CHUFSD Board of Education Regular Meeting 9/3/26

Thank you. Good evening, everybody. I'd like to call to order the 09/03/2026 business meeting of the Croton-Harmon Union Free School District's Board of Education. We will open with item 1.2, the pledge of allegiance.

Item 1.3, the approval of the agenda. Be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby approves the agenda as presented. On the question? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? The motion carries. Moving into the next portion of our agenda, item 2.1, the president's report.

Begin now. You got me open? You wanna switch me? Alright. Well, good evening, everybody, and happy new school year. Welcome to the members of our community in the audience watching the livestream and, of course, listening at a later date. And welcome back to our students, faculty, staff, and everyone here. The entire board of education joins me in wishing you all a wonderful school year. We'd also like to thank every member of the district who worked tirelessly this summer to make sure our doors are ready to open on Tuesday. And we'd like to extend a special thank you to Croton PD and our crossing guards for ensuring the safety of our walkers, bikers, rollers, and student drivers this fall. You will see that I am wearing my slowdown Proton badge today as a reminder to our entire community that school is back in session. Stopping for school buses, stopping for pedestrians at crosswalks is not just important. It's the law.

Thank you to everyone who shared feedback on last week's improved livestream quality. I hope I'm coming through loud and clear. We're very glad to hear that you're hearing a difference. And, again, we wanted to thank doctor Ellen Moskowitz and mister Greg Cavallari for their work in making these changes. A reminder to everyone around the board table this evening, as I said earlier, please be sure to position your mic directly in front of you when speaking. And a reminder for me, check that it is on before you start speaking. I'll begin tonight with a preview of some key agenda items. In addition to our monthly hearing of the public, the board will hear from our student trustees with their first reports of this new school year. We will also be hearing from members of our ad hoc committee on technology who will share the findings of this summer's community survey and listening sessions in support of the recommendations that they'll be making to the full board.

We'll follow that with a discussion of district goals for the 2627 school year, some of which will be multiyear goals before moving into personnel recommendations and our consent agenda. I'd also like to take a moment to highlight the robust and productive discussion we held at last week's meeting regarding Croton-Harmon School's technology reset. First, on behalf of the entire board, I'd like to thank the district's administrative team, our building leaders, and our faculty for engaging in the thoughtful, deliberate work that has put this district at the forefront of school systems nationwide addressing the role of technology in instruction, learning, and student well-being. As a board and as a community, we have a lot to be proud of, particularly our sustained advocacy over the last year on behalf of our district students. I am grateful for the collaboration between our educational leaders,

our school board trustees, and our families and community because all of that led us here. And I want us all to remember that the work to improve our students' educational experience is ongoing and never done. Just last week, like many of you, I'm sure, I read The New York Times article titled How Big Tech Captured America's Schools. The subhead of that article was really telling. It stated, companies like Google and Microsoft have used their money, their might, and their massive reach to influence nearly every step of the education supply chain. The implication being, not surprisingly, that these corporations see k through 12 students as their customers. The article went on to highlight workshops for teachers and students that were funded or led by corporate giants like Amazon, Apple, Meta, etcetera, and compared them to seminars for doctors organized by pharmaceutical companies that aimed to get physicians to prescribe the latest brand name drugs. The article continued, many parents would likely object if, say, ExxonMobil wrote their children's environmental science curriculum

or if Purdue Pharma trained their children's biology teachers. Yet over the last decade, the entire educational system actually has often embraced the technology industry in similar ways with that with very few questions asked. I am proud of our community, our board of education, and our school district for asking those questions, and even more important, for proposing new courses of inquiry, for reviewing practices and metrics, and for committing to improving student outcomes and experiences, as you'll hear more about tonight. Thank you. Moving into, the next item on our agenda, 2.2, the hearing of the public. A little preamble just to remind everyone. We believe that effective dialogue can occur only in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Therefore, it's our policy to conduct our business at meetings and in all communications in a manner that models respect and civility. We invite members of the public to share this commitment with us, and we invite you now to step up to the podium and,

deliver your comments or remarks for three minutes. Thank you.

Hello. I'm Marissa In. I have a third grader who is at CT, and I just wanted to say thank you so much for everyone's really hard work and thoughtfulness on the tech reset. It was very exciting to hear of all these changes. I know our work is not done, but, I'm so appreciative of everyone spending time on this. And it's awesome that Croton can be a leader in this space. So thank you.

From Truesdale Drive. I'd like to thank the board for the work they've done in this technology in the classroom. It has its place, but it's not just a fraction of the percent of where it's been. And it was a subject of the last selection. And rather than pushing it aside, you jump right on it. I wish people jumped on phones twenty years ago the way you jumped on this, but, you've done a good job and heard a lot of good things. So I'd like to congratulate you for that. I'd to commend the school district. The other schools look the same. And, in my family, we have a football history, and every one of them gave the district a a plus on the fields and the sports complex, which you spent money on, and, it's come to fruition. But back to the most important thing, which is the education of our children. So what I've heard from other parents is that you're on track and that the district is serious about education reforms.

And then the litany that the president of the board just went through, I'd also like to remind you that one of those big tech companies was owned by the Chinese Communist Party, and the and the stuff they sent to The United States branch was totally unwholesome compared to what they do in the home country. And that's one of these bad guys on the list of addictive characters and corporations. I'd like to mention one other thing in terms of Big Tech's influence over education. You remember that back about 2010, when the state of New York was short about five to ten billion dollars, They agreed with mister Gates, the head of Microsoft, who sends his kids to nontechnological you know, not schools that don't have technology. That's where he sent his kids. And for his $10,000,000, the state of New York introduced, you know, I think it was, you know, the reform number three eighty five Common Core,

which from personal experience was a paperwork disaster in the school that I was affiliated. We we had the finest teachers. And to load them down with the paperwork, the onerous paperwork burden that the common core provided when these teachers were produced they had a a plus we had an a plus school. It was a disgrace just for the money, and that was mister Gates and Microsoft. So thank you.

Anyone else for the public? Okay. We'll move into item 2.3, the superintendent's

report. Over to you. Thank you, Anamika. Good evening, everyone who's here in person and all those who are watching at home. In the week since we were last together,

as a board, obviously, we celebrated one of the the hallmarks of any school year. And certainly in the educational field, there's nothing like the energy and excitement of the first day of school. As we were also reflecting today, there's nothing like the fatigue of the end of the first couple days of school. So I would just wanna take a moment to thank, as we heard earlier, every member of the staff, of the board, every member of our parent community who was a part of making the first three days of school so successful for all of our students. We hope everyone gets some rest this weekend because we've got a lot of work to do, this year. But I wanted to highlight just a couple of some of the events from, this busy first three days of school, beginning with our kindergarten welcome event, where we had a chance to see a couple of our board members there wearing a different hat. But it's, always thrilling to get a chance to to welcome the newest students to our system. And particularly this year, I think the level of excitement around the classrooms and the experiences that they're walking into,

is really heightened. So, I thank Carrie and Craig and certainly the entire staff and and faculty at CET for, for putting together such a wonderful first couple of days for our incoming kindergarten students, and look forward to continuing that. Actually, one of the things that we learned was, because of the weather, as Carrie mentioned, the opportunity for parents to walk their their kids into the classroom and have that that moment and that memory both for the parents and the kids felt like a really special one, so that's one that we'll we'll replicate in years, to follow. Also wanted to mention that we had a chance, Laura and I, to attend the PVC principal's coffee yesterday. I wanna thank Millie and Nicole and all the parents who were a part of that. Some really great discussion around building goals, district goals, board goals, the technology reset, and everything that's gonna make this year a really unique and special one, at PVC.

And so I thank them, for their participation and their leadership in that. Speaking of leadership, I wanna thank thank our student leaders at the high school, our big buddies who are part of the annual tradition of welcoming members of the high school student body in such a robust and and respectful and and developmentally appropriate way. So thank you to all of those team members who are part of welcoming the class of, I guess, twenty thirty one from the high school. And also want to mention, and this came up yesterday briefly at the PVC principal's coffee, and we'll mention it later during, district goals. One of the things that we'll be talking about and sharing more information about this year is the opportunity for parents to come in on a much more regular basis and be in our classrooms. Right? Those we would call them learning walks. PVC has been doing these for the past three years.

Had a chance to to hear some parent feedback to Maylene and Nicole who have been a part of those at the principal's coffee, all overwhelmingly positive. And so we've expanded that now with the support of our faculty to all three buildings. So you'll be hearing more about that, in the next few days, but we look forward to those moments and thank our faculty for for being vulnerable enough to say, welcome. Come on in. See the greatness that's happening in our classrooms. See what our kids are doing. There's opportunity in that, and some great conversations that certainly will stem from it. So I want to to just put that on on everyone's radar as we start the year. More excellence to come on that front. Also, I just wanted to briefly address something that's become obviously a a hot topic of conversation over the certainly over the course of the past months, but particularly over the past few days was the the launch the introduction then launching this week of of the tech reset. Right? And so I think

all of us came and continue to come at that conversation from the the shared belief that learning is a social function. It's a social construct, right, and that classrooms and schools should reflect that, and that for too long in too many places, including too often here, technology and screens was getting in the way of and became an impediment to that social construct. And it was really it's been, it's always one thing to to say you have a vision for something, and then it's another more beautiful thing to see it in action. And so to be in all of our classrooms over the past three days, and Betsy and I had a chance to walk through many classrooms at the high school and and PVC today to see it in action, right, to see it in our k two classrooms at CET, the genuine enthusiasm and joy that's always been a part of our system, but to see it unimpeded by technology, to see our faculty having pivoted so seamlessly to

an environment that I think we all agree is a healthier one for our students in every way, has been heartwarming. I'm incredibly appreciative to our community, to our faculty, to our staff. And so now the conversation shifts to other folks in the region saying, okay. How did you accomplish that? And I wanna give, great credit to our faculty again, to Laura, to Ellen, to other members of our team who helped to operationalize this, and certainly to our board and community who, have been such solwart supporters and and motivators in terms of moving this forward. This is, I think, unquestionably a point of pride for our community as we begin the year, and we look forward to, seeing this continue to evolve as we go forward. And just one final mention in terms of what's next. We have, of course, the the great opportunities at the beginning of each year for our families to come in and spend time in our buildings with our faculty through our back to school nights,

and our curriculum nights. So I wanted to share those dates and times, with you. All of these will be on our website, our homepage as a pop up starting tomorrow morning. And so we look forward to welcoming all of our families of all of our students, as we get into later into September so that you get a chance to get to hear firsthand from our faculty about the curriculum,

what it is that that your students are learning, how they're learning it, and what their experience is like here on a daily basis. So we thank you in advance for, scheduling. We know outside of your your incredibly busy schedules, anytime you can devote to spending in our classrooms makes us better, so thank you for that. Thank you. Thank

you, superintendent Walker. I am pleased to turn it over now to our student trustees ex officio. Our students, Nikki Mukherjee and Madeline Kramer, joined the school board earlier this summer at the, in the middle of July. And this is their first meeting after the start of school. So you'll be seeing them come back to our meetings regularly with reports on various happenings, in both CHHS and across the school district and representing the student perspective. So I'll turn it over to you both now.

So hi, everyone. I'm very excited to be giving my first student report as student trustee this year. To start, the first day of school went really well. And from what I've heard, our freshmen had a great transition into high school. I'm looking forward to hearing more about how the rest of the year goes for them and the rest of our students. Since I don't have any new school issues or concerns that have been brought to me in the last two days I've been here, I'd like to just use this report to highlight a few topics I'm personally excited to learn more about and discuss with you all the throughout this year. As I am a graduating senior, there are two key areas I'm especially interested in, and those are changes being made within our schools and the reasoning behind them and how those changes ultimately affect students and their academic opportunities. This includes everything from new courses and programs to everyday policies and rules. I'd like to better understand the process behind implementing these changes and how are communicated to students and families and how their impact is evaluated in our schools.

One area I'm particularly interested in is our interdisciplinary courses. I myself am a massive fan of these interdisciplinary courses and learning, and I think that there is so much good that can be done with these classes. As these courses continue to develop, I have several questions I'd like to explore with you all this year. Some of those include, how are counselors communicating the purpose, academic value, pathways of these interdisciplinary courses to students and families throughout? Are colleges and admissions officers being made aware of why these courses are being offered and how they fit into our curriculum and how they might help students in their transition into high school and university? Since course rigor is an important part of college admissions, how do these interdisciplinary courses allow students to diversify their schedules while still demonstrating that they are challenging themselves academically?

Are there are there opportunities within these courses to increase academic rigor such as honor honors level expectations, additional projects, independent work, extra credit, or even connections with outside organizations and professionals. Last two, I promise. How these courses prepare students for higher level classes, including AP AP courses and other advanced coursework in college or even in high school if they choose to take it? And more broadly, how do we evaluate whether these new courses are achieving their intended goals and benefiting students? Now speaking on the new technology updates in the school, I, of course, have heard mixed feelings among the high schoolers. On one hand, many students are excited about putting their phones away as they won't be inclined to check them in class and ultimately get distracted. Of course, there are some that are upset at the fact that they won't be able to use their phone or electronic device in any school area during the school day.

With that being said, I'm truly excited and interested if opinions change throughout the year, how students will adjust, and how it will affect our learning as a high schooler myself. I'm excited to learn more about these questions throughout the year and make sure that as our school continues to evolve, student perspectives remain part of the conversation, and I'm excited to work with you all.

So the first few days back have been very eventful, very busy. I, like Nikki, don't have many, new fee much new feedback that I've heard from students in these past few days. I think the tech reset has so far been successful. Nikki covered, I think, a lot of, you know, what's been going on. I don't need to discuss that much further. But I have three main, pieces of feedback that I've heard from students, that I think they felt last year and are expecting to continue through the 2627 school year. So the first one in the high school is the rolling grade book. The second one is the art department and the school, fall and spring productions. And the third, that I'm very curious about is algebra for all in the middle school.

So to start with the rolling grade book, I've heard two main pieces of feedback from students. The first one being that they really liked the rolling grade book because they started with good grades in their classes and then were able to kind of coast on the work that they had already built up. Their grade didn't fluctuate so much, after they had had this good grade throughout the year. Students who didn't like it didn't like it because they started the year off so not so great, but they weren't able to improve their score no matter how hard they worked throughout the year. I should say the rolling grade book is, different from last year and previous years where in the high school, the grading has been on a quarterly basis where you kind of have a fresh start at the beginning of each quarter. And then at the end of the year, everything gets averaged together, for the students' final grades.

So with this system, there weren't any sort of fresh starts. I think this was a problem specifically in the math department. A lot of kids that didn't start the year off so well were unable to improve their grades, and specifically in algebra two trigonometry, the coursework gets a lot harder as you progress through the year. So I think the teachers saw this, and they really wanted to help the students, bring up their grades, And so they decided to weight the grades at the end of the year heavier. So there are a few checkpoints, and those each have tests. So, as you went throughout the year, the tests were weighted heavier. The issue was that with that was if you didn't do so well on those tests, they were re weighted heavier, and so your grade just went down. So, you know, that was a solution that was tried but didn't go so well. So I think the main the main point is that, students felt their grades were a misrepresentation

of the work they were putting in. Students The who did well at the start of the year didn't have to try so hard towards the end of the year, and the students who didn't do so well at the start of the year and maybe tried to do better weren't able to improve their grades so much. So my second topic of the art department and the musical. We have a very strong art department and, lots of very passionate art students in this community. I think, some students feel like they have a hard time, like, promoting themselves. I know the sports department has their athletic director, which helped them promote events, and games. We don't have that sort of position for the arts. We have students who are doing well on their NISMA tests and are getting into prestigious, orchestras, such as All County, and students in the art department who are submitting to Scholastics and are achieving great things. With the

the fall productions, the attendance has been pretty low, and we're me and Nikki, I should say, are both very involved in this. So the ticket sales that we get from those productions really are we're reliant upon for sets, costumes, all of the production elements. And so when we get less ticket sales, we have less profits to put towards those things. In addition, the attendance we do get comes mostly from student the cast members' families. So we're almost indirectly indirectly funding our own productions. A lot of sports teams, you know, we don't ask them to pay for students to pay for their own uniforms, and so it feels a little bit unfair to ask students to pay for their costumes. Lastly, I'll keep this one a little bit shorter. Algebra for all. I don't know much about this topic because I'm in the high school, but I'm very interested in learning further about it. I know a lot of students in eighth grade who took algebra one and felt they were strong math students and well equipped for this class and still struggled a lot

in this class. So I'm curious what supports we're providing for students who maybe math isn't their strongest subject, and are taking this hard level class. What supports we're providing them currently in eighth grade and then in fresh freshman year when they're pushed into geometry. So, that's it. Thank you.

Great. Thank you both very much. I wanna, I just wanna be able like, an overview of, what your sort of, student advocacy portfolios are gonna be for this year. I know that that was a that was an important distinction that you both made in terms of your approach to being student trustees, Sears, to actually focus in on a couple of important issues that are not important just to you, but also to the larger high school and even beyond the entire school community. And I appreciate how well I think you articulate all that. The great news in terms of some of the questions you've asked is that many of these are topics that we, as a board and administrative team, have actually already agreed to discuss this year. Things including our interdisciplinary courses and the impact of those, how we're able to sort of boost our arts program, specific things like examining the rolling grade book through, actually instructional practices and looking at outcomes, and then

delving in actually a little bit more specifically to algebra for all, I will at some point, I'm sure the, admin team I don't if you would like to chime in now to to talk about what we're gonna be talking about this year. These aren't things that we're gonna be able to answer today. But I think the fact that you've sort of articulated these as student concerns gives even more urgency to the fact that we wanna be having these conversations for our for the benefit of the board and for the community and also for the entire team to sort of learn from what your experiences are. Would you like to add anything?

So you're actually going to hear in just a couple of minutes as part of our district goals, a goal specifically around math that I think might answer some of the initial questions you have. And at some point, we can even I can even show you offline. We actually did a really nice data analysis this summer at our administrative and board of education retreat where we looked at the first year of the algebra for all data, which you guys might be interested in before kinda jump down the inquiry path of your own just as a starting point.

The other thing I'll chime in on just and, Allison, I know you're gonna be the mind my just saying, I had a I have had some conversations this summer with the the leadership team of our new performing arts booster organization, Champs. And I know that they are very eager to connect with folks at the high school because their efforts to service boosters for the arts. It's it's all the way from k through 12. So I think, that might be one of the first things we do for you all is to get you connected to them so that we can also start figuring out ways that, that everyone can be working together. Before we move on to our next item, do we have any other questions from the board on our student reports or any comments?

Yep. One of like. Hi. Just wanted to reiterate what Anamika said, thanking you guys for taking time out of your busy schedules to spend it with us and and provide this feedback. I just quickly, Nickly, not to put you on spot, but what did you like about the inter

I really liked how they were able to sort of weave in a bunch of different studies and topics. And, like, I know in some of the other ones, they were able to incorporate English with the social studies. And I know those sort of do go hand in hand naturally, but I think, really, I'm putting an emphasis on that and showing students how exactly they can learn both English and, English. Nope. That's not it. History and English, in one class, I I thought that was really interesting. And I think, as someone again, I'm gonna bring this up always, but as someone who's graduating, colleges are increasing their interdisciplinary learning, and they are trying to give students more of a way to learn differently than your traditional science, math, history, English. And so I think this is a great way to prepare our students for the future because, again, it's always gonna get more competitive. It's always gonna get harder to,

exceed. And so if we're preparing our students for those challenges, then they will be ready to face them head on when they ultimately have to. And so for me, those interdisciplinary courses really do help provide students a new way of looking at learning and, I guess, learning each subject. Yeah.

My freshman year, I was in the maps, connections, and timelines course. So while I assume there has been up there have been updates to the curriculum and such, I might be able to answer some questions you have. I also think when, interdisciplinary courses are, have a really strong curriculum, it allows students to, like, deepen their understandings of these two different subjects that maybe they didn't see the connection of how they work together. But ultimately, in the career field, in in college, many subjects are not on their own. They're very woven together. So I think this is a a good step towards that.

Any other questions from the board? Okay. Thank you both. We're looking forward to hearing from you throughout the year, but this is a really great start. So thanks for setting the bar very high for yourselves, actually, going forward. We'll turn it over now to board reports, starting with a question I know the answer to, but I'll ask again, audit. January. Thank you. Well, at a certain point, I'll I'll remember that, and I'll stop asking. Board governance, we gave an extensive report last week, so there's nothing new to report. This is the the nice thing about having meetings two Thursdays in a row is we haven't had so much time to do do, committee work. On behalf of the policy committee, trustee Ana Teague is unable to be at tonight's meeting, but she asked me to share that the policy committee will be scheduling its next meeting. We'll be sharing a timeline for the board to review the,

NISPA business meeting resolutions. And I believe, Allison, if you'd like to share you you're attending the Westchester Putnam School Board Association's advocacy meeting. Anything you wanna say specifically about that? These mics.

Mine on. They're great when they work, but they're so easy. So, yes, I I I will be the representative. I will organize some information for board colleagues on the resolutions. I did wanna give a quick note that from that I neglected to mention last week from the West Put meeting that I think is actually particularly interesting for the district overall. Apparently, some of the others neighboring districts are getting inundated by foil requests by an organization called, I think, Data Branch. And you've heard about this? Yeah. So, I mean, it's just for the community as well. It's like, it's causing some districts, like, hours and hours of work and expense. And it's basically a fur it's it's going to, like, an organization, if you Google it, that sounds like it's it's compiling foilable information so that to improve k through twelve's understanding of procurement. So it I'm assuming they're gonna sell it back to us at some point.

So, anyway, I thought that was of interest if it wasn't on your radar that people were talking about. Thank you. What?

Interesting business model.

Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I think I mean, and Denise can attest to this that there are a number of foil inquiries that the district receives regularly from companies that are just trying to scrape information, nationwide. And they're often not based in New York, and they're off sometimes not related to education either.

Yeah. One of the the discussions was, like, which is kind of feeding into a later conversation that there was a feeling like, is is it legitimate is the FOIL request legitimate if it comes from AI? Like, it's an something that's automated. And, apparently, they were told, yes. You still have to comply.

Fine. May maybe the legislation is not too far behind. Denise, would you like to add anything on this? I know you're tracking this.

Yes. And I'll try to control my temper. Okay. We have received numerous FOIL requests from that organization, and we actually received multiple requests just slightly deviated from different employees from the same organization. So it looks as though there's, like, something that goes out and many employees pick it up and send out a similar request. It's almost an identical request, but they're probably running it through AI, so it's slightly deviated. So we're having to respond to all of them. And we are we're working with legal to see if there is a a way that we can legally respond and and somehow collaborate all of those requests into one response. But thus far, we have not had any, you know, clear direct path.

So I think what I'll what I'll say is we are gonna be starting our, legislative advocacy season in terms of meeting with our legislators. We have our meeting with senator Gillibrand coming up in a couple weeks, and then the sequence for our local state, not federal legislators will also start. It seems like this is something we'll need to bring to their attention because it's a product of open it's a product of sort of, you know, municipal law, and, we have to sort of make sure that we're our resources are being allocated to where they really need to go, which is our students. And now with a the AI component,

they are able to just say, create a foil request asking about these items, and you can get a book of requests at with the snap of a finger. And it's really backlogging and inundating organizations where they're unable to comply. So it is an issue.

Their district was saying, like, every every week, like, clockwork at, like, Friday, 03:00, they were they're, yeah, they're getting the thing. You know? So it's it's a real organized effort.

Well, I'm sorry. That sounds like something we're gonna have to talk further about. Thank you for that update, and thank you for representing us at the, the Westchester Putnam School Boards. Yeah. Nikki, question.

For Maddie and I, can you guys just quickly explain, what FOIL stands for, what it means for our school?

Thank you. I'm not an expert on Freedom of Information Act or Freedom of Information Law. But, essentially, under the Freedom of Information Law in the state of New York, municipal entities, school districts, municipal governments, state government, etcetera, are obligated when a member of the public or a citizen has a question. That question has to be answered, and records pursuant to, like, records in support of that question also have to be provided. So it's it is it is a legal obligation that the school district has to to fulfill these requests. And what we're seeing is they've reported is that if we're getting kinda spammed by requests, it's gonna become more time consuming. So it's it's something that we have to, I guess, collectively you know, school districts across the state are gonna have to look at. My layperson's answer. We can also get you an official answer from from our legal counsel who can explain it in lawyer words.

I don't have those, unfortunately. If I can, I'm gonna turn it over. We're gonna just do a quick flip as we did last week and talk first about the ad hoc committee on hiring, retention, and tenure. I know, Theo, you gave us a detailed update last week. Yeah. Well,

too close. So, yes, did do a detailed report back, last week. But just for, as a reminder, the next meeting is of this committee is on September 8 at 05:00. And then looking even further ahead, we have already scheduled our opt we're we're having these meetings monthly. Our October meeting is October 6, which is also on a Tuesday at 05:00.

Alright. I'm gonna now turn it over to our ad hoc committee on technology and Omar.

Thank you very much. So, back in June, the board had created this ad hoc committee to engage the community and recommend a charge for a community advisory committee on technology. Thank you. So we held listening sessions and sent out a survey. We received a great deal of feedback. And what we heard from the community was that they cared deeply about ensuring technology is used intentionally and with purpose. And the conversation is much bigger than just screen time, which you will see shortly tonight. We worked with the administration on a draft resolution, which is on tonight's agenda. The resolution is for for consideration is to form a community advisory committee, which will carry on this work. Before we start, I wanted to give, or recognize Betsy Laird who did all the heavy lifting, did an outstanding job of, compiling the data, synthesizing the data, and preparing for this presentation.

And, actually, I would love to pass it on to you as the, thank you.

Just turn on your mic. It just

Sure. So before diving in, and, like, we wanna give a little bit of overview to get everybody on the same page of what we are trying to do. So if you don't mind going to the previous slide whoops. Sorry. So some background, this was the scope of our committee charge, which is basically to then determine the scope and charge through engagement with the community of a community advisory committee on technology, which is what our resolution later will address. So, we had this committee proposed by back in on May 7. It was approved by the board in June 11. We were assigned who was going to be leading it on July 16, and then we had those following committee meetings. Our approach to obtain this feedback was that we scheduled two listening sessions on July 31 and August 3, and then we also had the community survey that was available for oh, I forgot to put in the date. For the from middle of July until August 17. And, we tried to keep it very brief, the survey, to basically ask people like, get a little identifying information, but then to,

have people rank their priorities, and then we had these four open qualitative questions. So in terms of, like, focusing on the listening sessions, we had these two dates, and we we kept it pretty open. They were all two hours, and people could drop in. They could leave. And interestingly, most people stayed the whole time to have a very robust conversation. The first time, we had seven participants, and on the second, we had five. We had parents from pre k from other parents who had kids at all three schools. We actually had two former students from the class of 2025, had a grandparent. And, then in terms of professions, we did not ask everybody's professions, but it came up during the conversation. We had a number of educators from different perspectives. We had engineers, and we had college students. And many people were actual users of AI, so we were not a group of Luddites that that were in the room.

And so if we go to the next slide, just wanted to crystallize some of the themes that, came up from the listening session. There was, a desire for greater transparency and awareness of what is happening right now and why. There was this idea that technology needs to earn its place in the learning environment, and there is widespread support of the k through 12 k through two limits put forth by the New York State Union of Teachers. So this was all done before, like, a lot of the tech reset was announced here, as as expansively it has. There was a noted difference among technology education versus educating through technology versus using technology as a tool for creating. So it's pretty sophisticated, the dialogue. People felt there was a need for expanded education and understanding about technology, learning, and data privacy so everyone can make informed and intentional choices. And, lastly, alongside of this, there was a acknowledgment

this is this takes resources and will impact people's, you know, work. So there was concerns about class sizes and providing teachers with the tools and resources they need. And then I'll turn it over to Betsy.

Great. So you'll see that the survey, had a lot of the same themes as the listening sessions, perhaps unsurprisingly. There were a 182 respondents, as Omar shared last week, a 155 of whom were parents or guardians in our district. People were allowed to choose more than one role, so we had a few people saying that they're both a classroom teacher and a parent or a community member no. Sorry. A support staff and a parent. But we also did have 14 classroom teachers, seven community members without a student in the district, five students, and five support staff. So, again, the parents were allowed to choose whichever grades their children were in, and so the respondents spanned the entire school district with the bulk of the families having students in the elementary school. In terms of the ranking, the participants were asked to rank what would be most important to them from one to five in terms of topics.

And screen time came out very strongly for well, student well-being actually the qualitative screen time came out very strongly. Student well-being came out as the most important. A lot of the qualitative answers were really about the fact that all of this feeds into student well-being. So student well-being sort of begs the question. It's really the first question we're talking about everything with. The lowest thing that was ranked was artificial intelligence, but I do wanna make one caveat to that. In the annex of this, which people can look at online, there there was some discrepancy between teachers and parents. So parents tended to rank AI as not as much of a concern yet. I think that could in part be because a lot of the respondents had elementary school students, and it just might not be on their minds as much yet. But when you look at what the teachers were concerned about, AI became much higher in this ranking. So once you disaggregate by respondents,

you get a slightly different ranking. So in terms of the qualitative findings, 173 respondents gave at least one qualitative response. So you can see below which questions were answered with concerns being the question that was answered the most frequently with a 160 responses. So the clear message was a concern about the overuse of screens in our school. So ninety one ninety one of the respondents specifically said they wanted less screen time in the school, which is what the most recent announcement about our tech reset really starts to address. Interestingly, even respondents who want to avoid an overcorrection of tech did mention their concerns about the impact of technology. So there were some people who said, we don't want to swing too far and have our kids not understand technology, but we're aware that technology can impact the students. So specific specifics around the tech's impact on our students, 64 respondents described concerns about their children's development. So specifically mentioning

things like their attention span, their critical thinking skills, their mental health, their executive functioning development. 54 respondents talked about pedagogical concerns, questioning whether skills are actually better taught with paper based methods, feeling that tech was often used to have students do busy work. I'm worried that using technology and using digital assessments gives the teachers a less deep understanding of the students' abilities and challenges. 48 respondents talked specifically about AI use, and I think this is only as low as it is, again, because of the respondent base that we had. But those that did talked those that did talk about AI talked a lot about concerns around AI undermining students' ability to develop critical thinking and writing skills, as well as increasing cheating and shortcuts for both students and staff, leading to a more shallow education was how it was often described.

Concerns about students' privacy and safety. So this did not come up as frequently, frankly, as I actually expected it to. However, the people who did raise it as a concern were were very really emphasized that they think it's a very grave concern and that there's greater there's need for greater guardrails around student and family data and use that span, you know, from data being collected about students' assessment and whether that that data is being sold all the way to people being worried about their children's photos in you know, ending up online in various places. I did think it was worth mentioning that four respondents specifically mentioned that data privacy is is a topic that felt different than some of these other topics in the sense that it there are legal, ethical, and technological complications to data privacy, and so getting an expert to advise on data privacy policy is important. I just thought it was notable that four different people mentioned this.

I also found it really valuable to see how teachers and parents are both concerned about technology, but they might have different vantage points on what that concern might be. So teachers mentioned struggling to keep students on task who are exhausted from staying up late playing video games at home or just get distracted by games and social media websites on the computers. They mentioned worries about AI robbing students of opportunities to think for themselves. That's actually a direct quote, robbing students of opportunities to think for themselves. However, they also do see the value in terms of differentiation and tracking student progress. There was some good feedback around how valuable a couple of the teachers see the formative assessment aspect of it. Parents talked about and this came up fairly frequently that they felt undermined when they've kept their own children away from technology, and then their children are given so much technology access by the school. They felt worried that I've tried really hard to keep this out of my kids' hands, and then and then they've they've started to be exposed to it more.

There were also concerns, as I mentioned earlier, about technology not being the best path to develop children's socio emotional well-being, retention skills, and foundational academic skills. However, there was discussion of value in terms of learning about technology, which I'll get to on on another, page. And I think what this shows me at least and and the other members of the committee is that we really have an opportunity to bring these two groups together in partnership to address the challenges. Teachers are concerned about the home use of technology. The parents are concerned about the school use of technology. And so I think this is this is and will continue to be a shared effort. There was recognition that technology has a place in the world, and it's not going away, and it is important to our future. 16 respondents used quotes like this, saying technology is here to stay. Technology is a part of the future. Technology is part of our world.

However, there was a little bit of disagreement about what that meant. So some parents believe that means really strong technology education is needed. So really educating kids how to type, educating kids how to, how to use technology as a tool. Others said, well, technology is gonna find our kids anyway, so why expose them to it in the school? Which I I thought was interesting. Yeah. That's the quote down there. So I think one really important nuance that Allison also mentioned is that though respondents stated that they want a reduction in overall screen time, that that needs to be complemented by a renewed vigor to to deliver a real technology education and to develop teachers' capacity to critically evaluate how they're using technology to advance student outcomes. So how does using tech actually deepen a lesson versus when is it making the lesson more shallow? 34 separate respondents asked for education

related to technology. Media literacy, physical mental health and safety implications of being online, coding, vigorous online research, programming, robotics, etcetera. 14 respondents specifically asked for typing courses, which I thought was interesting. I loved my typing course as a kid. So yeah. Yeah. They were speaking. Exactly. It was the best. And so there there are some other deeper things in here, but these were really the themes that came out the strongest. The data set was incredibly rich. Our community really cares about this topic. They really care about our kids' education, and we've shared the raw data with the district already. They've read through them all, and we will share it with the board, after tonight as with the full board after tonight.

Thank you. Yeah. So any questions from anybody?

Students, anything that you wanna add or ask about? Questions? Okay.

Great. We will move over to then the

I just wanna thank you all. If you don't mind, just official I really I just don't wanna turn it off at all. First, just because I don't want you to have to thank yourself. I would like to thank, on behalf of the board and the district and our entire community, thanks for the effort and the thoughtful way that you put this entire study together. It's, the board doesn't often convene ad hoc committees. And when we do, it's for something really, really important, something that's time sensitive, something that's of large, of broad community interest, and something where, the recommendations that you make to the board and to the district are things that we're gonna take seriously consider and, discuss how we're gonna take action on those recommendations. So, again, I know we, as a board, offered you a very challenging timeline and a lot to get done in a short period of time, but I think it dovetailed very nicely with all the work that the district has done and, obviously, is working

worked in conjunction to some degree with the findings that we had from our own district committee on this topic throughout the year and what we've been hearing from the community. So it feels like this is all crystallized at a perfect moment, actually, to lead us into our new business, item 3.1, which is a discussion of the ad hoc committee on technologies resolution. Before we leave this, I just wanna say just for members of the public who are possibly watching right now and wanting to dive back into that, presentation, it will be attached to the agenda. It seems to have fallen off, we'll so make sure that it's attached to the agenda, later this evening or early tomorrow so that you can take a look through the slides, again, if you'd like to. So if I can move it into item 3.4, the ad hoc committee on technology resolution. The recommended action, be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby approves the resolution presented by the Ad Hoc Committee on Technology.

No. When

when Niall Kelleher moves it? Yep. Yep. Yes. So we've got it moved. Just on the question, what I wanna do is I actually it's like we can we can definitely have questions first. I I do think in this case, because this is a pretty significant resolution, although it's here, do you feel like it's too much to read? It is too much to read. Okay. That's why I had to ask. Look. You all you all wrote it, so I wanted to make sure that you didn't want it to be read into the record. But then we can open it up for questions. Yeah. Before before we start.

So we had relied on policy 2260 to help inform the how to write the resolution, and it's divided into a few segments. One is, like, you know, probably in the background, result resolution around the charge of the committee. And then because this is such a broad and wide topic, we really had a a long conversation many conversations. It took a few days for us to kind of nail this down around how do we wanna proceed moving forward. So the question that Betsy raised that other my community members had raised about how do you embed technology education, like typing into I I felt or we felt was a little bit too specific to write into the resolution and wanted to leave things like that to the committee. So when when first they form the committee and they start working, those would be the topics that I would envision would be part of the discussion. So the charge, because, again, it is so so such a vast topic. We divided it into three,

describing as pillars. One is to the first one is to examine, technologies within different grade bands, so k through 12. I can go into a little more detail, but I'm just gonna keep this because I know we're gonna have a discussion about it. The other one is to look at it specifically look at instruction and and student learning and how technology is being used to improve techno to improve instruction. The third one is trying to capture quite frankly everything else, AI, data privacy, student safety. And then the other, are just, again, per policy. We have to define who the membership, is going to be, the timeline for the, committee and when it when the term ends.

That was my spiel. You could just before you before you turn it over to questions, just explain to the community. Sorry. If you could explain to the community what the who the who the what the proposal is in terms of who the commune the committee would consist in and also explain the difference between the ad hoc committee that just presented to us and what community advisory committee is? Just because I don't know that everyone listening knows the difference. Sure. So the ad hoc committee on technology was formed with a very specific purpose, and that is to develop a a scope and charge

of the community advisory committee. And we are charged to recommend actions to this board by September 3 today. So that was the ad hoc committee, which as of tonight ceases to exist. This resolution is to establish a community advisory committee, which for this resolution, we're recommending and and, again, this is up for discussion. We're recommending we'll include up to six members of the community, include let me get the members of members of the section. It'll include administrators, teachers, students, and where is it? Yep. And and up to three board members to act as liaisons. So the idea is that the superintendent will recommend members, to the to the board for appointment and that we would seek, membership from the community that we'd have to, again, appoint for the term of this work, which based on this language, we're expecting or we're hoping for a final report on for to be presented to the board at the 06/10/2027

meeting. And after that, would the committee would be done with this work.

And just just to anticipate a question that might have been coming from that corner of the table, student representatives as well.

I did not say that. You might have, but I may have said it again. Okay. Yes. Students are student voice isn't there. Nikki?

Yeah. I think we're just wondering if you have any idea of the process of how you how how these student representatives will be selected. If you have an idea of what that process might look like. And if we can help

at all with the selection. Much appreciated because I was gonna defer to the superintendent Mhmm. On on that on the selection process.

Yeah. I we have not nailed that down yet, but we'd love to consult with you on that Yep. So that we can think through how best to represent the entire student voice in this work. So let's let's talk.

Yeah. Go ahead, Allison.

Just wanna clarify. So as a the committee of the work that we did over the summer, we're we just came up with this recommendation because anticipating we'll also get the question, what is the criteria we'll use to select community members, experts, etcetera? So that's, like, the some of the work that the up to the three BOE members who will be part of this committee will need to we need to figure that out first as the pre work.

First

of all, thank you guys for for doing this hard work and the presentation. It was great. I love the resolution. I love how comprehensive it is and how we're really gonna look at everything. Coming from the from the policy committee and trying to understand district policies more, looking at 2260 and 2260 r, I didn't see, and maybe there is a mechanism or a decision for, like, we've got a 100 great ideas here. What's the mechanism? Who decides? How do we decide what gets put forth as a as a recommendation to the full board? So don't if that's something that exists or we're thinking about, but I didn't see that in 2260. Maybe we can think about having something like that in there. But in in June, we say, we've got a 100 great ideas. They don't all align. What gets to the board? Something to think about. And then, also, we don't have to wait until June, I think, on some of these things. I mean, we saw what happened in New York yesterday with AI and screen time. So if there's stuff like that that bubbles up and we wanna move, I think we should move. But thanks again for putting this together. It's great.

Yeah. Thank you, Jake. So the you're right. We don't have to wait till June, which is why I have a line in there to say to the extent practicable, because it may not be practicable, that the community is encouraged to share any findings or considerations in advance of the district's budget development process. So if there are any budgetary requirements or, you know, information that would help the district in developing its budget for fiscal year 2728, would love that opportunity to have this committee recommend some some actions. In terms of how it comes to the board, I'm not a 100% sure, but I believe it's kind of the superintendent recommends or or the committee recommends the superintendent and superintendent in conjunction with the board, then kind of discuss the the recommend the recommendations on the findings.

Yeah. So I'm I'm just gonna chime in because I think our our most recent comp to this and, actually, Omar, you would I think you would you may be able to speak to this because you were serving at the time that it was constituted was when the district constituted the equity stakeholder team to look at the district's equity policies. That was that was actually a district owned committee, but it was a community There was community advisory. There was a community advisory component. It wasn't formally a board committee. And so it actually fell to that that, stakeholder group to to determine what the, what the key priorities were going to be. And that committee then made the recommendations both to the superintendent and to the board sort of working together. So it there there are definitely, I think, models to follow. But to answer Jake's question, it will primarily fall to the membership of the committee itself

to determine what the priorities are. So that's why, I think, my perspective, having that, vast representation across our community between students, community members, faculty, district administrators, leadership, you know, building leadership as well, we need to have sort of every voice at the table to help make sure that the priorities that are being presented to the board for action, or the district for implementation after if if there's a policy change or whatever, it ends up being, sort of represent the work of all those people.

And to maybe just add to the point that you had raised, or you had mentioned, Allison, about the about membership, the way we're we're we've written this is that, the board liaisons in conjunction with the superintendent or the administrative designee, will develop an application process and then recommend to the full board, at the October 10 meeting. We'd obviously have to go into an executive session just to keep, you know, privacy of of the applicants and make a selection then. Right? And then the first meeting would start no later than October 26. So it gives a little bit of time for I mean, there's a lot to do. It's a great deal of huge lift. But we've we've kind of maintained we've we've had great momentum so far, and we would love to kind of continue that momentum into the school year.

Other questions for the committee chair from the board or from the district or any comments from the district?

I would just add that, you know, I think this is the right work at the right time for the system and for the community. And and to your point, Omar, I think it's a it's a natural, point of momentum, right, in terms of the conversations that have had that have occurred here over the past year, the tech reset, and now an opportunity to deepen that work. Right? We've already positioned ourselves as as Anamika said earlier as regional leaders, and hopefully thought leaders on this, and this now will further that, right, put us, in a place again where the the depth of the conversations that occur here on behalf of our kids, are those that should be replicated elsewhere. So this is exciting for us as an administrative team. Looking forward to the partnership.

Thank you, Steve. And, actually, there is one more thing I wanted to add. It it felt while we're going through this process that, it felt to me, I think, in in the committee, members as well that there was it felt like there was some tension between or perception of tension between parents and teachers. And I and I wanna sued anybody from that of that notion. This was a very collaborative process. We were working together with the administration on this. Teacher voice is an instrumental voice. Student voice is an instrumental voice. While, again, I've I've I've said this before, and I'll say it again. We are elected by the community. We are, accountable to the community and to our students. But this is a joint effort where everybody is, absolutely focused on what's best for students, and we're all kind of in this together.

Very quickly, agree with the voices here that this is a great resolution, and a lot of great work has come out of, the existing committee. So thank you very much. Just as I think a a smaller point just as as we're talking about how we as a district are are, I think, leading in this area. I think it's always good with any of any committee work to also look at what other districts are doing, in relation to issues and whether and and I think great to lead, and I think other districts may also be leading as well and and and have innovative ideas around this. So I think, obviously, the priority here is our district. But to the extent that I think we can influence thinking outside of our district and also gather ideas from other districts, I think it makes our stronger. So I would encourage this committee to also think not only Croton, but also outside of of Croton as well to, I think, improve upon our our own work.

I I completely agree with that. And just to say that as part of the committee work over the summer, I shared a number of documents with Omar and Allison that came from other districts in Westchester as, like, these are examples of what's happening in Bronxville, what's happening in Hastings, what's happening in Chappaqua. So I think there there is some good work going on, and we can definitely learn from those. But I I think that with the most recent changes, we are now really on the forefront. And so I think, to your point, being a leader in that space and offering how we the district has accomplished the changes will be great.

Building on that, I I just wanted to highlight some of what in addition to what was pointed out there. You know, over conversations on this topic over the past year, the the data privacy has has been a deep, deep, deep concern. So we really tried to, within this, to address that and thread the needle on that. And, you know, totally agree, Theo, with your with your point about that. And we saw that how New York City just, you know, released that they are shifting their policy on, you know, the use of AI. But with all these things, the devil's on the details. Right? And so I think we have to be looking at what other districts are doing or how they're defining, and that's one of the things that's been so challenging about this because it is it touched on so many diff different aspects, and there's, like, no one perfect balance. So that's why I think we're really trying to, like, say, like, well, how can we become

as sophisticated in our understanding as possible as a district and give everybody the tools and resources and what does that look so that we really can as as the field rapidly changes, we're making the best decisions for our students as possible. Yeah. Thanks.

Anyone else? Any other thoughts or comments? Okay. Then I'm gonna call for a vote. Oh, no. Go ahead, Madeline. Sorry.

Just really quick. I wanna say thank you to everyone for being so thoughtful about this. I think AI and technology is a very real, very large topic that's affecting all students, and I really appreciate that these presentations and conversations feel very connected to how this will affect students and how we can improve student life around these topics. So thank you.

That's definitely the center of the work. So thank you for recognizing it and highlighting it again. So if I can, I'm gonna call a vote. All in favor of moving forward with this resolution? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? The motion carries. Thank you very much again to the committee. And the work actually just begins now because we have another aggressive timeline that, that, that, challenge has been accepted by this board to get this off the ground working with the district to continue this conversation, and moving it forward while we also take on another, very ambitious project, which we're about to turn to next, which is item 3.2, our district goals. Yeah. Sure.

So

getting to your point that we wanna move rapidly on things, when are we going to decide which of the board members are part of this so we could figure out? So that's a great that's a great question. We I I think we're moving so fast. We haven't figured out all of the logistics. But, typically, as as we know from the summer and from all of our board work, committee appointments are are we'll talk about them together. If if if trustees are interested in serving on this committee, please just email Omar and me your names. And if we end up with more than three, we will have a battle royale. Figure it out. Thank you. We'll have a process for determining we'll have a process for determining that. And the most important thing is is that this work is going to be ongoing, and it's going to come back to the full board regularly, you know, as regularly as possible. So we're all gonna have ways to intersect with the work whether or not we're serving formally on the committee.

Because this is a conversation we're gonna be having all year, probably for years to come, actually. So, so I don't think anyone will feel that they're missing out. At least I hope not. So before before I turn it over, to superintendent Walker for, the discussion of our new business, our district goals presentation, I wanna highlight one thing. We've had a lot of discussion about our technology reset. And as we enter this next piece of the conversation, want everyone to keep in mind that as we're hearing about what we're about to hear about, we're not going to see the word technology on the screen 58 times because we've talked about it 58 times already. The idea here is that our shifts in technology are underlying our approach. That's really, really important in terms of sort of level setting. So as we shift the focus to talking about our goals for the district, and superintendent Walker and doctor Duback are gonna share more detail on that, please know that the underpinning of that work is a

an evolving, thoughtful, view towards the use of technology in classrooms and how it supports instruction. And I just wanna sort of, put that out there before I turn it over to superintendent Walker to share with us district goals for 2627.

Thank you. Thank you, Anamika. I think that was obviously incredibly well put in a in a great segue, along the theme of ambitious goal setting on behalf of students. Whether it's technology or, our curriculum and instructional goals, all of them share that that same underpinning. The setting of district goals, is a a pro form a thing in a lot of districts. And I think one of the things that I feel best about it is that it isn't here. And most particularly this round, it it, I think, exemplifies a genuine process that, just to speak a little bit to how these got formulated. These really began, through a series of conversations and reviews of data through the budget process last year around how our students were achieving, where there were where there was evidence of progress, and where there were gaps and questions, that were left. That then led into the development of board priorities and board goals,

that then became the foundation for how we thought about the formulation of district goals. As the board knows, and as we shared with the community, the board and administrative team came together this summer, for a day of of administrative, and board work together, leadership work together, and one of our priorities that day was to try to begin to crystallize some of the ideas and some of the language around this. And that was a really important day, for all of us, I think, to to begin to come to consensus around the conversations that we wanna make sure that we're having. We all know that as a system, it's incredibly, important to know what it is we're gonna focus on, right, and to do that in a laser like way, and also to make sure that we understand our capacity, right, and how we wanna use the incredibly valuable professional learning time that we have within the system each year. Our teachers are incredibly dedicated.

The schedule allows for substantial professional learning time, but believe it or not, there's still only about forty hours in the year devoted to that work. Right? And so how we wanna utilize and focus that forty hours becomes a really important part of of our work. And so, hopefully, you'll see over these next few slides in the next few minutes, one, this isn't a onetime conversation. Right? This will now formulate, and be the basis for so many of the conversations that we have in this space and in other public arenas during the course of the year. And so we look forward to sharing these with the entire community. Just briefly, for folks who haven't spent a lot of time thinking about district goals, at a glance, kind of, they're designed to make actionable the board's priorities and goals. Right? And so you'll see that foundationally in the next couple slides, you'll see a relationship, hopefully a clear relationship between the board's goals and priorities and how the district intends to operationalize them through action steps for 2627.

As I shared, they were drafted by the administrative team. I wanna thank the entire team who devoted a significant amount of time to this. I wanna thank the board and especially Anamika and Omar who met with us, communicated with us numerous times, in feedback, revision, refinement to get to the product, that we've arrived at and are are so pleased to share with our community. So I wanna again thank the two of you for your leadership, and they represent to me progress. Right? No document is perfect. No plan is perfect, but they, to me, represent significant progress toward where we want the student experience to be, not only in '26, '27, but beyond that. They represent an ambitious series of goals and action steps for one year, but all based around the student experience. Right? There's genuine student centeredness to all of this. In terms of timeline considerations, just a couple of things I wanted to mention. One, of course, the budget process. Right? And so you'll see as we think through the reporting timeline, the reporting cadence,

a lot of it is based around how can we make sure that we're identifying times to check-in on where our progress is internally and then report it externally to the board and to the community to the extent that those things inform our priorities and where we wanna fund certain things going forward. Obviously, another priority for us is our summer professional learning work that really begins to get, put together in the spring. And so we wanna think again about how this work and these goals, not only in '26, '27, but beyond that, can it better inform and more clearly inform what our we want our faculty to be engaging in during that valuable summertime, as well as the subs, subsequent years' goals. Right? We've always thought about this work as an evolving long term conversation, not a whiplash of one year, it's this. The next year, it's this. And so I think I would encourage us as we make this shift into how we think about board and district goals that we think about, again, a trajectory of

we don't talk about math for a year and then drop it. Right? These are long term conversations that we wanna be engaging in, as a faculty and as a community. And so Laura's gonna talk to us a little bit about the relationship that was mentioned. The teams, the board's priorities, and the alignments.

Right. So you'll see on this slide, on the left, you'll see the three board priorities. And what we tried to do, following the Board of Ed and administrative retreat this summer was to really match up the district goals directly to each of the board priorities. And you'll see that the bulk of our district goals, lie in the continued to strengthen academic rigor, curriculum, coherence, and measurable student achievement. We have four of our goals in that area, and those are, most directly tied to the student experience. So we think that that makes a lot of sense. And now we wanna spend a little time going through, each goal and kind of the thinking behind each of them.

So to start, we wanted to share, an overview of our first proposed goal in terms of establishing a unified community engagement and response approach. And so just to to summarize what it is we're looking at on the screen, we have the proposed action steps on the left, of course, and then measurement and reporting and how we would go about sharing information on these various things on the right hand side of the screen. So just to highlight a couple of the key action steps, the first being, of course, onboarding a new communications team to help us rethink our strategy around how we're engaging with the community. This represents a significant increased investment in communications on behalf of the board, the district, the community. And so we look forward then to as we onboard these, these folks and this team, thinking through what an entry plan looks like, as well as how we're gonna be measuring

the progress here. And so we're proposing, obviously, some presentation around January of some first semester communication metrics as well as some feedback from what we're proposing to be a series of town hall conversations with the community. I referenced earlier the idea of the parent learning walks, and so tied to that, developing an exit ticket or feedback survey, for families as they leave those, to give us an impression of what it is they've they've left feeling great about and what questions they have in their minds, after having had a chance to spend time in our classrooms as well as an exit ticket or feedback survey system for those community conversations. So one of the things that we're proposing is, and and Laura will share some more details about one of our ideas shortly, is to identify two or three high priority topics within our community, perhaps in addition to technology. Right? We know that conversation will be happening. What are some other high leverage, important, timely conversations that our community wants to engage in, structure times for folks to come together to have those conversations, and then gauge feedback,

about from the folks who participated in those. And so you'll see on the right there, again, this idea of kind of midyear and end of your cadence to try to summarize all of the the work that's included in those action steps.

So our next goal, is around horizontal curriculum alignment. So we began work this summer with our teacher leaders in an effort to be ready to focus on horizontal curriculum alignment, and that is about ensuring that our curriculum is aligned across grade levels and content areas, which will help create a common student experience while still encouraging teacher autonomy and choice and pedagogical approaches. So horizontal alignment is about ensuring that the curriculum and experiences are not substantially different from teacher to teacher among a particular grade or teacher to teacher in a content area. So we always value teacher autonomy, of course, but core curriculum and experiences need to be common for students. So part of the work of ensuring horizontal alignment is to have curriculum overviews posted on a user friendly website, not our Atlas curriculum maps, for those of you who have tried to navigate that system,

for all grade levels and content areas. And those curriculum overviews will include common student experiences across grade levels and content areas, and those will be kinda clearly delineated so families can see that. And we will have those up in December after spending time this fall writing, revising, creating more common experiences and assessments, and going through a review process on multiple levels before they get posted. I gathered quite a lot of feedback from our community on what families in particular really want to see in curriculum overviews. And what was shared with me was actually very consistent across almost everybody, And what parents want to really see is key content by unit, core texts and resources, key assessments and projects, and student experiences such as demonstrations of learning that are consistent on grade levels. And interestingly enough, not surprisingly, I say, that's actually pretty similar to what faculty felt was really important for families to know as well.

And you'll see that we have quite a bit more curriculum work as part of subsequent goals in specific areas. And, to that end, we'll also be formalizing a review cycle for our curriculum to foster a culture of continual updating and improvement kind of on a a cyclical basis. Alright. I'll keep going to the next goal, which is around math curriculum development and assessment. And, some of this, Madeline will relate to what you were talking about earlier. So in our analysis of data that we shared with the board last year, our math scores district wide have some fluctuations and gaps and are less steady in terms of growth than our ELA scores, and that's why we really wanted to start with prioritizing, math curriculum development and assessment this year. So that kind of context paired with the fact that we are now using the algebra for all model in eighth grade makes it really essential for us to invest a deep look in our three to seven curriculum to ensure that we are best preparing our students and perhaps preparing them somewhat differently to reach that level of rigor in algebra for all.

Then on the other side of algebra for all, we also need to ensure that our geometry courses at the high school are being carefully created and analyzed to to ensure that our students who took algebra in eighth grade are prepared to move through a more rigorous math sequence more quickly because their our goal was always to have more students advancing in the math sequence than previously did, or in other words, as many students as want to will be able to take calculus by the time, they complete high school. So you'll see, on the right hand side what we're envisioning in terms of measurement and reporting where we, intend to see an increase in our periodic RENSTAAR assessments, in grades three through eight as a result of some of this work. And then we intend to crosswalk the performance of students who took algebra for all last year for the first time as they progress through this year in geometry,

looking particularly at geometry common assessments throughout the year.

And then shifting to English language arts, where, as Anamika referenced earlier, thinking about this as in in in some of our other scopes of goals in a multiyear case. So, for 2627, thinking about how we can further the work, deepen the work of the CET literacy committee from 2526, and engage in a process of reviewing the current curricular resources, particularly in grades three and four at CET, and then identifying potential additional, or supplemental curricular resources for, implementation. Additionally, looking at those curriculum overviews that Laura described for grades three and four to identify potential gaps in what it is that we're teaching, in addition to how we're teaching it. We anticipate that completion by the end of twenty twenty six and then work to define, develop and refine common assessments to be administered across all classes, in those grades. In addition, in 2627,

reviewing all PVC ELA curricula, to identify those same things, strengths and areas for improvement. So that is in year one in addition to the math work, an ambitious scope of of curricular work in those two core areas, then leading us into 2728 where we see the implementation phase. Those new updated curricular materials identified and brought in, hopefully, by the end of this year through this summer and into next year, that's when the professional learning comes to support those in classes through our coaches and and other resources leading into, our measurement scopes, again, reflect '26, 27 reporting to the board in this winter about where we are in terms of kind of an intermediate phase of this work and then looking at those projected increases, around 27, 28 assessments.

Alright. And our next goal is around college and career readiness, which is obviously our ultimate goal at the end of a a k 12 system. But much of that work lives in the high school world even though we know every student's experience leading up to, leads to their success in high school. But this goal really centers on the work of the high school. And as most people, I think, know by now, we have about seven interdisciplinary classes at the high school as options for students, but we have all of our ninth graders taking a core interdisciplinary class as freshmen. And so we wanted to use this goal as an opportunity now that we are in year three of having interdisciplinary team talk classes and dual enrollment classes in addition to our expansive set of AP offerings, including two new AP courses that were added this year. And, you know, in three years in, we now think we have enough kind of standardized data to take a much deeper look. So in particular, we are going to focus in this goal in terms of action steps and reporting on our ninth grade interdisciplinary course implementation.

And just for kind of background knowledge, if you're not familiar with the trajectory of the class, it's changed a bit over the years while still maintaining its initial purpose. So we wanted all of our students to start in high school with a core interdisciplinary experience and then be able to branch out to a number of choices throughout their high school careers. So in year one of the class, I think when you started, Madeline, there were only about 50% of the ninth graders that took it that year, while the other group of ninth graders took the Global nine course. And then in year two of the class last year, all of the ninth graders took the connections class. And now in year three, changed the name to humanities, but it's the it's the same core course, and there are more sections of it and more teacher teams of it. So we've made some incremental changes to the structure of the course, the number of students in each section.

And now in year three after piloting for the first two years, we've had aligned we have aligned the curriculum and are developing common assessments and have three teams teaching the class. And, again, it's being renamed to humanities to better reflect the content of the course and to be more in alignment with how this kind of course is named at other schools and more familiarity with the NCAA process, for our students who are going to be student athletes in college. So we have some data analysis planned here to track how our students are doing on standardized assessments now that we can do this for at least two years of assessments. And we're also planning to hold a of those community conversations that Steve mentioned previously related to this topic because although we've had coffee and conversations and communication on this over the years, every year this is a good reminder that every year, we get a new group of students and parents. So it's important to keep the conversation going and make sure that families understand the pull full picture when it's the time for their child to make the decisions.

We talk about it all the time, but it matters most for you as you're making those decisions as a student or as a family.

And the final goal is really about how we develop a cadence for planful, thoughtful sharing and community engagement around how we're doing. Right? And you'll see on the right hand side, an ambitious cadence of reporting beginning next month with the sharing of curricular priorities by content area, culminating at the end of the year with multiple reports, including an overall end of the year data report summary, that we're investigating, you know, thoughts with other districts now about who's done this well and effectively in terms of, sharing data with their community to summarize not only our progress toward these goals, but also, as importantly, more importantly, how our students have achieved, on various metrics, Renstar, AP, regions, other standardized metrics. Looking at, with humility, as we talked about on the first day with the staff, things that we feel good about and then things that we need to have deeper and further conversations about. Looking at at all of it, with an unbiased eye, with institutional humility, and a and a readiness and orientation for, continued growth.

And so I think in summary, again, this represents a significant potential year of progress within our system. I think, hopefully, a series of goals that, through conversations with the board and with the community, the community will will understand, will find value in, will see that there's a clear trajectory and vision for what we want the next few years of our system to be about and the launching and continuing of some really important conversations around student achievement. So we're happy to have shared these with you again. Thank you for making this a genuinely collaborative effort, in a way that I don't think it has been in the past. Right? And so I think that sort of work makes us all better. So thank you for for the time. I

wanna thank you both before we open it up for questions just for a really excellent presentation of what we have to look forward to in 2627, and beyond. And to reiterate again that this is this although there's a there's some new elements to this collaboration in terms of how we're articulating these goals and how we're sort of guiding them, it's important to remember that for this district, the idea of setting goals that are multiyear that tie very specifically to our budget allocations has been a practice here for several years now. So it's really important to remember that we may be using some different terminology. We certainly are talking about a different, level of measurement and reporting on an annual basis, which I think is going to be really productive for us because it really helps us make those budgeting, and governance decisions against data. But it is still very similar to the work that we've been doing over the last few years at a building level and certainly in terms of the overall budget, making sure that

we're always talking about our resourcing as it connects to student experience, as it connects to hiring instruction facilities, and all of those elements that make this school system, I think, what it is. So I just wanna thank you both and the larger team that met with us over the summer for the the very serious and thoughtful look you took at the priorities that the board articulated based off of our the feedback of our community. And I and I wanna reiterate again something you said last week, Steve, which is our goal here is to ensure that the work we're doing really does represent the values of our families and centers student experience, which I think we know it's the core and it's the heart of it, but this makes it visible in a way that I think is really important. The other thing I just wanna highlight before I open it up for questions is a really good point that Laura made, which is this idea of every year, we've got a new group of parents coming into kindergarten.

Every year, we have a new group of high school parents, a new group of middle school parents. And one of the things I know I've talked about this a bazillion times, but I I really appreciate how we've annualized certain experiences, like talking about, you know, my favorite one, the hidden transition. Omar knows I love the hidden transition between grade six and grade seven at the middle school. And, Laura, to your point, I think talking about, again, the, the value of interdisciplinary learning, the meaning of APs, while we talk about it a lot in this room and you talk a lot about it, you know, in sort of in these halls of the high school, I think to have that sort of regular cadence of explaining it to parents every year and becoming that sort of practice of communication, it's going to instill understanding and also confidence in the decisions, that we're making in terms of how we allocate, you know, our teaching resources and budget dollars and time spent in school. So I will open it up now for questions if I could,

because we we are trying to remember our practice of turning to our student trustees first. We'll start at that end of the table, work our way around. Don't feel put on the spot. You don't have to have questions, but if there's something you'd like to ask, this is a great opportunity.

I just wanna thank all four of you on that side of the table. I know how much work has gone into this over the last several weeks, and I the the specificity of these goals, I think, is really fantastic, and we're really headed in a great direction. So I'm I'm overall really excited, and Laura knows that I'm very excited for the curriculum overviews in particular. I I had two quick questions. So I wondered if maybe separate from or in addition to the parent learning walks, there could be a discussion of opportunities to open up more volunteer opportunities to parents. Are there things that parents could do to better support our teachers while also getting a feel for the building and their children's school day? You know? Can they come in and and read some books? Can they help in the lunch lines? You know, I sometimes think that having the parents there to actually help instead of just witness might might go a long way for building that community. So it's just something that crossed my mind. If I if I could just quickly on that, this is why we we talk about this as an organic process and an organic doc not one that we had thought about in terms of documenting, but we do recognize a need to think about our volunteer structure, our volunteer coordinator scope,

and role. And so, actually, I think that's probably something we should add in an action step. So thank you. Fantastic.

And the second one was related to the college and career. One of the questions that this is more just something I wanna learn more about, which is our college guidance process and how we are guiding students to think about what they might wanna do after after high school and and make sure they're kind of shepherded in some of the right direction. So this is more me admitting that I don't know much about that than any suggestion, but it came to my mind when that came up on the screen.

You have time. You have time. But no, no. I think that would actually be great and maybe, you know, I don't want to overstep, but I know we've been talking about kind of new trustee conversations if we might want to add even counseling because I know that's often a question. And if you don't have kids in the high school, maybe that's something we could do as a separate kind of onboarding conversation.

Would echo what Betsy said just around the the clear collaboration here and, and really just fruitful stuff that that came out of it. I guess, just a very, very general question, if you could speak to how you see the goals outlined here sort of, like, in the larger in the context of the larger road map that, you know, we the strategic plan, the kind of the big piece, right, that and and sort of how you I guess, just how you see this fitting into that ultimate picture,

and and, like, I guess, maybe looking forward, right, like, what piece of this puzzle of that overall puzzle does this represent? Yeah. It's a great question and something that we, wanted to make sure that we addressed as the faculty came back. Right? Because we what we don't wanna have happen is to lose the the work of the vision map within what, to Anamika's point, is is a different way of of thinking about, right, and communicating about the work. To us, you know, one of the the core pillars of the vision map is that idea of assessment and feedback, right, and how we're assessing student learning, how we're providing regular feedback to them. And so I think you'll see, obviously, clear alignment there that so much of this is about how we assess student learning, how we communicate to them and to the their families and the community on a broader level how students are doing. And the other part of it is is class design. And so what we spoke about was there's been a tremendous amount of work,

and innovation, but also foundational core curricular work that's happened here over the past few years. And so it's a moment to say, let's let's subject that all all of that to some really healthy scrutiny, from the community and internally too. Right? Well, that's one of the things we said from the beginning was we've we've embarked on this journey of doing some what we think is really important and impactful work, but we need to make sure we're measuring it. Right? And that's something that the board has has reminded us about regularly over the past few years. And so we feel like, to Laura's point, because now we're in year two, year three, year four of implementation of some of these things, we have enough data now to be able to do some some really interesting, analysis of it. So, I think, hopefully, the the staff who live this day in and day out see the relationship, and it's important for us to continue to remind them of that. Right? It's not a departure from. It's a continuation of.

Don't have a question. Just a couple comments and want to commend you, Steve, and the administration for for your leadership in putting these together. These are very different from what we have seen in the past, and student voice is very clear in here. These to me feel they're absolutely ambitious, but they're not aspirational. Right? They will require focus, but it feel like accomplishing these goals to me will make Croton schools the best they can be. Like, the when they when you say the best they can be, the these goals to me kind of embody, and these action key actions embody the that philosophy. So thank you for bringing this together. Really commend you again and the administration for that. Yeah. I I agree. I think they're they're designed to make us better. I wanna thank the board for,

coming into the year with some really defined priorities that that allowed us to then roll up our sleeves and dig in, to this work. And I think that it's absolutely positioned us to continue to to progress, to lead, and to make the student experience better.

I wanna make sure Allison and Jake have a chance to go, but just to to piggyback off of that, I think the other highlight just to to piggyback both off of Omar and Steve, your remarks is that that all of these goals actually, as I said before, also have sort of an evergreen quality. There are things that we're going to need to be talking about. Just you know, these these are the topics that we need to be talking about. So I don't think we're gonna see, you know, a complete shift as we as we look into '27, twenty eight, twenty eight, twenty nine. We're not gonna necessarily be stepping away from these. These are going to while there's gonna be a lot to measure on a yearly basis, these are conversations that are going to be ongoing. So we'll be able to build on the work of each previous year. And I think while it's gonna feel and it certainly looks like it could be a heavy lift this year, I think, you know, getting some of this work accomplished is going to,

it's gonna be a good sort of, baseline for us going forward. Turn it over to Allison and Jake for any other questions before I do my question at the end.

Echoing the appreciation for all this. This is a lot. So I'm sorry. I've I have a I have a laundry list. So just, if we could go to, like, say, one of the slides that let me see. That has, like, a 5% on it. Yeah. That. So, that slide says the goal is an increase, a 5% increase. So I just wanna clarify it. So all because there are other sites that just say 5%. So just that the the anticipation with all the slides is that when there's a percentage, we're talking about an increase. Increase in proficiency. So I just wanted to get that on record to to clarify that it's consistently across the slides. Okay. So I guess, one of the the questions that I think you addressed a a little bit, Laura, that I had a question about was the the, the prioritization in terms of timing of the math curriculum versus the ELA. I mean, I guess, like, I I like a lot of what I'm seeing. The the a a question I have with that is that I I know for a few years now,

we've heard questions about some of the the curriculum for the reading materials itself. So one of my concerns is, like, are we going to get enough recommendations for the budget cycle so that we can ramp up the a more robust reading curriculum for those grades? Because I also there was a literacy committee last year. I'm not sure where

things landed with that. In short, the answer is yes. Right? Not only do you see it prioritized here, you also see it prioritized as a CET building goal. And so we're, establish a different kind of structure for how we go about identifying what additional resources or what change in resources we need to have, but that'll be ready for the the budget process. Yes. Okay. Great. Yeah. Because I just wanna make sure we're not Yeah. Letting other. Yeah.

Then the other thing that, just wanted to, like, bring up. So when I when I'm looking at this, like, thinking about it, like, Laura, this is a lot for you, particularly. Like, falls under you and, like and you're in a new role. And then I was I was going through, like, further on and, particularly with the the review of the college readiness goal. And, Nikki, when you were presenting, Madeline, you kind of, like, stole some of what I was gonna be bringing up with this goal. So, you know, I think this makes a lot of sense to have an internal assessment about, like, what what's been happening. And, like and to me, this really focuses on the the learning of of the student experience. To me, what this does not yet address, and I wanna make sure we don't get lost, is that these other issues that come with these that aren't and, like like, what Nikki was talking about, how are these courses conveyed

to the colleges? How is the information conveyed to the families and students so they have a clear and, I guess too as we're just just going through this as well as some of the others, is to make sure that we're also thinking about this from because also this it this is the curriculum work. That's one group of people, but then guidance is a different group of people. So, hopefully, there would be a little bit of capacity to, like, still be focused on that to make sure everybody's making clear decisions when they're choosing their classes. But I I just with this, I'd like to make sure that we're also looking at what other other schools in our in our in our neighboring communities are doing in terms of some of their curriculum. Because that you know, when it comes to rigor, it's not only what are we doing, but also what are the other schools and the other options that those students are having to keep that in our mind. So also taking into account the the external environment as we're going through this,

because that does impact the reality of our students' opportunities. And then just the the last thing what I would say is, like, I really, again, I really like a lot of goals. I just would wanna make sure that, in terms of the development of a regular reporting schedule, and the data, that we're really making sure that when we're getting the data that it's it's it's done so in a way that that it's not marketing, that it's very clear, you know, all the scales. Because with any like, an annual report, there can always be a more of a spin on it. It can always be, like, these are the, you know, take it or leave it results. Because I think really what we hear from the community all the time too, and I think it's beneficial to us in our governance function, is is that we have data presented in a way that we understand what's happening here, but we can also see what's happening Mhmm. You know, compare it with what's happening with other districts. Because even if we don't want to do it, though, a lot of people are concerned about that, and they wanna have that information.

So just wanna say that I know what I'm what I'm looking forward to is to have something that might look very boring, but to see, like, the very precise not just, like, for example, the AP scores, not just what the averages are, but, like, how many people got a three? How many people got a four? How many people got a five? Like because to me, that's the way that we really get a sense of student performance in addition to understanding is the average. And I know there's different stories on why that average might be. There are their scores. Like, some kids might be more engaged in certain courses. They might be seniors and already gone to school, and they're like, this doesn't count anyway. So there can be a lot of reasons why there might be ones, but it's still important to see that information.

Thank you. I just, just to just for discussion and thinking, when we think about data and comparing to other districts, we just also have to be mindful of what's actually publicly available. So everything's publicly available for the regions across, districts, but not the AP exam. So we're not able to make those comparisons just because of what's publicly available. But for within, we can definitely

do what you're asking. And I I totally get that. I guess for us, like so so if we wanna like, somebody's like, oh, my friend is at Briarcliffe, and they you know, we could even get the information and slice it, not to put everything on it.

Yeah. So I agree every with everything that's been said, and I I really wanna, I think, you know, you know, point out how quickly and efficiently and effectively we put all this together. And it and it took a lot of work. It took a lot of hard work, the staff, the community, the teachers, BOE. But, I mean, this was we began talking about this, I think, in the middle of July and started putting these goals together in the middle of July. And here we are with, like, actionable outcomes that we wanna see, what timelines. So I think it's really great. I think the key is gonna be communication. Right? So we're already talking about, you know, even this presentation, like, how do we get this out into the community in a way that's accessible and digestible, right, so people can take a look at it, have conversations about it, ask the administration questions about it, making sure there's equity in terms of the town halls, which I love that idea, but making sure we have evening and remote and and translators,

right, available for those sessions so everyone can participate. And then at the end, you know, communicating out. So to contrast with Allison, yes, we wanna see, you know, sort of the full monty, but then also how do we communicate something that everyone can understand and see. You know? And and being honest and saying this is where we're gonna look to improve. You know? I really wanna commend, how efficiently we we put this together. It's it's the first week of school, and we've already got, you know, a couple year timeline. One question I did have was when you were thinking about the percentage increases in in benchmarking, how did you how did you put that together in a way that's saying we wanna improve, but we don't wanna put pressure on students. We don't wanna put pressure on on teachers and start hitting benchmarks, and it's gonna be more and more every year. So how did you think that through and and come up with those metrics?

Good question. So the safer percentage to use, to be honest, would be 3%. That's kind of like the industry standard. We thought that we would go with five with the, idea that that piece of it might be a little aspirational in a year, but I think we'd rather be a little aspirational and say, okay. It was three and a half or four, and not quite meet that five versus playing it safe. So that was that was the thinking, but industry standard is 3% usually.

I think the other part of it when we say improvement over a year, that's important, but the the bigger conversation is what are we doing year after year. And so because you have such variations in cohorts, sometimes you'll see spikes and aberrant, data, but our interest is through this sort of a structure is how do we create a system where there's a regular systemic expectation of improvement year over year. And I think that's when we talk about this is kind of year one of that sort of thinking publicly, public facing as a system, I think that leads us into that idea of this then changes the way that we talk about the trajectory of of students in the system.

Sorry. I just wanna say, you know, hopefully, too, with the tech reset, that will also

contribute to the improvement because it'll allow, hopefully, more, you know, focus, critical thinking skills, and all that as well. So I think that we were just like that. We were just talking about this earlier, actually, wondering about with Renstar being an online assessment, which for obvious reasons, we still need to use that because we're something better will come out soon once once these companies start working on it. But for now, it's what we have. So with the tech reset and very little tech happening in the classroom and then going to an online assessment, there might be a dip just from format changes. You see that whenever a test goes from paper to to digital or vice versa. So, you know, we're we're prepared for that. I don't think we will see it as a a failure if we don't hit 5%

exactly, but there's some interesting things to look at related. I was actually thinking from the positive. Mhmm. In in the sense, like, particularly the kids who are familiar with online tests that, you know, having less distractions potentially and more, like, reading stamina, etcetera, like that, that might be helpful.

Hopefully. I'll go that way. Just, Allison, to your earlier point about, kind of expectations and workload related to Laura, I think that's that's true. Right? She's leading this in a lot of ways. The there's an expectation of substantial commitment from the entire team, but as importantly, if not more importantly, from the faculty. And so we what we try to do is balance what can be accomplished administratively with what's gonna require time from the incredibly talented but busy faculty. And so I think, to your point, Omar, it's it's doable. Right? I think there there's aspiration in it, but, certainly, accomplishable, achievable ambition in it. That was the balance we tried to find.

Yeah. And I think just to just to sort of close out the, that piece of the conversation, so going to those questions about the benchmarking, I think the goal here is to look for progress. It's not necessarily gonna be, you know, a specific number in terms of improvement on an annual basis. There's gonna be we've already discussed what some of those factors are gonna be. That shift in technology, it's like it could it could advantage some students. It could disadvantage other students. And then we're gonna have also similar changes statewide and nationwide because, again, you know, it's like Renaissance Star offers testing nationwide. We have our I assume it's a New York specific. I don't actually know if it is a New York specific test. Right? But but, again, it's like the the those are all there's not gonna be any way to sort of, like, isolate the variables, so we are gonna have to be looking at improvement over sort of a continuum. I think also just thinking about in terms of the the work that we're going to be undertaking as a whole, it's going to be incumbent upon us as a board also to support that work by being very thoughtful about how we're using our work session and presentation time this year to ensure that the topics that we're delving into are things that they are working on to advance these goals. And so what I'm gonna ask of this board, and I think we've we've talked about it and we're in agreement, is that we wanna try to keep, you know, the things that we are honing in on, whether it's through committee work, policy development, technology,

advocacy, really relate to centering these the board's priorities and the district's goals every time we're asking a question so that the work of the collective is in support of advancing those goals. I think that'll help streamline and keep us from getting distracted from sort of what our what our collective goal is for this year. And then I think the other piece of it is, just again, being thoughtful about, like, how we can you know, for for example, like, work session calendar, I think as a board development committee, we board governance committee, we can go back to that now and sort of say, okay. What are the sort of specific points that speak to what our students asked about wanting to look at this year? What we had sort of brainstormed can now coalesce into specific points. And all of that, actually, I was thinking about this. Know, You thinking about, for example, we've been doing,

through Rachel's department, the reporting on climate, etcetera. Like, that's also part of that conversation. That then becomes something that feeds into that end of year annual assessment. It's not just going to be, like, what was everybody's renaissance score test, but how did they report they felt that year? Because it is there's still a holistic view of student experience, and, social emotional outcomes are equally important within the school district in terms of, like, how we're experiencing life in school. So all those all the things that we're asking the district to sort of provide us information on, I think, is gonna come together to sort of give us that picture at the end of the year. And then that picture is something we'll be able to look at year over year to really look at progress in terms of the district, in terms of sort of, like, the life of the system.

Yeah. Can I sorry? Go go ahead. Go ahead.

This is just really fast. Like, interestingly, Betsy and I were at the Meet the BOE, and one of the community members, parents who came, brought up this issue about liking the concept of academic rigor, but also how do we balance with so, like, doing keep the social emotional learning and thread that needle with the balance. So 100% of what you're saying, and I think the community is also looking for that us to maintain that balance.

My final thought on on this is if you were to to hide Croton-Harmon, right, and you just take these sub goals and take them to any institution and any organization, these to me speak to a value of continuous improvement. And that's, like, that's a that's a cultural shift for for many institutions that they try to do and aren't able to accomplish. But, again, like, reading this, that that between the lines, like, that's what that's what I'm hearing here. I'm I'm, quite frankly, just less concerned about hitting the 5% mark as long as we're it's the learning from the exercise of looking at the data of questioning what where we can we can do better, and this is, again, that is embodied in these goals. So,

yes, thank you. Thank you. Any further questions? Otherwise, I'd like to, again, thank Steve, Laura, the entire administrative team, our building leaders, and our faculty leaders, and the entire faculty for their collaboration on this work up to this point. And I think we have a lot to look forward to and a lot of really great meetings actually where we'll be discussing this in the year ahead. I wanna take a pause just because we are always trying to keep things on time and say to our students, these we've got four more agenda items to go through. So if you feel like this is a time to step out, we're gonna do instructional personnel. But the majority of our active discussion on big picture topics is winding down. So if you'd like to to to use this as an opportunity to head out, you're welcome, or you can stay for the next four. We will try to make it efficient. Okay? Yeah. Absolutely. I know it's the start of the school year, there's already homework.

I am aware. Yes. Unfortunately, trustees, you have to stay. I know we all do. We all have homework. We're listen. Hey. Wait a second. We started at 06:30. It's still before 08:30. So we're under a two hour meeting, and I just wanna point that out to everybody. I think we're doing a really good job here. Madeline, you don't mind if I talk while you're closing up your stuff? Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. So we'll move then into four point item 4.1, instructional personnel recommendations. We are not so it's not a resolution because the district has presented these goals, the board adopted. So, again, just for the benefit of the community, the board adopted goals earlier this year. Those are gonna be published to the to the website. Generally speaking, we don't adopt the district's goals because the the the board the the board goals sort of are the the overarching, view. And at this point, we've agreed. And through this conversation, I think they've got some good feedback.

Anything that needs to be refined in terms of how these goals are presented, that'll happen. We obviously, anyone member of the public can see it in the presentation in board docs tonight, and then they'll be shared through various mechanisms. And we're also going to be hearing, as you know, at our back to school nights, it'll be touched on by our building leaders as families come back in. We will also in a couple of weeks, I don't wanna set a date yet because we haven't determined that, but we'll be hearing the building goals as well, how how the different buildings are going to interact with these priorities, and what we'll be seeing in those, in those individual, buildings.

Yes.

Is there value in thumbs up? Absolutely. There's a 100% value in a thumbs up. You wanna go back? We can do that. Yeah. I think I think we demonstrate

and show how we feel about Absolutely. Because I think for Frank, because I think there's alignment. Yes. There's value in sharing. There's alignment for our. Yep. Or

Yeah. I I that. That works. So thumbs up. Yes. You can give you can give a, yes, a an emotional two thumbs up, but we only count one of your thumbs, Jake, for the purposes of of of for recording purposes. So and I appreciate, again, for everyone who was in who engaged, you know, and, delegated to Omar and me the, representing the voice of the board throughout this conversation and for your feedback every step of the way as well. It is definitely a group effort. And for me, it feels really good. I hope for everyone sitting at this table, feels good because I think, again, we've got hard work ahead, but we're hard workers. That's what we're here for. So I'm really, really pleased, and I hope our community sees sees our commitment to centering student experiences and outcomes in all the work that we're always doing. It's just being articulated much more clearly. And on this third day of school, man, that's pretty awesome. It's really good stuff.

Okay. Moving into item, 4.1, instructional personnel recommendations be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby approves the instructional personnel recommendations as presented.

Second.

On the question? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? The motion carries. Moving into item 4.2, instructional personnel recommendation. Recommended action, be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby approves the instructional personnel appointment of Amanda Caposello 1.0 leave replacement position for Dorothy Morales as a special education teacher at Carrie E. Tompkins Elementary School effective 10/05/2026 through 06/25/2027 to be compensated at an annual salary of $91,744, MA Step seven prorated. On the question? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? The motion carries. Moving into item 4.3, I think you'll all be pleased to see the recommended action resolved that the Board of Education hereby approves the probationary instructional personnel appointment of Carmelina. I hope I pronounced that. A school nurse at Proton Harmon High School at a salary of $73,178. Nurse step 14, effective 09/17/2026.

Fifty two week probationary period to end 09/16/2027. On the question? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? The motion carries. Moving into our consent agenda item 5.1, be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby approves all the items under the consent agenda.

Second.

On the question? Any questions on any of these items? Okay. Then all in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Moving into the closing of the meeting, item 6.1, our second hearing of the public. If there are any members of the public who would like to address the board, please approach the podium, state your name. You have three minutes. Anyone? You you are welcome to, you are welcome to state your position or questions on anything. We won't necessarily be able to respond in the meeting because our practice is to get back to individuals afterwards, but you're welcome to state them here. And then if you can provide your email address, we can respond through that way or set up a time to meet with you. Sir, I'm sorry. Could I ask you to approach the podium if you don't mind only because then you won't be picked up by our livestream? And if you could,

I I'll I'll just give you, like, a little preamble. Our practice is that we do ask people to introduce themselves by their name and the street that you live on and the school district if possible. That would be great. Okay. Thanks. You have three minutes. Do I turn it on? You're on. Alright. Chris Field. I live on Applebee Farm Lane,

Proton School District. Yeah. August. Just on the the college and career slide, it's, there's, like, a gaping mist there in that the only thing you talk about is college. Like, there's gotta be some like, we have to do something. Like, not everybody in the school is gonna go to college. It's not a 100% of people that make it to college, make it all the way through college. We have to acknowledge that that's a reality and support it because those are also real jobs. So they're careers and things like that. So might wanna.

Right. I think that's actually an excellent am I Mike, Don? Yes. So I think that's an excellent point, and sometimes we we will take an opportunity to answer it. Do you have another question? Or I'm just ask about I'll just email.

Okay. Sure thing. Sure thing. So so just to sort of reiterate that I think that for this evening's presentation, we specifically asked for a focus this year on, college and career readiness through the lens of our educational program in terms of core curriculum.

We actually have a very strong relationship, Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES through which a lot of our students receive technical and career education. And part of our, annual initiative is actually to discuss and present the work of students who attended those programs to recognize the specific type of project work and curricular experiences they undertake. We also go often and visit our students who are up there taking part in the coursework there. And through our student trustees, we're actually going to develop a way again this year, which we've done the last couple years, to invite those students to come down and actually talk about a little bit of what their programs look like. It's a really, it's a really it's really insightful for all of us, and I think it also supports the idea that there are sort of many paths to what comes after high school.

And if you're gonna have a goal slide presented by the district, it should be inclusive of all of the educational outcomes, especially when it's talking about careers and, you know, lifetime employment. So

Really great feedback. Thank you so much. Moving into item 6.2, the polling of the board. Go ahead.

Just just a brief comment that, for for me, when I hear something around college readiness, it's really about, preparing students for preparing them for experiences that transcend college and that a focus of or having a a focus of preparing students for college will prepare students for college and and career as well. So that while we were saying we're articulating college in here, I don't think that means we're not focusing on students that may not be pursuing or to have that ambition. I just want to say that. But I think that but I think that yeah.

Right.

Yeah. So I think that that I think that's a point well taken, and I and and and for consistency with the majority of communications that come out from the school district, that is our, our standard terminology. But we'll we'll definitely make sure that that's acknowledged in the way that these goals are presented. It's excellent feedback. Thank you. Moving into item 6.3, the next board of education meeting is currently scheduled for oh, yep. Sure. Yep. I

just wanted to thank, Steve for we had a great walk through the middle and high school today, and it was really wonderful to see the students so socially engaged with each other. And I've never walked through the middle school before. This is my first experience. But I what I really love to see is that in multiple classrooms we walked into, kids were sitting there with big books, and they were reading. And it was just amazing to see how engaged they were. One of the students said, should I read this one or this one? That was really funny. But I I thought the energy in the school was so fantastic. I really I saw some kids playing Uno in the hallway at some point, which I was like, that's so wonderful for their social development to be really with each other, and I found it really impressive. And we also had one student give us a quick presentation about her summer, and I was really impressed by how well spoken and confident she was.

So I really enjoyed seeing that, and I think the school year is is clearly off to a really great start. And I would echo mister Riley's feedback that the schools look impeccable. I mean, I don't think a middle school has ever looked so clean. So, yeah, just thank you so much for that opportunity.

And yeah. And, Steve, if I may, you've offered you've offered that invitation to any trustee who wants to go on a exclusive learning walk with Steve Walker. I was yeah. Was just gonna say that. I I would love that opportunity. I think we had a great time today. We did get,

dragoon by, Marty McDonald at at PVC to play some baseball as I something's with I put my rotator cuff now, but, that was it was a wonderful walk through, a great great chance to get a chance, for us to see in action some of the conversations that we've had, including, you know, that sustained silent reading as a response to the tech reset, and that that would have looked different in May or June. So, really great conversations that came out of it, and I I extend that invitation to all members of the board. Would love to make myself available at your convenience to do that. Right. I think last year, we took a break from doing our board learning walks because Allison had just sort of lived through thirteen years immediately of being a school parent.

So we we didn't prioritize them last year. But in previous years, we've actually scheduled specific times for the board for three of us to come in at a time. But, again, I think there are multiple opportunities. I think also as trustees, should avail ourselves of the building, scheduled ones as parents because I think, again, you get, like, a different experience when you're walking in with a group of other parents who are parents of, kids, know, your kid's age. So I think there'll be multiple opportunities for us to sort of be in there. And going back to your point earlier about volunteering, I know that's something that we have been talking about, as a leadership team for a few years now about how to sort of, to allow for that that connection to come back because that homeschool connection of having, like, the parents sort of see what's happening in the trenches, it's just a way for you to have visibility to what your student is doing. So I think it's really great that the district is

moving back to some of these common experiences for parents too, actually, because that that's that's another practice that I think is we're welcoming the return of that. So moving into item 6.3, again, our next Board of Education meeting will be scheduled for 09/17/2026. It's another work session. And we'll announce the topic after we, regroup on that a little bit. Item 6.4, we're moving into entering executive session. So be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby enters into executive session to discuss a confidential student matter regarding a particular student. I will note before, we move this that the board will, after entering executive session, leave executive session and promptly adjourn the meeting after that. If I could just get a motion, please. Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? The motion carries. Thank you. And thank you to the members of the public, the admin team, and Nikki,

Denise, Greg for being here tonight and supporting us. We will, leave executive session, and then adjourn the meeting. Thank you, and good night.