Study Session Meeting

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[0] Nancy Thomas: Everyone, I'd like to call to order the regular meeting. Roll call.

[26] SPEAKER_15: President Rodriguez. Vice President Thomas?

[31] Nancy Thomas: Here.

[32] SPEAKER_15: Member Martinez? Member Gutierrez? Here. Member John?

[37] Nancy Thomas: Here. I would entertain a motion to approve the agenda.

[42] SPEAKER_37: I'll make a motion. I second.

[45] Nancy Thomas: OK. Please vote as soon as I open up. Since Member Rodriguez is on the phone with us, Let's have a vote by hand. Please raise your hand if you vote aye. Member Rodriguez, do you? Member Rodriguez votes aye. That's four ayes. Thank you. We do have one individual that would like to discuss, that would like to address us on the study session item, Mr. Newk.

[85] Cary Knoop: Good evening, everybody. I just wanted to say a few words about the chronic absenteeism. So I looked at some data to place new work within the scope of Alameda County. And well, there's a reason for concern, I think. We are definitely at the bad side of the graph. Our English learners are actually the highest in the county. So we have the district that have the highest chronic absenteeism for English learners. Kindergarten next to Emory Unified. So I think these numbers are very worrisome. I also looked at the number from the year before, and they were pretty much the same. So it's not like a one year off. So there seems to be something that is different in Newark. And I hope that the team can work out what the problem is because, you know, that's a real serious concern. My second comment is I looked at the presentation and it looked pretty good and I unfortunately don't have the time to sit for the presentation. I have to take my kids. But one thing that I saw missing is the high school scores. And I looked at the high school scores and these scores were very good. In a sense, they were so good that I wonder if they're very credible. I don't know if the high school is serious about roll calls. Looking at the data, I just have my doubts. And I hope that we're not going to have the argument, well, you know, the state doesn't care about the high school, so why should we worry about it? No, we should worry about it. We should worry about it for the students. We should worry about it for the parents of the students, because if you don't come to school, your grades will suffer. So it's very important to get all kids to come to school. With last comment with respect to the suspensions, I think we're doing reasonably well. If you look at for whole Alameda County and for the last 10 years, our rates have gone down and we haven't had any spikes in any of the categories. So I think it's reasonable. You know, we're reasonably doing well. And I would caution, at least from my perspective, to set excessive goals of improving that. You know, we're living in a world where suspensions are a reality, you know. And sometimes kids just have to be suspended. And to say, oh, we want to lower it by 5% or 10% is sometimes, it's not always a good idea. Thank you. Goodbye.

[253] Nancy Thomas: Thank you. We have one other. Mr. Merritt.

[262] SPEAKER_14: Thank you very much. I debated whether I wanted to talk about this one or not. I read the presentation and the title of the presentation and the actual presentation, I'm not sure, are correlated enough for me. PBIS, not a fan, but it is our program. And maybe it works. I've heard that some people, some districts have been able to make it work. Positive. And in this climate, we have to have a positive reason for kids to come to school. And although we do have to hold them accountable, parents accountable to a law, it's not presenting a customer-centric reason for kids to come to school. If you're coming to school because you're going to be punished if you don't go to school, that's not an incentive. That's an incentive to try to figure out a way to beat the system, not join the system and be an active community member. Thank you. Thank you.

[339] Nancy Thomas: So next, we will move into our study session. Superintendent, do you want to introduce it?

[345] SPEAKER_21: Yes, I'm going to allow. Associate Superintendent Salinas will lead us through this process and her team.

[352] SPEAKER_31: Yes, good evening. If you could join us at the table for the study session and I'll ask Ms. Aquino. Thank you. There's the PowerPoint and we'll get started. So good evening. Tonight we have our Director of Special Projects, Ms. Robyn Sert, and our Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Ms. Amy Black. I wanted to bring us back to the discussion we had many months ago. If you recall at that time, we had the discussion on differential assistance and what was happening with the indicator of chronic absenteeism. We thought we would envelope this and include all of the other aspects that really is something that we need to work on as a district. There's a lot of intertwined work that we do around chronic absenteeism, around climate, around our suspensions and expulsions, and we wanted to bring that forward. At the time, what we said we would do, and we've done, and we continue to work on it, was to really evaluate what's the state of the state, and really do a root cause analysis. And I wish Member Martinez was here tonight. Because I remember that clearly, and from all of you, that let's look at it. What is the causal analysis of why are we way above the county average in terms of chronic absenteeism? How do we support our students to come to school and support our families to bring their kids to school? Because as you can imagine, if you're not in school, you're not learning. That's what it speaks to, and it also speaks to climate. So today, we're going to start with sharing what we've learned as we've met with our clerks, our principals, teachers. We've looked at our data, and also we've done a scrubbing of the data. And I think that was the other ask, to really look to see what's happening and what are we doing here. So I'm going to ask the team to kind of take it on, and then we'll stop for questions along the way. It's a really big deal.

[495] SPEAKER_21: Before we start, I do want to share If there is any aspect when we get to the close to the end of this that you want to go deeper in at another study session, if there's more specific things you want, either about attendance or expulsion, we can do that. So we're happy to do more of these as you need them. But we thought this would be a good starting point.

[515] SPEAKER_32: OK, so this is my area of focus this year is our LCAP. And so I always want to tie all the presentations back to the LCAP, because the LCAP is our guiding force, for lack of a better word, of what really drives the work that we do in the district. And so it's really my intention to always bring what we're presenting and sharing back to the LCAP and where it falls in the LCAP. And so in the LCAP, we do have goal two, which is about school climate. And underneath school climate is chronic absenteeism, suspensions, and expulsions. That's where all of the indicators fall. Click to our next one. Our specific goals are goal 2.1. So this is kind of how you read the LCAP goals. It's two is the overarching goal, one is an action, and then the number after that is for you further go deeper into that action item. So in goal 2.1, we're continuing to use A2A. A2A is our service that collects the data for our attendance, and I'll talk a little bit about that process in a minute. In addition, we have worked with our DLAC this year in sharing our chronic absenteeism data and getting input from our data, as well as training our parents on providing our families resources to support our students who are chronically absent. A specific example was last night at DLAC, one of our parents shared her daughter's chronically ill. So I connected her with Agnes today, our district nurse, and so she can get the support that she needs as well. In 2.1.3, I'm going to be talking about our SART process and what that looks like. As what that looks like for our students who are chronically absent and kind of what the process entails. And then the last part is just our continued focus on attendance. So just tying it back to the LCAP. Oh, the panels, the SARB panels. SARB panels, yes. So those aren't individual meetings. Usually there's a full day of SARBs, and I'll give you the details of that, but there's usually anywhere from five to eight families. Also within one SARB meeting, you SARB the whole family, not just the one individual child, so that's included in that total as well. So the way A2A works for us, is A2A collects the data for our attendance every day. So when our clerks take attendance, it's recorded in A2A. And then after a certain marking point, then a first letter is generated automatically through A2A that notifies the clerk and the principal are notified the letter's going home, as well as an email goes to the parent that they will be receiving a letter about their child's absences. And that they've reached a certain level that's a concern for the district. The initial first letter is about unexcused absences. But if you also have excessive excused absences, you receive the letter. But we did not initially, when we began with A2A, we did not initially send the email home to families, just the letters went home. Our families gave us input and said we'd like some other notification. Sometimes we don't always check our mail as often and so an initial email goes and then within a couple of days you actually receive the letter. So in A2A, this is all of the communication that has been generated up to, this was about mid-March. So there were 5,191 parent communication pieces, I'm sorry, as of February. And then average letters are about 346. What triggers the first truancy letter? So the first truancy letter is seven unexcused absences, okay? And then like as I said, seven that have just not been excused by the parent. Or we haven't received any documentation for. And then that's the first letter that goes. The second letter is once they've gone past 10. So it's kind of that warning letter and then the next letter goes up. Third, truancy letters is really when you're really far into the truancy process. On top of that, we also have families who get the first letter for the 10 days of excused absences, and then they go further. So this is just, we just wanted to share with you kind of the process that A2A really holds the data for us on our students missing on a daily basis.

[812] SPEAKER_21: So this is the software, and these are all aligned with the PED code, correct?

[817] SPEAKER_32: Correct. Yes, so these aren't the cutoffs that Newark has decided, this is the educational code that we have to follow.

[826] Nancy Thomas: And this is done at the secondary level as well?

[830] Nancy Thomas: TK-12. And is an excuse, what happens if a student misses a period? If that student misses three periods, is that an unexcused absence or something like that?

[844] SPEAKER_31: It depends. every period can mark as, is tagged as an absence. And I know that there was questions about why isn't the high school data here? And that might be something we can bring back. But if you recall, the state indicator does not include high school. And so we track it. They follow these notifications. So if they're missing the first or second period, they're certainly tracking that. They're seeing if it's because they're tardy and it just, Was it just that they didn't take roll yet in the classroom? What is it? We have all of that data and we can bring that back. We have really not had as much time to really dig deep into the data with the staff at the high school. It's really our focus has right now been at the elementary. We do intend to move to that for next year. And part of it is because we are in different systems for the TK-8. I do want to add that when you look at that 445 conference notifications, that's the work that happens at the sites. And so the principals or the assistant principals that are tagged with either that side of the alphabet or the student, these are conferences that must take place where there is some kind of a human interaction. We're not just emailing and sending letters. There has to be a meeting of sorts that happens with the families. In terms of, you know, Robin was sharing, Sir was sharing that if a child is chronically ill, That's where the intervention also takes place, where we're not going to continue to, you know, we can silence the barrage of the phone calls and the phone banking if we know that there is a medical issue that's happening. And so what this tool does is really put data at the fingertips of the principals at the high school, you know, certainly the attendants. end up, you know, working with the front office. But that's, I think, the next step for us, and we can start to unpack that.

[954] Nancy Thomas: I think, Eileen, before that, if you do bring back information, I think it would be instructive to know how much money we're losing at each level, or each grade level, or each, especially at the high school, how much money are we losing by having students absent?

[972] SPEAKER_31: And I think, and I'm making myself a note, I do want, when we talk about the action plan for implementation, we are looking at our attendance campaign for next year, and we're definitely going to be using that information to share the information with our community about how much money we are losing. Absolutely.

[989] SPEAKER_32: And the way that our, what's the word I'm looking for? Our ADA, the A2A was confusing me, the ADA is, calculated is through the A2A enrollment on a daily basis. And so what you'll get from us, the percentage rates from A2A is like we have 96% of our students are here. And so that's how our ADA is generated. So you'll see two different numbers, the A2A, which is the ADA, And then there's the chronic absenteeism, which is separate. And then there's truancy. So there's lots of levels. And the work that Ms. Salinas was sharing, those are called SARTs. So it's a student attendance review team. And it's really an opportunity for the principal to invite the family in and find out get to the heart of why the absences are happening. We want to encourage our families to come to those. A lot of our families are worried about coming, but it's really an opportunity to meet with the administrator and see how we can support the family to come. So the way the SARB process is, is when you get to a certain level, then you are invited to the SARB panel. The SARB panel, as I was sharing earlier, We've had a few full days and it's really an opportunity for the family to come share with a bigger panel where we have administrators as well as counselors as well as we've had our parent partners, our parent manager, Ashley has participated, Ms. Costa has participated in those, to really get to the heart of why there are such excessive absences for our students, excused or unexcused. The SARM panel is for both. And so getting at the heart of what resources we can provide for families to help ensure that they come every day.

[1107] SPEAKER_31: I think part of the message is, back when we were in school, I remember there was a distinction between, okay, well, it's an excused absence and your mom or dad could come and excuse it. Those days are gone. Now it's really, you know, we want to have instructional hours. They're missing instructions. So excused or unexcused, it's still true.

[1124] SPEAKER_32: So we had in 2016-17, and this was as of the end of February, we had 47 SAR referrals in 17, 18, 91, and then this year we've had 75. I know that number has increased a little bit, but that was as of February. So we still have a number of referrals. And again, this is our opportunity to meet with families to see what other support we can provide them to ensure that their students are coming to school.

[1157] SPEAKER_31: And I think we can also point to just the focus that we're putting on attendance. So, and supporting our sites with, it's not very easy to just refer someone. As you can imagine, there has to make sure that we've done all of the notifications. The principal has had an opportunity to meet with the family, because we're trying to intervene at the lowest level before we get to the actual formal process, such as a SARB. But then we've encouraged them that, and sometimes that is, when we have all hands on deck, if it's the district nurse, if it's our parent manager, so that we can bring resources to families.

[1195] SPEAKER_28: So this data is pulled from our dashboard as well as just from the state analysis that we receive. And this is just a refresher slide for you. So we went in depth in the fall looking at our chronic absentee data as a district and in our school sites and grade levels. We went into actually more specific data with us when we did our last study session. So this is just kind of a refresher where we were on the dashboard and why we've been identified for differentiated assistance, so that you'll see that we have a significantly high chronic absentee rate at our elementary schools. And when we tweezed out even further, it was definitely a trend in our early grades that we had an even higher rate. And then we're in differentiated assistance for African-American student foster youth and homeless and expat students, more chronically.

[1247] SPEAKER_21: Would you expand a little bit on

[1259] SPEAKER_28: So differentiated assistance basically is that, so remember we have six state indicators on our dashboard, and if you are in the red in two of the six indicators, you'll be identified for what's called differentiated assistance. And so that can also be based on student groups as well. So indicators are to refresh your memory, chronic absentee, suspension, we have an EL learner indicator, we have graduation rate, college and career readiness, and then we have an academic indicator, which is considered one, even though it's two indicators in one, right? So the caveat with that is that even if we show red in ELA and math, it counts as one point. So we would have to also show red in another indicator. And so for our district, we showed red for African American students and homeless and foster youth students, in both chronic absentee and suspension, so that's two indicators. So that puts us in differentiated assistance. And then we also are in for specialized students, which includes chronic absentee, suspension, and academics. So what that means, basically, is that we collaborate with the county. They oversee and have meetings with us. We actually had three meetings with them. to just do some root cause analysis to try to understand what programs do we currently have in place, what does our data say, what local data do we also collect, and what are some next steps that we need to take in order to have program improvement to support these groups. There was also some funding attached to that. And we're actually gonna be meeting with the county formally for them to give us a formal letter of written recommendations for us that we'll then present to you. as well tied to this work.

[1374] SPEAKER_31: And it's been a really clever process with them. We're not alone. Not that I want to be in this group. I think there's about eight other districts that are also in. Overwhelmingly, districts are in for special education. But then also, there's a group of us in chronic absenteeism. And so the county has partnered with a nationally recognized organization, Attendance Works. And so we've done some work with Attendance Works on our own with our principals, and we'll talk a little bit more about what that action plan looks like. But we're glad to partner with the county and really learn more from Attendance Works.

[1410] SPEAKER_28: And then this is just another way to look at the data, the 5x5. So you'll hear references to the 5x5, and this is just what the state uses in order to determine So remember, in our dashboard, part of our report card is receiving a color, right? So you're gonna hear, we're in the red, we're in the orange, we're in the yellow. What does that really mean? And so then this is just another way to tweeze out the data to see what quadrant we're in. Along the side, you'll see what the percentage rate and where we are to be at standard or below standard. And then across the top, indicates increase or decrease by a certain percentage, variables, and then that's what those two come together and meet what our color is. So we wanna see an advancement in color. So like for example, if we look at music at the very bottom, they're in a very high percentage box as well as they also increased within that band. So when we're setting goals, which we'll talk about that also in this report, then in order for them to move to an orange or a yellow, we would need to see a decline of up to three or more percent. for them to shift their color band. Still, even if they did, let's say they did 3%, I don't know what their current rate is right now, it's still a significant amount, right, that we want to see more of an increase, but remember the dashboard tells us we're celebrating growth over time, and so that's why, where they've come up with the color bands. We want to continue to see growth over time and increase. We saw a significant increase, like they did, let's say 20%, and then that could potentially be in the green. So it just kind of, depending on the chart and our growth, like where our indicators fall.

[1516] SPEAKER_37: And the high school's not on here, but that's because Dashboard doesn't require it to be tracked, but not, but we still are tracking.

[1522] SPEAKER_28: Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. We still track it. I actually gave the 5x5 charts to the high school for them to do work with their staff, just as an FYI, because I think it's an important conversation to continue to have, even though it's not an indicator for them. They need to keep track of it. how their students are doing and if they're coming to school. And then the connection to their suspensions, because we often see a correlation of chronic absentee and suspensions. So if they're in for suspension, they need to absolutely

[1558] SPEAKER_31: It's good, it's good. But then that's when we dig deeper into suspension rates for what student group, and that's gonna be what we also have to look at.

[1567] SPEAKER_28: Yeah, so we don't wanna look at just a high level. We wanna see, tweeze in, okay, let's look at our subgroup data. Is there a higher rate for certain students or certain subgroups? And then what is the trend that we're seeing in all their indicators? And chronic absentee is absolutely one that we wanna

[1587] SPEAKER_36: Is there a hard number to measure to qualify someone as a planning absentee?

[1592] SPEAKER_32: Yes, that's 10% of the school year.

[1596] SPEAKER_31: Yes, that's 18 days. At the end. So it's a moving target, and that's part of the data. So as we're tracking the data, A student can become chronically absent the longer we get them through the school year. So we're trying to stop and get the warning signals on kids who are getting close to be chronically absent. But total, it would be 18 days.

[1617] SPEAKER_36: So at the beginning of the school year, you wouldn't have anybody. Correct. Instead of looking at a rolling 180-day window, OK, I see. So if at the middle, say, at the end of December, that's half of the school year is gone. If you already have people that is qualified as chronic absentee, then that is considered pretty bad, right? Because that's only four months.

[1647] SPEAKER_28: That's a great question. I think we're on to the next slide. OK, so let me talk about some of the action plans. So since we last shared the data with you at the beginning of the year, and they're being identified for differentiated assistance, sharing some of the work that we had done prior to that, and then also escalating our efforts this year because we want to tackle that seriously. And what we know about the new dashboard is that if we increase and get out of red, we're out of differentiated assistance. So it's actually a really positive model. In the past, when you were in program improvement, you're locked in for three years no matter how well you do. And so that's a really positive thing. It's motivating to know, OK, so if we make a significant impact and we get out of the red, then we're able to be able to differentiate assistance, which is very positive. So what we've done this year, and I think we've mentioned before that we meet weekly with our district leadership team, our principals, and one thing that we've added consistently in our meetings is looking at chronic absentee. So we've had numerous discussions as well as we now pull reports weekly of their individual students and give them their report. So even just that act of like, physically giving them the report. I give it to them in hard copy as well as soft copy so they can manipulate their own spreadsheets when they get back to their site. Because really what we know about chronic absentee, and I know that Ms. Stark also kind of alluded to that, was it really is down to the individual family and student. So to say a percentage and not understand the dynamics of the family, we're not going to combat that, right? So we need to understand what are the forces especially when we're talking about young children, because they can't take themselves to school. So what are the hardships of the family that we need to be able to support so that they can come to school? So that's work that principals need to do with their teachers, and their families, and their students. And they have been doing a really fantastic job of identifying that, who are these students, and what needs do they have, and doing a collaboration with that. attendance and beefed up their incentives just school-wide so this is actually a really fun opportunity for schools to show their own like spirit or reward system and so and get really creative about some of them like I know Graham has I think like Top attendance classes, they have raffles, and that's just one example, but a number of schools. I know music has done a big push. Every time I drive past that sign when I come to work, they're celebrating attendance. So just also celebrating in a positive way. the work that kids are doing and being excited about coming to school and getting the prize. And that was afforded also by Prop 47 money, that's grant money, a collaboration again with the county that we entered last year. Because we noticed that chronic absentee may be an area of concern and what are some things that we can do proactively. So we've been able to use that money to help with incentives. at our elementary schools, as well as doing additional training for our clerks around coding and making sure we're capturing the data correctly and connecting with families.

[1839] SPEAKER_31: And I want to add, so going back to the whole thing of like, why are we here? So why did we get here? And as we start to dig deep in the data, we notice that it was one, Families also just had that misconception still about excused and unexcused. And so a lot of our sites started to do this, a campaign of any absence isn't good for kids because they're missing seat time, they're not in the classroom. The schools, our front office clerks have been so, so helpful because they're really making those personal phone calls. And then how do we support our teachers to also, they're the frontline connection and parents really, that's going to be the first person they see, or it's going to be the first front office staff. And they've been supporting us with this as well. So we noticed that families just had that misconception. So we did this whole campaign. And we'll talk at the end. I mean, one of the things we're really looking at is this huge kickoff campaign with new families for the next school year. So last night, Ms. Black was here, and we had incoming kindergarten families. How many people were here last night? 65.

[1906] SPEAKER_28: They were like blowing out. I thought I saw you. I was like, I think I saw her. I didn't see her again.

[1912] Nancy Thomas: I was just like. I wanted to come, but it said parents only.

[1917] SPEAKER_31: And we meant it because we didn't want the little. Any adult, we should have said adults only.

[1926] SPEAKER_28: although it was hot and crowded, but it was great energy.

[1929] SPEAKER_31: And I think it's the idea of a campaign to get families excited about bringing their kids and why it's important to bring the school every day.

[1937] SPEAKER_37: I have a question about the campaign. When did you guys start this one?

[1940] SPEAKER_31: So the attendance campaign is going to start And in fact, we were kicking around different slogans. And we're going to share it out with some folks to get some more inputs. But we're looking at a slogan, the banners, and all of that for next year, leveraging our Prop 47 funds. The sites have been doing their own individual campaigns. And that's really what's kicked off a lot of the work.

[1965] Nancy Thomas: What can you say so far? We're about two-thirds into the year. What are you seeing compared to last year?

[1975] SPEAKER_37: in regards to the campaign, though, because I did hear a lot of parents' concerns about, well, I don't know how it works. You know, a lot of the things they were saying, it's like, oh, I thought it was an excuse to absent, you know, et cetera, or I thought I could take my time. So just the education aspect of it, I did hear a lot of parents saying, explain to me what counts. I don't want the school to lose money, so what do I need to do, whether, you know, they need the packet or whatever, what do I need to do to make sure that my student doesn't get, the school's not losing money and my student doesn't get targeted towards this. Yeah.

[2006] SPEAKER_31: So more of a detailed education camp. It's education, yeah.

[2009] SPEAKER_37: Because that's what I heard from parents, that they struggle. Yeah. You know, you want to do the right thing.

[2015] SPEAKER_28: Yeah, exactly. That's helpful. Yeah. OK, good. So, okay, so we're going to show you some new... So, Mr. Larry Simon surprised us all last week with some really exciting data and I was like, how did he pull that data? What happened? And so part of not only of our campaign and our attention to chronic absentee, just like we discussed earlier, is like maybe there's something off about the data? Like the numbers seem really, really And that was something that you brought up as a concern, and so that was something that we took to heart. And Larry and his team did a really fantastic job of looking and working with the schools. So one thing that came up was that students were being coded incorrectly if they go to science camp. So it was showing up, so it was coded correctly on our end, but then the back end coded for CalCADS. was showing as an absence. And that was true of also some of the field trips. And then just in general, some of the activities or things that were coded were just on the back end of our system were not linking accurately to CalPET. So that ended up cleaning up a lot of our chronic absentee. And then also another example would be like independent study might be not marked correctly, or even though the materials were turned in, then it wasn't marked as, the absence wasn't

[2094] SPEAKER_31: And I think what it taught us, and as we start to plan out our office manager meetings and our clerk meetings, is what more hands-on professional development training do we give our staff? So that we can really kind of all be on the same page. And I think we rely so much on them. We say, oh, they'll figure it out.

[2111] Leonor Rebosura: No.

[2111] SPEAKER_31: I mean, folks need some support. And we need to, as a district, provide that support. We've had a lot of new people and new roles at the school sites. And we can't go back to the practice of a verbal, or what do you call it, an oral history. It has to be something that's really written down in terms of procedures. But as we started to, as Larry, Mr. Simon started to scrub the data and really look at the coding, we said we would do that. And thank you, Mr. Simon, he did it. And so we also saw some changes there. So I think that's better reflected.

[2144] Nancy Thomas: How often do the office managers and clerks come together for training?

[2150] SPEAKER_31: It varies. So our office managers come separately from our clerks, and that's something I think we need to look at. So it's about once a month, more the office managers than the clerks. And then that's something where we want to look at some of our dollars, and maybe that's where we look at the Prop 47, because our clerks are not full time. They're all less hours. And then we also don't want to pull them from the sites while the kids are there. And so if we start to look at the Prop 47 funds for next year, to look at more meetings with them and to leverage some extra hours to convene everybody together.

[2184] SPEAKER_28: And the other thing, actually, we just had a meeting right before this meeting because we're always, you know, like quickly coming together and problem-solving. We had an opportunity to meet with Mr. Simon and just say, how can we be more proactive about this, right? Like our checks and balances, like in the past is kind of like just pushing through the cow pads, like is there, are there things that we can put in place? And he's like, I'm so glad you said that because I have the spreadsheet of like who we need to, he's like, I've been wanting to talk to you about that. So yeah, come on over.

[2213] SPEAKER_37: Is this still just looking at elementary, not second year yet?

[2224] SPEAKER_25: It's like, it's everything. It's everything. So there's pieces of that that are like, when you say coding and transcribing, some of that is like system-wide. It affects everything. Some of it is practice that has changed this year for the office people. So it is sort of across the board.

[2240] SPEAKER_28: So why don't you show them your little chart that we... Oh, I don't think it's in here.

[2252] SPEAKER_25: You can talk about it. Right, so basically we're just establishing process now for... The information we sent over before was kind of a black box. Nobody was looking at it outside of a couple of people. So we're establishing who the stakeholder is, for instance, the discipline report we certified CALPADS, or the chronic absenteeism report, which is new as of last year. Just all the various reports, who needs to look at it, when they need to look at it, and it's going to be part of the principal sign-out process for the end of the year. So hopefully we'll have more eyes on the information to verify everything is correct.

[2280] SPEAKER_28: If something comes up that seems like that seems really off, right?

[2284] SPEAKER_31: And I think once we tie it to the principal checkout, then it's like, you're leaving for the year, you verify the data, you know the data the best, and then that way, because the rest of us still stay here for the summer, but no one's here to help us to verify it. So we'll do that before they leave for the summer.

[2300] SPEAKER_28: So let's go to the information that Larry and Mr. Taylor shared. So if you look at just how the information has been pulled, so it was pulled less than 5%, absent, chronically absent, five to 10. So the critical areas are 10 to 20% and then more than 20%. So if we're looking, what is, what color is that, orange?

[2323] SPEAKER_25: Orange and red, yeah.

[2324] SPEAKER_28: So you're gonna combine those two percentages and that's what would be reported from the state on the dashboard. So just as first glance, you're like, wow, we're looking at from 20, sometimes 30% to 5% at some of our schools. So I think just a combination of the cleanup And our efforts this year of having concentrated conversations and regular data and making individualized efforts at the school, we're seeing significant I want to say it's not a growth, it's a decline, which is fantastic and something to be celebrated.

[2363] SPEAKER_31: And we can't let up, because as John was very clear, the school year has to finish by the time we can say hooray, because that can still... So one thing I'd like to say about that, I thought about while you were bringing that up,

[2375] SPEAKER_25: The way I put these numbers is not over the 180, which we'll get to at the end of the year, I did percent of the year, so this is like out of 140 whatever right now. So when I did look at the data in time windows, people were more chronically absent going up to December, like around that time frame. And when I looked at the last, I did run these same, I don't have them in here, but we ran the same sort of charts for previous years. It seems to get better later in the year, because right now you still have a lot of that December data, like a day, one day out of 140 matters more than one out of 180, right? So I would expect the number to drop a couple of tenths of a percent. So a lot A lot of that is coding and the way things were checked. But even if I applied those system-wide codings to last year's data, it's still better this year than it was last year.

[2428] SPEAKER_36: So this looks like BGI is on absenteeism dropped from 19% last year to less than 3%? 3.8% on this graph.

[2438] SPEAKER_32: But remember to keep looking at the green, because those are your students that are on the border. So those are the kids that they have they have to decrease, right?

[2448] SPEAKER_36: Yeah, because they can't move into that.

[2451] SPEAKER_25: Right. So if you're thinking about it in terms of like on the bubble, that's what I would call this like lime green, whatever, whatever color that is. Um, what happens with just a couple of differences and things, a lot of those on the bubble become orange, right?

[2464] SPEAKER_36: So that's the orange and red color. Yes. Even before, even at two-thirds of the school year, they were already qualified. No, no, no.

[2474] SPEAKER_25: So when you're saying that, that doesn't mean they have 18 days already. Because the way I generated this graph is out of 10% of the year to date. So if they had been two days into the school year and I calculated this graph, they'd be at 50% if they missed one day. So that's because they didn't seem to make sense to only look for kids at an 18 because then you'd have a really low number and we keep growing as the year went on. So I did it as a divisor of the 10% of year's data. Yes, which made more sense to me.

[2503] Nancy Thomas: Well, it seems like music has made good progress.

[2506] SPEAKER_31: Yeah. She really has been. She's been kind of the leader on a lot of this work.

[2510] SPEAKER_28: The champion. Yeah. And it's showing.

[2512] SPEAKER_36: Even if you look at Schilling, it's like less than 8%. Schilling was 32% last year.

[2516] SPEAKER_25: Right. But a lot of it is, when we said that's the coding piece as well, right? So if I applied that same logic to last year's data, the numbers go down a lot, right? But it still looks better this year, even with that logic applied. Because a lot of it is practice in how they're coding absences and the things they're doing in the schools to reduce chronic absenteeism.

[2533] SPEAKER_37: So based on that information, then, We can conclude that our dashboard had some coding errors.

[2541] Terrence Grindall: Yes.

[2541] SPEAKER_21: I don't know if we had a dashboard, but I think the inputs that we were putting in the dashboard, we had some data entry errors that we've done correctly.

[2554] SPEAKER_36: No, no, no, the inputs, the data, the information. Yeah, so based on this one, it does feel like by the end of June, at the end of the school year, most of the school will probably have less than 10% of the funding absentee.

[2575] SPEAKER_36: I really don't see the next two months somebody will jump on.

[2580] SPEAKER_25: And the trend the last year and the year prior going, it should go down a little because there's generally less absences around now versus. But the balance of that is there's a couple

[2596] SPEAKER_21: So I think that's no so speaking for last year I would I would

[2621] SPEAKER_32: anticipate that the chronic absenteeism rate also had to do, was correlated with the suspension rate last year. We had a high suspension rate last year.

[2633] SPEAKER_32: I can't speak to this year.

[2635] Nancy Thomas: Yeah, so far this year, they're probably the worst.

[2638] SPEAKER_36: Well, they declined the least. Oh, here? Yeah. Are you going to believe that? Yeah. It's not the worst. No, I think they declined the least. if all the other schools are going from 32% to less than 10%, they went from 25% to more than 70%, they might, they declined the least probably.

[2657] SPEAKER_25: Well, Kennedy, Lincoln, and BGI declined the least, because they went from sub-20% to. Yeah, I mean, but those were already small, like, low to begin with.

[2665] SPEAKER_21: Which means that it was still pretty flat. There has been a lot of change. So, declining the least.

[2679] SPEAKER_25: Well, no, I mean, snow is at 28, and they're going down to 7.

[2683] SPEAKER_31: To 7, yeah, that's a significant decline. So it's significant. But I think, you know, going back to absolutely, we've got to keep our focus here. Because remember, if we can also get the general ADA up, because that's going to be the other positive offshoot of this, right? Because then that's going to generate more funds for us also as a district.

[2703] SPEAKER_36: Do you think the ADA number is affected by this?

[2707] SPEAKER_25: I don't think they're necessarily directly correlated, because a small number can change this a lot, whereas that's the total number of days versus the attendance. The ADA does look a little better, but better in decimals and percent, not, you know. And you are at 96, it's hard to go to 100.

[2723] SPEAKER_32: But I guess I want to look at it this way than you'd be. If you missed 10%, you're still 90%. Right. For A2A, right? You do ADA.

[2731] SPEAKER_21: Yeah. The ADA calculation, do you know the elementary calculation? I know the high school one. It's generally just that they attend one full day.

[2746] SPEAKER_21: They can be served attending a full day at the high school.

[2751] SPEAKER_32: One period?

[2751] SPEAKER_25: Is it one day?

[2752] SPEAKER_36: I believe so. So the average ADA is we average out all the 80 days. So one day is when we have 5,800 students. And then we average all 180 days, we can't average ADA.

[2766] SPEAKER_21: I think ADA looks more in action, so I'd have to ask. No, it's actual attendance. Because the data we're putting this into is their database. So they pull their own reports whenever they want from the state, and they can see our live data.

[2779] SPEAKER_25: So it's it's it's that's where it becomes really confusing why the ADA numbers are not might be really accurate and these were Inaccurate last year because we send them to two different things. The ADA system has been in place for a very long time It's pretty you know, the numbers have been saying I've been really going for a while. This is new as of Technically two years ago, but last year's the first year. We're seeing the information and it goes through a whole different system and I'm guessing the state's going to go to using this more for everything in the long run. But right now, they're still separate.

[2807] SPEAKER_21: So we can provide it. So we can bring back more information and provide an update of the more specifics of how the ADA is calculated.

[2814] SPEAKER_37: I'd have to ask the finance how that's done. So I have a question regarding suspension. If a student gets suspended for a whole week, that's five days, do they get the packet sent home? No. So that's considered absent.

[2827] SPEAKER_31: It's a double hit. I think my point about saying why it's good to keep the focus on chronic absenteeism, because it's more the attendance campaign, right? It's about why attendance is so important, just in general. Because in the end, we will generate more funds, hopefully.

[2847] SPEAKER_28: And that's just a different cut. It just shows you by grade level. The first one was showing you by school site. And then this shows you, because remember we talked about how we see a higher percentage in our TK and K. And I'm still seeing that. I mean, it's not... How does TK compare to last year at this point?

[2870] SPEAKER_25: Well, everything in general looks a little better. The big thing I noticed, because I'm looking at it visually when I generate like this, is the lime green bubble is smaller. When I looked at it the last year, it was more like out here. So we're a lot more bubble here than last year, which to me really says they're making efforts. So a lot of those bubble kids seem to be sliding back, and they're not chronic. And those are definitions A2A does.

[2895] SPEAKER_28: So I just matched that. I know, for example, music, who has preschool and a TK program. She was talking about how they do a number of parent professional development with their preschool parents around like, how do you get your kids out of bed? And what's your schedule in the morning? And how do you bring your little ones to school? So just giving them tips and resources about getting them in the habit of coming to school. So obviously that's been one positive thing that shows Okay, so our current work, we've done a lot. So I did a little high overview of the action plan. So, I'll just go quickly. So, like I said, we've done a lot of work at DLT. We're doing a partnership with attendance work. We recently participated in a webinar and our last DLT, we also through attendance work completed a self-evaluation at a high level of district supports around chronic absentees while principals, we had a really candid and thoughtful conversation about where are our gaps, identifying our gaps, and what are some possible immediate action critical areas, next steps. Schools are also gonna do their own self-assessment at their individual school and do a similar process. So one thing that came out of it, loud and clear, and it's something we've talked about all year, is we need a district-wide attendance campaign. So working on a slogan in conjunction with attendance work and Volare and trying to come up with a really clear way that we can message to our community and increase parent education. Looking at our multi-tier system of support and having, and that was something principals were really clear, like we need a specific, what do we do at each step of the process? Like early on in identifying, these are the steps that we take. If we're getting into a critical area, what are the steps and resources that we have available for families? And then when we get into tier three, what are those resources? Also really looking at our McKenty-Vento students, which is our homeless students, and what does that really mean? Helping staff understand, it's not the traditional picture of like, oh, you're living out of your car. It's also students that may have multi-families in a home or living in multiple homes and traveling and don't have a one solid place that they stay. So how do we first identify those students so that we can get resources to them? Also developing sensitivity and understanding the needs and differences of these students and how to support our families. And then also looking at, that was something too that came out of our self-assessment, is that we don't really have a district-wide or like a district office centralized attendance team that's really based at the school site. So how do we have support at a district level that would have other players that would be able to help connect multiple resources that maybe the schools aren't aware of? And so we identify the coordinator of pupil services and the manager of mental health and wellness, because that's already work that they're doing and have a lot of additional contacts, of being able to then have teams come in and say, this is a really tough case, we need more help to help this family. And they would also be in charge of doing regular data reports, tracking the data, following up with schools, noticing what's happening with this family, where are you at, and so just additional support.

[3113] SPEAKER_31: And monitoring, I think, district-wide, all of the schools to solve their problems.

[3120] SPEAKER_28: Oh, so expected outcome, we're gonna decrease by 10%. And right now, it looks like we're going to be blowing that out of the water. Hopefully. And so even by decreasing by 10%, it would take us out of the red and out of differentiated assistance. So we feel like this is a really reasonable goal and one that we hope that we can celebrate because it's higher and then also adjust so that we're continuing to combat that.

[3144] SPEAKER_31: And it's important to also address the student groups, not just the all students. Yes. So a particular focus to African-American homeless and special education students.

[3152] SPEAKER_37: And do you guys see a potential growth from red? Oh, it's yellow. So you can make orange.

[3161] SPEAKER_32: So the next part that we have, and I'll be very quick, this is just to remind you of where we fell on the indicators with suspensions. And it's by all students. And then the three groups that we are also in differentiated assistance for. So as I said, it's all students. Our African-American students, our foster youth, and our homeless students. Okay.

[3184] SPEAKER_21: I would suggest, I don't know if we're gonna, if there's a break point for expulsion, we'll come back to that at a later study session. How much can we do in the next two minutes, really?

[3196] SPEAKER_32: Right, right. So I'm just giving you the quick overview of kind of the data about suspensions and by school site. And then I'll give you our action plan. And again, the five by five, so you can see where we fall with each school and district wide. This is all data you've seen before. This is the older data. This was presented, Ms. Black presented this in October. As far as expulsions, we had one in 2016-17, zero in 17-18, and then we did have a spike this year in 18-19. And so we had six as of March 1st. And so we did a little bit of our own root cause analysis with that. And we came up with an action plan. Again, we want to establish the multi-tiered system of support and focus on our secondary schools. We want to explore restorative practices at the secondary level and look at other high schools that use the practices as a model and develop our own process here. Increase our mental health clinicians to support our non-Medi-Cal students. So at the high school, we are fortunate enough to have a therapist who can meet with the students who is non-medical, and so just increasing the opportunity for our students to help support them with their social emotional needs. And also, did you guys want to talk about the Student First campaign?

[3278] SPEAKER_31: Yeah, I think we're in the midst of right now planning the fall and our kickoff. And what we really looked at is that we really need to do a focus around students. Not that it's not happening already, but really bringing it to the forefront particularly at our high schools. What we've seen is that there has been a spike with just anxiety around testing and anxiety with some of our students and certainly social media. And that's not something new to Newark, but I think it's really putting some resources and support for our teachers and our staff at the high school. In particular, I think around sensitivity training, but I think more than that, it's more training around how to work with our student groups and how do we support families and kids of color and also kids with disabilities. And how do we do that, right? So this has to come from the staff. And I think once we're looking at some stable leadership for next year at the high school, we've started some work around having a landscape report with Illuminate and really seeing what are building on the success of the high schools. Because I will tell you right now, we have very resilient, hardworking folks at the high school, but we see them in isolation and how do we support them to be united in the work and I think and I know that it's with stable leadership at the high school to really support them. And then the other thing we're looking at is expanding health education at the high schools. We've seen a gap in that and I think that's an awesome avenue to really bring in these conversations and professional development around social-emotional, health hazards for kids in terms of vaping and other non-health, you know, things that are really going to be detrimental to their health as individuals. Yeah, really, you know, our kids are really combating with a lot of stuff out there and in turn our staff is as well. So giving them the support that they need to really deal with some of these issues and so looking at expanding health education.

[3392] SPEAKER_37: Can I ask a quick question regarding our spike here? Is that, do you guys see it as possible change in leadership that could cause this? Or is it behavior within students that is different from priority?

[3412] SPEAKER_32: It's probably both in conjunction. You can speak to the leadership part, but the students are also facing a lot of different anxieties than they have in the past. Different than they would have in 2018 and 17? Whether it's social, emotional, but we're also seeing a spike in students, which impacts the chronic absenteeism, not wanting to go to school for anxiety reasons, too. And so that impacts it. As far as expulsions, I think it's the level of support that we have for our students, too. With I would say with the leadership part because we have reduced by two Administrators at the high school level so there's less opportunity for students to check in so you're at risk students Dean's a dean and a VP We reduced both Right, but so it's the it's the student to adult ratio contact to and checking in with your most at-risk students because when you have a a higher number of opportunities to check in with students, they're less likely to get to that point.

[3479] SPEAKER_21: Some of those also are statutory required expulsions. I don't know if all of them are.

[3484] SPEAKER_37: No, I understand, but if you go based on that, that's what you're hearing. Right.

[3489] SPEAKER_37: Are kids behaving differently? Are students behaving differently?

[3492] SPEAKER_21: Well, definitely the instability is part of that.

[3494] SPEAKER_31: Right. And I think, but going back to, I think we need to do deeper work on that response analysis. Like, how many of it had to do with drugs? How much of it was fighting? How much of it was other behaviors, right? And then looking at the instability of leadership and kind of being that front line to really support it.

[3518] SPEAKER_32: I'm just going to also say there's part of the PBIS is the check-in, check-out for your tier two students. And so with less opportunities to check in with people, because there's less people to check in with, that also leads to higher percentage.

[3535] SPEAKER_31: So here, and here's our goals for the 2021 dashboard. Certainly, we know this is going to, we're really looking at also next year as a working year, but we're developing some support for the new leadership that's coming in, looking at restorative practices, and really unpacking those expulsions and suspension rate at the school.

[3559] SPEAKER_37: I did have a quick question that I wanted to ask in regards to, or maybe just kind of put the thought out there in regards to the process that is being used to prevent suspension compared to an in-house suspension, where the student is still But if you committed something wrong and you go in-house, which means you're in school all day, you don't participate in school with lunch or recess with the rest of the kids, but you're doing work in the classroom.

[3595] SPEAKER_21: And part of that, too, is really the part I think that the instability or the changes in the leadership of the high school have not helped, is really leadership's role at the high school is to really work with staff to come together on what are our non-negotiables, if you will, or what is our code of conduct going to be for the year, and how do we all look at it. There's certain things that we all have to enforce consistently, and I think we saw that in our conversation with students. And I think that's something where we stabilize the leadership and then they can really work with staff as a team and hopefully come together with more of what I call code of conduct system-wide.

[3669] Nancy Thomas: legal counsel regarding existing litigation and conference with legal counsel regarding anticipated litigation. Is there anyone that would like to address any of these issues?

No minutes available.