e e e e good to go all right welcome everybody thank you to everyone who is joining us online and welcome to everyone who is here in person looks like we have about 24 folks online we've got about uh four community members in person and uh and we have a a representative from the board and some administrators so thank you all so much for being here tonight this is uh our first inaugural state of the schools address um I hope that uh that this is a this is a unifying event um so I'm gonna start by giving a little bit of background as to why we're here and what the goal of of all this is and then I'd like to just kind of get through some information for all of you and explain to you kind what we're able to do working with our team here and trying to answer some basic questions and start to come up with a with a with a a basic explanation as to kind of where we think we are and what area what things we think we need to do to improve a little bit a couple of caveats uh this is a very data heavy presentation so we try to make the data slides um approachable and not too intimidating but we do try to also make them very rich and useful so depending on your comfort and interpreting data this might be something that is uh very comfortable for you it might be something that's a little bit daunting I will be using my uh my laptop here so for those who are so you'll be able to see me move the cursor on the screen when I point to things uh you'll also but for the folks who are in here in person I will try to move around a little bit but for the folks who are at home they're going to see primarily the screen and then they're going to see a little box in the corner that is me so um so I'll try to try to give a joint presentation in a way that's appealing to both audiences to some extent um I also want to share that in so far as the presentation is concerned this is our first year actually doing the state of the schools address here in Ridgewood so I'm working with a new team uh we did this in my prior District we did it for six years every year there's a different iteration and I tried to uh level up a little bit with some of our analysis even over what I've done in Prior years but uh some of the systems that we had in place and the data collection systems that we had in place in my prior District we didn't have we don't have in place yet so this is sort of like a baseline year and uh I'm going to be asking all of you who are joining me whether it be virtual or whether it be in person to and we did and just for those at home we did just get a bunch more people come in live and in person so thanks so much all for being here and um but what I'm thinking but the primary objective that I have with all this is not to tell you all how things are going so I know there's a bit of a direct like kind of a correlation between like the State of the State or like the State of the Union right very typically whoever is actually the governor or the president at the time that they give those addresses it's often like their opportunity to share all the things that they've accomplished and kind of like uh you know T tout all their successes and then their objectives this is not that's not my Approach here my Approach here is actually to be very objective and to really actually try to be very careful about how I choose my words so that really this is meant to be uh an invitation for all of you as community members to be able to join in the conversation and help us to tell the story behind this data help us to understand what's might be going on and even to sometimes poke holes in the data so sometimes when we have data sets and we're looking we're seeing Trends we think we see a trend sometimes what we're measuring maybe might not be exactly the right measure sometimes we might be thinking we're measuring something and we're actually might be measuring something else and sometimes you might see a trend that looks alarming and we so what we try to do is is corroborate that through other metrics as well and sometimes they don't always line up and sometimes it's just because there are data errors we worked very hard to not have data errors here uh I there are still a couple things that I want to check out because the trends just seem strange but we have a really excellent data team here that I'm really grateful for and I want to start just by thanking them uh we have a technology director of Technologies Nam is Siri morun we have a data specialist as well or name is Georgia and I'm Al bronzo right yeah so I'm sorry I'm still I'm still a little new to the place myself um but Georgia and S he uh really love data and even prior to my arrival they were building out an interoperable data system Warehouse that can basically house all of our data so that way we can use we can do all kinds of analyses on demand so they've been building this and since we did the student surveys and we collected a variety of other data from um from the college board and from the New Jersey Department of Education website we're able to merge all this together and develop a lot of really interesting graph charts uh we've had a lot going on in the district over the course of this last year I know for those of you who've been following along that's not a surprise to you so we' we haven't been able to have this will this will improve with iterations and I think there will probably be some followup there will certainly be some follow-up analyses to these data but I think we're going to be giving you a presentation that is going to help at least create a a a commonly a commonly held understanding of some basic facts about where we stand as a district and then at the end we're going to have a Q&A session there's some comment available there too and that's an opportunity for all of you to share with me and to share with all of us maybe some suggestions of maybe how we might explain what we're seeing uh part of what how we work in data is that we look and we see we see we see a data visualization and we form hypotheses around why the data might be that way so my hypothesis are are are only one only coming out of one brain so you as community members have a lot of insights and you might be able to help out with some of that I'm also going to invite you to recommend other future analyses there's more that we do in District than what's represented here this is designed to be a publicly facing view a lot of the data is aggregated so it's basically at the district level um we don't we we do do a considerable amount of school level analysis and we use the school level analysis for the schools to develop their own plans but so as to uh not pit schools against each other and make sure principles feel safe working in their spaces and and and and working on the areas that they want to improve we we try to avoid giving that really specific of data in these public presentations here in this style format um but that said if you want to know more about your child's School specifically you can go to the New Jersey Department of Education performance reports and you can pull up your child's perform you can pull up their analysis there as well so um and of course obviously the high school we only have one high school so when we talk about high school metrics we obviously have to talk about only our one high school but I'm going to go ahead and start with the presentation there are quite a few slides and if I don't start soon uh we're going to be here for a long time all right um I don't want to I don't want to um stifle your anyone's questions but for the sake of for the sake of time I think it's going to be best if we move straight through the presentation and if you can maybe want to have your your uh your maybe have like like an app on your phone out where you can take notes or if you have a piece of paper jot down some of your ideas and your questions I may very well answer some of your questions and your your thoughts along the way but if I don't then you have a little record and you didn't lose track because we are going to go through a lot okay before we get started people who are here with me any have any questions or concerns before I get rolling all right thank you so much um I'm not going to go through everybody online with that question too so you all got an advantage for being here in person that's your bonus thank you very much but everybody online uh thank you so much we'll get we'll have give you a chance to ask questions at the end all right and for those who are just joining us please feel free to take a seat anywhere thank you all so much for being here with us today all right so I mentioned the presentation objectives but I just want to reiterate them oh and and if anyone's interested in seeing the presentation it is posted online at this point Miss corus so you can get it on just refresh my memory again all right so if you go to the homepage of the website is right on news this presentation is now available as is so if you have a a smart device or a tablet and you want to try to zoom into it you can go ahead and zoom into it and try to uh and and and look a little more closely at this these figures so we're going to develop an evidence-based Community understanding of recent academic performance trends we're going to use a lot of different academic data for that we're going to you look at student perceptions of the school experience that was collected through student surveys this year and we're going to look at our performance rpss performance on various rankings and rating systems which I know are of concern to folks our goals are really to identify areas of strength and areas for improvement and then of course next steps and then we also want to draw as I said before on the collective intelligence of our community we'll have a Q&A I want to hear your thoughts uh we'll we'll also have upcoming data collections which I'll talk about more later and then of course will'll continue with our future superintendent coffee sessions um there are some key takeaways here um that I'm actually going to come back to this later you can see that you can get to them if you want but I'll talk about them again at the end but our welcome and thank you I want to thank the this entire Ridgewood Community I want to thank our students uh for they they participated in these surveys we had great participation and I think they were really honest in their in their responses we had a chance to read all their comments too uh parents Federated HSA RAF booster clubs our whole Community faculty and staff they do great work with our kids and of course our administrative team I actually gave a preview to some of the members of the administrative team earlier today we work with data a lot and uh they have been just so eager to understand what's going on in their schools and to take ownership for student outcomes so I'm really proud of them and grateful for them if you're not familiar our mission statements listed here um it says that our schools are committed to a tradition of Excellence which we're familiar with but it also says and innovation in partnership with the community to provide a rich and challenging learning environment enabling students to maximize unique potential to become lifelong Learners productive responsible citizens we have some beliefs and practices which I will not read to you but they are from the 1920 to 2024 strategic plan and uh these have a lot these these had a lot of meaning at the time and I think they've carried through I think the language here is really strong although I think we could do some updating in an upcoming strategic plan which I'll be recommending in a little bit if you're not familiar with our district goals you should take a look at these because they'll give you an idea as to what we've been working on this year so our first goal was to evaluate and update the district's strategic plan our takeaway was that it did yield some good fruit and that we want to continue with another strategic plan that's kind of the short version um the district goal too was to reevaluate and formalize our RPS plan for inclusivity it's really important that and for those who are interested in Dei and making sure that we're having a uh really strong equity and inclusion practices in our schools I like the term inclusivity because I think it really says really what we're most concerned about and sometimes the term Dei is misconstrued by some folks where talking about having a public school environment where anybody who walks in our doors can get access to a world-class education regardless of their background and their identity and we also want to be responsive to the kind of backgrounds and identities of students who are with us so that they feel like they have a place in our schools they belong in our schools regardless of whether or not they are they they they are part of the uh the majority culture the majority racial identity we also have our goal three which is to evaluate our Ela and our math programs and we have a uh which which which we'll talk about quite a bit and we also wanted to reevaluate the state of the district's finances as well as our facilities so although we're not going to get into this today if you're interested in finance and Facilities particularly financials you can look at our uh budget presentation where we gave some analysis and talked about kind of the state of where we are so Ridgewood by the Numbers just a few basic facts for you if you're not familiar with District district Factor grouping uh these aren't technically used anymore but basically the de the Department of Education for a while was classifying districts with these letters and and it was based on your percent of enrolled pupils on the free and reduced lunch program so uh we're a district Factor J which means that we have the lowest enrollment of economically disadvantaged pupils and that's one of the reasons not all the reasons but one of the reasons why our our general performances are among the highest in the State student test scores generally F very gener always to some extent follow the income levels of the community the parent education levels and um and the overall economics of the community uh that's just been established for through years of research so what we're trying to do is recognize despite the fact that we have those forces working in our favor here how can we ensure that we have really strong inclusive schools where all kids regardless of whether or not they fit that stereotype in Ridgewood uh they that they can that they can be thriving in our schools we've had some recent recognition we've run some sustainable Jersey acknowledgements uh we recently were acknowledged for an Innovations and special education award US News and World reports ranked us fairly highly in Prior years and then our Niche uh niche.com we have an A+ rating and we're number number five best school districts in New Jersey uh under enrollment um you can see that we're experiencing a bit of an enrollment decline we talked about this in the budget presentation I think Dr McKenna you pointed out the fact that this is part of a national Trend and uh and we sure enough see it here so you can see that our enrollment levels are getting pretty lower usually by first grade we usually have about the full cohort so you can see our first grade here happens to be our smallest and even up through third grade we're not breaking 400 so the difference between that first grade class and the difference between say our 11th grade class which is our biggest is over a hundred students different so we're we should we should expect to be seeing less crowding in our schools um and ALS possibly some some other some other Financial challenges as well under District diversity uh we are we are a little bit more male than we are female um we have a very low enrollment of economically disadvantaged students those are students in the free roduced lunch population a special education classification rate is about 13% which is about standard for for a for Public School District it's about average under home language we have about 10% of students who speak a language other than English at home and I not many not a lot of people realize that uh under race we have a considerable uh considerably sized minority of uh Asian Americans here in Ridgewood about 20% of our of our student population is Asian uh we have a big multi-racial chunk as well uh that could be anybody who clicks multiple who selects multiple boxes for their racial identity and then under ethnicity we're about 11% of individuals identifying as Hispanic so we're going to get right into some academics and assessment again this is about a 60 slide presentation so if it feels like I'm moving quickly it's because I'm gonna you might feel fresh right now but you're not going to feel so fresh in about 40 slides all right so we're going to focus on a couple of different metrics that are public available so we're going to focus on uh njsla analysis uh we we'll do njsla science also as a separate analysis uh we have a we're going to look at AP performance data PSAT sat act grad rates and a little bit of a a little bit of a window into college acceptances particularly I know there's a lot of focus on acceptances at some of the more difficult uh to access universities so we're going to focus our attention there today that doesn't mean that it's all about those universities but I just know that that's public concern and we want to respond to that all right so we're going to start with a stable cohort data this is something that we we named the stable cohort um basically the idea is that when we look at our our test scores what we're trying to do is we're looking at we want to look at the performance of students who have been with us from one year to the next if we just look at all of our test takers one year and all of our test takers the next year that doesn't necessarily give us the whole story of how our students are achieving because you're going to be including scores from students who maybe just got here and there's going to be other kids that we worked with who left who won't be included so to try to control for that a little a little bit we we and for the sake of program evaluation and looking at how we're doing as a district we're looking only at kids who are here for both of those tests okay so because of that it's spanning two years and not everybody's tested in njsla there's only six cohorts for ELA for whom that qualifies remember this is 2023 so when it says grade nine that's our current 10th grade right but we're looking at the transition from e8th grade to ninth grade seventh grade to e8th grade sixth grade to seventh grade fifth six Etc right so what we try to do is make this very straightforward if you saw if you were here with us when we did our njsla presentation you've already seen this so you know it's it should seem somewhat familiar but effectively what we tried to do is say all right we're looking at our our scale score the scale is uh is um uh 650 to 850 so basically like 850 is a 100 and 650 is a zero right so 750 is the dead middle and 750 is also the cut score for passing so you can see that all of that all these classes in aggregate on average they are well above the passing rate but you'll notice that there are four lines that go up and there are two lines that go down so interestingly when we talked about this in last presentation one of our board members pointed out the fact that and you can see this on the right the cohorts that went down are the are the in red there but the class of 2029 in the class of 2026 let's go back to the prior slide 2029 is the transition from fifth grade to sixth grade so that's where they leave elementary school and they go to one of the two middle schools and then class of 2026 is the transition from 8th grade to 9th grade so they're coming out of middle school and they're going to high school so it seems that something's going on with this transition and we're examining this right now and one of the possible explanations is that we're just not using similar expectation systems and so students are there's some disconnect there but also this could point to like a scope and sequence issue so for example if we have not been looking at our K12 articulation really closely then at the end of fifth grade we the the elementary teachers might have this mindset that they want the the kids to be here but if the middle school they're expecting the kids to not quite be that high but down here and they're teaching them lower than they need to then they might not actually be covering as much as they need to and that would be supported by based on the fact that once they're in the elementary when they're in the elementary schools and once they're in the the middle schools they then see growth upward growth so um these tests are all different to be fair each grade levels Norm differently they're the tests change from year to year so it's not exactly perfect Apples to Apples but this does seem to indicate that we need to hear evaluate those transitions pretty closely if we look through the lens of IEP students or economically disadvantaged students which are categories that students from any class could be could be associated with we find that although IEP and non AP students are are perform at different perform differently which I think is to be expected to some extent they are both seeing growth or at least some level of growth however under economically disadvantaged as expected are not are not economically disadvantaged students are seeing growth but our economically disadvantaged students albeit a small population saw a slight decline so again is that statistically significant maybe not but it's pretty clearly not gross Improvement right so it's something that again the reform an hypothesis maybe we need to do more for our economically disadvantaged students maybe we need to do uh so that's one group in our mind right looking at racial categories again we we we we've this has been repeated over and over again when students in different racial categories are uh are are looked at they perform they generally perform differently we can't fix all of the wrongs ills of society just here in Ridgewood but what we can do is try to make sure that everybody's growing you'll notice that we have Black and Hispanic categorized in the same group that's just because it's such a small group we're trying they're both traditionally underserved populations we're just trying to make them a bigger number so we can get a little better better analysis out of them um and what we're seeing here is that through the lens of race all all these groups seem to be having some level of an upward Trend if not like a seemingly quite positive upward Trend hopefully that can continue let's look at math now these are there are fewer cohorts to look at uh but if you take a look you see we have two going up two cohorts going up and two cohorts going down so following the logic of the prior presentation the prior slides you would guess maybe those are transition years but oddly and I'm sorry the class of 2029 that should be coded red so that's a typo so the the class of 2029 says 770 and 760 that shouldn't be green that should be red that was a decline so 2029 and 2031 we go back up 2029 that was our fifth grade to sixth grade okay so that's a transition so that makes sense so that's consistent with our other observation but the class of 2031 that's third to fourth grade so that doesn't seem to quite make as much sense so we want to take a look there what's going on in our math sequence at the elementary level that we're having this issue between third and fourth grade the reason we can't go higher than this in terms of examining this cohort model is that in a 7th e8th nth 10th grade that's when the kids start breaking out into Algebra 1 geometry and Algebra 2 and their sequences are different because we start accelerating students so some takeaways here maybe some inconsistent performances in math especially at the younger grades and uh and our economically disadvantaged students in the other category were not looking so strong let's look at how this actually plays out with across some other areas so for IEP students interestingly our IEP students in this in this Co in in in in math on the whole showed growth interestingly our economically disadvantaged students also showed some growth and it was our non-ip students and our non-economically disadvantaged students who actually saw a decline perhaps that's a curricular issue maybe our expectations for Jed are is are are not as strong as they should be so again these are these are areas of inquiry for us looking by racial category uh looks like we had some level of growth for our Black and Hispanic students our Asian students our multi-race students and our white students saw a slight decline in their performance so on njsla um we're going to get you know we had a pretty big disruption the last data set prior to 2022 from njsla was 2019 so we can't we there's no there's no cohorts that span that time but next year uh when their kids are currently taking njsla now and some of them are done so in the fall in the summer and the fall we'll get some fresh data um and we can run an analysis like this again so in the fall we should have another Year's Worth to see how these Trends pan out a little better in the meantime we're drilling down at the individual schools to see if there's specific trends at specific schools that we need to address so let's talk about AP so we're kind of going down the other end of the spectrum uh high school so APS just like the njsla these are commonly used in ratings and ranking systems um these are these tests are sponsored by the College Board which not everybody's a fan of the college board but they they they are widely regarded as uh a reliable source of quality assessments and the AP tests in schools are com commonly administered and they are very much a part of the rankings and rating systems that uh that U that we're also very familiar with that people use when they choose where where to buy a home so there are three metrics that usually come into play when we talk about AP so the first is AP enrollment and you can see that across the state those are the blue lines enrollment has been a little bit flat in Ridgewood we seem to have had a little bit of a pickup in the last three years under AP exams taken it's been fairly flat but the last three years there's been a little bit of an increase um but here in rid and here in Ridgewood we've also seen the same kind of an increase as far as scoring three or more the score of three is passing so uh scores of three or more little bit of a kind of stable stable uh model for the state uh but we seem to have seen a bit of an uptick here in Ridgewood so this is across all APS we're not doing a huge Breakout by subject but it would appear that on the whole AP participation performance is a positive thing that's probably something that is a positive driving force in our high school rankings uh sat PSAT and act are also administered by the College Board Act is sort of an alternative to sat and the PSAT is the practice sat so the ACT has been in Decline uh I'm going to talk about this in a later slide but many of you are probably familiar with the concept of test optional so we all I think everyone in this room probably came up in a time where most of us were required to to have SAT scores to apply to college um or some some test like it and uh that's not the case anymore there's been quite a trend that's really accelerated postco to no longer require uh require students to submit test an application it's not no longer an admission criteria so students may but they don't have to so what we see is in the wake of all this the state's seen a decline certainly in this participation but Ridgewood Public Schools this I'm sorry so in act especially there was already low participation in the state Ridgewood Public Schools used to have a high participation rate and now the high schools is that's in Decline for us and we're seeing declining rates as you can see uh uh both in that and the PSAT in the PSAT um I think the reason our we were talking about this as a team I think the reason why our performance rates on the PSAT are lower is that many schools I I I don't know if I could say most schools I don't know that but many schools administer the PSAT as part of their school day we still offer PSAT on Saturdays so students have to try to fit that into their schedule um we're all we're we're generally uh we generally think at this point it's a good idea to give the kids the option and the ability to take it in school because the kids are very busy generally speaking I think it's a good idea to give kids access to such practice tests um I don't believe that tests are bad for kids um but in the same way that like if you wanted to be a marathon runner you don't train to be a marathon runner by only running marathons right but it is good to run a marathon here and there so that that's kind of the approach that we're looking to take is making sure the kids we're encouraging the kids to have good practice but as far as the SAT is concerned our participation rat's been fairly stable it is a little bit under the state level but um but our scores have been like I said fairly stable with an increase in the last few years by subject performances are pretty flat so reading and writing are pretty consistent a little bit of an uptick in reading and writing a little bit of a downtick in math uh the state has been seeing a general downtick uh we did our own ranking just purely by sat to just see how we fared across the state this was one of the on ones where our ranking looks actually pretty good um despite the fact that we have about a 50% participation rate um in 2021 we were in the average so averaging together both of the SATs or combining sorry I should say combined sat um we had um we're we're 13th we're 13th in the state in 2021 12th in 2022 and 11th in 2023 for those of you who uh who are uh with us at home I'm sorry I should use my cursor here for those of you who are not with us at home you're not seeing me pointing but if but you can see with my cursor here a lot of these schools are actually technical schools which means that they are selective schools so they don't have to be they're not inclusive they're actually inherently exclusive um so they have the ability to choose who goes there so it's a little bit of an unfair comparison but there are some districts who per who are outperforming us on Sat burners Township tenly Montgomery Princeton and Milbourne were above us in 2021 in 2023 it's Burns Princeton tenly Montgomery and Milburn again West Windsor Plainsboro also excuse me there we decided to break it out by Ela and by math so that we it wasn't like one was really high and lifting us up and the other was really low they're actually about the same so when we when we did a ranking by sat we also did NJ GPA as like a to kind of corroborate how we were doing and you can see that um the way the NJ NJ GPA is the uh is the new high school test that's like the graduation requirement so we have pretty good participation rates there but if you look actually I'm sorry I'll Point here on the screen again here so uh NJ GPA is all right here notice everybody's 90 for whatever reason when they report out on this they don't report a score above 90 so you're just 90 plus if you're in in the 90s so that's why everybody here happens to be in the 90s again we're 12 on the math side of things uh we're 88.1 um so in Princeton we had a little bit of a higher GPA and they had a little bit of a higher SAT score by subject um it looks like we are we had a little bit of a dip in science which we're going to talk about in a little bit um we had maybe just a maybe this is a one-off it's hard to say the just you know the the ACT scores come in whole numbers and there only is a scale of 36 or so so uh so sometimes just one one metric will actually look like a big jump but this could just be a this could be just a single point um we may have a downward Trend in math here can't say for sure but uh that's something we want to pay attention too we'll talk about more reading looks flat uh now we're at graduation rate graduation rate is also something that we're judged on graduation rate is obviously important because it's the students who are actually graduating from our schools and this was a really important analysis for us so first of all I just want to have to apologize our our our data system that we use does have a few limitations because it's kind of a custom system and right now it can only spit out these comms in alphabetical order so district is right here it really should be off to the side so I apologize about that but you can see our district rate is quite high you can see that same rate reflected pretty high in with Asian students and with white students but you'll notice that our economically disadvantaged students oh I'm sorry I jumped up one there's four year and fiveyear we're looking at fiveyear right now all right that's what happens when I touch my cursor so in the four-year graduation rate here you see that with our students with disabilities you see that there's this low graduation rate well we looked at this and we we thought well first of all we saw 97% graduation rate and at a school district at a school our size for us to only have for us to have three% of our students not graduating that's very alarming that's quite a few students so we started to drill down into this and we saw had this made this observation about economically disadvantaged students which is a very very very small group but then are students with disabilities so we actually drilled down into all the states data and we actually got to the place in the state data where we could actually find the names of the students who were making up this list and we discovered that our that our dropout rate is less than 1% we do have a couple dropouts each year um it just happens kids have circumstances way outside of our control we do everything we can to keep them here but we can't stop them from from from dropping out but the majority of this list of not graduated stud students are actually students with special needs who are part of 18 to 21 year old programs and some of them are here in our district some of them are in outof District placements appropriately so and as a result of that they are still on record as our students who have not graduated so we're looking into uh there are some we're looking into our what processes we need to go through with the state to make sure that they're registered and coded correctly so that in future years we actually get the graduation rate of 99% plus that we should be having and interestingly in these rankings the difference in graduation rate is not like proficiency rate like most schools the vast majority of schools are the 90% graduation rates so to go from 99 to 97 is a pretty significant hit and graduation rates are advertised across or usually are included in almost every ranking system so for us to be able to fix this will have a measurable impact in how our schools are perceived you can see the same Trend here with our five-year graduation rate and to be clear this doesn't involve changing practice in terms of the kids this involves fixing our whatever however we're whatever process and our data reporting is not correct right now this is our science performance so you see our fifth graders performing performing pretty well here our eighth graders performing seem to be pretty well by the state uh we chose to focus with limited time on this right here on our high school because our high school njsla science performances are actually something that we get scored on now by a lot of rankings and rating agencies and you notice there's this Spike right right here pretty high seemingly high performance compared to the rest and then all of a sudden there's this drop off well this was the first year 2019 was the first year that this assessment was was was issued and we believe that our well uh we we suspect that this was that our students believe that this was a mandatory test like many of the other tests that the schools provide um and interestingly but they dropped off quite significantly so a funny story The our first day of having the teachers back my first year as superintendent we have our convocation and we had it at BF we have a nice big opening ceremony we have a lot of fun there's music and and like skits and it's all all feel-good stuff then we I you know I give some talks to kind of get People Pumped up for the year and then we all break out into different meetings so then I went around the school and I was popping in some different meetings and I happened to walk by the science uh science faculty meeting so was all the secondary science teachers in The District in one of the one of the classrooms and they were having some heated discussion and our science supervisor ter Tor uh wanted to make sure that they got feedback on how the students did on the Science assessment and they put it up on the screen and the conversation was these kids do they know it doesn't count for them and they don't take it seriously and they shared a bunch of anecdotes the kids are very explicit like why do I have to take this test this doesn't make any sense I'm in 11th grade like this doesn't this isn't going to impact me at all right and we so often in in our in our public meetings we tend to focus on math and language arts so much that there is this perception that maybe this test doesn't really actually matter that much I've since talked to some parents and corroborated that they that that is that is very much a perception that kids have and if kids don't try it's like anything in life if you don't really try very hard at something you're not going to get the same level of performance out um so uh so this now though is something that I think that we should really promote with kids and we're talking we're we're actually the kids are actually taking this test next week and we're going to be communicating out with them that this is a test they should take seriously it does it gives us feedback as to how we're doing in our in science H and it's publicly available information and it's actually a part of some of the rankings and rating systems by which people judge our schools and judge our community so we don't want to put all that on the kids like it's not their responsibility to to like to to to maintain our property values or something like that but at the same time though there is a level of Pride that goes into this is an opportunity to show how smart you are and to look good for our school district so we're we're working on messaging to make sure that that's delivered to them in an appropriate way and hopefully they can try they can they can give a little better effort to be clear uh we are nowhere if we we did a we did a depth ranking we are nowhere near the top of performance so this is not an issue in other school districts in New Jersey so you probably know that the college acceptance has been a topic on a lot of folks Minds so we've gone back and forth as to how to address this topic um I think the best way to talk about it is to like I said just put together some data that kind of show what we see um it's hard this is hard data to work with because uh we we use systems we we used to use a system called Naviance we now use a system called score and it it gives us the ability to work with universities and students to basically exchange information and understand who's applied where track applications track acceptances and have good good information to work from regarding regarding those things so we can get good outputs from this as well but there is a there's a lot that we can't know in this data so I always a little hesitant excuse me I'm always a little hesitant when we talk about college acceptance rates because sometimes some families and some folks get really caught up in that like where you go to school kind of sets the direction for the rest of your life and whereas there are definitive advantages to acceptances in certain places that are commonly esteemed as being highly prestigious uh there are wonderful opportunities for education in many places and the reality about acceptances into these very very quote prestigious universities um are are ve are uh the rates are extraordinarily low we'll talk about that in a minute nevertheless because it matters to people I think it's important to give actual data so that we can see kind of what the trends are so what we did here is so before I show you the data I want I want to start with is just make sure we highlight and understand some of the background about some of these Trends so first of all I'll show you a slide on this in a second the most most the the most selective most prestigious most rejective universities are becoming increasingly more rejective because they're getting applications because of the Common App and because of some of the kind of global fervor for being in these schools uh the number of applicants that these that the top tier schools are are are receiving are are just growing growing and growing and growing and again we're in a more globalized world too so we're having very very highly qualified people coming from all around the world um also the test optional environment remains popular some school some universities are going back but I think that people I get the impression that people think that the test optional uh environment was a function of the pandemic and it became more popular in the pandemic but I included a link here if you want to take a look the there was this has actually gone back it seems like the earliest popularizing of the test optional environment was in 2004 Bates College had actually decided to be go test optional in 1984 but they collected data on their students and even when they accepted students in a test optional environment so if students didn't submit test once they were admitted they were asked to supply their tests and then what they did was they ran a study over 20 years in a blind environment where they were they were they were bringing kids on without test scores but they collected their test scor afterward they then measured s measured their put put their test scores up against how they actually did at their University over 20 years and their contention was that there was no real difference now every study has limitations who's to say that that would have been the case if they were perceived as as being one of the most prestigious schools out there who's to say but my point of ringing this up is that in the it seems to me and I'm not a I I don't work in higher ed um but talking with folks who are in higher ed and who are connected with folks in higher ed and reading reading a lot about this mindset online this is th this is not just a pandemic issue this is a philosophical stance that many that school that many schools are taking that that that test scores are not actually the best indicator of what makes students successful in college so although some are requiring tests again many are not and many will continue not to so what that means for us I think we as a community need to figure that out and then uh last year and it's not really clear exactly how this would impact our community but last year there was the UNCC Harvard decision so if you might remember that there was a case um uh and particularly there were two actually cases one against UNC and one against Harvard that their race conscious and that was the language that they used race conscious admissions processes which were aimed at diversifying their student body were unconstitutional so that was decided last summer and at the point of the decision which I think was in about June there was about they I think they had a 60-day timeline to to to to all adjust now that's not to say that if a student in their application talks about their race that the district that the the the school can't consider that but that can't be like the determining Factor it and it can't be like a blind Factor like we like we are like our goal is to diversify our staff our our student body so this is the first year where that decision is actually in place so it's unclear exactly how that will impact our schools although I although I'm we're hearing we have some early anotal evidence that our acceptances acceptance rates are a little stronger this year that said uh what we did here was uh well actually I'm sorry I've talked about the uh you've probably seen charts like this before I we we didn't have time to to do these charts ourselves so I just credited a couple of couple of different folks who had them um I wanted to show you two different versions because I wanted to be clear that it wasn't just like somebody cherry-picked data this is both these sources one's from a website called Ivy Scholars another is from a graduate student uh who is publishing on a on a medium uh publication called tour data science but they're both pulling data from the US Department of education's college scorecard and they both show over time different selection of schools but some of the most selective schools are becoming increasingly increasingly more selective as time goes on that said we see a little bit of that Trend here in Ridgewood so what you're looking at right now is two versions of the same data on the left you have the US News top 25 and on the right you have us news top 25 these are US News and World Report this is their top 25 best best universities they have their own system I'm not saying these are the best this is just an objective selection of what the most selective universities are so starts with Princeton goes to MIT Harvard Stanford y University of Pennsylvania Duke Brown and goes all the way down and it ends with University of Virginia and then what we have here on the right is the dist is the actual numbers of the amount number of applications that were made to those universities and the acceptances to those universities and then what we did was we ran the percentages of the two to get to uh to get to the percentages here and then I coded them anything it's a zero just gets a light gets a u gets a A pck pink um anything I think like a three gets like a very light pink and then up I think five and above it gets a green color and then the darker the green the more the higher rate of percentage of acceptance so you can see over time from 29 to 23 that we saw um an actual increase in our applications not necessarily across the board but we saw an increase from 2019 to 2020 to 20121 to 2022 and then we saw a significant decline in applications in 2023 but you can see in those EX rates just by looking at the color coding that we're getting fewer acceptances as time goes on very similar to what we saw in this graph here to get a sense as to how this impacts uh the rest of like some some other schools down the list again all very good schools we went to the next top 50 so these are the next 50 I'm sorry on the left it should say top 50 it says uh it says H it says top 25 that's it typo sorry about that but you can see that obviously our acceptances here are much higher so again would seem to indicate that that those those those very very very top perceived schools um are because of their Prestige and because of their demand it is it's growing increasingly harder for our students to gain acceptance now that said this is also a very competitive very uh excellent list and we have many more well I shouldn't say well we we we seem to have more applications we definitely have more applications to this list um and we seem to see a little bit more of a balanced Trend over time now what's hard is if you go back this is these are things that we need to dig into but to what extent are students just not applying to some of these schools because they know the rates are so low additionally there's also a trend right now talking to our high school guidance department where students are intentionally applying to schools that they're comfortable with that they'd be happy with to do a first year so that they can then transfer to one of these more prestigious universities because it's much easier to gain acceptance as a transfer student with a proven excellent academic record in in college we don't that data doesn't exist anywhere we also know there's also some evidence um I've saw and I I just didn't have time to fully research this but we will continue to research it but with this list too um there is there is a there's some evidence that legacy admissions are now playing an increasing role in these kinds of organizations as well in these type of schools as well again we don't have data to support that we can't evaluate that and we don't know how many of our admissions are based on Legacy based on this data we also don't know how many of these admissions are based on Athletics acceptances we've also had conversations too because you know sometimes kids will get into these schools but they'll choose to go to another school or maybe they won't even apply to these schools although they could get in because they were going to focus on schools that might give them an academic scholarship or a merit-based scholarship but again we don't have any data to to by which to evaluate that so one of the suggestions that I'll have uh it's I'll reference at the end of the presentation is to really expand our data collection in this space so working with the high school administration Dave Bailey and Jeff nyas um they had some really great ideas about how to expand we do a senior survey where we collect a lot of data really expanding that data collection even going to our Alumni network and Gathering more information around when people go to school especially like the last five years where when people have gone to school how many of them went based on based on the fact that they had family members who had gone there and that's what we mean by Legacy and to what extent when students went to a school did they actually get any kind of Merit Scholarship but we'd love to build a data set around that as well so that again we can track that over time I didn't say this yet but I'm a big believer in the fact that we measure the things that we care about so I think that um you know one one measure is how many of our kids get to extremely extremely Elite universities but more importantly I want to try to find out as many ways as possible to measure how well prepared our kids are for school and how competitive they are at school so that's so that so that's where we're although we're focusing on this here we want to turn our Focus towards what are the right measures for determining just how strong our kids are and how can we ensure that we're making them perpetually stronger more resilient and more more capable so we're gonna take a second here to take a break from uh all this academic performance data and we're going to talk about some although this is hard data because it is it is actually Quantified it's brought in by surveys it's it gives a little bit more of like a qualitative look it's more of an evaluation of the school context so often when we look at the test scores when we have to look at test scores like the state requires us to We tend to just focus on the scores but here we're really focused on a couple of areas um we have some indicators that we built in the student survey um it's not everything that's in the student survey we'd be here for too long if we tried to do that but what it is are some indicators that are very similar and align well with a lot of research based indicators that are used in research um I didn't tools that are used for academic research are not necessarily designed to be given to students over and over and over again they often have like negatively phrased questions and trick questions to try to make sure that people are taking them validly in a valid way um so we try to change them a little bit so that way they're like they're very they they fall they hit positive with kids they're not really negatively framed and they're relatively simple but I've grouped them in a way that that similar similar research items are grouped so um and I'll show you that in a second so our survey information as I said I think I said this no I didn't say this before so students in grades 3 to 12 participated in the survey we figured students second grade and younger a little too young to be able to really process a survey uh they were taken with their with their teachers especially at the elementary and middle school level they're taken with their teachers um and we had a response rate of 74% so as far as surveys go that's pretty good uh we scaled everything on a lyer scale so it's agree disagree strongly agree or strongly disagree and the way we coded the information was based on we basically made it binary like what percentage of students chose some level of agree to the items so you can see here we had pretty good representation across Elementary and Middle School school high school was a little bit lower uh we didn't have that we didn't use they used a little bit of a different methodology to to to for when the kids took the assessment we didn't get as good of a rate but still about 50% of the kids a little less than 50% but that's still a good representation we had about 2,000 of our students in the white category 700 in the Asian category 343 in multiple boxes checking multiple boxes um our black students represented 40 were there were 43 responses from our black students and there were 18 who fit other categories and then our student climate survey and then this is the survey so the in order to give you as much data as possible and as in as few screens as possible uh what I found success with is doing like heat Maps like this you saw another heat map before with the college admissions but what this is are the there these are items we didn't group them this way in the survey but I regrouped them so that way we had indicators that Focus I think on the strength of our academic culture in our schools which is important for student achievement we have to believe that students achieve organizational Health which have to do with safety and fairness of school and like the orderly nature of school and then the next slide we're going to get into relationships and belonging so these all have some sort of a a research basis evidence evidentiary basis for being important for student well-being and for student achievement and you can see a horizontally when you see Trends those are Trends based on items but then at the top we have different subgroups of students so you can see the extent to which uh different students in different student groups are experiencing schools differently so again I'm going to try not to try to use my cursor without messing up the slide here but if you take a look here this is the one that jumps out to everybody I find schoolwork interesting and you see this is the the color gets gets quite dark here it's scaled out so that way anything below a I think it is anything below a 75 starts turning yellow and then anything below a 65 starts turning reddish so you see this line here now that some people think that's a little bit alarming but I will say that um uh this watching this metric over ages this always gets goes down as kids get older so it I sort it sort of seems a little bit like a proxy for like as school gets harder and there's more demands in school it seems to be a little less interesting that said I think we can all agree that we'd like kids to feel like school's interesting right so there's probably some room for improvement there but if you look at the top up here some of these are really really great I'm confident in my ability to do well in school that's reflect of self-efficacy which is important for students and we have pretty high rates across the board I do my best even when the work is not difficult or interesting again feelings of of grit pretty good across the board now getting into the staying with that that style of Engagement school's preparing me for many career options After High School school's preparing me for my life as adult again these scores are a little lower interestingly I showed this to my wife uh before we as I was building this presentation I was working at home on it one night and when I when she looked at that she said you know I wonder how much Tik Tok culture has to do with that so I don't know if you follow a lot of the T some of the influencers that kids the teenagers especially are listening to but there's a lot of stuff around oh you don't need to go to school look at how much money I make and I'm just I'm an influencer and I and that that is actually quite pervasive especially I mean I have two boys they're 13 and 14 they're in the you know they're in the latter latter end of middle school and they've seen they joke about how ridiculous this culture is I mean we we we we we make it very clear that college statistically people go to college are much greater Advantage uh into being competitive and and and having job options um and they know that but they talk about this widely widely this this false perception so I wonder to extent to which that influences people nevertheless schools should feel relevant to kids and they should feel like that not only are these things important for college but they're also important for real life so organizational Health we seem to have a lot of room for improvement in the school rules or Fair category um those numbers seem a little low to me from what I'm used to so I think we can look at some opportunities for improving that same thing with participating in school most days um this isn't I feel like this is a metric that kind of indicates the extent to which students have warm feelings about school and I think school should be challenging and just in the same way that like you know I I don't think anybody I don't think there's any adult who looks forward to participating in work every day but the reality is that you know we do want kids to have a positive experience in school now looking vertically we can see some different Trends again as I mentioned before the black students a represent that's a very very small sample um but nevertheless it is a little con it's definitively concerning to me that if you look vertically at this trend there is a slightly more negative skew it doesn't show up in the in the persistence toward work that doesn't show up in uh and I feel safe in school but it definitely shows up in some areas about participating in school each day school rules being fair we see a little bit of a dip here with Hispanic students as well with school rules being fair actually they were a little lower uh interestingly I noticed this uh we have 504s uh our disability plans and many of our students have 504 plans related to anxiety and I noticed that finding School workk interesting or looking forward to participating in school most days was actually quite low for that group and I you know again this is about hypothesis I wonder or wonderings and I wonder if that has something to do with that so let's go to the next slide and by the way comparing male and female responses are pretty fun also um so this is relationship and belonging and there's some really interesting there's some really positive things on here and there's also some concerning things so I want to highlight these I have friends at school who care about me look straight across the board 90s almost all the way Ells for whatever reason scored that a little bit lower so that's still not a low number but we maybe want to take a look at that but otherwise these are very strong numbers pretty consistent across subgroups right I respect and value differences among my classmates our students gave themselves near perfect scores across categories for respecting others but then when we go to students at my school respect and value each other's differences we saw quite a drop off all of a sudden when we're talking about other kids it's not as Fair it's not as respectful but again I mentioned this vertical category again small group of kids but being a small group of kids I think we want to be additionally protective of them uh our students in the black category are they answered students at school adults at school understand me they were a little lower than everybody else and they were pretty significantly lower about kids at students at school respecting and valuing each other's differences so I know that sometimes when we talk about like uh culturally responsive teaching and and uh and um being inclusive with our curriculum sometimes uh you know people interpret that to mean that we have to like change everything that we've ever done or we've canceled culture here but and I think that that's the wrong interpretation I think that but I do think it is important to make sure that when we're planning our curriculum we're planning our texts that we think about who our student composition are and we make sure that we have a broad enough experiences and a wide enough view at the world and that we're giving kids opportunities to see the world through different lenses enough that students have opportunities to kind of to to to connect at school connect with the curriculum and also that we would take make an effort to make sure that we're doing that we recognize that we're in school to learn but that we also are School community and helping kids to develop some cultural competencies uh and so that they can they can feel like they can connect with each other despite the fact that we may have some uh some minority groups who who who who approach and see school and the world a little bit differently so there's an opportunity there economically disadvantaged students also had had some lower scores uh off of the rest of the group interestingly in our parent group one of the questions that came up we had some parents work with us on these surveys one of the things that came up was people felt were concerned that because we're so like neighborhood School based you know like everybody like like I meet people in Ridgewood and they don't tell me they they the first thing they tell me is what elementary school they went to I don't say like oh I went to Ridgewood High no they're like I went to Orchard I was actually I was I was actually at a at a uh when I first got when I first got the job here I was actually at a at at a a friend's birthday party like an adult birthday party and somebody at the party found out that I was a new superintendent Ridgewood and I didn't even know who they were I just met the person and uh and she yells across the party you're the superintendent of Ridgewood again the very next word out her mouth was I went to Orchard so that that's how people I tell that story at Orchard they love it but our but our elementary school seriously they make people's identity and whether it's Orchard or whether it's Somerville or whether it's travel or HW it really matters to people where they where they identify so there is this fear that there's not there's not a CO a cohesive Ridgewood identity so he specifically developed this one that there is a Ridgewood Public Schools community and I'm a part of it and interestingly the scores weren't too bad except for the fact as I said before that some that that particularly our black students did not feel that way now again this is a small group I don't know I don't know who exactly constitutes this group but again maybe we can do something to to to to make that a little bit more inclusive but at the same time it's not as though these numbers are really low across the board so clearly some opportunities for improving the School experience but it's not as though our schools aren't really great places um some other things that were really positive adults at school care about me really great scorers across the board adults at school encourage me to do my best great great uh Impressions across the board so I think our professionals deserve a deserve some acknowledgement for that interestingly adults at schools understand me that was a new one that we added this year um so they clearly care about the kids but maybe there are some things that we can do to better understand our zenal that we're all working with right now all right so we're going to transition to rankings and rs I feel like I should give everybody a break or something so if you need if you need to give yourself a break feel free but I'm gonna keep going all right so we're going to break down a couple of different rate rankings and an and and ratings so uh in just starting with the Department of Education uh they are a rating system but one of the things that we're finding is that even companies that call themselves rating agencies actually use ranking systems to develop their ratings so meaning what they'll do for the Department of Education for example uh they say that they have a rating system they have to have a rating system because the federal government to to give us all the federal funds for schools they have to comply with the federal rules if you if you if you remember your uh your law your your your your uh Constitution classes your Civics classes education is a falls under the 10th Amendment and it's a responsibility of the states it's not a federal responsibility but of course when the C when the federal government wants to get involved they just offer States lots of money and they say we'll give you all this money but you have to comply with our rules so that's how it works so the feds give the state a crazy amount of money and we get a we we don't get as much but some districts get a lot and so to in order to comply with the federal monies they have to follow all of these rules so all of our testing that we do in the state it's often perceived as like something the state does to schools they have to do it it's all part of the Federal Regulation so we have there's a whole Esa plan for the for the state of New Jersey that requires all these gradings and they have to grade their schools that's part of the federal requirement so if you go on to the New Jersey school report cards if you Haven never done that New Jersey creates these report cards and in the very back of the report card you'll see a page like this and it shows where we're meeting expectations where we're not and all these different all these different rating scales but the reality is that how they calculate a lot of these and actually over here you can see on this side this is the this this is at the district view but if you look at the school view there's these indices that they call them and the indices are actually ranks they're forced ranks in the form of something called zc scores which basically just equivalate a score to a normal curve based on the distribution of scores from lots of different districts and so it is in effect a ranking system and so and as are the growth scores they're a ranking system and so as a result of that even the state ranks our schools now interestingly if you look at this a little bit you can see that the that under the graduation rate we talked about how we're being impacted negatively because of the way that our special needs students are being counted um so that should be something that's rectifiable but in terms of math proficiency we have a couple groups not hitting this of course we already identified that math is something that we need to look at um and then um our students with disabilities in English language Learners although we were seeing growth in them uh they're not yet meeting this what the uh what the target was that was set by the state um I think we said enough about the doe Great Schools is probably the one that people are some most familiar with because this one connects directly with Zillow and connects with um realtor.com so when you're looking for a home to buy and you see like a school rating on there it's connecting they have a contract with greatschools.org so when you go to greatschools.org what you'll find is actually I have to say they they do a pretty one of the things a greatschools.org does well is that they're pretty transparent so when you go on their website you can actually see you can click there's like drill downs and you can click and go deeper in the data there's tabs you can look at data different ways they actually explain some of the research on education pretty well and they also have this little information button where if you click on the information button it'll actually tell you where the data is from so to make your life a little easier I add I just I just I just put it here but they're looking at test scores student progress that's basically student growth metric through the nsla they're looking at college readiness using graduation data uh equity and and an environment now interestingly Equity college readiness and the environment they use a civil rights data collection that happens typically once every four years they did collect it two years ago but they still haven't released the data and right now greatschools.org is still rating our schools in every school in the country based on the 2018 civil rights data collection that data is do the ma that's six years six years old so that data is six years old and that's still taking playing a role in your current schools rating but some of the things that were positive about grade schools as I said here is like I said it is pretty user friendly I will say they don't always monitor public reviews they have a report button if you see a bogus review when actually I saw a bogus review in one of our schools I did report them but I was doing that in my prior district and they weren't changing it and it was only until recently that I actually published an article with a colleague on rankings and ratings and we talked about them and they they caught their attention that they finally actually changed uh that that high school ranking which was getting tanked because uh somebody very angry in 2012 gave them six onear ratings with no no no comments on the same day they also make claims about school environment which I think are quite which I think are a little which are questionable if not invalid based on the limitations of the data that said uh they just give a simple rating so you can go on them if you want to drill down into them I don't need to represent that all to you here but one of the things that I find really interesting we've talked about like our math sequencing and one of the things that's happening with our math sequence because we do geometry first is that our students take geometry then we have all of our students for La this year and last year uh taking geom taking geometry there's no math Aid option so every single kid has to be accelerated they all take geometry and that geometry test is designed to be a sophomore test so every student in Ridgewood takes geometry in eth grade it takes a sophomore test in eth grade so our performance rates are very very low and so our growth score particularly is very much suppressed in the greatschools.org weight so here it's seven out of 10 but our growth is five out of 10 but interestingly and this is something we have to account for as we make this shift because we flip it that way all of our Stu all of our honor all of our accelerated students take Algebra 1 as freshman in high school whereas the majority of other school districts uh accelerated students take geometry so we get a bump in our algebra scores in high school but we get uh we take a hit at our middle at our geometry scores in middle school so we might be seeing a slightly inflated score there for the high school we might be seeing a I think we're seeing a definitively deflated score for the middle schools our high our elementary schol schools are are are are clustered something you have to keep in mind though with respect to this cluster this clustering though is that uh because it's growth data it only the only students because of the the because of the pandemic the only students with growth scores were fifth graders last year so these scores are based on one cohort of student so there could be there's can be any single cohort can have some pretty significant fluctuations US News and World focuses primarily on high school so this is a high school ranking uh one of the things that frustrates me greatly about the high school is that there's a severe data lag because they do a lot of creative metrics they their 2024 publication of of of results is all based on 2022 data so the recent rankings of of Ridgewood High School were for the class of 22 so that again very big data lag when we're talking about these these these Trends um that said they do they do use a lot of creative factors they they contract with a company called RTI International who helps them develop creative metcs particularly around underserved populations and they they've done a lot recently to actually rebalance and really heavily weight underserve populations and so actually I'm going to go ahead and click ahead uh so that you can see you can see them here State assessment proficiency um has to do with the actual performances but this this this next one here State assessment performance is actually a a weighted rep a secondary measure that focuses on how students um how students perform from traditionally underserved populations particularly black Hispanic and from low-income households and we saw from through some other metrics that those students are not performing as well in our district right and so here they're waiting them pretty heavily they talk about college breath that has to do with ap participation here's again another underserved student performance um metric and then graduation rate we know the graduation rate is flawed so this is where we fall right now we had been 28th we since gone down to 37th I've taken out well we we've taken out of this list no actually I did this one I took out of this list all the um any school that was a magnet school or had a selective process right so these are all the schools above us the ranking number represents all the magnet schools as well so we're not actually when we're comparing ourselves to other similar schools we're not 37th um but but I just left them there so you can kind of see the distribution but you'll notice I bolded hunon Elizabeth Ridge and Li those weren't in the top 50 for the last two years um I I just I I have data from the if you go to the I was if you go to the Madison Public Schools website where they have their state of the schools addresses which I led there we have the old data here so you can see that that's that's how I was able to check that we were 28th here from Ridgewood um but those schools were not on the list at all and that's be it seems to be because they've rebalanced it they've also added in science proficiency so there's again people I know some people were concerned about are dropping in this rank ring we have a graduation rate that's not accurate we know we have the science proficiency concern and here once again we see we're at 51 worth the 51st percentile in science performance like that's not consistent with our other data our reading proficiency seems fine I mentioned that potential math bump 97th percentile probably has to do with that that concentration in algebra and then our APS and RP taking at least one AP exam and passing at least one AP exam those metrics are seem like they could be better but they seem okay so that would seem to explain why we might have dipped a little bit and with addressing some of those issues maybe that will change niche.com is uh interesting because it's the only one that really actually uses surveys in their actual scoring so you might see the rankings are a little bit different we actually do quite well on niche.com um we're ranked number five in New Jersey um we have an overall Niche grade of A+ across almost all categories the only one that's not an A+ is diversity again they use zc scores for individual categories to get those different weights they have actually dropped act and sat completely so the other rankings still use them um they have they no longer use them because of the test optional environment um but this one like other ones too they don't provide longitudinal data so that's a little bit of limitation um but they use academics primarily they talk they they evaluate they use they use metrics based on teacher salary teacher absenteeism state test results and survey responses they have culture and diversity metrics which we saw that we had a be on parent student surveys uh resources and Facilities uh and again this is based on a lot of this is based on surveys but then when you go to the scorecard that they give you you can see that they add a couple of other categories they had food which is kind of funny so I took I I wanted to understand this better so I took the survey from my kids school district and the way that they collect data on food is they just say how is your school food and they just give you five stars so you choose a f star rating so we have an A+ on our Foods if you knew ate A+ food we do but when they do the actual total scoring they don't use this uh this food metric or this college prep metric so niche.com works well for us and then the last one that's also quite popular is schooldigger.com schooldigger.com looks at performances over time that's I think is the probably the biggest virtue of it they do use Z scores as well to Force rank school districts so you can kind of get a sense of Trends over time it's much better at the school level you can see your school's kind of at performance but it's primarily njsla scores and that's it um there's a couple other data points that you can pull up but as far as their charts are concerned it's njla uh njla percentile rank uh so in my opinion for its limited purposes this is quite useful because it's historic um but but it doesn't take into account many other things so that's there's a lot more data that we could pull together together there's a lot more that we could dig into but um at this time I want to focus on just kind of like pulling back and identifying some key takeaways so these are some things that I would suggest as key takeaways first of all that our schools plenty of outcomes in our schools remain strong we have strong Ela grades a strong strong Ela performance in elementary we generally positive satap Trends um I I've made an edit to this SLB but it must not have carried through but um we also saw some really positive uh evidence of positive relationship ships in positive School culture and context uh in certain areas but we identified a bunch of areas for improvement so the fifth to sixth grade transition e8th to nth grade transitions we need to look at we also need to look at some of the inconsistency in the growth in elementary math particularly in that third and fourth grade um our R we have to look at the student performance and how students applying themselves on the science test at njsla um I think it would be good for us to focus on giving the PSAT during the day and try to increase that participation I think it'd be good practice for kids um and it's a good opportunity for kids who are really really busy to get that done during the school day we have to fix the graduation rate issue and then as far as Stu and then we also have to pay attention to students in certain subgroups um some are not having as positive an experience as others and they're not having the same levels of academic performance we do seem to have comparable growth and that's very positive so everybody is experiencing having a positive academic experience but we need to stay really focused on making sure that those groups continue to be successful and that their that their experience with the schools uh is as growing as positively as their academics are and then a student engage and then as far as those surveys are concerned it also seems like student engagement conflict resolution diversity values and adult understandings of students show some room for improvement so uh I also have a few suggested action steps so immediate things encouraging kids to do better on the test like I said Revol resolve the grade discrepancy I think I already said just these but I also want to expand data collection systems so we've expanded uh benchmarking and data collection in grades uh K to 5 to the middle school so this is kind of a baseline year of collecting uh student uh uh progress data at the middle schools we'd like to expand that even further into the high schools so that we can track kids right through right through nth grade into 10th grade and Beyond as needed and uh and the goal of and we also want to collect data as I said before on College admissions we want to better understand the role that Legacy plays that Athletics play that strategic transfers plays that Merit Scholarships play uh in in our kids choices and then we also recently surveyed staff and we have a a survey that we're finalizing right now for parents so something we're going to anyone who's listening with us I want to raise your attention uh we've been talking about the parents surveys um as we've been trying to finalize them we've been coming up with some different uh additional items that we want to collect some data on um so we've been adding to them but in the coming in the next week or two we're going to get those out um especially in response resp to this to see if there's any last data collection pieces that we want to bring in um we also have been doing a lot of work on our literacy uh literacy program uh We've also we're changing our math sequence back to the traditional sequence so we need to we're we're developing strong Communications in those areas for parents that parents can be fully informed as to what we're doing for planning actions looking at the long term uh our 2425 goals we're going to focus a lot on data but we're going to focus on the school level version so I say data set but I don't mean just this one each school is basically going to get a version of this we also want to expand our systems of support so again in aggregate we have a lot of success but we also know that a huge amount of our kids and maybe I should have included this slide huge amount of our kids do participate in tutoring outside of school that's not a surprise to anybody but that's a very high percentage somewhere in the ballpark of 50% so when we talk about how well our schools are doing we have to take into account that a lot of people are paying for private tutoring on their own dollar so we need to have internally very strong benchmark systems so that we can identify students who are not currently meeting expectations students who are maybe just meeting expectations and students who are consistently exceeding expectations because most students seems here are at that meeting expectations level we want to make sure that we're not losing kids off that edge and we also want to make sure that kids who are not there are able to come up and for those students who are just consistently exceeding expectations we also have to make sure that we have a good program especially for the younger grades program through some sort of gifted and talented opport OPP unities for them so that way they can have they can they can they can be fully challenged and be thriving in school as well and again we need to develop structured programs of support for all levels of need so that way every kid can be achieving well and thriving in our school and then lastly we want to engage the community not just in these conversations but also as we move into developing a new fiveyear multi mul multi-year strategic plan probably five years to address various issues so things we've not talked about here but are certainly topics of concern are as I said I mentioned system of support but also student engagement generative AI uh We've formed an AI task force to kind to to to uh to start making some strong recommendations about how we're going to proceed with making sure that students and teachers have appropriate and ADV advantageous access to such systems and such Technologies but not and not to the extent that it's going to compromise our academic Integrity or become a crutch I think we need to address as a community student screen time not necessarily that we as a school need to be spearheading that but I'm currently working with a community group that's gaining some traction it's it's gaining some momentum to try to bring different groups in the community to talk about what makes kids well and what's what's making kids suffer right now and screen time is definitely a part of that social media use is a part of that so we want to be a part of those conversations but in the meantime we also want to be mindful about how much screen time we require of students cell phones are an issue in school and I think we as a community need to come together and figure out how we're dealing with cell phones in school um we know we've been leaving it to the schools to kind of figure that out as they go as the kid gets kids get older that gets a little harder but um it's pretty clear that students are finding phones as many adults are increasingly distracting and the evidence is mounting that kids should really not have their phones in school in fact a book I'm reading right now some of you might have seen it on the it's a pretty popular right now in sales is the uh the anxious Generation by Jonathan hay and he puts out several calls and one of them is call for cell phone free schools so that's not to say that kids aren't allowed to bring a cell phone into the school but that we would have procedures to make it very clear that students do not have access to a phone during class and and then career Pathways as well uh you know we tend to I do I do see it as a bit problematic when we talk so much about college acceptance that we create this mindset that every single student's best option is going to a four-year school um that's just not true I think it's probably true for most kids and going to a four-year school is very advantageous in terms of your grand scheme of life for most kids but there are lot many really fantastic options in the trades as well that are really ideal for some students um there's there's uh and there's other there's there's other opportunities in technical schools um and uh and in service work as well so but those are things for us to decide as a community not for me to dictate so as we jump to question and answer and comment a few guiding questions um first of all did anything in this resonate with you please feel free to share was anything not consistent with your experience please feel free to share do you have any hypothesis or anecdotes that might explain or help us understand our trends and any other further areas of inquiry and I'm going to add one last question is this in this presentation was this the right data or is there other data that we should be looking at or is there data here that we really should stop worrying about so if you have any opinions on that I'd love to hear that as well so uh we got some folks with us online um and we've got some folks with us here in person so we're going to get to everybody but for starters I'd love to just give our folks in person here an opportunity to join because they've taken the time out of their day to be here with us in so can we start with that anybody have any questions or comments to share with share with us hi so in the variety of rankings that you showed which one most affects the portfolio that colleges are given when a child applies to that college so when the college gives their applic when the student gives their application it usually coincides with the guidance counselor giving the Ridgewood portfolio yeah what what which numbers drive that within that portfolio and then that number is that an incentive to give to our elth graders for that testing score sure it's a great question thank you and it's actually available on our website so if you want to go on to the the district profile the senior the senior class profile I think it's called um you can you can pull that up and you can see it none of the uh the third party rankings and ratings are referenced there but it is rooted in we do share a lot of the data that we shared in this presentation so we talk about um gpas we talk about um SAT scores we talk about I believe we talk about AP quite a bit uh we also share the schools that kids have that that that students have been accepted to in Prior years but it's all there it's a four- pager there's a lot of good information there but I definitely recommend you look at it um but that's a good suggestion that we should look that if we look at that when we're talking about impressing upon kids the importance of it that what makes them look good as a class also makes uh the district look good uh thank you so much for the presentation really helpful um in terms of of the at the end you talked about um being able to catch those students early and kind of identify those on the cusp or those that might need help I don't know if you are referring to kind of using a lot of the child study teams for that at at least at the elementary school levels um and again at the elementary school levels where it is important to catch those kids and give them the help they need as early as possible to catch up get where they can get my understanding is that child teams are all the same size of all elementary schools where elementary schools have very different sized student populations so is there any thought about having more of ratio of those sorts of supports to track check find the students that need help um um so that we can reach everyone the same time frame that's great thanks for that question and and uh and you feel free to keep the mic nearby if there's a followup but um so no I'm talking about a systemic practice like a general education special education a practice for everybody meaning that and it's particularly a general education practice the idea would be that we have special education for students who we identify do have actual specific disability either specific learning disability or or another type of classification but they have they have something documentable that is a specific that that is a disability impacting them and then we create an individual education plan for them right we meet try to meet their needs but there are many students outside of dis outside of disabilities who aren't performing at grade level expectations so it's about shifting uh cognizance and practice with all of our classroom teachers and at the elementary level what that means is means that that teachers um as part of their professional practice and part of their school practice would have professional time allocated for looking at how are their students are performing for monitoring their student process then responding to that any of our teachers do this we've actually had this link it uh program which is a benchmarking system in place and in many schools this is exactly what's happening um to the extent that it is truly systematized across all grades and across all schools that's the part that I'm talking talking about but we have pockets of excellence in this space already working what we need to do though at the at the at the school level and at the district level is make sure that we're allocating an appropriate amount of supports and and in so far as that that's individuals to your point we need to make sure that they're being staffed there but we also need to make sure that our Master schedules are being built in such a way to allocate this time appropriately both for the professionals to have time to work with this data um and to and to and to actually identify which kids they are and who they're going to help and and how they're going to help them but also to have some time to work with those kids in addition to what they have in class time so we have to make sure that we carve that time out you also made a comment just about District on a separate note you made a comment about like the district the the the equitable distribution of Staff members and child study teams at schools because we have different programs at different schools that's actually on a radar we're evaluating that right now um I can't make commitments about what we're going to look like next year um but uh and and could because it's hard to we definitely can't definitely in position to add positions right now um but uh and we'd have to justify if we're going to pull someone from one place and put them in another but this has been something that's been on WE and actually we just had some conversations about that today with some some uh some of our Educators who had a similar concern thank you any other questions or comments here we can go we can go online we got one more here and then why don't we go pick up a few more questions online so if you're online with us oh we have two more here but if you're online with us we'll get to you in just a minute okay yes thank you for the presentation um I feel like I say this every time we talk but the transparency like I'm really impressed at how transparent you were with this data compared to presid presentations we've had in years past um the one thing that I caught on that you said early on was some of the data systems and things in the district and that we don't have in place what you've had in previous districts and then you use that magic word yet so I'm hoping that as you look at this the data collection systems are going to be definitely at the Forefront um with progress monitoring that will address our special ed population but also those higher achieving students and everybody in between um I think that's something that'll really Drive how we how we anticipate where these Trends are going to go and how we're pro like proactive in meeting our kids needs um at every level um the one thing that I think this data that we could um go deeper with and look at and I had pulled some of the data in preparation for this um was when we look at those kids economically disadvantaged and special education and we see those Trend that are below um or uh not making the same amount of growth I wanted to just shed some light on the numbers when you look at that um njsla data from last year that are E when we're looking at literacy specifically um the economically disadvantaged students at third grade only 27% of our students are meeting or um uh meeting expectations or exceeding expectations and our student students with disabilities again Ela only 45% and that data to me is really concerning when we look at non- disadv or non-economically disadvantaged students 81% are reading proficiently and our non are our economically disadvantaged 27% and our students with disabilities 45% those are two categories that do not have access to the tutoring that we talk about or don't have the time in their schedules because of all of the other therapies and so I think we really need to be looking at that data collecting it and making sure our practices are aligning with science because they aren't so um and I pulled you know third grade but I also pulled fourth grade and seventh grade and it gets worse as the kids get older which tells me as we move along and um where our focus is on literacy in those early grades we're teaching them how to read and that's part of the program when we look at our seventh graders um students with disabilities 27 or 24% are reading proficiently and that's really concerning when the research says that with appropriate literacy instruction direct explicit instruction 95 to 97% of all students can read and we have 24% so I just think we need to dig into that more um with what are our children actually learning learning in the classroom and what is being supplemented by parents privately to reach the scores that we're seeing when we look at the whole yeah I think I I can't see your data set right here but um um I'm assuming you're pulling from the performance reports yeah and so uh and that's exactly what that's exactly the point is that we need to make sure that you know students who fit the category of economic disadvantage have lots of other types of challenges that they're dealing with not just in the in affordability of tutoring and so uh uh and often I'm sorry I'm um I'm getting I'm cut this is cutting in and out on me can we just do a can you do a battery check on this guy um you know in a big part of literacy yes there's a lot that we need to do in schools and and I that's my point is that and when a students off base like we need to do everything we can to get them on base but at the same time though and this is the challeng is that that that Community Schools that serve communities where they have much higher rates of poverty deal with is that students don't come to school also with that same level of reading background that a lot of our other families do so it's not just a function of tutoring but that doesn't change the fact that we need to have we need to anticipate that we need to have systems in place to be able to account for that yeah yeah absolutely and and direct explosive instruction is something that we absolutely value and we're we're we're we're we're continuing forward with um but Additionally the depending on the disparity between the need of the students in the class and the students who who are off Mark um just to be just to be clear I think that uh we still also would need to have systems still needs to be systems to account for the fact that there are certain levels of differentiation that you can do in a classroom even in a direct instruction classroom but there is a certain Gap that you get to where you really can't meaningfully meet the needs of all the students in that class and I think it's a little bit of what we're experiencing here in Ridgewood and that's where those intervention systems and those Master schedules need to be tweaked because those kids in addition to getting high quality instruction in the classroom they also need a little bit more and a little more time but thank you for those comments appreciate that Miss Madison um well I wanted to Echo um your her comments that I think the um difference between um economically disadvantaged and the other students is a gap that needs to be closed and I think it does indicate the um difference in access to tutoring I would posit that tutoring is way more than 50% in our district especially as you move up the grade levels um and I think that's just a problem on so many levels um particular L when we talk about um equity and diversity um so I do think you should do a much deeper data dive into that and how much supplementation is going on in the district um but away from that I wanted to ask you with the focus on the degradation and performance when you get to these um transition grades uh and I'm not necessarily asking you to share this publicly but you know we have a lot of schools that come together at those points are you looking is there a difference are you looking at the data on the school level in other words is there a difference in performance from children depending on what middle school they're coming from or what elementary school they're coming from um because I think it would very interesting to make sure that we're having uh a standardized approach um across all of our multiple schools for all of our students so that's just a question of if you're looking at the data that GR early yeah thank you that's a great great comment great question um and we actually first of all so with the tutoring this was student reported and that's why I didn't make it a big point of this Focus but something that is in the the parent is an additional question that doesn't limit it to just tutoring because we recognize that that students sometimes go to things like math camp or like or like they don't call it tutoring they call it like like they go to Kumon and it's just like additional math support or something so the kid it might what what parents design as tutoring for their kids we would think of as tutoring does or enrichment doesn't necessarily register with kids as that so we're going to be asking parents the same question that number May probably come out higher so and we we we're happy to share that um and then with respect to I'm sorry the second part of question again I was asking how granular are you going with the data are you are you actually looking at because maybe the performance differs against schools when they come to these places where they meet up yeah exactly so and again people want to see their school data they can go on the performance reports but internally with the administrative team that's exactly what we do so as I said the surveys have already been disaggregated by school so they can actually see how their school did so that they're not they're not like assuming that just because it's an 80% across the district that they're okay right maybe their school actually has that as a weakness vice versa maybe their school is doing really great in something and they're like a leader in the district so we want to figure out so they can all learn from each other who's doing well in what area and then with respect to the academics that's exactly what we look at we also look at growth rates and growth growth competencies as well and where students and and and looking at them on a school basis and then what it really comes down to is as we build our Master schedules and we plan for the coming year to what extent do our efforts and our scheduling and all that align to what we're trying to accomplish in these things that we're talking about here so yes so it definitely is we're definitely taking that granular approach great thank you so much thank you um why don't we for some of the folks are sitting very patiently at home why don't we do take a take a round with some folks at home for now I'm going to hide the presentation hello hi so I work at the high school lever and my question is is with regards to the special needs part of it does the state factor in that many of our special needs students actually up out of test in either because they can't sit for testing or they have uh certain needs that don't allow them to go to testing like how does the up out option affect our statistics especially with special needs and other parents are are saying we don't want them to go to testing because they're not ready either they have anxiety or they're on the Spectrum how does up out affect the statistics thank you so much uh thanks for that question Mr Freeman so that's a great question so if a student decides to not sit for the test if a parent basically explains that they they they just refuse their child to have the test we obviously don't want to put the child through a difficult circumstance so we they don't sit for the test that does imp that so then their score does not count toward our proficiency rate but it does get deducted from our participation rate and although it was might not have been clear on that last slide we not only do we have to have a certain proficiency by the state's measure we so have to have a certain participation and that participation rate I believe is 95% is what we need to have so we are above 95% even with some folks not wanting to sit for the test but no the answer is that those student scores do not count against the district in their at their performance rate but that's a great question thank you for that thanks for thanks for serving our kids thank you hello hello Mr Riley hi hi thank you so much um I I just I really appreciate the presentation like others have said the transparency and the openness to look at you know the places that we're not doing well and how we can be doing better and I have to apologize because I I missed large chunks of the presentation trying to do other things tonight um but I'm looking forward to going back and listening but just some um comments I or questions I had uh one with your question about the data I was I kind of surprised to see like great schools and niche.com included I mean I know Great Schools there's issues with like the licensing fees it takes from Zillow and you know the the way that its ratings map closely with students race and and poverty um and also issues around the way in which it's been accused of driving segregation in New Jersey schools so um that was just one comment M I had about that um my second question was and I apologize again because I don't I missed portions and I don't know if this was addressed at all but I've heard many times um I think the statistic that you know Ridgewood was at 18% in terms of classified students um it's gone down to 13% and I I've heard this mentioned at different meetings like cpag meetings and stuff as um a win for Ridgewood but like the state um average is 15% and I just don't I've never heard any explanation of what has driven that reduction in classifications and I've heard from number of parents that feel that you know kids are being Declassified um inappropriately like that you know it shouldn't be the case um so I'd just be interested to understand or hear what's driving those declassifications and how I it doesn't really seem right that rdwood would be you know under the state um average in terms of classified students um and then third and finally uh I just in comment small comment in terms of um I was really happy to see the pull point you said about use of phones in schools um I have a rising sixth grader and I went to the um sixth grade presentation at one of the middle schools um which was great uh but I was there was a question from the audience to some of the uh children who had been there representing the school about the use of cell phones um and the answers were all that those kids had gotten phones in sixth grade um and each student who answered the question said that they were required that they were their use was required in some classes um you know they said that they were supposed to keep them in their lockers but some teachers required uh the use of cell phones in middle school and so that was quite surprising um so I I would be I'm I'm glad to see that be a focus of your presentation and just um encourage that to be kind of looked at more closely um I understand how it's probably useful you know to have a cell phone um it was mentioned that you know sometimes they're used in like an art class to take uh digital pictures and things like that but it does I think send a mixed message to you know have students be told that they can't have cell phones and then to require that I've heard that in the high school many times as well that students are you know required to have phones in some capacity to complete school work so thank you very much yes thank you so much for your comments there um I appreciate all that feedback um I'm Sorry Miss Riley you said a lot I'm not sure that I caught all of it but uh I'm I'm sure that I'm GNA remember all of it uh you mentioned the rankings um uh again just want to be clear I'm only reporting on the rankings that are just commonly understood so I'm not advocating or supporting or saying that any of these ranking systems are valid or less valid um I do think it's important to identify the things that are concerning about them um but if there is any use to them I'm trying to give them uh trying to give some acknowledgement there um uh but I think the cell phone topic is a really important one um and it's a conversation that we need to have uh the prevailing wisdom for cell phones in school had been that they should be away but if the teacher allows you to use them for some research purpose then that's okay but you know but we have on toone environment now that Pro that may not be necessary but again it's a community conversation especially in involving our staff as well uh but I appreciate your support there and your interest there Mr kello yeah yeah thanks so much uh for the presentation and you know again taking the time to put all this together um in terms of of data that you mentioned before you know data that perhaps should be included um in a presentation like this um so I spoke at a board meeting uh earlier this year about a uh a marker indicator of inclusion for um special education students and there an there an annual report that's put out by the state of the percentage of students uh with disabilities who spend 80% or more of the day in the general education setting um I think this would really be an important indicator to kind of keep track of um in and and you know really talk about in the uh in a presentation like this and perhaps uh maybe Benchmark that data uh against uh similar similar districts so I'm sorry just real quick before you jump uh you said you suggested that we track the percent of school the percent of students who are included in 50% or more of the school day was that the metric you mentioned yeah so H percentage of students disabilties 80% or more of their day in the gened setting the the report puts out you know it's 80% 40% and then um a separate setting that's great thank you for that suggestion I'm that I'm not sure if that exists but that should be something that we could put together yeah on website I could send you sure great thank you so much yeah we'd love to look at that more great thank you we have question or comment from the audience here in person Dr McKenna thank you so much and I just want to Echo what all of the compliments you've gotten tonight this is incredible data we are data Geeks in this audience and we we like seeing numbers um I wanted to come back to something that a previous comment made Janet Riley she had wondered about the special education classification rate in oh thank you that was the middle point that I could remember sorry yeah I just wanted to add a couple thoughts you know so the average special education classification rate across you know any district is about 15% and actually in Upper income towns the rates are actually even higher like Upper Saddle Rivers 18% because the parents know that special ed you know they the kids need these Services the kids go to the right doctors get the you know the right classification but in Ridgewood our rate I believe is 13.9% and that's a curious number and many of us have just wondered about it and I was wondering if you could shed a little light on on why sure and I we have some members of the administrative team here so I'll invite Dr Fenwick to share um just but for those who are maybe not as familiar on the topic you know we've we've students who are classified special education I would say probably the majority of students retain their classification but the goal of all special education programs is to try to uh uh help de students develop strengths and Independence to a point that they ideally would not need those accommodations at some point in time so students are exited from time to time um but of course the percentage represents a portion of the whole and so the question is why would we go from a higher rate of classification to a lower rate of classification so Dr F did you want to share a response can we uh give Dr a microphone please the hello when I came to the district it was uh about 18% and um a part of the reason when we dove into that um the metrics was that a lot of the reevaluation periods were um waved so either at the middle school level or the high school level there was a um a tradition of saying you know no we have we've gotten the information and we really don't need to look at that um classification again and so when I came um we did a real dedication to making sure that we reevaluate it over time you know in your own home you wouldn't allow your systems to remain stagnant you would go and you'd look at your air conditioning you'd look at your heat in your car you you would want to have some level of review of course we would want that with our children to do a re-evaluation of whether or not a child still meets the eligibility criteria um and then whether or not they meet the criteria if they also require that special education specialized instruction in order to meet their their educational goals so when we added in the reevaluations we were finding a lot of times that students no longer met eligibility criteria at the same time we also spent um you know the last four years have been dedicated to adding in general education interventions so as general education interventions improve for all students struggling students make progress and perhaps no longer need to come to special education to require their services so that would be a few reasons for the reduction in the percentage of students classied thank you thank you Dr Fenwick yeah and so to be clear um certainly as a district and you know we talk about we talk about our intervention systems we talk about special education classification quite often and um to be clear the when a student needs Services uh as a district and I think the concern I think the concern it would be if I'm interpreting correctly I think the concern is is there some sort of an effort or some sort of a mindset from the district to be resistant to classification or to say that like we're trying to avoid classifying students to sub way sh report meaning like is there like a predetermined like mindset toward that um so uh I can tell you from my vantage point and art my conversations with Dr Fenwick and with uh and even with um members of our child study team that uh I certainly don't see any evidence in terms of what I've seen over the course of this year of resistance to classification uh there there is not always there can't always be agreement regarding whether a student should be classified or what a student's services are we have a we we have a community where people are very well educated they're very resourceful and they attempt to learn they they they educate themselves very very well as is evidenced by many of the very intelligent people in the room who shared a lot of really insightful comments um however uh the the our special education processes and our Professionals in school offer a different lens most of the time there is alignment but sometimes there is not so I think it's important that we that we um I just want to say just from a district values based perspective that that is not something that percentage of there's no target percentage of where we should be as far as special ed classification I can tell you that I I I that's not something that I I consider in any way shape or form so I'm sounds like we could probably talk about that for a while but uh but we continue that conversation as needed another time are there any uh any further questions from the room or online I think at this point we can open up from either and we have some folks online hello us hello are you able to hear me yes yes so you did talk about diversity and inclusion in the school which I very much appreciate I'd like to know how that lines up to the teacher diversity and inclusion please um can I ask and is it Nancy yes Nancy are you asking about how it lines up with having a more diverse staff yes um so we in terms of our hiring practices it's very important us that we hire of course we have a a selective process um where we are hiring the best person for every position but it throughout our throughout our processes with to hiring we do place value on candidates who can bring um uh who who's who's who in their identity and who they are can add some value to our school district so although is not like a single criteria by which we decide to hire people um it is something that we recognize when we're interviewing candidates of diverse backgrounds our faculty is particularly uh predominantly white and um and predominantly english- speaking and so uh we certainly value when we have candidates and we consider that as part of the complete package of a candidate when we consider what they can bring to our school district question um you told me what your policy is so I appreciate that my family is Hispanic and my daughter does exceedingly well please don't think I'm saying anything bad she does exceeding well but I would really like to see more diversity in the school district I don't think it represents the community as a whole not just for Hispanics but for everyone I agree that that's that's that's an important thing to accomplish and that's we certainly try to make our we're certainly while working within what we can do something we strive for okay thank you thank you with Mr fredman again yeah hi again I just have one more question because I went back and rad it and this one kind of surprised me the first time around and I thought maybe I'll hear something in your student climate survey you said that students at my school are able to walk out discent with each other but our Ela score which is something we talk about like opinion pieces and essays is like phenomenal how can that happen at the same time that we could have really good answers in the classroom but not with each other and so so where's the disconnect there and like is this also broken down by high school students talking to each other versus Elementary School students talking to each other so I'm just trying to understand because we have so many cultural events we have many diversity effects but somehow this score it seems extremely low to me I'm just trying to understand how this is possible by the general sense and if there's anything new that's about to come our way to try to help students walk issues out with with each other so you're saying you're you're asking to explain the the disconnect between all the events that we hold and the um and the evidence in their writing of how much they value differences but then they can't work out disagreements with each other yeah I just I see cultural events I see every week some other group coming up and then somehow our survey scores are still very low even though our score is like always a happy good lucky place that's a great comment thank you for that Insight um I will tell you a little bit of an Insight because I had a chance to dig in this data a little bit more um that n those two metrics are felt the most difficult at the middle school level so they're better at the elementary they're actually better at the high school level if I'm recalling correctly but if I remember correctly they were they were acutely uh uh uh difficult at the middle school level and to be clear that's not a function necessarily reflection of the middle schools that's part of why Middle School at all school districts at all ages so difficult those tween years particularly um between the ages of roughly like 10 and 13 they're very difficult years for kids and they're establishing their identity they're changing um they're experiencing hormonal changes and yet they are not as their brains are not as developed as they are when they are later so they have a tendency to be uh to to to have some some strained relationships and have some conflicts with each other um a little more easily they haven't learned how to work it all out yet that said that doesn't mean there's more not more that we can do but your observation that there's so many good things going on at the high school is really appreciated um and I think we have a lot of really great examples of positive things across the district and to be clear uh you know a clear majority of students feel that that students can work out those differences but again we're setting a bar pretty high that we'd like to we'd like that to be more Universal thank you thank you Mr Freeman and we have Miss Ramos yes good evening so I just want to um I guess support uh last two comments uh regarding Nancy my children are Latino and and yeah I don't the projection that you want to project in the reality are two different things because I don't think there are that many diversity or inclusion with the teachers and also how black and brown population is treated is not very um suited for me um anyway other parents have you know done their investigations or have the proces and investigations in place um but yeah it's just not Measuring Up and I've never use a tutor for my children um I think that the school district needs to be the one educating my children and my children have are excelling in both middle school and high school um in spite um of the some forces um that I don't think want them to succeed and also with my middle schooler now he's in a double accelerated math program and Mr leik will not be teaching at BF but GW which is very disconcerning because he's an amazing teacher he you know teaches them well not just well but he just talks to them like human beings and appreciates all students unique agency um so I will be at the June 10th a mathematic sequence I have emailed um Mr Robert Freedman and also um miss an nembo um I don't really the map sequence at membo when she presented at bfms HSA basically left me with a big headache um I don't know if it's going to affect my child um my child like I said is excelling and I hope he continues that course but I do think a big factor in his excelling in the double accelerate program is because of his teacher but now his teacher is not going to be there which is very dis concerning along with the other um stuff that I mentioned thank you Miss Ros for sharing all your concerns with us are pretty specific to your situation so I think we probably should do uh just have some followup there if needed um sounds like you're already in contact with some of us so that's good um speaking just generally uh it is important that we ensure that our policies and procedures are impacting students fairly if you go back to the presentation which you all have access to on the website but if you go back specifically to the slide that talks about school rules being fair um it does show that Hispanic students and black students who took the survey did report at a lower rate that school rules are fair but to be clear it's not a huge gap from the rest of the schools now again the school rules are fair doesn't mean that they're that students are experiencing them fairly for themselves they may actually be answering that school rules aren't Fair because they may be the beneficiary of uh of of of unfair rules but I think it's very important to understand that uh we are a large organization and we have lots of people from all kinds of backgrounds and in order to ensure that we have really high quality and Equitable practices we need to make sure that we're tracking this data down to the specific places we have wonderful Educators here who care about kids um we have but no one is perfect and sometimes people uh I've seen many examples of people who are well-meaning who don't realize it but they sometimes the things that they say and the way that they engage sometimes make students feel alienated and so we as a district are really intent on making sure that we understand what our practices are to make sure that all of our students feel welcome and feel respected and that all of our rules are fair so data collection like this helps start those conversations and then we can also do we can also uh provide that drill down level and look at at the school level and even the grade level where necessary but we also are committed to uring that um as per our district goal that we're attracting these factors that really impact kids so we do have a district goal specifically um toward trying to develop metrics to track our uh to track our um the diversity of our staff I know Miss Mrs um Miss Murphy here has done some good work in that did you want to speak Mrs Murphy and just talk about that a little I mean I know I know it's at an early stage because that data doesn't exist anywhere so we're trying to work to collect and set that and and TR try to make that data something that we could be useful for but what our committee we had a committee for our inclusion goal and what our committee recommended is that we uh we we contract with someone who has some specialization in the space to help us to find out where we maybe have some opportunities to improve our practice and to engage in some thoughtful practices to audit and reflect and try to help our staff to figure out and to partner with us for how we can better serve these populations so specifically um there's actually been some some some few groups identified did you want to speak to that real quick and again Mrs Murphy is our director of Human Resources but she's also the chair of our uh she's one of the chairs of our inclusion committee for district go three or two excuse me so um the committee has been um working with and talking to a number of universities partners that may be who we look to partner with in the future universities that are actively engaging in this type of work um have been engaging in this work with with K12 districts in New Jersey already um and that have shown good practice at helping districts identify where their strengths are and where where the opportunities for growth are in this area as well as helping districts to build strategic plans specifically around um improving inclusivity in schools so we're in the process process of narrowing that down we we're kind of down to two Universities at this point in time we'll be reviewing that information together as an administrative team and with the group and then presenting options to the board for approval so that we can move forward with with some additional um outside objective help looking at our practices so that we can improve what we're doing in in the the arena of inclusivity for our students thank you Mrs Murphy Mrs Ros you still with us did we answer your question did we speak to your concerns hello hello Mrs Ramos are you still with us yes can you hear me yes yes so we're trying to speak to your concerns here I think the other concern that I just my notes I had here is that you were concerned about um just changes to some staffing uh related to math right now so that's certainly something that um if you're not yeah I have I have reached out I have St my opinion I don't know how it's going to affect my child like I said the mass sequencing I just gives me a headache um when it explained to me um but I don't know how it's going to affect my child I don't know how taking um a factor that was excellent and going well for my child that's being taken out of the equation next year will be affecting him um so I don't I don't know a lot of things I know that there there's a lot of processes starting I don't know if they'll benefit my children in the long run I just don't see it I would like for my children to see themselves in the staff um but I'm not seeing it in other places as well and like I said my children are excelling besides some forces H which is unfair um but they're excelling So and I've done that without using any tutors so I really can't complain but you know it's definitely a negative impact when you have to go to a school and you don't see people that look like you or who do not want the best for you it's just some not most so that's all I got to say well thank you for joining us OS we have Evelyn uh hi hello hello yes yes hi um first I wanted to thank you for making this uh meeting and I would like to um regardless the Mrs Ramos uh concern I was in her position a while like a year a year ago I was kind of nervous too about my daughter's academic performance to be lower because you know that my daughter now is in high school but he is a little bit tough because the teenagers they have a good culture in GW where um hello can you hear me yes okay so they have a good culture in GW where the kids were very supporter the teachers were very supporters and they were trying to help each other you know when they struggle and and you know and work independently as well you know uh high school was a little bit of my concern but I'm being constantly working with teachers and actually it's being improving a lot I have to tell that from a year or two years ago this um type of um let's call it um like a situation is being improving a lot and I'm very grateful for for this because as a part you has some fear you know you want your kid to success you want your kid to be happy and be able to in a healthy environment where the kids you know they're supporting each other you know that you don't want it to start to decline the performance the academic or to be l you know so the most I want to be thankful and like like she says there is also work constant work because until the kids don't graduate as a parent we want to be vigilant that's I think and I think that's one of um is like I say it's getting better H my concern now now is a little bit only about the PE peer pressure with the girls become more competitive and you know they want to feel good they start you know like the peer pressure basically right but like I say it's been better and I'm working towards it and I would like to keep an eye on this because it's very important the emotional the emotional support that they go through inside the high school because there is a lot of pressure too so basically it and again thank you for this meeting and thank you for this is being getting better every time that's it I'm so glad to hear that thank you for uh for sharing that and um uh you know certainly again we uh so many great people in the school district who care so much about our kids again no no group of people are perfect no individuals perfect but I'm so glad to hear that you've had a continually positive experience and and our certainly our goal is to make sure that every family uh can have such a positive experience so thank you for joining us and we have Miss Davis how are you Miss Davis I'm good how are you good uh thank you so much for all this and I just wanted to um say I'm happy that uh you know the special education impacts of uh some of the data have been mentioned um but also um I agree when you uh the conversation about classification and those things that we could go on and on about it and I just wanted to put in a little plug um that the uh the cegs uh final meeting of the year on June 3 um are topic will be the state of the schools and how um you know kind of the uh how it relates to special education as uh and you'll be our our guest speaker so uh for any of those people listening or or there who want to kind of dig a little deeper into some of those topics that were raised tonight um please feel free to send your thoughts to us um at uh contact at Ridgewood cag.org and um that way we can let Dr Schwarz and his team know um for the June 3 meeting that those are the things that people want to hear more about so want to put that out there and I just confirmed while you were talking that that is on my calendar and it is I'm glad yeah we had to reschedule so it's it's it's on your calendar for the correct day yeah thank you so much thanks for joining us all right thanks any more comments from the audience or questions from the audience while waiting well we've been going at this for a good two hours plus at this point um I just want to take a second and just thank all of you who came who took the time to come out um life is busy again right during covid things quieted down a bit um and it was it was it was an eerie and an unpleasant and painful silence for many but uh we have certainly come back to full swing uh and I really appreciate all of you being willing to take time out of your schedules to actually be here both in person and virtually um I think that uh I'm really blessed to be a part of this community and to be a leader within this community um and uh and I really hope that uh you all would take me up on this offer and please know that it truly is representative of the board of education's wishes it's representative of the administration's wishes we truly want to engage people do not have to agree all the time we don't we're not trying to force agreement that's not the point the point is to be able to continue conversation and if we can't necessarily all agree on specific directions at least we can get some sort of a majority consensus and we can also figure out what kind of questions we need to ask what inquiries we need to engage in and what sort of processes you need to engage in to make sure that we're all working together towards seeing our kids successful in all ways so we have a lot of work to do as a community but I'm excited to do it with all of you and I'm grateful that you all took the time to be here today so on behalf of all of our faculty all of our administrators our Board of Education no we've got a zoom user all right let's let let's last comment come in I was on a roll too hi is that is up for me I think yes you're coming up as user okay your name thank you um this is Martina cha um and thank you so much for everything you shared tonight and I appreciate you acknowledging both the good and the bad and the goal of finding opportunities for improvement um I was really surprised to hear that almost 50% of the students are getting private tutoring and I was wondering if there will be any type of Deep dive into this figure to find out like what are the deficiencies ridgewood's academic programs or curriculum where these tutoring rates are so high like it then leads me to think that like our test scores are skewed and that doesn't necessarily reflect our school as opposed to reflecting uh you know additional disposable income that families have that they can spend on tutoring so I was just wondering if there's any plans to look into where children are getting tutoring and then how that reflects overall scores um and maybe where we can find to the deficiencies in our programs that's a that's a really interesting question thank you for asking it so yes we and we referenced it before but just to clarify we are collecting that information in the parent survey that will be a more reliable data collection and I expect actually that number might go up um and I believe we're asking it to differentiate what type of what type of services uh parents are getting it so it's not just tutoring it's also a lot of it's I believe is enrichment so this was also a very similar my prior District we did some digging into it we're going to dig even deeper here but one of the things that we found as we dug into the issue is that a lot of the tutoring is actually preemptive so it's not necessarily as though the parents are responding to a deficiency many of them are don't get me wrong but many of them are also just preemptively paying for Enrichment Services to accelerate their kids as much as possible which also creates as I mentioned before like we have the students who consistently exceed if a family and if a child especially if a child's interested in a subject area and the family is willing to pay for additional education they're going to end up in a place where have already mastered many of the concepts in class or at least are close to mastering when other students are just being introduced so it's important that we have an ability to just differentiate between what our students needs are and then figure out what we can handle as different as within one classroom and what we need those additional services for but with respect to the idea that I so I just I would just caution on drawing the conclusion that it's indicative of some of that it's that the whole of it is indicative of a deficiency there probably are some deficiencies along the way that are being compens ated and one of the concerns that I always have in places where you have a high degree of tutoring is that you have this environment where the the the the school gets a false sense of confidence of its ability to have success with the majority of students because the majority of students are getting these Services already but there's also inherently a degree of instructional adjustment when you have students who are way ahead of where they should be so it's it's it's not as it's it's not necessarily a one for one yes it skews but it could skew kind of an either direction it could skew also in the direction of us moving kids through the curriculum more quickly and leaving some kids behind because other kids are more equipped for it so that's why having a benchmarking system is really important because we can kind of check where we are with that and make sure that we're not gassing too too too hard in the direction of of really high level learning that maybe is beyond what some kids in the class would have but also that we're not slowing down the the learning of the class because there are some students who struggle we should have some appropriate level of differen iation and back to some of the comments we had before for the students who are significantly significantly off that normal curve additional time or additional Services is going to be necessary to make sure that they have what they need to be to be brought up to be able to sustain potentially or maybe they will perpetually need some additional Services periodically depending on what their level of learning is and what their skills are to be successful but I think but again that is definitely on our radar I appreciate you bringing it up did I speak to your concern up well Mrs Z yes uh thank you you made some very great points thank you I appreciate it all right well thank you again for joining us um and we've got um all right Mr Freeman this is your last one you're you're you're capped after this go ahead Mr Freeman I know I'm sorry I just want to ask you does the National Honor Society tutoring that happens in our school count here it's a good question a lot of tooing happening in know High schools and middle schools peerto peer do those count inside your statistics all right that was a good question you're off the hook um but but I I I don't know because we asked the kids we just asked them if they go to tutoring so I don't know how they respond to that that's a great point maybe some of them were responding that that they went to that tutoring I think we asked out out of school I think we asked for tutoring outside of school I think that's how the question was structured so they probably wouldn't have reported that but I appreciate you bringing that topic up all right thank you Mr fredman all right I'm G to wrap it at this point so thank you all so much thanks for being here in person thanks for being here virtually if you're if you're watching the recording after the fact thank you for tuning in and watching this recording um really grateful for all of you and really looking forward to many more conversations to come please put the calendars on your C please put the coffees on your calendar uh please try to make an effort to be there with all those um and uh and um if you can tune in board meetings too they can be a little long but there's some good conversation there also especially if you just tune in for the presentation portion so thank you everyone have a great night and uh and have a great close to your school year