Meekerley opened it up to share the first draft of a new Board dashboard. She discussed the gaps we were having in the current way that data was being shared out to the board. We currently have been using open architects to share out data was not making it easy to understand where to focus the attention when analyze. We are now proposing that we use a google sheet to highlight strategic priorities metrics, school health metrics, and charter progress metrics. We are hoping to pair this with a newsletter that dives into the overall narrative of the data. This newsletter would be shared out prior to outcomes meetings, for feedback. And then a final draft of the newsletter would be shared out to the board prior to the trustee meetings. 

Sarah and Meekerley opened it up to the committee to receive feedback. Would this help you process what the state of the school is?

Questions/Discussion:

- Would Trustees still have access to open architect? Yes, we would still have that so people can play around with the open architect data

- They like that it is quick snapshot of the data

- Idea is there a snapshot tab that can show how the data is changing overtime? To make sure to not lose the growth.

- This is helpful in terms of the snapshot, it is nice that it shows the progress quarter over quarter, it is helpful that it ties to what we are tracking long term as well over 3-5 years.

- Are there areas where we want more or less details?

- Is it possible to have color coding to make it super clear to have what to focus on

- Good start, focus on getting it right before getting it going? Suggest start using this dashboard to make sure that it works? Are there places that it overlaps or repetitive? But overall it seems like 

- School health metrics: metrics that are important to the state of the school, but are not directly connected to a current strategy or priority, but we wanted to include these metrics somewhere, but need to sort out where is it overlapping or too one off? Do we want to build this out more? Or should it just be a tab called "other"?

- Suggested next steps: start using it, too see what we actually need in here? Are there things we talk about that don't regularly show up in the dashboard?

- Want to see how the progression and growth of the students will look over the years? We have students joining our community, and the question is if we are serving them in a helpful way to best serve their needs?

- Is there a cadence in which you would find it helpful to update these metrics? The metrics themselves will directly show how often they need to be updated? The beginning of the year, we will update it all based on the end of the years and comparative data. And some will be updated as we go and be updated before outcomes meetings.

- Would a newsletter in the summer be helpful?

- Three big buckets: Back to school, we have MCAS data, winter data (iReady), spring data that doesn't need to wait to the MCAS timeline. We would really need to map it and see what makes sense. We want to make sure it is natural to talk about certain data at certain points. How do we architect the outcomes committee school to make sense with the data timeline?

- We should have an updated dashboard before outcomes and board meetings? But also decide when in the year we have heavily focus on a specific metric.

Newsletter Companion to the Dashboard- How would you like to see the school based team use this to support the narrative of the dashboard?

- A clear pull out on the biggest concern and the biggest win for the board to see the highest priority things

- Meekerley proposed that Katie and Lily come up with an example of what the newsletter could look like next year, and share this with the board.

School staff led discussion to analyze the panorama data from this school year. We administer surveys to staff, families, and students to understand how the culture of the school is. Overall, we found trends of what we are doing well and what we are struggling with. For example, staff felt that we are serving all students. Where we are falling short is having purposeful PD. We pair the panorama data with anecdotes from over the course of the year. Boston Prep continues to analyze what changes we made positively impacted the school culture and which were not as effective as we had anticipated.

In terms of the bets we are making for the upcoming year, the school team conducted a data analysis and worked with school leaders to come up with a strategy. This past week principals did a state of the school with middle school and high school to come up with action plans and proposals for the upcoming year. The goal is that by the time we leave there are socialized drivers and plans to start right away in orientation. 

We have categorized into two buckets-- MTSS (Multi Tiered Systems and Supports), making sure we have processes in school to support students as needed in real time. To help really understand who needs extra support and build intervention plans around this. Currently, we have pockets of great systems, but we do not have a school wide comprehensive support, which will not only help kids but also help support staff by having a more cross functional team. This is a big infrastructure goal.

Additionally, we are focused on how we support our students with executive functioning skills-- there are many sub-skills, so we are currently narrowing down to 2-3 sub-skills to focus in on for next year. 

Two more academic achievement drivers, are we are building out systematic reading and writing. We are doing so by building a culture of reading. We are also working on the practical side of reading, do the teachers have the skills to support our students skill building. Collectively, these are the big bets we will be making. We are also doing a 6-12 ELA curriculum adoption. We will be doing a ELA curriculum 6-12.