world learning opportunities like global STEM squads because of your support Clayton high school has also reached the highest level of student participation in AP coursework and exams. ever with 947 tests administered with a 91% pass rating. And let's not forget your support of our athletic programs Clayton has won 10 state championships in the past 80 years 10 in 80 years remarkably eight of the 10 have been in the past four years. that's right that is exactly right. You that's true, you also help guide the district through some. True it is it is you also help guide the district through some incredibly difficult and unexpected moments like navigating the pandemic engaging in complex Community conversations around coloris and most recently leading us through the May 2025 tornado. In each of these moments your steady leadership helped our district move forward and emerge even stronger as a Community. And now, as your service comes to a close you leave us in the midst of another important chapter your thoughtful work over the past two years on the long range facilities master plan has helped bring us to a moment we now are in prop oh. On a personal note, both of you are part of a board that hired me as a superintendent your trust support and confidence in me have meant more than I can fully express. You pushed me when needed and supported me every step of the way, not many superintendents can say that and I stand here proudly as someone who can. You truly mean the world to me and I sincerely hope the relationships we have built will continue long after your service on the board, thank you for everything. 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Well since it's my last official board meeting I wrote up a little something too so good evening everyone. I've heard it said serving on a school board is like being a parent. Now I need to put on my glasses though but with 2,500 more kids and significantly more paperwork. I will miss the camaraderie but I admit I'm looking forward to being demoted to civilian status. I'll start by thanking my family. I see that Molly is here. Welcome back for spring break Molly. Serving on a school board does involve a little bit of time away from family and I want to thank them for supporting me the last six years that I served here. Every board member has an equal position regardless of whether they are designated officer. Vice President though might have been my favorite position. I'm a senior officer position. All the prestige without the public comment death stares that the President endures. The treasurer's job is to ensure that district finances are secure. I've been treasurer for half of my time on the board. John who is also about to retire for the second time as a CFO of the school district. I want to sincerely thank you and the entire finance and accounting team for being my partners in fiscal taxes but John and I leave you with balance statements, clean audits and a robust fund balance that we expect our incoming CFO and future board treasurer to guard like dragons protecting a hoard of gold. So it's been an honor to serve with everyone who has been at this table past and present and I see Frank Hackman in the audience today too who care enough to spend their time never losing sight of the true bottom line and I'm confident that the new board members who will be sworn in next month will work closely with you Nisha to ensure Clayton remains a top school district for academics, the arts, athletics and the long list of things are accomplished students are recognized for long after I'm gone. That includes you as a student rep and all the other accomplished student reps at the table with us and last but not least thank you to everyone who cast a vote for me and put me in immense pride in what we built together. Thank you. Okay. That was really nice and hard to follow but I also wrote a few words like Kim said. Although my term as a board member is not yet officially over and will definitely not be over until at least April 8 and we still have a lot of work to do. This is our last public meeting so I would like to say a few words reflecting on my time in this role. As Nisha said I was elected in 2019 which was on the same ballot as prop E and as Leo so eloquently pointed out to me concluding my time on the board with the very hopeful passing of prop O would make the perfect bookends to my board tenure. At my very first board meeting in 2019 my very first vote was to approve adding a student representative and I will never forget it. Ensuring that student voice is part of our discussions has been one of the most meaningful aspects of this work for me. It feels fitting that tonight we are voting to amend the student rep policy which reaffirms our commitment to elevating student perspectives in everything we do which is another perfect bookend. As many of you know I began my career as an educator and with a master's degree in school counseling. It is meant so much to me that I have prioritized both academic excellence and the social emotional well-being of our students. It has been the perfect balance that reflects and utilizes my own education and professional experience. I come from a family of public school educators. Both of my parents were teachers as are both of my sisters in law, my brother in law, my aunt, a few cousins and my mother in law was not only a teacher but also served on the school board in the last two years. So education is obviously a passion for me and my extended family. Serving on this board of education has been a deeply fulfilling extension of my entire family's commitment to education. I am especially grateful to have served alongside each of you, Kim, Jason, Chris, Pam, Leo, Ben, particularly over the past two years during my time as President. Each of you has supported my leadership, challenged my thinking, taught me a lot and made even the hardest work feel meaningful, and yes, we have fun together too. I am also profoundly grateful to you, Nisha, and your outstanding team of leaders. You are an exceptional leader, both visionary and inspiring, and it's been a true privilege to lead this work alongside you and to witness first hand the remarkable ways in which you have reimagined education to best serve our students. These last seven years have gone quickly actually and have been incredibly rewarding. In many ways I feel I have received far more from this experience than I have given, but I sincerely hope that our students and staff have benefited from my service. Thank you to Nisha, to my fellow board members, to this entire community, and especially to my family, my daughter who is here tonight, for supporting me in this role over the past seven years. Thank you. Okay. I'll start. We can't let this meeting go on without also saying something to these two amazing women. I'm going to try not to get emotional, but probably not going to work because Pam's emotional, but we've got a whole meeting to go so I'm going to keep it together and maybe later when we cake together again I'll get into the details, but I just want to say that these two women right here are incredibly wonderful role models to me personally, and what I love about that is that you're also incredible role models to all the students. I think about that. I think about if they watch these meetings and if you interact with them, et cetera, you're just fantastic people for our community to know and to be able to be touched by your wisdom and your kindness and your leadership. It's just been phenomenal for me and like I said for the whole community so I will kind of leave it at that for now, but I just want you both to know how much you'll be missed so much. It's going to be really, really hard without you guys, but we will do just fine and only your phone call away, but just know that you're always here with us. You're welcome. I didn't have anything prepared to say. I don't want anyone to feel like they have. No, no, absolutely. That wasn't prepared either. I was off the cuff. All right. You're better at this than I am. I just think there have been some difficult times in the history of this board and Pam and I came in through a tough race and this has become a really cohesive effective board and I think that's truly a test of it to both of you and I think you handled some things with immense grace and I really thank you for that. It's very impressive. Thank you. I will go now. Kim got me into this whole mess. First of all. No, seriously. I think both of you have shown myself, I think everyone else at this table what it really looks like, what excellence as a board member looks like, leadership, you know expertise, but open to hearing voices and building consensus so that's really what it's about so that legacy you guys bring will continue on. I guarantee that. Thank you. Okay. I wrote, well we all wrote each of you more personal notes so I'll save that for the writing, but to let the community, all the people listening know as a board we underwent training and evaluation of board dynamics and to summarize the Missouri School Board Association representative who works with boards said that we were amazing so I mean that's like the summary and the reason I'm sharing this year is that it really is a very important thing and it is the leadership of Stacey and Kim that has brought us to this place. The legacy, you know the wisdom that you all have cultivated in your six and seven years on the board and the way that you shared it with us will leave a legacy here and I truly believe that you two have changed the way that the Clayton School Board will function moving forward so it's enduring. Thank you. I'm trying to think of something I'll say some other things offline but I just you know in the I'll just say here publicly that you know this is a board and Leo touched on it a little bit and it's a board that really has gone through a lot of almost like eras shifting if you think about the recent past of the school board to where it was five or ten years ago to where it is now. You know there's one era and we transition to this era and this is a highly functioning board as the state has told us you know as Pam has reminded us as Leo has said and without the two of you I'm not sure where we would still be here just for the board and it's not clear how effective we would have been and this turned out to be a great group and leaves a high bar for the next folks coming on up so thank you guys for that. Thank you. I have faith in the next ones. So I'm going to turn it over to Nina for our student ref update. I would also really quickly just like to thank the board. It's been such an honor to work with all of you this year and I appreciate all the guidance and support you provided me. You are such great role models. Thank you so much. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the technology studies that we did so on December 11 a group of fellow high school students from principals advisory club had the opportunity to review a potential new device for the upcoming school year. The team was very excited about the session. We spent about an hour and a half asking questions sharing feedback and exploring the device's features. We had a similar opportunity to evaluate a different device on February 11. Both sessions were very enjoyable and informative and the members of the principal's advisory club brought many thoughtful questions and ideas to the discussions. Throughout the process we had several opportunities to share feedback and ideas and the ability to keep multiple tabs open at once and faster loading speeds and a strong battery life. I had a great time getting to know the team at Apple and working with the students on the club and always provide great feedback and have so many ideas and excited to hear about the results. Thanks Nina. I'm so glad to hear about that experience with the students trying out different devices. Thank you. That's great. Okay. Now we're moving on to agenda item 5.1 which is Dr. Garganigo and Dr. Halscher in the social studies curriculum. Good evening. I'd like to first start by introducing a couple of people to you. So first Dr. Paul Halscher is our social studies coordinator and when I was reflecting on Paul's retiring this year and when I was reflecting on this and he and I have talked about this he is one of the two coordinators that was in place when I took my role. So he and I have been together for a long time. He was I remember when I came into this role he was really integral in helping me adjust to the role and being really willing to be open and help support me in that transition. I also want to say that he's one of the coordinators who really embodies what my philosophy of our teaching and learning team is. So I always say I'm a generalist and our coordinators are specialists. Paul has some of the deepest content knowledge that I have ever seen. So the work that he does with our teachers, the work that he does with our students has always been a challenge for me. I don't claim that I'm a social studies person and so I value his insight and his talent in that area tremendously. I would also say that Paul is somebody who has always pushed my thinking and so I like to have people on my team who support me but also who push my thinking to push us to be better and so as a consequence of Paul's work he's challenged us to be better. He's had us really think very differently about social studies and he's challenged himself also so things that he wasn't always familiar with he's put himself into elementary classrooms and helped support the content knowledge of the teachers and teaching the students and I remember when we first talked about that he was like okay and I think he's done tremendously with that so Paul is leaving us with a department in really good shape so thank you publicly for your work. I also want to take this opportunity to introduce Mark Solomon. He's a seventh grade social studies teacher at Weidown and he's taking over as our new social studies coordinator and so he's inheriting a department in good shape but I also think we're putting our department into really good hands. Mark is a really strong leader. I've had great opportunity getting to know him both when I was at Weidown as well as through my work within this role and I think he's going to take over and I think he's going to do great in supporting us so thank you to you also Mark. So before we get into the social studies okay before we get into the social studies part of this I want to spend a couple minutes because this is the first curriculum review that we're doing this year so to get us regrounded in what we're doing and what we're talking about so I always like to start with our profile of a Clayton graduate soon to be our profile of a Clayton learner because it grounds our work and this is surrounded by our three goals of our CSIP. Tonight we are going to focus specifically really on goals one and two within our CSIP so when we think about the commitment to educational growth for our learners and thinking about the experiences that we provide them in a teaching and learning environment as well as that idea of ensuring that all of our learners see themselves as part of the curriculum that we're teaching so I think as Paul talks through the work that he and his team have been doing you will see evidence of that work and the equity work within the district so the overview of our self-study process is that it is a two-year self-study during that time we ask the committees and the departments to revise their enduring understanding so enduring understandings are big ideas that ground the work of that department and that curriculum area so we ask them to go through and review those and make sure that they still represent what we believe about that content area. They're intended to be long enduring pieces of work that really ground us and our work and allow students to see that learning outside of just the content area so transferring that learning beyond. We also spend time reviewing the curriculum and the resources that we use in our teaching and learning environment and we again ask you to re-approve the curriculum itself and we will re-approve all of that social studies. Tonight it will be social studies all of that curriculum. During the first year of the self-study each department presents to the teaching and learning Advisory Council to gain input so you saw in the report the information that we solicited from that subset of parents and then oftentimes the team there is a little bit of choice here of what that work looks like but sometimes it includes site visits and input and then data analysis. Particularly some of the departments when they're coming like English you're going to see a whole lot of data. When they come forward. Social studies we don't have as much of that data. What we're going to ask tonight for the approval is there are long range goals so they'll have four years to implement those long range goals. The financials that are attached to those goals and then like I said a reapproval of the curriculum. I'm going to hand it over to Paul. Thank you. I have three quick thank yous starting with my partner to the right. Milena has been so supportive in this role and great about communication. She works so many long hours. I can prove it because I get lots of texts at night. I want to thank the committee that I work with. My K-12 committee is representative from each grade level and we meet on a monthly basis to go through the board review but consistently assess! So without naming all of them just an amazing group of teachers that make it happen and lastly sincerely and not the timing tonight but I want to thank all of you. Whenever I teach government this is my 25th year in Clayton 31 overall I taught government 20 times. We use Board of Education as an example of getting involved in your community. Not everyone is going to run for a senator but you can do things in your local community and the board has always been super supportive of me in social studies. Somebody mentioned eras. I have been through many of those eras. This is my 18th year in this position. It's my third board report and so thank you very much for what appears to be a very friendly environment to go through that. Sincerely thank you for your time and energy that you put into this. I have two kids in college and they are doing it for the right reasons. We will start with our enduring understandings. We wrote these in the last board report and came back to revisit them. In my mind it's like what do we believe? What are our main ideas? What are our overarching directions? As you read through these they are wordy. There are five aspects of social studies so when you go through each of them the first one is culture, the second one is history, geography, civics and economics except for the first three or four words. We have chosen those very carefully after much deliberation so engaged, there was discussion should this go around it changed to empowered and engaged and global citizen and in the 21st century we are preparing kids for an international world and the word citizen was used there as a huge part of public education to get kids involved in citizenship in so many different ways. So I am going to walk you through and paint a picture here. Six years ago, five years ago coming off of COVID I did not intend my last go around to be a major revision. A group of elementary teachers are meeting with me over the summer which frequently happens. We had great representation from a large group of teachers, diverse group of teachers and the goal at the time was to revise grades one and two. We saw a lot of overlap. The teachers were not challenged and there were specific economic units that repeated itself the way the Missouri standards were set up and once we got into this conversation and got deep into it we went way beyond first and second grade. There were four things we were thinking. One a greater alignment to the Missouri standards. We teach the Missouri learning standards but ours were askew in terms of how we had done things and since the 1990s we found teachers coming in and out of the classroom Secondly there was consistent feedback from teachers that we wanted more meat. We wanted content. We wanted social studies to not just be a superficial feel good community but push in terms of our thinking. 25 years ago people said the research said kids in first grade can't abstractly think about history. We're now teaching a history unit in first grade. We want to teach a concept of thinking about things from the past. Number one we wanted to align with the Missouri standards. Number two we wanted to challenge our students a little bit more. Number three we had overlap but the heart of this is 2020, 2021, 22 the time period of George Floyd and the district had lots of initiatives and conversations structurally hiring black teachers and reducing barriers to students in dive in? Why don't we embrace it? Why don't we teach some of that hard history that maybe at times I know when I was growing up wasn't necessarily taught so when we think about those four elements that's where we started making changes. Kindergarten celebrations is the same. The teachers are responsive to the kids in front of them. The celebrations year to year may look different if they're students from China or Mexico very big shift, that expanding horizons model but as an anecdotal example not to take too much time. We said we were going to do St. Louis. Let's do St. Louis. We took on a small piece of Mill Creek Valley where we had an African American thriving population that was displaced. We were able to collaborate. I'm a big soccer fan and a soccer coach. We were able to collaborate with St. Louis. We integrated into second grade. Second graders like myself love soccer. We started going through these changes and we realized we didn't want Missouri history in third grade to be a typical history. When you look at the Missouri learning standards they suggest things like Dred Scott and teachers say we're supposed to teach Dred Scott but we haven't taught enslavement. We're supposed to teach Lewis and Clark but nobody talks about that. We're supposed to teach the students about the! And this is really the influx of the learning for justice standards so this is basically a framework that says why you do social studies or what are the underlying reasons at a deeper level that get into this? U.S. history in fourth grade it says 1,000. We go Cahokia. What a wonderful. The museum unfortunately is closed. We haven't gotten there for a couple years but what a wonderful thing. Learning for justice standards really was something that the teachers and myself and the committee said this adds a little more depth to what we're doing. It's not woke history and revision history. It's the things we're looking at. When we got through K-5 and put pen to paper we said wait a second. See that fifth through seventh grade sequence. That's really going to kind of be. We kicked around the idea of another year of U.S. history. Most of my background is in non-Western history. I teach the AP world history class here so we have to get something international in there so people and places is geography but not the memorization of capitals like we did when we grew up. It's human geography. Keep in mind we have some location geography. Very important for me that every sixth grader knows their continents, oceans, cardinal directions. I'm old school when I was in seventh grade and this was done in a series of discussions. We thought what a wonderful opportunity. Massachusetts passed a law and said we need every middle school kid to study civics. I taught high school government. High school I hate to say it almost too late sometimes to introduce these concepts and think about civic identity and things like that. A lot of my high school kids say it's rigged and against me. The cynicism and the! We felt like this was a wonderful opportunity so we reached out and in each of these we had help from collaborating partners in different groups but one in particular the democracy knowledge project at Harvard took on the Massachusetts law and said if we're going to do this in Massachusetts for eighth graders let's do it well. We haven't done the whole thing but we took bits and pieces of what we're asking for in terms of students and that's a picture of the changes. When we think about what we're asking to approve in terms of long-term goals I basically summarize the first one of those that we want to align more closely with the standards and not abandoning that but learning for justice as some of that depth. I'm very, very proud. We had a speaker in third grade the other day somebody else who came out of Harvard working at UMSL and said we're teaching persons of color in a positive light prior to enslavement and all the third-grade teachers chuckled and laughed and raised their hand and said we teach the ancient civilization of Benin in third grade. Every K-5th grade class has an introduction to West African civilizations, different civilizations so that we can see persons of color in a positive light before we start moving into enslavement and these things. Moving on to the second goal which again is elementary and middle school. So many times when districts talk about integrating in literacy it's the loss of social studies. It's for minutes and social studies kind of gets put by the wayside. We are in some ways the fourth discipline but my job for the last 18 years is making sure and Milena has been very supportive and so have all of you so the integration with literacy is not a loss of social studies. It's using literacy skills. If we're going to read nonfiction, right, let's read nonfiction that lines up with what we're doing already in social studies as opposed to something distinct. If we're going to do narrative writing let's do the narrative writing as an assessment of our learning for social studies itself. So whereas the first goal is well in the works and we really need the next four years to add assessments and you read about the different things we're doing and how we give kids choice still even when we have common reading assignments and there's things we need to work on as social studies teachers. The third is mostly at the secondary level and my visual was taken unfortunately out of the slides. I'm very proud of my visual. It's basically a four-part circle so the inquiry model is kind of the current pedagogical approach to social studies. It's not ketting edge. It's not brand new or anything that's rebranded but essentially what we're looking at is four parts and the first is inquiry. How do we get kids to ask good questions? So many times in my education the teacher stood up and said this is what we're going to learn and this is the way we're going to learn it so we don't do inquiry daily but some units and some days and things like that asking kids to ask good questions. The second piece is what I'm most proud of and that's the evaluation of the students. It's increasingly significant that we work on media literacy skills and so that second comes out of Stanford. They have a digital inquiry group, civic education group that has changed a little bit but essentially 612 we have three overarching questions that become more nuanced by the time you get to APs. The first question is what is the source of information? Who is behind it? So when you think about who is behind it in a primary source online thing it's who is putting this information together online? We have exercises where we give kids two websites and they have to dig in and look. It may say it's an environmental website but if you dig deeper you realize it's funded by an oil company or something so question one is who is behind the information? Question two, those are real things we train kids for. Question two is what does the evidence say and three is what does the evidence say? So the research at Stanford suggests that kids and they're talking Stanford freshmen spend a majority of their time reading straight through a website and we've done that click, click, click, click. It's very simple but powerful. Lateral reading is no more than 10 minutes on a site before you open another tab and check that information against something else so the inquiry cycle and I'm getting detailed because I like this one. What are we doing for homework? What are we doing in class, et cetera? And the last one is our CER, claim evidence reasoning which again is not new but what I'm proud of in this particular goal we started working on is aligning what does that look like? A CER in sixth grade, seventh grade, eighth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade so we're using common language all the way through. CER is used in science and used in literacy. We want to be able to collaborate interdepartmentally or interdisciplinary with this sort of language because really when you think about showing your learning CER is a major way to get to that particular learning so the last goal when we think about that is the impact if we go back the impact that this is going to have on eight, nine and ten. Eight, nine and ten is our world history three year sequence where they do early history and then kind of ninth grade is 1877 and then tenth grade is kind of mostly 20th century 1877 to the present. I love and I'm proud of our integrated approach. In the 90s when we did this we were one of the only districts that I could find that truly taught U. S. and world history combined and going back to this engaged global citizen. When you look at this we're not 100% sure. I'm just being honest on what impact that's going to have. We had a lot of discussions coming to you and we're not sure what it's going to look like until these kids matriculate their way through the system so it looks like on paper they're going to have less U.S. history so we're going to have to build up U.S. history and narrative around that. It looks like because I'm in the classroom every day geography and civics is going to be way farther than before so in some ninth grade units on the American Revolution maybe we can compact some things or shorten some things and write assessments. As Milena said we don't have a lot of state assessments or mandates or things like that to make sure we're evaluating at each one of those steps what the kids know, where are the deficits and how do we make those changes. To do it at this point I think would be a little premature because we're trying to see once a kid comes through this new sequence what is it they've had? Not every fourth or fifth grader will that's what this goes through and spirals as we work our way through. So those are our four long range goals. I talked about a little bit of this already. How is this going to make us better? Learning for justice provides a deeper more critical approach. The word critical can be controversial. We're asking kids to assess the role of Native Americans, black Americans, aspects of history that maybe have not necessarily been in the history of our history that we want to expose kids to and get them to think about. Again removing the overlap is the initial catalyst when we started doing this. Sixth grade geography, human context for the world. Seventh grade I talked about civics. It's not, Mark is a seventh grade teacher. It's not a traditional American government high school class pushed down to seventh grade. It's very much around civic identity and diversity. It's a very big project where they have to choose something to get involved in their community. Keep going all the way through. I think the literacy integration will help us with common language. There is no reason that literacy skills can't be used in similar assignments and such. The inquiry cycle I mentioned before the four parts, my diagram that got pulled out of the slides there. Pushing for curiosity. Good, good, good. This is my Canva production right here. I'm very proud of that. You can teach old people new tricks. Frank's in the audience. I've been around so long. I had Frank's youngest kid both in class as a sophomore and on the soccer team. Frank's youngest for his Eagle Scout project built, helped me. We went in on spring break and did a bookshelf together. His son said you have a lot of books and you need to read them. Thinking about the inquiry cycle. Again common language, argumentative writing, claim evidence reasoning and the last one up there says systemic measurements, right? So how do we write assessments where we'll get a really good sense beginning, middle and end of eighth grade so that then we're able to make those curricular adjustments. I'm not here to make future predictions but I think what we'll end up seeing is the shift of some time periods, some units, those sorts of things around a little bit to make sure that we have the final product that we want going into 11th and 12th grade and keeping a lot of the APs and those things there. So closer alignment along the elementary building continues to be a challenge, right? Getting nine teachers on the same page and having the same resources and have field trips and things like that. Collaborating with the community to be able to come together. High school teachers in this eighth through 10th grade kind of assessment have also acknowledged that more students are coming in more than ever into the high school with significant reading needs and so as teachers instruct in nonfiction and assign writing and continue to have rigor there we need more training around reading and those things and we don't get a lot of reading training itself and kind education is underway. Hopefully if you have kids in those grades you hear good things. I hear good things from the teachers and the kids in the buildings that I'm in and monitor that and monitor what we need to be able to change. Thank you. What questions do you have for us? Thank you. Who would like to start? Go ahead Leo. I sent you a couple of questions by e-mail and you gave me an answer and even though this topic is super near and dear to my heart and I would love to talk about it more. Maybe we don't need to do it in this open meeting but I do think that there's a nexus between history and civics that American history presents. I do think there's room for continued development on that and that's an area of a lot of interest for me. Yeah. I have to say that reading your 19-ish page report was like so fun so thank you. I've never read one before. And I mean it. So great. So I just want to start by saying that I am incredibly impressed by the work that you did, the extensive professional development that you all underwent as collaborations with other school districts and as you spoke about Stanford and all these other places locally and nationally is you are the reason Clayton is Clayton. Thank you. I love the collaboration that you talk about between literacy and social studies and the elementary and middle schools. I love that you spoke about media literacy, something we need so much. I really appreciate your very clear plans for future work and the curricular changes and not rushing into it after making these K-7 changes so I want to just start by saying how incredible. You, I also asked a lot of questions and I'm guessing was a very long website. It limited me to this website, the educating for American democracy. And there's one, it was a very long website and I did the wrong thing. I read the whole website rather than lateral reading. Don't trust your sources. But I just wanted to like read one line, one of their bullet points that I just felt like would ground all of us to both love and critique this country. There's so many good ones but I just wanted to call that out. Okay. So my questions. As I just said that I appreciate your clear plans and not rushing into new curriculum. I also have concern about not about the we're just going to wait and see for the eighth and up. And so is there a change? Is there something in the meanwhile? Yeah, 100%. I share your concern. April 7 we have a PD day and eighth and ninth grade is meeting. Last summer eighth and ninth grade met. Like to really think about what that change looks like and how that transition. And so there's discussions around student expectations, reading, writing and what the curriculum will look like. We changed one unit already between eighth and ninth grade this last summer for this year and this summer we're going to get back together and look at that. So Mark has been on the committee for a long period of time and I'm not trying to cast this off but I think I share your exact same concern. I mean if you could go back through PD days we had multiple plans up and we looked at multiple options and I didn't because I was the one who put the proposal, the draft proposal together I didn't feel comfortable making a huge shift in the process but you're exactly right. As we see here we responded to teacher and student needs as soon as we saw those that were evident and so this year's seventh grade going into eighth grade immediately we're going to look at those assessments and figure out what we need to do. I don't know if I call them sticking points but the areas of deep consideration are do we keep U.S. and world history together? That's kind of a unique blend and it can be difficult at times for kids to think about globally, thematically, comparatively at the same time so that's going to take some deep consideration assessing kids, surveying kids in this process I don't know how much you write the report but I don't know what kind of sense you. We brought in former students. We had a full panel of former students and current students and we asked them what do you remember, what do you not remember, what do you like, dislike, all of those things to get to what you're saying so I share your concern and I felt safest with the idea of not making a radical shift until we had a better sense of kids coming through the program but we're not going to wait four years to make a change. Those are literally going to be ongoing. Okay. Thank you. I asked this question that like my son who is a sixth grader, right, never heard of it. So anybody who has got sixth graders now when they were in fourth grade the U.S. map was taught in fifth grade. When they got to fifth grade it was taught in fourth grade and so he doesn't know it and I'm sure there's other things and I'm sure you could tell me all of the things that were missed so I would love to hear how you're going to catch these holes because you know what the holes are, at least some of the holes. We created some bridge units as we made those changes themselves so there were many units that are not the same as a full course year but some many units were created as kids went through that initial transition in terms of catching those holes you can have on paper in fourth and fifth grade we cover these things but quite honestly until they get to eighth and ninth grade and getting a sense of what they remember and don't remember how things were covered and assess those students so when we talk about assessments we're talking about tests and concrete knowledge like place geography, like historical presidents, those sorts of things to get a sense of where the kids are and then you know carefully but relatively swiftly make changes as that could be. That could be three years from now divorcing American history from world history. That could be a separate approach if we feel like the U.S. history narrative needs two years to truly get there. Somebody had mentioned the interaction of civics and history and those sorts of things so until those kids get through I don't know if we have you know I think I would be dishonest if I said here is exactly where we're going to be right so I feel like the most cautious and the best approach is to assess those kids, right, those tests, figure out where we are and make those changes. I'm very fortunate K-12 but especially at the secondary level to work with a lot of teachers that have a lot of content background that are well read, that understand their history so we can be relatively agile in making those changes. Okay. You mentioned in the document the focus groups that you did and you just referred to them but you also had some with parents of current students and talking about this shift from memorizing like we all did to I'm just going to say your inquiry cycle and then you also spoke about ninth grade being very content or at least students in ninth grade having a difficult time in that transition to the heavy content compared to eighth grade and so I'm curious because I love the value of inquiry and I also feel like there are some things that need to be memorized. Maybe I'm wrong but I think that's an important skill and our kids don't memorize much of anything except the multiplication tables so I'm wondering how do you meld those two? Yeah. Because I understand the shift. Sure. Yeah. So the teaching and learning counsel I think what you're referring to the way we set that up was the initial setup was to reflect on your own social studies education and I hear constantly about that and I hate it history and I love it now so what is that? I'm not willing to throw teachers under the bus but what happened in those particular classrooms and I think a lot of people suggest that it was just sit and get memorization so I totally agree. I'm a content person. I think there are things that we should know when we have the profile of the graduate or the student or something like that. My feedback doesn't say that anyone needs to know who Lincoln was and I'm on that side in terms of content. There are things that kids need to know to be citizens beyond where to register to vote and in terms of the eighth to ninth grade transition I think and I only teach social studies but I think it's something wider than just social studies so what we're trying to do in our little realm is have the eighth and ninth grade teachers get together as much as possible and close those gaps so eighth grade is a long year. What are teachers in the second semester as opposed to second semester and how do we beef up the expectations so when the kids come in in ninth grade? This particular group of ninth graders have a lot of reading challenges and so we're also operating at a time period where the teachers feel like the reading and writing skills, maybe it's COVID and a hundred other factors but those are areas that we as social studies teachers, not English teachers, are very much part of that so closing that eighth to ninth grade gap I don't think is anything that's unique necessarily to social studies but by frequently getting those teachers together, talking to students as they're coming in the hope is that we can continue to have those really high standards in ninth grade but at the same time the compacting of some things or the intensity of ninth grade might need to change a little bit by having less students. The other particular challenge and I don't think this is unique to social studies is content and skills and how you blend those content and skills so that kids are prepared. There are very few kids, some, but there are very few kids that go on to become politicians or city managers or whatever his kid does. The majority of us do other things, right? We're not training historians so the reading and the writing skills are an absolutely essential part of the process. Some of this is curricular but some of it also is making those sorts of adjustments as well. Thank you. I guess my final thing is if you could just speak for the whole community to hear about DBQ and the micro DBQ because I think it's wonderful. Yeah. So DBQ has been around longer than I have. It's the main kind of heart of AP history classes so our main three history classes are world and U.S. and Euro. There are plenty of other classes like psych and econ and things like that but that's the traditional basis of those classes. DBQ is anywhere from five to eight documents and one question and what kids have to do is sift through those documents to find patterns, cause and effect, similarity differences, things like that, but yeah, exactly, but also when we go back to sourcing source those documents and we can review all of those sorts of elements so it's really higher level thinking. In the report the idea of doing the micro DBQs are so that it doesn't have to result in a massive essay. It can be 15 minutes at the start of class where two things are put in front of kids. We're doing more and more visual primary sources at the elementary level so I talked about the history lesson and look at two pictures and compare those things so it's higher order critical thinking around primary and secondary documents that are hopefully getting kids to be able to kind of see patterns in history and be able to analyze information. Thank you. Sure, thank you. Okay, so I think the work is great. I think the work is great. I think the revamp that you did even as you're exiting stage right here along with me is great. I had a couple questions. So in order for our students to be engaged global citizens how are we incorporating current events into the social studies curriculum K through 12? You know, how do you guys do that as a team to make it age appropriate especially given all the things that we're seeing unfold in history real time today? Yeah, great question. At the elementary level sometimes it's what the kids bring up, right? To be real and honest in the world we've lived through in the last 15 years a lot of times teachers need to prepare for the kid that said I saw this on television so some of that is unscripted and responding to the needs and things that kids see in a way that's age appropriate and our elementary teachers are learning that goes into those things that are essential. As they get to the middle school it's more scripted and incorporated. Mark is always consistently showing the what's it called? CNN 10. They're all kinds of high paced relatively short six to eight minutes and it brings up all kinds of different questions and issues that are age appropriate. The kids are going to be learning on the class, pick and choose when there are spots. Lunch conversations will often be did you talk about this? How do we handle those things? Frequently when things come out I'll shoot out emails and sources the night before so we know that kids are going to come in having questions about Israel, Iran, Venezuela, you know what I mean? Sometimes it's where is Venezuela? So teachers have those resources so they may plan a lesson and sometimes it goes in different directions and you have that secondary slide set to say okay let's pause for a second. Where is Venezuela? Who is the leader? What happened? And be able to walk through those things. It's a combination of sometimes it's a consistent approach and a class like civics is built into that and sometimes it's kind of responding to the news of the day. And then my other question. I think it's great by the way that you're moving civic values up to seventh grade because I agree with you that if we wait until high school it's too late. You know one thing I don't know if this is if you guys have thought about this or if you think about what happens then after you introduce civics in seventh grade but I think there's a civic community give back component that we could really enhance through starting in seventh grade. So a lot of other high schools in our area make that an intentional part of the curriculum. Here I think in the high school we don't kind of really see it as intentional until senior service day and I will tell you by observation of participation that's not really fully participated in but I think again starting that civics lesson in the seventh grade hopefully will increase the participation as you guys are taking this wait and see approach to see then what it looks like for 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 but if there's an opportunity to make a civic stay not an optional participation that's kind of like something for the seniors to do now while the juniors are taking their SAT class I think or their SAT exam I think is when we do it. I think that would just be a suggestion that I would ask that you take into consideration because I think it's a big part of again becoming that engaged global citizen and it starts with what we do in our backyards right here and then the last thing is as a soccer coach for many years and you can answer this maybe later but Franklin Four is how soccer explains the world the unlikely theory of globalization. It's a great book. Everybody should read it. So. Yeah. Just to comment real quickly. My heart is in the exact same place. My teaching career started in the Navajo reservation and in the Peace Corps in East Africa. We finished June 2nd and I'm flying to Malawi to volunteer for the summer. So that community service element is a huge part of what I perceive as the need in SEL and I think it's a little bit outside of my purview but I would love to see service in terms of what we're doing because I think it's just an incredible opportunity for kids. Yeah. Frank Four's book I don't know if anybody would comment or whatever but the thesis essentially is despite globalization and international lenses and things like that we are all deeply, deeply parochial at heart and it's being represented by and we have the World Cup coming up and all those things but yeah. Great book. Yeah. So you did a good job. Thank you for that comment. And just to go back because I think I might have missed a really, really good 80 minute traditional lesson also includes some relevancy to today, right? So current events sometimes can be a planned eight minutes at the beginning of class but often, right, so most of my career I've taught AP history so 10th century China is hard to kind of connect but we try to look at things either at the beginning or the end of class. We used to call it the hook at the beginning or the wrap up so a lot of times it's embedded in the lesson itself to be able to make that present day connection. I think what has clearly come across in the presentation and your comments is the emphasis on critical thinking and not teaching children what to think but how to think and then make decisions for themselves about what they need as a citizen and if you look at the attributes we have up here on the board about what makes the profile look Clayton graduate or a Clayton learner. Yes, thank you. You touched on many if not all of those in some way, shape or form here tonight so I appreciate the alignment of where we're going with as a district and the thought put into this so thanks. Thank you. Ben? Ben? Ben? I think one of the things that occurred to me listening to your presentation is the fact that you mentioned maybe perhaps less in the way of U.S. history I guess kind of traditional curriculum is interesting because I feel like at least with a couple of my kids this is my own experience. Some of revisiting some of the same themes over and over again and I guess you're nodding like you're recognizing what I'm talking about. I feel like it kind of sucks the life out of some of that so I love even if it's obviously going to go over certain things based on state standards or other things but just doing them differently so that sounds like that's what's in play. That's very cool. Thank you. The other question I had and this is kind of just like a tactical I guess or maybe it shows my age but what about the beloved term paper? I don't hear much talk about term papers but I could maybe have just missed it but I feel like that sometimes that was a traditional tool in social studies. Is that something that we still do? The reason I ask it is around sources and around reading and writing skills which I think that tie is so critical. We've been talking a lot about that at this board so. I really do like this group. What a great question. I could be here all night. Yes, so our traditional term paper. What's that? No one heard. Our traditional term paper was at 10th grade at the end of this consistent sequence and 11th and 12th grade kids choose a wide variety of electives. We have 18 different electives and things like that so we chose 10th grade and we chose the 20th century class and so forever in a day it was pick an event, an idea or an invention that has changed history and then you have to go out and get 10 paper. Anyone imagine the issues with that? In the age of AI it is almost impossible, right? So our 10th grade PLC and I've taught 10th grade for a number of years said we still want everything that you're saying. The inquiry, the sourcing, the complexity of taking a wide variety of sources and then sharing your information so we went, not crazy about this but we went from the written term paper, six to eight pages to an oral presentation, okay, so an oral presentation a student has to know what they're talking about. They can use their notes and things like that but in the age of AI it's not something that can be quickly downloaded. Now we've added to that and we talk about kind of some new initiatives that didn't make it into the board report. We're trying as much as possible to make connections with Wash U so that is launched with some administrators to explain their research and how they go about it and how they do it and then our audience for our 10th grade students is Wash U kids who come over and critique their oral presentations and things like that so they're presenting to history majors at Wash U. I feel like we're missing out on some of the writing, the written component, but I feel like we're also addressing the reality of AI and still keeping a lot of those integral skills so when we think about the building of skills it's that 10th grade that we're hoping the kids have done all of these things, the cycle of inquiry numerous times, doing numerous ways along the way and so in 10th grade and I'm proud to say that's a college paper. You know what I mean? When I went to Dismet Jesuit that's what we did in English class at the end of 12th grade, right? That level of research to have for our 10th graders I think is and I would love to invite you guys when they do that this evening. Thank you so much. Chris? I'm really impressed with I loved it. I did. I really enjoyed reading the report. I thought it was fantastic. I really did. I love the feedback you got from parents. I'm so happy to hear that you got it from students too. I love where we're going with this and how the changes you've made are exactly in line I think with this profile as well as our values as a district so I'm very pleased to see that and I really appreciate your efforts to do it because I know it's not easy so way to go on doing that. It was the right thing to do and the other thing I'll say is one of your recommendations was your first your last one was you want personalized individualized inquiry and it said curiosity leads them to their own sort of pathway and that's kind of an amazing thing to think about. I think about that in science sort of but think of it in social studies I think is powerful too because I do think that we are hoping to build global citizens and part of that is knowing themselves and what drives them and therefore sort of tapping into that and saying okay go do this with this is what you can do with that so I really appreciate that part of what you're doing in a social studies setting so I also just want to say that I think it's different types of social studies. I know that my kids have really enjoyed them. I think it's such a good idea to give them that kind of choice and have different types of and realizing it's all in social studies but there's so many different aspects of it and I love that we offer all of those. I'm assuming we get really good turnout in most of those. Yeah. Okay. Great. So social studies get more APs than any other discipline by far? Exactly. Wasn't even close. Right because it's such a nice broad and I love that we offer so many gender studies. Who knew we offered that? I didn't know until now but it's fantastic. Philosophy we offer, Sociology. Sociology. I was trying to say those at the same time but all of that is just incredible and I'm really happy that our students have the ability to take those types of classes so yeah that's all. Thank you very much for everything. We're sad to see you go. Thank you for everything you've done for this district. Nina do you have any questions? I have two really quick things. First I would like to say Mr. Solomon's seventh grade social studies class and the CNN 10 is like the sole reason I'm so interested in current events today and I still watch CNN 10 and I think Clayton is doing such a great job of incorporating current events and then it's second. You guys talked about so many amazing learning objectives and something I think is super valuable. Right now in my AP Gov class my teacher Ms. Hartman every day we obviously have our lesson but on the board she says what our learning objective is and what we should have accomplished by the end of the day not in terms of you should know what year this happened but I think that's super valuable and if there's any way that could be something brought up to other teachers across different grade levels especially I think that's super helpful for learners to see what I want to do by the end of the day and why I'm doing this and not learning all the facts and I feel like that helps the document questions and helpful for them to incorporate what you learned into later projects but yes you guys are doing such a great job. History is by far my favorite. I mean talk about civic engagement. Nina I always learn something from you. You always say something so insightful. Thank you. That was great. So I always go last and inevitably this happens often but my questions were all answered so I just want to say I also was fascinated by the presentation and what you shared with us ahead of time. I was hanging on every word you said and I find this fascinating and I appreciate so much how thoughtful and intentional these changes were truly and I can sense it in your passion but also it just makes so much sense and the feedback you got from so many different stakeholders and teachers it's just I appreciate the thorough way you went about this and the thoughtfulness and the recognition that you're still kind of figuring out there might be some changes that still need to be made so that flexibility I also appreciate so much so thank you for all the work you put into this. I also was going to mention but Chris did that wasn't in these long range goals but the choice of social studies courses at our high school to me is like a small college. I am like anytime I talk to anybody else at another high school and I talk about that I am so proud of our social studies department and the type of courses we offer and I think it's especially special for students who maybe don't do great or don't enjoy studying history in certain ways to pick a specific subject and learn history that way. One of my own children did not enjoy history but took the sports class and did so well, loved it, got the best grade in social studies he had ever gotten because he was learning it through sports so as one example so I love that for our high schoolers as well so congratulations on your retirement. Congratulations to Mr. Solomon for taking over. As we're both retiring maybe we'll see each other in Nashville. Go Commodores. His daughter goes to school with mine and I know you guys saw her there this fall. At the Mizzou game. Yeah. At the Mizzou Vanderbilt game. Anyway maybe we'll see each other there but congratulations and thank you. This was so impressive. I appreciate it. Thanks. Okay. Oh yeah we need to read the motion. Oh my God I totally forgot. Chris I got all it was such a fun presentation I forgot we had to approve it. I moved that we approve the revised social studies review goals, the district written social studies curriculum and the financials as outlined in the report. Second. Okay it's been moved and seconded. All those in favor. Aye. Any opposed. No. Okay the motion passes. Congratulations. On the new goals. Good work. I think that's the first curriculum review that got applause. So now Dr. Garganigo will be joined by Mr. Heider to review part the first year or first part of a two-year self-study in technology. Okay. Like before we'll start with what grounds our work as a system so the profile of the Clayton learner surrounded by our three goals of our CSIP. We've highlighted within goal two where we feel like this falls within our CSIP and generally when I talk about goal two I have educational growth highlighted tonight. I don't have educational growth highlighted. Equitable personalized and individualized learning experiences highlighted. So I think as we've engaged in this work around technology one of the things Jeff and I used to talk about this Luke and I continue to talk about this philosophy of the purposeful integration of technology and teaching and learning and that it's not even about devices. It's more about the work that we do with those devices in thinking about our profile of a Clayton learner as well as our thinking around empowered learning and so a lot of our focus this year with technology has been how can we use it as a tool to empower students in the work that they're doing within the classroom. So a little bit different from the other self-studies that will come to you that we'll be talking about this spring. We are coming halfway through a study. So we wanted to make sure that everybody is kind of aware and grounded of why we're coming this early as opposed to having everything sort of tied up in a nice neat bow for you because it's not tied up in a nice neat bow and you'll find that as we talk through this. But there was Senate Bill 68 came to fruition in the I think in the spring of last year or in the summer and the board policy that we talked about devices and what that was going to look like so personal electronic devices at that time and we made a decision of a one year sort of hiatus of kind of dealing with students bringing their own devices to the high school in particular and so we knew that we needed to study and really have some thinking about what our device fleet would look like from the district moving forward because we knew that we knew that Chromebooks were no longer adequate for the things that our students needed to do within the teaching and learning environment and also that we were relying on personal electronic devices to help with some of that teaching and learning so that's what accelerated our pace. We're also acutely aware of House Bill 2230 which is the one that's going through right now being discussed within the legislation about the amount of time that we need to have with our particularly our youngest learners are on devices and so that has influenced some of our thinking and will continue to influence our thinking and we have had a lot of conversation about that so you'll see bread crumbs of that and you won't see that tied up in a nice repo but we are working on that. The other piece we knew as we were talking about what needed to happen with district devices is that we have multiple platforms that are operating right now and so his team has a pretty heavy lift with those multiple platforms and those decisions were made purposefully the last time that we did a technology study but we think we've outgrown our thinking at that time and so our thinking has shifted and some of that is influenced by the need to have some consistency across the system so across the entire district and then like I said technology and learning. It's not about devices. Tonight is going to feel about devices and I think we're we feel like we have to sort of overtly talk about that but knowing that isn't really the purpose of our work. The purpose of our work is how children use these tools to help advance learning. Okay I feel like I've said enough about that. So the input that we sought through this first year and we have really accelerated very quickly with this work and in order to do that we also cast the net pretty wide so our technology committee is one of our largest committees in the district. We invited probably about 55 people to it. There's about 40 that come with consistency. It's representative of teachers K-12. There's administrative representation on the team. Ben is a part of the team. Luke and I lead the team together and all of our teachers are part of it so it's a very large group. Some of those teachers are coordinators so they represent a larger, bigger, broader perspective within that work. We've also Nina talked about this. We've sought input from students particularly the principal's advisory committee and they were really integral in helping us really think through what tools not only what the tools are but the ways that we could be using the tools more purposefully within the classroom and one of the things that I think was really fun and Nina and I talked about this but what was really fun for me was to watch the students interacting with these devices and thinking about the possibilities of things that could happen with them that just haven't been able to happen with the fleet that we currently had. We went to the teaching and learning advisory council. Stacey reported back on this. We talked through or was Chris at that meeting and really about soliciting some input from the teaching and learning advisory council about from a parent lens what is important for us to be considering and thinking about. Some of that, the bread crumbs of those conversations are going to be evident in work that we're continuing to do that we know we need to do. One of the most sort of overt pieces was the us making some pretty concrete decisions about when we would send our kids home and also helping parents to understand when we make that decision why would we be sending them home and for what purpose. So having some really clear guidelines about what that would look like. We felt like that was really valuable input that is leading some of our work actually through the end of this year and then Luke has worked with his counterparts in other districts to really get a sense of where other districts are thinking of going with their fleet and how does it integrate with teaching and learning? All right. Well, good evening. I just thought to myself as I was sitting in the back I was like I don't know how I drew this card but I get to start on the tada moment which is kind of fun. It's super exciting, right? So I don't know how I drew that card but it is. It's really exciting. I think all of this work culminating back to last summer it was a charge of the board and students and staff and everybody in the school community to look at these one to one devices and student devices just in general across the board and so we took that charge and it's been a great process working and getting feedback from all over the district and beyond and so it's great to kind of land here. I'm going to talk a little bit through here at the very beginning just to give you a little bit of background on the proposal and then we'll go in a little bit deeper as we go throughout the proposal itself so K-5 we are recommending that Apple iPad would be the device for that just as a little bit of background our K-2 already utilizes iPads and they match the number of kids so it's an iPad is available for every student that would be in every class. They sit in carts that exist in classrooms and are utilized as needed so really the K-2 component of this doesn't vastly change. A lot of these devices really are on cycle already anyway and so some of these devices would be being cycled regardless of the fact so that is the K-2 component. Not much would be changing there. When we got feedback it really the feedback came back that it was the right device for what they were using it for and it was a great tool for them to use and being able to kind of work with kids to do some of that discovery and things like that but also there are some other components that we'll talk about here in a minute. Three through five feedback came back pretty across the board. Creation of things and doing some of that work really became evidence in this group. We also saw that our third grade teachers talked a lot about the fact that there was that transition time that we were having to reteach students in third grade to a brand new device. There was some loss of time and a little bit of frustration trying to get through so we really just heard that consistency would really be helpful in this case. Six through eight. One thing I will say about the feedback from six through eight it was universal that Chromebooks were not it and so it became very evident very quickly hearing from students even at the middle school that they were looking to be able to do more and have more opportunities. Things like the front facing camera and beyond which we'll talk about here in a minute as well. Nine through 12. This is the fun one for me because this was one that our students really kind of pushed some thinking when we got together with them. Our students are awesome about that. They were able to give us some insight that we really even in So it really challenged our thinking to be okay let's find the right device for the students that meet all of the needs so we really felt like the iPad by itself wasn't going to meet the need and so the iPad Air was chosen as a more professional device. In fact the chipset that has now been released that the students would be getting should that be chosen this evening was actually the most expensive actually had the most of the MacBooks in the district and so it gives a little more space, more professional case and we still achieve a lot of the things that we were hearing. Mobility, the weight of the devices. We wanted to achieve that. Keyboards that were more professional in nature and being able to do a lot of that and then the last thing that we kind of land on is the stylus and the computer. So think about that connection of teaching and learning with this one of the things for us both in the last cycle that we did in thinking about our fleet and then also with this is like why is this the right device for us so how does it meet the needs? So we a lot of times people come into committees with a preconceived notion of what they want us to do and students come into a meeting and they have an idea of what they want us to do do this or that or I want to dot dot dot and so what we think about when we think about like why are these the right devices? When we think from the K2 lens a lot of so all of our assessments that are standardized are on a device. Most things at that level require a touch screen because it requires children to manipulate things so pre-reading skills, children are not yet reading necessarily they need to be able to manipulate things to show us their knowledge and understanding. Additionally this idea of documentation with a camera so when we think about your teaching and learning experience what are ways we can document things with cameras and mark them up so we have evidence within math classrooms of things that have been awesome of kids having some agency and voice and choice in that and taking a picture of some geometric shapes you might see around the classroom and marking that piece up to be able to show their learning so no need for a keyboard at that point and really no need for anything different than what has already existed. Teachers work really purposefully around how to use the technology and there continues to be conversation and a value placed on the importance of a balance between a device and physical materials so thinking about manipulatives, thinking about actual texts and those kinds of things so not having children to do the exercises and those types of things. As students age up in the system the tasks that are required of them become more complex so in 3-5 the reason why we're looking at the integrated keyboard as a part of the case is because keyboarding becomes a part of the curriculum so if you think about our curriculum we're learning how to print K1, we're learning cursive in second grade and we're learning keyboarding in third grade so it the curriculum and we continue to ramp up our expectations around writing on assessments so you think about a performance task where now they're writing versus some of that manipulation of materials in K2 and then the idea of creating. Stacey referenced this when we came to the teaching and learning advisory council and I have a sticker on my computer that talks about the creating is bigger and better than the learning and using it for a purpose and using it in that sort of sense of presentations or the kinds of documents. That continues to amp up 6-8 with the increase in writing, creating with the tools and then we talked about in world language classrooms this idea of being able to use the device to record and get sort of instantaneous feedback is a really important tool as we're building proficiency within languages and in 9-12 some of the examples we thought about were things like within science we had actually at one of the meetings that Nina was at we had a science teacher who talked about the fact that when we have a device this is how they used to use phones of a science lab where they can capture something on video and then really spend time digging into that lab and unpacking what that means and what do you see so if you think about a physics lab or something like that and capture that on video and really sort of think about periods and those kinds of things with that. Again recording our Globe students have talked a lot about the sort of lack of a like their Chromebooks are not great for being able to record their interviews and then thinking about this larger screen so a standard iPad having a smaller screen that the high school students really do need something that's larger and the high school students they were in the process of writing a pretty big paper and a lot of the feedback that was on their mind of make sure the tool is something that allows us to be able to do that piece. Yeah so I think it would be important and I think Milena hit on it a little bit here but I'm going to speak to it again what the process really looked like when we got together with the committee is that we really did we started with this idea of okay what do we just want kids to be able to do and let's focus on that because I think everybody around this room like Dr. Garganito just mentioned is that if we were to sit here and I was to say hey choose a device that would be right for kids we would all have some preconceived ideas that maybe this would be it this would be it but we really didn't want to start there so we spent all that time getting to this point thinking point where we need to develop some of those skills and we started there and then when we kind of developed that skill list we then moved into the area of okay let's talk about the attributes of a device that could support that before we were even talking about a device itself and then we moved into that last really rung of being able to choose a device based upon you know what those attributes really were so when we were talking about how we benefit you know really what we were really learning is that the creation tools that were going to be available to the iPad and the iPad Air were going to be significantly greater than we saw in any other device and I think we experienced that when Apple was here we experienced it across the board with the committee and so it was really positive with that front facing camera and the mobility and all of the things augmented reality and it's much more available to our students for those aspects. Consistency as I spoke to earlier was we really do benefit here. It allows us really to make uniform not only the experience across students as they go from grade to grade to grade but even from a standpoint of it allows us to be consistent in professional learning. It allows us to be consistent in the management of the devices that if I'm switching grades or something like that that experience and we've had a lot of that. That really was producing when we got feedback some frustration across the board. Built-in accessibility for all learners this is huge. One of the things that Apple does really well and if you use Apple products you may or may not be aware but some of the accessibility options are unmatched by any other device that's out there right now. They are really putting a lot of effort into it. There is so much available that we'll be able to utilize for our students across the board and then the fun one management and safety. I love it as the technology person. Being able to do some of this work better on behalf of our students and parents across the district is important to me and important to our team and so being able to provide windows in to how devices are being in or being used and being able to provide a safe experience across the board and manage devices well is going to provide us that opportunity. This transition gives us some opportunity to move some other things across the board as far as technology is concerned to really meet this need in a way that we would feel is appropriate across the board so talking about the budget component of this and I'm going to go through and give you a little bit of background about this and then also how this looks across the districts and talking about the budget implications as a whole so currently as of last year we moved into touch screen chrome books and started in an early cycle of that to bring those devices into the district. That is the cost of last year's devices. We anticipate that this device cost was going to raise probably quite a bit because everything has been going up. So we would expect that would be much higher but a higher price going into this upcoming year. You know typically what we've learned about chrome books across the board is that after a full cycle of a device they really aren't worth very much at the end. Chrome books after four years of use don't serve as much of a resale item. Really most of them are surplus at very minimal amounts just because they don't serve that. They don't have that recalculation return on investment like other devices have. So that kind of gives you a little bit of idea what we're doing now. So the iPad changes the game a little bit because a standard iPad actually comes in underneath what we're paying for a touch screen chrome book right now. So as I mentioned earlier as we move into a more professional device like the iPad Air for our high school students it does take that price up per unit a little bit more. looking at more opportunities and things available to the iPad Air that aren't available on the iPad by itself. One of those would be down the road we would we could look into Apple Intelligence that is available on an Air but not available on a standard iPad. Now obviously we still have another year of a tech study talking about the AI components. We still got a lot of information that we had not taken advantage of an opportunity to make sure that all possibilities were available to us throughout this upcoming cycle. iPads historically have retained about 30%. I'm going to show you an example of that of their value when being surplus after four years and so we'll look at that. Overall that typically reduces the net life cycle cost so that just means by bringing that back into understand what we use from a year to year basis to fund our device purchases. So an example of this we took the step and went ahead and took our current fleet that is existing at K through two that would be being surplus some already and then some within the year and we're able to take that and actually quote that as surplus now so giving you an idea showing you that these devices do carry that value beyond the cycle and give us an opportunity to really recoup some of that cost at the end demonstrates that secondary market value. Now again I think it's important to note that this always will assume that Apple retains their value but historically we have seen that across the board for years and that hasn't changed often or really at all so when we look at the total cost breakdown this is kind of a slide that gives you a little bit idea what kind of we're seeing the case cost again really diving into the error and being the most expensive device there in total but offering all of the attributes that we really wanted to see for our students and giving them a more professional experience and then some of the ROI as we go through that on what the devices are worth afterward. In totality we have not probably seen the! Even close to a 10% from our Chromebook but there are situations in which that could be the case so what does that look like when we talk about a four-year cycle? This is what we see across four years and so this would be every device in the district. This is a full cycle of every device all the way from K all the way to 12th grade and so this would exist over the next four years so that is essentially broken down by four years. Now what that looks like as far as Apple and the opportunity that we have in front of us that is a total cost there over four years because the full cycle would be four years. Apple has offered us a three-year zero-percent financing which breaks down to that and on year four basically we would finalize that buy back and bring that overall cost down to very similar to what we would see now so if we were going to look at how that would look over four years we would anticipate that as long as the value of Apple holds that we would really be very close to if not in the positive cost neutral by the end. Again always assuming that there is that value at the end of the cycle. So the things that we know that we still need to do work on and some of these are this year so pending the decision of the board if we were to move forward we would know that we have to start really planning out what our professional learning would look like and that would look like student learning as well as adult learning and so we have said oftentimes the worst thing we can do is give you a device that doesn't work and the second worst thing is give you a device you don't know how to use so we know we have to do some learning in that way and so as we develop our year-long professional learning plan for students we are starting to have some conversation about what that looks like in the classrooms as well as what that professional learning for staff looks like embedded within the classroom so it's not really effective if we want to really focus on this idea of integration of technology and teaching and learning it's not effective for us to sit in a space and teach you how to use a device it's more effective for us to be in your teaching and learning space and think about the teaching and learning advisory council this idea of age appropriate technology use guidelines so both what does that look like within our classrooms and what does that look like when we make a decision about when devices go home so whatever grade level that is that we make the decision that devices would be sent home and we would be helping parents to understand the purpose of why we are sending them home and expecting them to be home and also having some conversation about what that looks like in the classrooms so just because we have access to devices doesn't mean we have to be using devices all the time so that sense of how do we make sure that allocation of time within the classroom has a healthy balance of physical materials physical manipulatives real books those types of things and access to devices. AI is something that's really big for us we have about two years ago we developed some temporary sort of guidance around AI and haven't done a lot with it since and our teachers are asking for more help with that both from a teaching standpoint of how teachers use AI but then also from a standpoint of what is happening with students within classrooms and then if we make this move one of the things we think is important is to really explore the idea of a learning management system because we have a way of being able to manage things with students that also can lead into where they're going because the majority of them are going to college where learning management systems are a good part of that. So the device and the management component of this just a couple of things that we're thinking through right now. Number one is the need for MacBook still to be available. We have always maintained this. We have always maintained kind of like an additional fleet that has been available when certain needs arise. We have it. We do feel like there will be need for MacBooks across our high school and so we have already kind of begun the process of really allocating resources to be able to fulfill that need and to be able to provide students when needed whether that's if they're doing work in Adobe or there are certain science courses or physics courses that may need those components that are only available on a MacBook that they would be available and so we have already kind of started that process and what that looks like. The cycle itself we've been working through as far as the management specifics are concerned. Google really does remain as a mainstay within the district. It doesn't change. One of the main comments that we got when going around to the schools and talking to staff was is it going to change the fact that that is still going to be a component of what we do and what we have within the district so Google actually remains the same as far as that's concerned. You know the repair and components like that we'll be working through as well. Apple care is part of this purchase just in general. There is some really great reasoning for that. It really does provide a turnaround of a device much faster than what we are currently experiencing with repair right now and so it also then allows us to actually keep a fewer amount of devices and so we can move down to basically almost just about 5% of extra devices to be able to have to keep on hand to use as least devices when students have a device mishap we'll say and so we'll be working through that process, be talking about what that could look like in the future and developing some of that. You know it also kind of changes the look when we talk about the bring your own device we knew that was on its way out and so we knew that we also had to make sure that any device when I go back to CHS MacBooks but that would be across the board with devices not being able to be on campus any longer we're working on that and so we had to make sure that the devices that were on campus and available to students met every need and so that was a major component in the study infrastructure. We've been doing a lot of this work. This is not work that we could have waited on. We have to do this pretty early on in the process to be able to make sure we're ready for any type of device deployment to this magnitude because we're talking about an entire cycle here changeover and so we've been doing this work working on filtering, making sure that that is a reality, that is going to be a working reality. The best thing to be working on right now we have felt like is let's just make sure that when these devices were to launch day one that they work exactly as we intended and so a lot of thought gets put into that, a lot of work on behalf of our teams in moving forward should this be the direction that we go. So what questions do you have for us? Why don't I start with Ben because he's on the committee. And he could shed some light on some of this work. Absolutely. And ask questions. Well, and thank you because I feel like I got quite a few of my questions already somewhat addressed at least. Thank you for that. It has been a really great, great privilege to be on this committee so thank you. Thank you for having me I guess I would say. You know just to experience because again I have some background similar to Luke in terms of being IT in school so it's just great to be back and hearing like learning from specialists, technology specialists of which we have some great ones and then also some of Luke's staff and all the teachers. It's just you know it shows you just how complex actually everything really is at the end of the day. So I guess there's a couple things I want to make a couple statements. You know the Chromebook is really what's called a cloud device. It really is dependent upon connectivity. It can't do much without it. And so you know in terms of it's really kind of night and day between an iPad and a Chromebook. Chromebooks have their place. They have especially because they've been traditionally inexpensive and easy to manage and also my sense is that coming out of COVID there was a lot of rush into it because we needed devices and we needed them quickly and be able to manage them wherever they go so I think just to understand that like an iPad can function independently of a network especially in a very intentional way with apps that can run independent of having any connection to the internet for example. I think the other thing some folks like to ask is how good can the keyboards be compared to a traditional laptop? And I got to say and again I'm actually not an Apple guy at all. I'm a PC, Android. I'm a weirdo. Yeah. Weirdo. I'm not sure I can hear the green text. Wait. What's happening here? No. So what I would say is the keyboards have come a long way. The traditional sort of keyboard that comes with a tablet I think in the past were kind of cheap or whatever. They are not cheap anymore and they also are totally seamless. There's no moisture getting inside those keyboards. They are waterproof which I can tell you the Chromebooks are not waterproof. I'm sure Luke can tell you. Many stories. Many stories. And then what else did I want to say? I think the form factor that's been mentioned a couple times, the weight. I mean I again I pick up my kids' backpacks and it's like oh my gosh. Like you know chiropractor here we come. You know. So I just think that that experience and this is true for I think all levels of course it is really important. Like how people feel about being able to be productive and get right after their task versus like you know it just matters. I mean like small things that we experience that we don't like how they work, you know add up to like a lot of frustration and distraction so I think there is something to that. I guess I did want to Luke you mentioned that it makes sense to me that we're kind of looking at this now. First of all we asked to look at this as soon as you could possibly do it and I think in the time spent when you see the task you've done so much and so I appreciate that. I guess you know I understand now you're saying that you need time to get ready for something this big, right? It's big. So I'm just curious what are maybe some elements of that preparation that you foresee? Yeah and there could be some assistance that we may need in deploying devices when the time would come. We are actually doing some pretty I'd love to be able to tell some of my team that is really thinking outside of the box on how to be really smart and efficient with making a sign in and making deployment and being able to hand a kit of advice and go oh I can sign in and I can do these things and they are really putting a ton of effort in making that super seamless and so we are really pushing forward and we believe that we have some really great work being done. Emmett Barry who is part of our team has really dove in to making the student experience good and he's probably listening to this right now going what have you said about the student experience and he's really put a lot of thought into it so to that point we're really thinking through the experience of how it gets to a student and we'll be working with our team and working with the buildings to facilitate what that's going to look like going into next year and into the fall. We have some ideas and so we'll be flushing those out. There could be an opportunity at some point to just for the sheer movement of as many devices as we're talking about looking into that but for the most part we're pretty confident that with some of the new processes going into place with identity management and with being able to provision the devices that we're going to have some good options. I think also from my lens what I've seen happen since Lucas come into this role and with his team because we have sort of a fleet of iPads already he's already been doing some work in streamlining some of the processes that the teachers will talk about how quickly now a child can get into a program so putting clever on the devices allows a kid to very quickly scan a QR code and get into what they need to get to whereas before we had children typing in long passwords and things like that, forgetting those passwords, that eats up instructional time so some of the things that Luke's team has been able to respond to from questions from staff and things like that they're wanting they have been able to make happen. We also have a pilot group right now that we call I am power and it's this sense of thinking about the iPads in this integration of empowered learning and they have been piloting different kinds of things with the devices as far as management is concerned as far as teachers being able to deploy something to students quickly so now we're sure everyone is on the same thing. They're not over here somewhere on the Internet when I need them here. The iPads have allowed us to do some of those things and Luke's team has helped us to be able to do that. From my lens that's super important as far as maximizing time in the classroom and focusing on instruction versus spending time getting them into the device so I just want to say from my lens I think that's been really important work that his team has already been doing and so I see it that the fleet were to expand. And I think at one point too like Ben you and I talked about one of the things that we do see is that when somebody needs an application or something like that we very early on we realized that we were really inefficient. A teacher would need something, they would need an application, a software of some kind and it could be a month before that full process took place. We were able to take that process, reinvent it, redesign it, bring it digital and now we're seeing it in sometimes a matter of just 48 hours and being able to turn that around in just a magnificent fashion so we've been putting a lot of thought into this early on that to try and make this as efficient, efficiency is super important to me so trying to make it a good experience. Can I jump in here because you're bringing up the concept of change management with the tech system and I don't want to have to go back to that topic so let me just type in with one question. So I get that there is a lot of process changes that happens with the teachers and within a school. It strikes me listening to all of this that communication with a variety of stakeholders is going to be really important in the change management aspect of this including not only teachers and administrators but parents, teachers and staff and all of that and a lot of that communication is going to have to happen over the summer so have we thought through the communication aspect to change management and what is our viewpoint on that knowing it's still a work in progress? Sorry Gina. Oddly enough we've already been working on some of that communication so some of that has already been taking place in some capacity that we're getting ready to roll it out. It should be a good question. We're developing a lot of documentation as far as okay if I need to find this information on how to do something as well is it going to be available to us and so we've been developing a lot of that documentation on top of all of this in effort to really communicate this well. Okay. And the one thing I would say just listening to the last couple of comments before I interrupted the one piece of advice I would give you guys is let's get the core product out and working first. It could be my interpretation. There are a lot of add-ons and bells and whistles you can put in over time and what we wouldn't want to do even if you roll it out here are the great new Chromebooks. Shout out to my pixel brother Ben over there but you know just get it working correctly so everyone has a really great experience and over time you can add all the bells and whistles it can do with these devices. Yeah. That's really good. We even talked about a status monitor of being able to monitor the core things of what we would expect them to be able to do so that everybody could know where everything is at in that expectation to be able to do that so that's really good. I have a couple more things. I could go on and on. Can I, I'm sorry, can I let Nina ask her question? Oh yeah, please go ahead. I'm sorry Ben. It's very very quick. I was just wondering about the extent of your like loader devices that we would have because I'm wondering for things like I'm sure there's a lot but maybe NWEA testing or I know there's a school administered SAT test so would these be things that could be taken on this new iPad Air at the high school or would Okay. That's really cool. Okay. So that wouldn't be something where every student needs to get a separate one. Okay. That's great. Wonderful. Thank you. That's a really good question. We definitely had to spend some time on that. She does. Good night, Nina. I guess one of the things that is so in the spirit of course of the legislation of late, you know the fact that we still and it's understandable why we still have kids who bring their own devices to high school, my son included. Do you think would the expectation be for next year or some other time where we would go ahead and be able to make that no longer possible? I mean in a related question that is I would imagine that any issues that we may have on the high school network could also be related to the fact that we have a whole army of rogue devices essentially, right? And also back to the intentionality and what is not happening on these because you really don't know what is happening on a device that a kid brings to school potentially, right? So I just want to see if we can touch on that. I know that is at least the spirit or intent of some of this but curious what the roadmap for that. Yeah, so the provision for bringing devices was really just for this year and so that does come to an end and probably to the point of that it is a healthy end. We do believe that if we can provide the right devices we limit the distractions and there is a lot of availability on these devices to be able to really be safe and secure and eliminate those distractions so to that point yeah there is not a whole lot of insight that we get other than some base filtering to a student's device that they bring on campus. This changes that game quite a bit because now we have devices that we have oversight in completely and those exist on our campus with complete control really and so yeah that would be the end of the one-year-old device. There we go. I also envision that the roll out of that would be us partnering with Dan and his team to think about how is that communicated to families and students so similar to the personal electronic devices I think it's going to be a parallel kind of approach to things that will have to be monitored that we will have to remind children so Dan and I had a conversation the other day that after spring break is a good time to remind children of what the rules are so I think that's what we're talking to Dan about what that might look like. Okay. So can I ask the obvious question of will we be allowing kids to link their personal phones up to these devices? No. Okay. That's the right answer. Yeah. Because you do know that with all of the bring your own devices that is exactly what is getting through the filters. And part of this process and I know the kids probably don't like hearing this but part of this process is actually doing some of that work. Things that need to actually be really managed and secured and this gives us the opportunity to do that. And then do we do you have more questions? No. I'm done. Thank you. Okay. Should I ask the next one? So the durability of these, just the iPads versus the Chromebooks, do we think from a tech perspective that they're just as good or you're not worried about it because of the Apple care warranties? Sounds like the keyboards are probably better because they're waterproof but just in general like they're going to get dropped. Absolutely. They're going to get kicked around. We know this. No matter what devices in the hands of students we have to think about all of those things. We do anticipate and did spend some time doing some studying of devices and rates of damage are much, much, much lower on iPads than Chromebooks and they are much lower than MacBooks and so this really from those studies have shown even some of our third party friends that do some of the work and repair and devices have all said that there is a lesser percentage. Representative really on the of the 5% buffer that we'll be having on hand to be able to meet that need and so we do believe that also Apple care will play a huge role because Apple care does give us the opportunity to really get those devices in and back pretty quickly and so that is a role and there will definitely be breakage. We understand that. We do feel that the cases that were chosen were chosen with that in mind as a result of the need and that is one of the reasons. Cases are a big deal in this process because they really have to meet both the security of the device need but also be able to meet and not limit the use of the device and so there is a fine line when considering cases for that but we do feel like we'll be able to meet that need. So kind of in a follow-up to that and more from a guess treasurer question perspective like a lot of schools charge a fee like a security deposit fee or an annual tech fee to kind of offset some of the cost of damages that wouldn't be covered by something like an Apple care warranty. Have you guys considered that as you enact your second year of your study or as you roll these out? Is that something that or if you you know you maybe that as since we're rolling this out so quickly for the next school year and the good faith is that we're covering the Apple care warranty that has clearly been mistreated. That you know there will be a deposit fee before you get your second device that covers the cost of the next Apple care warranty. I think there's probably some things to consider around that that makes this even more financially attractive and durable even beyond the return on investment numbers that you put in. I totally understand that the Chromebook becomes like a paper and based on the important communications that have to go out to families when families understand there's skin in the game for you to have this enhanced technology device that is going to support your child's learning when it's used in an age-appropriate manner for the right classes and all the other things you engage in second year that we do expect that you treat it like the valuable device that it is. Yeah and that actually has been an active conversation on what that could look like. Most often seen in schools as like a self-insurance. The idea being is that it's a deductible per breakage. Currently we have some very what I would call loose parameters around intentional damage and being charged for intentional damage but our goal would be to really unify that messaging and come up with something that is more well known because I don't think across the district that is a really well communicated item and this is an opportunity I think for us to really detail what that should look like moving forward and a conversation that we will be having moving into next year. I was going to say Ben and I talked about that same topic a little bit and something else that I thought about in addition to maybe a monetary financial skin in the game is you know the kids and parents sign that contract maybe looking at that again and putting some more responsibility in there about you know and you're signing a contract that if you were to damage it or more than once or whatever anyway just maybe that might require another look as well or consideration. That's it. Good work. Thank you. Okay. Leo? Sure. First of all thank you. I can tell this was a lot of work and it's true the board asked you to do this and they asked you to do it in a hurry and you know a big part of the intent of that was getting rid of the individual devices and I'm glad to see that happening. It's a big deal. I wanted to I always feel in this conversation I always want to reassert the context that technology use changed in our district and every school really rapidly in a unique situation a few years ago and we're now I view this process as partly going back and looking at that and thinking about what of that was good and what of that should be unwound perhaps or altered and so it's just really important and I think you're doing this to kind of avoid the path dependency of the I think this is where we got there because of some very specific circumstances. I had three kids in elementary school when COVID hit and they all suddenly had devices 100% of the time at home but they wouldn't have that even now under our current practices a kindergartner wouldn't have a device at home so that's important to think about. So that's kind of the philosophical approach. I think you used the word purposeful. Could you say that again? The purposeful integration of technology and teaching and learning. So is that kind of the philosophical approach that you've taken to this work and the district's approach to technology? I don't want to put words in That really started when Jeff came into the district. We made a concerted effort to tie the two departments together and so when Luke took over we continued to feel like that's a very important part of our work is to tie the two departments together because I don't think either of us ever wants people to think that we have devices just to have devices. That it really is about like how can we be focused on this idea of empowered learning through the use of something that allows us access in different ways and everything but we still have to have purposeful conversations about what that means and I think we have a lot of conversations both with one another with people in the community, with teachers about what does that mean on a day-to-day basis of what children are doing on these devices. I think Paul talked a lot about when you were talking about memorization and that kind of stuff of being a little old school. I'm a little old school too. A book is important. Being with a pen and those kinds of things, those are important things that we still have to value within our classrooms but then there's also this thing that allows us opportunities that we wouldn't necessarily have if we didn't have those devices and so it's really, I use the word balance but I think sometimes balance indicates equal. That's not what I'm trying to indicate. It's more about when we think about the pie, what is the allocation shifts from unit to unit or what we're focused on? There are times where a child, a kindergartner in our classrooms could go a week with not overtatching a device but it's sitting in the classroom but also having the availability to use it when we need it especially for, I'm big on maximizing instructional time. When we're trying to do a standardized assessment and we have the luxury of having these kids very quickly and move into what we need to do with instruction. If we're moving those from classroom to classroom and thinking about that kind of stuff we can't have the same sort of in the moment response to things and I think that idea of maximizing instructional time is so important to my philosophy of teaching and learning and I think our teachers share that philosophy and I know Luke shares that philosophy with me. There's a professional development that we do that has an image of a pool and we talk about the use of technology within the pool and in that image we also have a person standing outside of the pool and the purpose of that is to say we are never going to tell you that you always have to use technology to do dot dot dot. We're going to tell you there's times you're not in the pool and that's important. It's important so when we run professional learning we oftentimes will reference that image of it's moving back and forth from the shallow end to the deep end and what are children doing with devices and sometimes you're not even in the pool. Thank you. I'll climb down off my soap box. We all have to get on the soap box. Could you go back one slide to the next steps piece of it? Still to be determined? Yeah. I want to go through in particular the three bullets under guidelines and systems. Let's start with AI and I'm just kind of curious what the current may you spoke a little about this but what the current practice is or if there is a coherent current practice. I mean is there an expectation that kids will encounter AI at a particular point in their education in our current system or is it left up to individual teachers and I understand this may be a little bit of a question that we're going to be codified over the next year but do we know what the situation is now? Right. So we have a document that we developed a couple of years ago that starts with a series of belief statements and those belief statements are tied to the profile of the graduate and one of the first statements that it talks about is AI is here and here to stay but that we have to like some of the next statements talk about so then we have to like what is our responsibility as educators to help children to understand those tools. I think they're historically within our system there's a certain level of autonomy that teachers have and that we trust them with that level of autonomy so that looks different in different classes so there are some classes and we've given sort of sample syllabus language that could be used and some of that none of that language does it say shut it down but the language does speak specifically to sort of this idea of academic integrity and so like if one is going to use something this includes the adults in the system if one is going to use something like that that you have cited it that you have made it obvious those types of things we've also had a lot of conversation with teachers about what are the tasks that you have children do so if you create a really robust task a child can go to AI to complete that task right so if and when we think about the competencies of the profile and the way that we develop tasks if there are things that allow the child to put themselves into that work you can't have a computer generate that right those types of things so we've been putting some shape to it in that way we have teachers who would say to us give us much more guidance and lock things down we have teachers who say open it up to us and let us go and everywhere in between and Ben has been a part of the conversations on the committee they are difficult conversations and also I think some of what was interesting to us with the teaching and learning advisory council was I had a mental model of AI and when we were talking to that group I realized that the parents didn't have necessarily the same mental model of AI that I had so we sometimes look at AI as something that can allow us to explore something a little bit differently or whatever we have teachers who think specifically around this academic integrity piece and cheating and that type of stuff the parents never mentioned anything about cheating it was much more about this sort of like not really knowing what the possibilities are with this and it's sort of this unknown entity and so that kind of changed some of my thinking too of what is the work that we do as a community as a whole to understand this piece also with the adults we spent some time really thinking about this is going to show my old schoolness again too like AI can be a tool that can help you to be more efficient as a teacher I didn't have that available to me when I was a teacher so I sit there and think we should be writing lesson plans like this and so that has been sort of a growth point for me also of like what are the possibilities and capabilities with some of these things that could help us to be more efficient and also help us to create tools within a teaching and learning setting that could allow us to differentiate in a very different way so there's all these things for us to explore and we don't have it figured out but we're trying and I would sort of I guess sheepishly say to you that our first like blush at creating a tool and guidance is not a good tool and guidance so the teachers have said to us this really isn't helpful and we did present it like we had the teaching and learning advisory council actually look at it and give us some feedback we had the committee look at it and give us some feedback and we don't know what to do with that feedback because it's all over the place because this is one of those things that not everybody agrees on and so that is a really hard thing to do and we're talking to other districts about what that looks like in other districts too but I don't know where we're going to land on that. Yeah. I mean as someone in a profession that has a lot of people trying to get us to use AI all the time it's a really good way to make big mistakes is what I could tell and at some point you've got to teach people what it really is and not what it appears to be so they can avoid those mistakes but I don't know where that falls. I agree. I think one example of something that has broadened our horizon so there's a tool called snorkel which is an AI tool that when we think about our world language teachers and the idea of building proficiency and everything like that children need to write, they need to speak, they need to do all this stuff. Teachers need to provide feedback on all of those things and if you think about an elementary Spanish teacher and an elementary Spanish teacher teaches 350 students there's no way they can give that kind of feedback like immediate feedback. Snorkel has been a tool that has allowed some sort of instantaneous feedback to children so now the teacher can focus on conferring with these kids and these kids are also getting feedback. It's not the only way they're getting feedback but it has maximized that thinking around the teaching and learning environment that I'm like all right now we're maximizing I would move up next bullet age appropriate technology use guidelines and really I think the conversation we should have here right now is about at the elementary school and you know do we have any clear expectation about when devices will be sent home by grade level? That's one question. Right so we're doing some work with that right now so currently devices really don't go home until the end of the school year so we're engaging in conversations with teachers right now about like if you are sending devices home what are you sending them home for? So like us really getting sort of a sense of like what's the status quo? And then we're also doing some work with the teachers right now and do we really believe that's necessary or is there a different way for us to be doing that? I think all of us can agree that the longer we wait to send a device home the more helpful it is to the families and if we can accomplish those things without sending the device home then I think we're good with let's not do that. We have not decided what that grade level is right now but we're engaged in pretty Yeah there's a component to this too that is technological in nature. When we do decide whatever age group that would be taking devices home what does that look like at home as opposed to here? You know what kind of guidance do parents get or have? That is one thing that we heard from parents quite a bit is that these devices are coming home and we don't know exactly how to deal with them and so we've been working on a working on some of that throughout this transition as well from the technological side what resources, what windows into the things that are being done on device, what ability maybe even at some point to restrict off hours at home so we are working on that as a part of this as well. Did you just say that you can like you could shut it like if they take it home you could shut it down at a certain time? Is that what you just said? We are working on that capabilities to see if that would be a possibility moving into next year. So and I really everything you just said I really appreciate and when you said it earlier I'll just you said you know we're talking about when we take them home and explaining the purpose of doing it but everything you just said is important to add to that. It's not just the purpose of doing it. It's you know when this device goes home especially the first few times it goes home helping the parents understand how to manage that within their own home and it can involve sharing best practices with them maybe it's shutting it off but maybe it's explaining to parents when it should be shut off. That kind of thing really helps I think understand how the school and the home are relating around this technology thing. And then the learning management system. So you said something more robust than Google Classroom. Can you expand on that a little? On what I mean when I say something more robust? Sure. The yeah so when Google Classroom came into this district it was a consequence of COVID-19 and a need for teachers to be able to deploy information to students and students to be able to hand in things to teachers and that was really as far as we were trying to go at that point and actually at that point I was the one who was entering all the students into the Google Classroom so I have no interest in doing that anymore. We actually have a much more better way of doing that and everything but it's so when we think about some of these other tools I think they allow us a different kind of flexibility and I think honestly we're really thinking secondary when we're talking about an LMS. It's like the need for something more robust I don't think is a need at the elementary but I do think it is a need at the secondary and my own children I have watched them use an LMS to not only use it as a way of moving sort of digital paper back and forth but also as a way of interacting with the content of their class in a very different way and those are the things that I think we want to explore. We have a lot of teachers when they come from other districts they're surprised by the fact that we don't have a more robust learning management system and they are often pushing us generally in one direction but I think we want to address this the same way we addressed the device piece which is the LMS one. We want to make sure it meets the needs of what the teachers feel like they need and that requires us having those conversations with the teachers to really understand those needs and we haven't had time to do that and I don't foresee that happening before the fall. I think that's a year two piece. Can you go, well maybe you don't need to pull up the slide. On the inputs, you know, there's a piece here, there's parts of this system that interface with the home. We've talked about that and I wonder whether your inputs are capturing that perspective fully. You know, where is the home parent perspective in this coming in? I mean to what extent and what point in this is it coming in? Do you want me to do anything? Yeah, go ahead. So the Teaching and Learning Advisory Council is really the vast majority are all parents. Thank you. When we met with them, exactly what you were describing was exactly what we were talking about. A lot of really good conversation when we were talking about when we met with them on what parents are, what their viewpoints are on devices and how they're used and how they're being used at home and that and so we spent and got a lot of just I think really solid feedback for guidance in this whole process through that. I don't know how many? I mean the actual committee is pretty large. Who shows up is about 10 to 20 at any given time and they represent parents pre through 12 and then there's two administrators on the group. The one thing that the way I describe the group and I describe the group to the group this way because when the coordinators come to present to them I say they're a very kind group but they're going to push us and push us hard and they do ask us really difficult questions. They tell us stories so the stories that we heard as a consequence of devices they also are really good at when we are not clear with what we're saying pushing us to articulate that better so we in the technology piece an example of this is we kept talking about management of devices and we kept talking about a teacher being able to deploy something and everybody being in the all the children being in the same space. That did not mean anything to them and it actually for whatever reason scared them in a different way that I was like no, no, no this is actually a good thing but they're willing to say that to us. We don't know what you're be able to talk like educators and talk like parents and so I actually really value that group and the way that they push us but it is a hard group. There's like I don't think we've ever come out of a meeting and been like your head hurts because they're pushing you to think and that's actually the sign of a good committee. And then one more. I think when I read other districts that your comparative work is primarily with other public school districts. Not entirely. There were some considerations given that we have some schools around us even in private schools that it would be fitting a lot of some of ours. It's not that I think they're necessarily doing anything better. I just think broadening our perspective is good and we do get compared with all kinds of schools in the area. So keeping that broad perspective in mind is good. That's what I've got. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Leah. Pam, you want to go? Thank you. I trust the two of you. I respect the two of you and I'm guessing by extension your teams as well. So I just want to start by saying thank you. What we're being asked to vote on tonight is not like all this other stuff. It's like do we say you can go buy all those things in terms of like what device I trust you. I don't care. I trust your research and your work. Fine. What the question that I want us as a board to focus on is why do we need to purchase one to one devices for I'm going to say K five six eight high school. Yes, please go tomorrow. That's my perspective. The high school. Yes. I really question one to one devices in K two like so much and in three five. So I'd like for us to have these conversations and I think the thing that is sitting me in it are these two graphs. So do you know NAEP? Is that like a common thing? Okay. I didn't know about it. National assessment of educational progress. And then they'll take it again in eighth grade. So what I've learned is that this assessment happens in fourth and eighth grade around the country and it has been the same assessment and the same scoring rubric since 1992. What they have done is what the social scientists have done is that they have looked at when one to one devices have rolled out in districts which has happened in different places around the country at different times of year and basically this is your fourth it happens in reading and in math like this is 1992. This is like the year that they go in one to one devices and they can see this in all these school districts and scores just like go down and then here's a grade eight or yeah, great eight obviously that we can like talk about correlation with the correlation and causation. I don't want to have that conversation although I happily have it. One to one devices is not necessarily good and I don't think it is good for learning especially at these younger ages. So that's the conversation that I would love for us to have. Can I ask a clarifying question? No, of course. When you say one to one devices what does that mean? Oh, question. I think what I understand that that means is that every student gets their own device that is theirs and then in our district currently in third grade it starts going home every day. In some places it starts going home. Not all third graders take their devices. Okay. The reason I ask that question is because I think when we initially developed the fleet of devices we developed it to say that we would have the number of devices available to equal the same number of students that we have basically but that we would not provision them in a one to one way so the one to one at that point was only nine through 12 and then as a consequence of COVID that changed and the only reason we were able to do what we did during COVID was because we had the number of devices available to be able to do that. Okay. I think we would say that really currently six through 12 we have our devices set up in a way that's what our mental model of a one to one is so kids have their own device. It's in their possession all the time and it goes home. K-5 we have the number of devices to be one to one but they live in carts and they don't live in the kids' backpacks. They don't live in those kinds of things. Especially in K-2 classrooms. They're not in their desks. They're in charging carts and the teachers are having the control to be able to say here's when we're going to go get the devices to do this so that feels to us that feels different than a one to one because I think often times people's mental model of a one to one is a kid has control of the device at all times and it goes wherever they go and that's not actually true. When kids go to specials they very often don't have their devices with them. You mean elementary. So to us the K-5 piece we wouldn't call it a one to one. We would call it the number is the same as the number of students but the way that we use it is not a one to one kind of approach. That's what we would say. And there are components I think that are important to think about this too. There are some things that are required. When we talk about assessments and the state we talk about certain resources that are really only available on devices because that is really the age in which we live in and so there is definitely that component of being able to have those available from an efficiency standpoint and being able to say that we're not running wacky schedules all day to try and accommodate losing class time switching from place to place to place and so being able to do some of that really is important. I think the way I have began to approach this is having been in this space now prior to the pandemic and I think that's one of the things that I've been doing for a long time prior and for many years I've gotten to see kind of the evolution of where we've gone. You know COVID did happen and COVID kind of thrust upon us I think some of this work that both technologically we weren't ready for and in the availability of the technological components to be able to correctly govern. So I can start by saying that which is as we begin to have this what I consider to be a really good conversation. I mean these are things that we want to consider and we want to push on and we want to really look at. What are the tools to be able to really do that more effectively and to bring it to a space that really kind of has a safe landing space and a productive efficient landing space across the board so that means we are meeting the needs appropriately that require a technological component but then also really, really being intentional about that is the use when they don't need to be used. They don't need to be there so there are those components. I think there's a reality. We have a lot of educational components that require some level of device and in which case what does that look like? Well we want it to be the type of device that we have correct management and support and we want to do a lot of procedural thinking around what that actually looks like which I really do believe is the work that we're really setting up heading into especially as this conversation I would say across the nation really begins to ramp up more and more. This is not a conversation that is unique to us. It's a conversation that is being had everywhere which is really healthy across the board for education and kids. I was just going to say I misunderstood that one to one elementary thing also until our last teaching and learning meeting that we had a table I was at. We break up into small groups. The table I was at had the same question and kind of conversation and one of you I don't remember which explained it just like that. Like a second grader doesn't have an iPad that's solely theirs ever. Even when they grab it from the cart they can take any one. They're not so it's... They generally do grab the same one because things are stored locally. They can keep track and teachers can probably keep track of them better that way. But I also and the people at my table also misunderstood what one to one meant at that age so I appreciate you bringing that up because I hadn't thought to bring that up because it allowed you to clarify that again and I think that helped when you explained that at the teaching and learning committee at my table as well for the same reason that everyone I think was picturing like a first grader having their own iPad just like a ninth grader does which is not the case. It's just lives in the cart and there are enough for each student basically for assessments is one of the main times you mentioned that each kid would need it at the same time. Yes. You mentioned that like I think you were talking about a key stage one kid or classroom that some teachers might send them home and some teachers never send them home. Something like that. Key stage two. Okay. Thank you. You mentioned teacher autonomy and that and it made me think about what we read in the social studies presentation that we just had which was kind of surprising in a way of taking away teacher autonomy is that what they're moving towards in the social studies department is every teacher teaching the same things and giving the same tests and using the same rubrics and I can't imagine that they can see the value in that and so I just wanted to say like one of these things that the district our district values itself on offering or giving to teachers is their autonomy and what happens in their classroom but I do think that with technology and I know that I feel very aligned with the values that both of you are speaking about or I hear my values reflected in what you're saying. I feel like this is a place where I have concerns about that kind of teacher autonomy that some teachers whatever key stage they're in can send them home and others don't that I think that there should be guidelines. So I think that's what we're trying to get to with the when we talked about the work that we still need to do. This idea of like the age appropriate technology use guidelines as well as which includes when their devices are being sent home. I think we are aligned in your thinking that we need to actually make a decision about where is the point in a child's career in the district that we're going to say is going to come home with you and that right and that the level of autonomy I do want to clarify one thing about social studies because Paul would be upset if I didn't. The alignment that we're trying to have like horizontally within courses there is still agency and autonomy that teachers have in the how that they teach. It's just not in the what they teach. So we are aligned in what we teach. We're aligned in how we're going to assess. We're aligned in what we're using as the assessment and what we're using to provide the feedback but I don't want like this is a very strong belief of mine that I do not want every single ninth grade English classroom to look exactly the same because they have different kids. The teachers have different talents all those kinds of things. But we do have things that we have to agree to. So I call it defined autonomy like we have given you a sandbox and now you complain the sandbox but you can't come out of the sandbox. The same thing I think is the vision of what we're trying to do here is to say we're going to define the sandbox. We haven't landed that plane yet but we are going to define it and whatever grade we say like this span of grades they're not going home. They're not going home. And right now that's true K through two. They don't go home. Three through five is where we currently have had this level of agency and that's the place that we're having the conversation to say does that really need to happen? I think where the natural break was there was the device changed so all of a sudden it gave us something to say I don't know maybe a Chromebook should go home. Right. And as a consequence of COVID I think there were some practices that were put in place that I'm not so sure we can't roll back. And that's the piece that we feel like we need more time to be able to have that conversation with teachers to say does it really need to be going home or is this an old practice of something else? It tied into that conversation is a conversation about homework. So like when should children be doing homework outside of school is also in like all of that is all tied together in like what is our district philosophy on that? So we look at that as we're gathering information. We're going to make a decision and then we're going to implement the decision. We just can't tell you what the decision is right now because we don't know. We're still gathering the information. I appreciate that you're looking at that though because now that the device won't change that decision might change. Can I just clarify when you say and you said now that the device won't change does that mean if we go iPad everywhere then is that what you mean? Yeah, there's consistency there so then the ramp up in third grade doesn't. It's not iPad to Chromebook. Right and everything like that. I don't I mean I'm not sure that that's actually what influenced the when it went home. There's just like we talk in KeyStage as educators and so we make different decisions by KeyStage and at this point we have given a certain level of agency that that now we're considering whether that you know whether that needs to be the level of agency that that teachers have in this instance. So one of the questions I had asked you was why do we have to buy K-12 all of them at the same time? Why can't we like roll them out in phases? The answer you gave me was right now we get zero percent financing. I think you gave me a two part answer. We get zero percent financing so financially it makes sense. If that is the answer I would like to see a difference in finances of not zero. You know what would be that different? Yeah and there's more and there's more to that answer to you like we really part of our K-12 would we be on cycle anyway and really within a year all of those devices would be on their normal cycle out and so all this does in addition to that is bring everything onto a set on the same cycle across the board so it's predictable across the board with all the same device and that so there would be a portion of our K-2 iPads that are already on their way out and so with that being said it would make more sense to go ahead and bring everything to a universal cycle at the same time. I think that's easier for Luke. It is. I was going to say I think that was the second part was if you don't do that then you're doing a lot of the work on the K-12 iPads and Chromebooks and that's a lot for a department to manage. Yeah it brings everything under a very predictable process. Can I cut in? Sorry. I'm just going to ask all my questions and we have them with everyone else's questions so hopefully that saves us a few minutes. It's good. One of my questions was on the financing part of this. Should the board expect every four years a huge, an abnormally large cash outlay for the next generation of devices that we buy? So really what you're seeing is stuff that's already really budget across years anyway because we actually do have a cycle in place right now and so this is while you're seeing it you're seeing the full four year cycle component and so really what we're doing is we're saying yes we're getting all the devices here today or this year I should say but really we're not doing anything different over the next four years with the budgeted amounts that are being put out. Because we're financing it over four years. Yeah so really those amounts are budgeted across years regardless of whether or not it's a part of the devices here and then a part of devices the next year. We're just saying all the devices at once and then breaking that up over the four years that we would be working on that. And so really and this is fine but just to say this in case someone is here in four years the answer is we have certainty about the financing for four years. Four years from now Apple might say you know our financing option is less attractive and you're going to be asked to approve everything all at once. Yeah and then at that point. It's just important for everyone to like for some of us to hear that. It could be finance through another party. It could also be there's a lot of ways to do it. This might be John is. Special guest star John Brazil. Long time listener first time caller. We can purchase it all at once and finance it through a third party if necessary so that our cash flows over a four year period. We can always manage the cash over multiple years. Yeah. You know this is not a reason not to. Right. So up till now we've basically been on a list for simplification. We've replaced 25 percent of our devices every year and we pay cash for them. We can replace 100 percent at once and pay cash over four years to the same at the same cash flow effectively. These are capital improvement dollars that come out of fund for we allocate dollars over there for this purpose because they're multi-year assets. Yeah we use a life the asset. What. You know we're not going to be able to do that. We're not going to be able to do that. We're not going to be able to do that. Okay. Pam did you have more questions. Yeah. Those were good questions and really helpful answers I felt like that really that answered a lot of my questions and helped me my thinking here so thank you Chris. Do you want to finish it. Oh did you have more sorry. I just have. Keep going. I said one. Go ahead. Thanks. Thanks for inviting me. It's getting late. It's only going to get worse from here. So my only comment is and this goes back I don't know maybe like 30 45 minutes ago but sorry I part. It was a comment about this. This you know we asked you guys to accelerate this part of the text study. This came out of the cell phone discussion and that there was this aha moment of oh maybe some of our hardware. Yes. You know requires people to bring their own devices right and now you're saying that's going to go away. The other part of that is it has to be enforced right and and this is just for the administration broadly speaking you know we you know someone's going to have to enforce that. There's going to be change management around that too and I just think that's worth saying out loud. That's the piece that we talked about that we're partnering with Dan. Right. And I heard that I appreciate it. And some of that becomes natural from a technology standpoint the ability to sign in to wireless can go away. And so then it becomes it really becomes a very difficult process. Yeah I mean that that alone is a big deal. So I'm most likely finished. So thank you. Hopefully they're not listening this. They're marching on the marching on the office tomorrow and there's plenty of other schools that do that. Yeah I mean that's not an I mean we know schools that do that so I'm sure you could talk to them about how they communicate it anyway. Chris your turn. Okay. Great questions. Thank you for answering all of them because it really did help me. I like to know the process by which you came to these conclusions. That's really important to me so I appreciate knowing what you did who you talked to everyone that was involved on why you know you came to these conclusions is super valuable to me. One of the things that also is valuable to me is that you do as much research as possible. I talked about this with cell phones you know in terms of talking to the districts what they did or didn't do and that kind of thing. So when I when I talk about it in this context what I mean is how much time do you guys get to spend. I say get to because you're really busy and I already know that there's so many responsibilities but how much time do you have to spend on trying to really track for our kids whether or not using devices and in what even despite what they're used for but in the classroom as an educational tool is a benefit or a or not benefit to their to their learning. So maybe I'll answer first from my end. So one of the things that I think we believe as a central office school is that we have a lot of people who are really interested in this and I think that's a really important thing for our campus team is our presence in buildings is really important and that is a philosophy that we hold as an entire team and so when people ask questions about what's happening in classrooms I feel like we can speak intelligently to what's happening in classrooms because we're in those classroom spaces and I would say that the majority of the time what I see happening with devices is what we're trying to really focus on with this idea of this purposeful integration and I do truly believe that teachers are putting a lot of thought into why they're using a device and why that's a why that decision is the decision that they come to at that point. That doesn't mean that we don't also then have conversations about like let's unpack that so one of one of my like if I was going to define my role in the district the top role that I would define is a coach I spend a lot of time coaching which means that I spend a lot of time asking questions and if you ask anybody in this district they're going to tell you that I ask a lot of questions and really that's about helping people to be introspective and helping me to understand better why people make decisions but helping them to understand like for them to be able to articulate why they make those decisions and so sometimes we have to have hard conversations about like this doesn't like to me as somebody coming in from the outside this doesn't necessarily feel purposeful let's talk through it and so I think we are engaging in those conversations and having those hard conversations I've been having conversations so we're in a budgeting process right now I've been having conversations with coordinators about why are we spending money on certain tools so there are some tools that we have used like when we implement a new instructional practice or something like that we will often provide funding towards tools that could support a teacher with those tools at some point we have to sunset some of those things like you now have the talent to be able to teach those tools so those are conversations that we're having and sometimes depending on where people are in that learning journey may mean that we need to continue to fund those tools so a teacher teaching a phonics lesson could in early in their journey around phonics use a recording or something like that of somebody else doing that work because they're still on that learning journey at some point we need to sunset that tool because you now have that talent and actually we would say that we believe that students learning from humans like in the space is better than learning from a recording but sometimes we have to use those tools as something to help you know as an aid you choose to you don't have to right but right and we're being very deliberate about those decisions and that may look different across classrooms that's my defined autonomy right but so I think we spend an inordinate amount of time in classrooms and I think we spend an inordinate amount of time having those conversations with teachers not just about technology about everything about teaching and learning I can spend all day talking about teaching and learning right that's why I knew what I wanted to do with my career because I can spend all this time talking about it and thinking through it and helping teachers to think through it in a more deliberate way and so that's what I see my role as being with this and I think us collectively as a central office team spend a lot of time thinking about those things we talk about these things in meetings like we'll bring up things that we see in spaces and like why is that I don't know what I'm talking about I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I'm thinking about that and I I don't like my philosophy of leadership is you don't have to agree with every decision I make but you should understand the decisions that I make. Exactly. So we should be able to explain those things. If a teacher can explain to me why they need that tool right now okay. But then how can I help you so that we don't have to use that tool three years from now or something like that. Right. And how can I help you to continue to grow. So our whole philosophy of of of teacher support is around continual growth. So that's a long answer to. Yeah I think we are being very deliberate about this. Yeah okay but it and that's fantastic. I really appreciate that and I believe it wholeheartedly. I've seen it in practice with I know that's who you are. Malena it's it shows through. It really does. So would you say that you talking one on one with those teachers about why that tool is important at that moment and then being able to articulate it and you being able to say that makes sense. Would you say that's the only type of research you're doing now I guess because that's very one on one and that's great. But what what about the broader understanding about devices as they you know Ed Tech in general and how that affects kids long term. We know more and more as we know as we use more and more tech right. So I just want to know again I always want the right people at the table. You guys are educators which is amazing but you don't have time to sit here and study all the studies that have come out about this. However that information is important. So I'm in addition to local you know understanding of what what's happening I want to know that you guys are aware of in our keeping track of in our holding in priority of knowing you know the data around technology in our classrooms. I think it's super important to to to kind of just state that you know as educators we spend a lot of time with other educators outside of the district. Working through workshops and all kinds of different work specifically on certain topics sometimes sometimes open you know conversation regardless. We we do network a ridiculous amount to have these conversations and that is important because we're all really more in the same spot than sometimes we even realize there. You know what I would say just to add to some of this that I do think is important. I spent a lot of time in the buildings talking about this especially towards the end really almost talking to probably what would be every educator in the district. And what I would say is that most of our teachers are very very they want to have this conversation as well. They're not afraid of it. And so like I think there's some there's some there's some real power in that there's some there's some real things to be excited about because it's not something that I think you know it's it's it's going to be one of those things where just as our team is like hey here's what's going to happen. They want to have that conversation alongside us and so that's huge. Yeah it is. I totally agree with that. Okay so so in my eyes because these conversations are constantly happening and because you value them and because we know that technology constantly changes one of the things that I keep thinking about and I've talked to Jason about talked to Ben about this now doesn't it does it in your eyes make sense for us to have a technology committee that exists all the time rather than just during this study. You know Ben and I we were having this conversation like wow what will we be done in two years. Exactly. You know what you said my whole point. Will we be done in two years. You won't be there. There is a lot there is a lot. You won't be done. Yeah there is a you know I think everything you know with technology is constantly changing and so I think you know when we wrap up that second year there's a there's probably a very good chance we're like well we need to continue this work for this reason or that or the other. I don't think we're afraid of that you know it does exist probably in other areas. Like all other departments have a curriculum committee that's standing when you're in self study you have a bigger committee and then go to a smaller committee so I think that could be a model that we continue in the same way that we have because the other the other pieces coming out of this two year study we're going to end up with long range goals. We need somebody to help us implement the long range goals. The two of us can't. Exactly. Yeah. And technology is just always changing so there will always be a new topic to study and discuss. Yeah. Yeah. Okay great. I love that. I just really like you know we do a lot of things in an evergreen model and I would say technology certainly has to be one of them so just having a set you know all these different stakeholders at the table to look at our practices understand best practices by maintaining an understanding of current trends and understanding is really essential for us as we go forward. So yeah. Okay. The other thing I'm going to ask is in the second year of this study and and or in the technology committee that will exist afterwards one of the things that I think is important is in addition to talking to these folks these parents at the teacher and is to maybe do a full survey of all of these parents in terms of really understanding their attitudes towards technology not you know how much do you know how much your child does or doesn't use it in their class. What is your expectation about their use in class. Do you know I I really would like you to as an administration to understand where parents stand on this issue because if we don't we don't ask in advance we're going to get told later anyway. You know what I mean. That's what's going to that's what happens. So I don't know what you're hearing now and I'm glad that you have this subset of parents but I'm just wondering out loud whether or not just a bigger wider outlook at all the parents at the different levels and just to really a better understanding from parents point of view how this technology is seen as a positive or maybe not so much as a positive. You're going to get the whole range of answers right. But it'd be great for you guys to have that understanding and watch how that trends over time with different things that you roll out etc. Okay. Let's see. I think I said them all. Oh my gosh did I really do it. Yeah I think I did. Yeah I appreciate you listening to all those ideas about you know continuing this work because it really is. Oh one last thing of course AI is another reason why a text tech committee should be I mean whether that's just part of it or a subset of the tech. I just we are really going to like you said well I know we don't have we don't have a set like we're going to start it here and we're not going to do it here and we're we're going to allow it in this. We got to do all that. So this committee is essential for doing that right. I don't want just the two of you to be sitting at the table doing that right. So so I agree. I think I think with AI especially you know it's time for a committee to really you know be able to manage on a consistent basis and come up with our values our systems you know in around how we teach what AI is how to use it what it's for what it isn't for. You know our those are just essential parts of just like civics now we're understanding how important that is. Understanding of AI technology is just as important now and we need to understand how to integrate it into our curriculums from K to 12. So that's my soapbox. Thank you. The one one minor thought I had and it is minor and I'm sure you thought of it is when you said the students will be provided with a stylus like I see those being lost so fast. Yeah it will be the. I mean we kids can't keep track of their pencils. I just want you to consider. Yeah no we. The cost of those the necessity of those the replacement cut. Yeah we we have it we have a model we have another school district that will probably follow in this model of providing. Yeah. Of providing the first one and then making it available for somebody to get should they lose their own. And they're not necessary are they necessary to use it or you can use your finger. Oh you can use your. So you can really use any stylus. I just as like the first one we would those are going to get lost. Everyone. In fact we can get them really everyone around the table asked such great questions that all of mine have been answered but I do just want to thank you again which has been mentioned for. Listening to the teaching and learning committee that very clearly said we need more parent communication around expectations for devices at home and also for listening to us. As a board last year and this fall when we adopted the personal electronic personal electronic device policy and the law went into effect that we realized if we were like violating our own policy like if we're letting our kids are bringing their own devices to school because our devices aren't meeting the needs. So they and we asked you to quickly come up with a solution and you did so I really do appreciate the quick work you did in researching and figuring out what the right devices are so that this one year period so that we figured it out in this one year period and can now be abiding by the our own policy. So thank you for that. Yeah go ahead. I think I was really happy to hear that there are no time. Did you say this. This is the way I inferred this that really the only time that in K through two that every kid has a device at the same time is when they're doing assessments across the grade level. Across the grade level. There's no time during instruction in K through two where the teacher says everybody get out their iPad and they do a lesson. Within a classroom that may be the case but not across all three classrooms would not look the same at any given time. Okay but there are lessons that are given on an iPad that there aren't. I would so I would I would be cautious in how we phrase that because I'm not sure that I would say that there are lessons that are given on an iPad. There are things where it's like we're we're engaging with the device. All of us are engaging with the device at the same time. Okay. So what I'll add to what I was saying that that committee could possibly do is really help us get an understanding from our. Because what I would like to if I was a parent I'd say well how much are they using it and then I thought to myself do our teachers even understand how much they are using it. So one of the things that I think is important for us to be able to say you know have out there in public and be transparent is our students do use it this amount they and it's for these reasons right. I just wonder if we have a time you know because I think if we if we said it's eight hours you know a week maybe that's way too much for our parent group and they would say whoa we don't like that. So those are the types of things that I'm thinking about is you know the amount of time spent on a screen is part of this discussion you know in terms of understanding what our parents how are what they want with our technology use. I think that's what we were envisioning when we talked about the guidelines like the guidelines aren't just about the home piece it's also about what does that look like within the within the school setting. Yeah. Are we ready to read the motion. So everyone asked all their questions. I mean I guess my question I would love for us to like to hear from people on is there a reason that we would say no let's do this in two parts like let's not do how whatever the all of it let's not do all of it now is there a reason to not do that. I would say my understanding is a couple of reasons not to is one the financing deal we were offered and two is the deployment. So that is to do it right. Well and also having a consistent device across the site the replacement cycle. That's what I'll say. Is there a reason not to do those are the reasons to do right. Is there a sound reason for us to. Not do. Let's do that. In this school. I think I came in here thinking no way I didn't I wasn't going to I didn't want this for lower school. You have convinced me. Yeah they gave really good. Yes you guys were very helpful in helping us understand. So yeah I don't think I don't see a reason not to unless anyone else does after hearing them tonight. I don't either. I mean I do think I am I do really want to hear from you how many minutes we're using where the entire class is using an iPad or just you know I just I do feel like part of the second year of this study needs to really understand the amount of time that the kids are on a screen and us being able to be transparent about that and and be able to justify that etc. I mean I because I agree I'm hesitant when I think of you know I don't love the idea of a kindergartner on an iPad I just don't maybe half of America does and maybe you know half of America does I don't know I just for me there are you reasons to use it it's purposeful and it's fantastic but it also doesn't have to be there so I want to know like I just want to hear the justification for using it and I want to know the amount of time so because if it's 15 minutes a day that's very different than if it's you know two hours a day. And I think you'll hear that year too. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. That's what I mean. I won't. That's why I said you know I think you'll come back for that presentation. I feel comfortable making this vote tonight but right knowing that that's what I need to hear in the future. Right. Does that make sense. Yes absolutely. And just to say this explicitly because I know this is just to say this explicitly whatever we if we vote to approve this you guys are looking at all that lower grade age appropriate decision making with an open mind you're not because we voted for this here today going to be more inclined to use these devices that we've purchased if you go through this process and you look at it and you say you know what we shouldn't be using them we should never have a situation where everyone's on an iPad in the classroom you would make that decision even though we bought these devices right. There you go. Yeah absolutely. In fact maybe. That's a great closing statement Leo. Yeah. Thank you. Okay now will you read the motion Chris. Yes I will. Everybody ready. Yep. Yes I'm ready. Okay where is it. I move to approve the purchase of student and staff computing devices from Apple in the approximate amount of one million six hundred and fifty five thousand dollars less the value of any device buybacks to be financed by Apple at no interest cost and payable over three annual installments and further amend the FY 2025 2026 budget to fund payment of the first installment if it becomes due prior to June 30 2026. Second. Okay it's been moved and seconded. I think we've asked all of our questions. All those in favor. Aye. Any opposed. Motion passes. Thank you for all your work and research on that. Great and great job answering our questions too. Okay we're moving into policy. Lady. We're doing the first and second reading tonight for the student advisor to the board. We're doing the first and second reading tonight because we need it approved prior to selecting the next student rep to the board. So Chris why don't you read the motion and then we'll see if we have questions. I move that we approve policy J.F.B.B. student advisor to the board with the recommended changes. Second. Okay did anyone have questions or comments about this one. My only wondering is on number 10 says meet with students of diverse identities from Clayton High School, White Island Middle School and all Clayton Elementary Schools on a regular basis. The only school that seems to be missing from that list is early childhood which I don't believe that our student rep engages with currently but is there any reason or occasion where that would you would want to include that or what or the adults or the educators. That's a really good point. It just seems like we don't we listed everybody else but not them. But maybe that's intentional because of the age group of the children at the early childhood. It's an open question. I'm not advocating that we need to include them or not. It's just we should be thoughtful about why they aren't there. Good point. It wouldn't be the student reps role to meet with the parents. But the students. But I'm sure Nina would have no problem running over the family center. Hanging out there for 30 minutes. It sounds delightful. We all love doing that. My only question is do you just you know and the and the early childhood center. Or just change it to all of our schools. Yeah. I mean do we think it's realistic that that's my high school student board rep would meet with early childhood. And maybe that's the reason why it's not there. And I don't even know if it's appropriate. That's the other. That's why I asked the question. So we all I think it's a great question. But are we all okay leaving it off. Yes. Do you think that's best. Keeping it off. Keeping it off. Okay. But at least it's raised the question. But I'm glad you did bring that up because I hadn't thought about that. Yeah. Pam. The only other point that we had is that number 11 was changed. And I don't know if that was pointed out to everybody. It did say represent the views of all students while participating in board meetings and Stacey and I suggested to take out the word all because that's just not realistic. Great. Okay. Any everybody else okay with it. All those in favor. Any opposed. No. Okay. That motion passes now the second reading of policy K.H. The public gifts to the school. We read that motion please. I move that we approve policy K.H. Public gifts to schools with the recommended changes. Okay. That's been moved and seconded. Any comments or questions. I would make a quick comment. There is that it's from the from the first reading and there was one added explained in the narrative that was presented to you. There was a couple more edits that were made today. Okay. One of those is to the title of the section that's formally said gifts to the district foundation and now says give to the Clayton education foundation. Good. Thank you. The second edit is the definition of word gift which was truncated to just really refer to donations bequests et cetera without the ending part that said to the foundation of the district. It's really a correct corrected definition of that term doesn't really change the meeting but it's how a definition should be written. So with that I think we've enumerated all the the edits. Thank you. There any other questions or comments about this second reading. I'll make a comment. Go ahead. On the wellness committee we're doing we're working on the triennial assessment and we're about to go hear about it next month and. One of the things that you when you go through and you talk about all the various things that are you know required by law for us to think about in terms of health and wellness on our campuses is it came up that you know should we have in policy that we wouldn't accept gifts from places like Marlboro. You know I mean that kind of thing and I really thought about it. Mar cigarettes. Marlboro. Yeah Marlboro. Not a common occurrence. Like we're not going to take Jack Daniels is not going to be a sponsor for soccer fields is what I'm saying right. I'm just saying it but I don't think so. I mean that's why I'm bringing it up. We it the actual guidelines that we're supposed to be following it. It says like do you have it you know we don't have to do this but we could just get a no on this part of the survey but it says do you have a policy around. You know not promoting things that are unhealthy basically is what it said. Not those words but basically that's what it is and so I thought about this policy when we were going through that and I would say number three is appropriate for the school environment. I would hope that would include that we would of course never take a donation from Jack Daniels but I just want to throw out there that it is something that the people that think about health and wellness in schools have thought about is you know what let's think about who we're accepting gifts from because we wanted that to be appropriate and promote health and wellness versus the opposite. And the way we deal with that is that we bring those to you. They're on donations are here so that the board can accept or reject those and that would be one of the considerations. Exactly yes that would. And it also says in deciding whether to accept it the superintendent and the board have to agree that it's appropriate. Exactly. I feel fine with it. I thought about it a lot but I just wanted to point out that that is health and wellness comes into everything all these policies including gifts. And that's great. It should. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay that motion passes. And just one more is rescinding policy FFA because it's been merged into policy KH so we read that. I move to rescind policy FFA memorials on facilities and grounds. Second. Okay any questions or comments about why that's being rescinded? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay that passes. And okay sorry now I lost my place. Okay now we're moving to consent. Will you read that motion please? I move that we approve consent agenda items 7.2 through 7.9. Second. Before we vote I just want to read about donation which we always do publicly out of consent. On behalf of the district the Board of Education would like to thank the Runnels family for their generous donation of $1,200 to the social worker discretionary fund so thank you to that family. Very generous donation. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? I just have one comment. Oh sorry. And so I just wanted to point out the cooperative boys volleyball scholarship so that's yet another example of our cooperation with other school or sponsorship. It's another example where our schools are cooperating with other schools to give our students opportunities that they otherwise wouldn't have because we don't have the participation numbers that we need so we've seen this now in girls field in our football program at the high school and now in boys volleyball we do it also in academic programs like catalyst so it's a good thing so even though we have all these opportunities to give our kids the existing opportunities that we're expecting to have when they get to certain levels of the school and I appreciate that the district through Steve Hudson and through you Nisha and in the case of the school we have a lot of opportunities to give our students the opportunities that they need to have. So thank you for pointing that out. Wait. Did we vote or not? Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Okay. Any opposed? Okay. Consent agenda passes. So now we're on board communications. I will start with Ben or Leo on CRSWC. I think you had a meeting. Yeah. We had a CRSWC meeting. A couple items on the agenda. We had a good discussion around replacing the scoreboard or the swimming timing system that's used for competitions and I expect that may come up for a vote at our next meeting but we had a good conversation around it and... Of course. And you know so everything is going great. Okay. Anything to add to that Ben? Okay. Chris did you have a governing council meeting? You want to tell us about that? Yes. The governing council meeting several things. First we got a pack update which we always do but this one what they're trying to do is restructure pack. They found that many participating are interested in the pack and partner districts don't have a robust pack within their districts so now the pack at SSD is trying to do a better job of sort of centralizing all the pack and having... So there's going to be some outreach around that and some more discussion but they're really trying to reinvent that program so it touches more families because in certain districts it's touching no families so they're trying to really help that process. We're lucky that we have what we have and each district can have a parent that they want but they're trying to do a better job of making sure that every family in SSD is aware that there is a parent committee that they can go to for... The other thing we did was we oh they discussed the FY 25 audit was clean so that was great. That was good news to hear and we did the board of elections, the SSD board of education elections. One was contested and we have to vote again in June and we'll do that but otherwise we have some new board of education members over there and that's it. Great. Thank you. I had a PTO council meeting. I would say they talked... they are still kind of in continuous talks like with Gina about the new website and how to use their... you know each PTO has kind of a... Web page within the school and adjusting to how to use that with the new website but I think that the new website actually as they're realizing is going to be much more useful and user friendly for them to push out information. That was part of the conversation. The other part was around prop O and how PTOs can help support prop O. They ultimately all decided... each school kind of had different feelings about it but they decided as a collective group that each school's PTO is doing a DOUGH for prop O night. They're doing a mod pizza fundraiser night or day and night I should say. I think on March 31st you might have seen it on social media where they are donating mod pizza will donate a percentage of the proceeds to prop O in name of all the school's PTOs so I think it's great that as a collective group they've kind of all decided to do something together. I also wanted to highlight a little bit about the celebration of black achievement. I'm sorry Cameron's not here to hear this but those of us that attended I think would all agree it is a really great event. I would love to work on getting more people there because I actually feel bad that more people didn't see this. It's really great that we highlight our own black alumni and their successes and they are so proud and our current students and current students and the alumni are so proud to have come from Clayton High School. They each every year talk about that a lot and they have such great memories and relationships with teachers and specific memories of classes and teachers that got them to where they are today. Anyway and yes we involve our students from elementary on up in the program and I just think it's great so thank you to those board members that attended that as well and the community members and also just wanted everyone to know we had a great meeting with some former Board of Education members to educate them on Prop O and took them on a tour of Gay Field to see the facilities there which I hadn't actually toured the facilities yet either so that was eye opening for me as well to see the needed changes over there and it's always great regardless to engage with former board members like Dr. Halscher mentioned Frank earlier. I think they have such historical knowledge to share which is valuable so I always enjoy getting together with that group so that was good too. Anything anybody else attended? I don't think so. Okay we can adjourn Chris. Move that the Board of Education adjourn. Thank you.