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Community Council Minutes

Community Council Meeting

October 5, 2021

Minutes

  • Attendees
    • Members Present - 
      • Parents – Alicia Willoughby, Jenny Smith, Marinda Fowler, Kristin Hall, Monica Cameron
      • School  Members – Mary Jo Williams, Deana Davis, Kelani Maughan
    • Members Absent - 
      • None
    • Guests
      • Parents- Laurel Mock
      • School Members- none
  • Welcome
    • Kristin Hall welcomed members and visitors and opened the meeting.
  • Review of Prior Meeting's Minutes
    • Alicia Willoughby motioned to approve prior minutes and Monica Cameron seconded.
  • Data  Shawna Blamires - Instructional Coach
    • Ms. Williams handed out updated data from Beginning of Year (BOY) Acadience Reading and math testing and verified the data from last year.
    • Acadience Math Data is from a new test. The state requires K-3 to take the test, our school administered the test to the whole school. We’re not really sure how valuable the data is yet.
    • Acadience is considered a screening test. We can do further diagnostics as needed.
    • We now have three testing aids, allowing reading aids to continue working with interventions without having to take two-week breaks for testing at the beginning, middle, and end of year.
    • Presentation of Data by Shawna Blamires
      • Orchard Springs Data Wall—broad strokes of the overall school (BOY 2021).
      • Can see when the shutdown happened—less blues but a big increase in reds and yellows.
      • We aren’t starting from scratch—data from EOY last year and BOY now is very similar, meaning that we didn’t lose a lot of ground over the summer.
      • If 80% of students understand the essential learning target, we can move on. If we don’t hit 80%, then we keep working on the skill. This means that about 20% of students move into Tier 2 interventions and we shouldn’t have more than 20% of students requiring that intervention. Students in the red move into Tier 3 interventions.
      • Our K-3 students are coming in lacking a lot of skills. 
      • 6th grade scores blew our minds this year! They are doing well. Benchmarks drop because the test is more complex. 6th grade is considered intermediate and not elementary.
      • EOY benchmarks are higher than MOY because kids might be hitting their mark at MOY and so the EOY goals might be different/higher goals.
      • Measures change in MOY for 1st grade, removing one test and adding two in, changing the composite scores.
      • Fewer reds in higher grades show that our interventions are working. We are trying to get kids more on benchmark before 4th grade. There are more intervention students in 4th grade this year. We had an increase in need in 4th and 5th grade.
      • Pathways of Progress is how Acadience shows growth. It is a national comparison, dividing kids into 5 cohorts of 20% segments. Teachers set individual goals for kids, both realistic and ambitious goals. Actual outcomes are tied to national statistics and not teacher goals. We are more interested in growth than benchmark. There is no beginning of year pathways, so we only have MOY and EOY data. We only have one year of data for that because of the shutdown in 2019-2020.
      • Pathways allows us to look at growth for kids who are already proficient or starting at benchmark (kids in the blue area). We can keep them growing. (Example: we have a second-grader who could do fourth-grade work, but at some point it is going to get hard for him).  Blue is the new green—we want kids to keep growing!
      • LETRS training: the science of reading. Mrs. Maag and Ms. Blamires did this training already. We changed the diagnostics which allows us to help kids better. Right now, it is a numbers game—so many kids need so much and are behind. Reading is foundational. All other K-3 teachers are beginning this training.
      • We are using diagnostics to help us find holes in learning. It is difficult to not be impatient—we have to look at this as a long-term goal (aka five-year-plan).  We are much further ahead than we were two years ago. We’re trying to put in place a systematic process so that we can have kids succeeding in older grades. We want to see growth, no matter what cohort the child is in (red, yellow, orange, green, blue).  
      • As we know more and learn more we can do better.
      • For example, in 2nd grade they usually focus on accuracy, but this year not enough kids are ready to meet those benchmarks, so the district is focusing on nonsense words. The goal now is to read 25 nonsense words by MOY. We are tracking this through progress monitoring to help students make growth. General approach is to test every two weeks on red, every three weeks on yellow, and monthly for green and blue. There is not always enough time so sometimes the green and blue students don’t get measured as often.  On Wednesdays we don’t pull for interventions, so the intervention aids do progress monitoring during that time.
      • Because we have so many K and 1st graders needing intervention, we’ve changed our approach. Instead of small group intervention for 20 minutes four times a week, we are doing individual targeted interventions for 5 minutes a day. This teaches the kids individual responsibility and allows the interventionist to correct errors immediately.
  • 2021-2022 Trustland Plan
    •  No changes to Plan/Budget Expenditures. Aids are getting their first paycheck this month and we haven’t cut a check for Chromebooks so not much has changed in the budget.
  • Action Items
    • None
  • Meeting Dismissed:  Alicia Willoughby motioned to adjourn, seconded by Kristin Hall.
    • 5:10 pm 

Next Meeting

  • November 9, 2021 4:00 to 5:00 PM at Orchard Springs Elementary