Amy updates the Board regarding the embargoed MCAS results and the Board discusses them for planning purposes.

Rebecca talks about middle school math issue - what do you make of 53% meeting/exceeding in 10th? Amy says they had excellent ELA teachers. Rebecca says great instruction matters but this is still an important data point. 

David asks how this compares to pre-pandemic? Amy says we are still trying to climb our way out. 

Amy discusses trends and correlations we discovered while analyzing this data. 

• Attendance 
• Homework
• Habits of Success

Denise asks if parents would be interested in this information? Yes! Amy says we are starting a parent education center on our website - we are deciding what the topics should be here and the above three things are the first three topics. Rachel says we pulled research and shared it with our parents last year but now that we have research specific to their students, it should be more impactful.

Michael returns to the 53% in 10th grade. How much does a great instructor play into this? Amy says it varies. Rachel adds that the gaps are wider and weirder than they have been in the past. Ann says it's difficult to build a whole system around one person. Amy says they did make strategic choices about moving great teachers this year to those anchor grades of 5th and 8th. 

Amy says we are trying to use this data in a more strategic way moving forward. 

Ann asks how do we use lagging indicators moving forward. Amy says we use the interim assessments to help us gauge where students are throughout the year. 

Rebecca asks if we have support for math homework? Amy says we don't have anything yet but we are talking about homework support after school or on zoom. We want this to be more of an instructional time as opposed to a compliance thing. 

Rachel says we couldn't really make sense of the data with all the things we've been doing to see improvement, so we've been looking for correlations and we are now focusing on being stronger in the areas that we found these correlations. 

The Board discusses some of the surprises that they found in the data i.e. 5th grade. Amy says the thing that was the most surprising was that all the work we did with writing didn't have more of an impact. Rachel adds that we knew 8th grade might have a blip because of teacher turnover in that grade. 

Rebecca asks if DESE still releases actual student examples? Amy says yes, we haven't looked at that yet but we will and we will share that information with teachers. Rachel says we have also decided to focus in on the students who are partially meeting and get them to meeting or exceeding and then for those who are not meeting, they have other issues such as attendance, so there are interventions being implemented for those students by our culture team and other school staff. 

Denise asks if it is the pressure of the test that makes our students unable to preform as well as we hoped. 

Aaron asks if our schools are fully staffed? Amy says the high school is and we are just missing a special education teacher at the middle school but we had an interview for that position yesterday. 

Ann asked how often we are looking at key indicators? Amy says we have a dashboard to look at them weekly and then we will move to quarterly as needed. Amy shares that we shared and discussed these indicators with staff at PD this week. 

Denise asks about tutoring services. Amy says we used one last year due to a teacher absence. Rachel says we've talked about bringing in college volunteers and leveraging our own teachers for after school help. 

Everything is tracking as would be expected for the month of July. We are going to be fully hired so no big swings in the budget anticipated there. 

Auditors are finalizing their report in the next few weeks and will present to the finance committee in September and then AnnMarie will report those findings out to the entire Board in September. 

Hold for next month when Matt is with us.