• Jess presented the academic and culture dashboard.  
• She highlighted the work we did to encourage attendance in December and the positive attendance results we saw.
• Sally noted the increased national attention she's seen on chronic absence.
• Our chronic absence rate is better than last year but is still high at 15%.
• Bill provided an update about the Board of Education's recent discussion about changing the accountability system to further prioritize chronic absence improvement.
• Jess provided an overview of a recent disciplinary incident.
• She presented the 2nd round of ANet.  Overall, students are performing similarly to last year.
• She highlighted some dips in 2nd and 6th grade and the schedule and curriculum shifts we've made to address these.
• She reminded the group that last year's 8th grade performance was very strong, and we expect to see lower performance this year.
•  She noted that the 7th to 8th grade improvement (the same cohort of students) is good.  I.e., students are making good progress, but we expect absolute performance to be lower in 8th grade than last year.
• The committee discussed the network composition and how important it was to have other district comparisons.  Jess shared that she thinks it could be helpful to have a benchmark but what's more important is to know what the target proficiency.  But ANet doesn't provide that.  Jess talked about how we use ANet, and how it's an opportunity for teachers to learn more about the standards.
• She presented the STEP and MClass data.  She noted that we will be moving MClass assessment up to January next year (instead of August).
• K and 1 are moving kids quickly, kids are struggling in 2nd grade.  3rd graders are our last "COVID" kids.
• We believe this is at least partially at decoding issue (based on MClass).  But we may want to strategically build knowledge.  We are already doing this but doing it more signficantly would mean a complete change to our literacy curriculum (e.g., it involves aligning fiction with non-fiction within grades and across all grade levels).
• Jess highlighted ACCESS results.  Our results were excellent, in terms of helping students meet their individual goals, and in terms of proficiency attainment. 
• Bill noted that DESE has asked to highlight the program in a research study.

• Bill presented the VOCAL report.
• He highlighted the positive data in general as well as trends showing some concerns about interpersonal relationships in 4th and 5th grade.
• Jess shared that she shared this with the instructional leadership team and they felt like it reflected strong scores in the areas the school has focused on, like academics and culturally responsive teaching.  
• Bill noted that this data doesn't indicate major concerns, just a need to be attentive to the social interactions of our upper elementary school students. This could be because they had greater -- and earlier -- exposure to social media than many of their peers due to the pandemic, or simply because of when they are growing up.  But it may be helpful for the school to devote more attention to supporting positive interpersonal interactions.

The committee decided to meet next in March at noon.