Tom Burris, Superintendent

Tom Burris, Superintendent

·  Staff Appreciation

·  Teacher Evaluation - 60 teachers qualified for the 75% of VAS

·  Eddie Ramirez got all of the debit cards from the state out today

·  PPP Grant – there is 58 people who will get $5000 and there is money for A and B schools. If money is available again do you want to do it again, get a vote from your school and bring to the next SAC meeting. On A and B schools everyone in the schools gets money, ancillary staff included.

·  Calendar – we need to get it rolling. Mr. Burris will send you one or two drafts for you to share with your faculty. When you send them back, title them calendar and cc Holly Cain.

Dr. Peggy Brewer

·  Dr. Brewer introduced Mona Kirk at the Distict1 Board member.

Eddie Ramirez, Finance

·  The debit cards have been given out, please make sure to turn in receipts and acknowledgment form to your principal. Instructions are in the envelope on how to activate the card.

Dr. Christian Northrup, Testing

·  Third grade teacher at BES, Toni Wooton has a VAS of 3.082 for her ELA 3. That is the 99.99%, there is no 100%. That is the best in the state. She was at the 98.7% for Math 3.

·  Dr. Northrup is seeing good things at all of the RISD schools

Tamie Pargas/Brian Byrd, HR

·  Please turn the receipts of the debit cards to your principal.

·  Summative Evaluations – attendance for the most part we are not making appeals. Your paystubs show your days, keep track of that. There are two exceptions with FMLA and those will be appealed

·  Domains 1 & 4 – we have two teachers that have no score for Domains 1 & 4. Ms. Pargas will meet with the teachers and look at that. Concerns will be sent to PED all at once.

·  Licensure Advancement – in the past we have waited for you to come to us. This year HR will go to each and every one. There are five necessary things to go from a I to a II and a II to a III;

o  You have to have three years on that level, the years do not all have to be in Roswell

o  You have to have satisfactory evaluations.

o  You have to have 50% of the STAMP, student achievement

o  Application and $95 fee must come as a money order

o  Has to have Superintendent signature

o  To go from a II to a III you have to have a master’s degree

·  Step 1 with no VAS scores has to write a Dosier, The district has a Dosier class that it offers and pays for, every Wednesday night at 6:00 pm

·  Mr. Burris recommended if you were at a point where you could do the Dosier and get it out of the way to go from level II to level III, do it so you do not miss out on a year’s worth of advanced salary. The deadline is October 1st. It can be done any time you want but to get the pay it has to be done by October 1st.

Dr. Arsenio Romero/Elisa Begueria/Pat Lujan, Instruction

·  Supply List – please get the information from your staff regarding the supply list and send it to Dr. Romero

28:58 pat lujan

Royce Braggs, IT

·  In the middle of phone implementation, starting with Washington Ave. As soon as the wrinkles are worked out all schools will have them.

Penny Rodriquez, Washington Ave.

·  Calendar – suggested to move in-service to Tuesday, so there is not two interrupted weeks.

·  Parent Harassment of teachers – parents are constantly on a teacher regarding grades, stuff being brought home, etc. At what point is it considered harassment. They can check grades on powerpoint. Visit with your principals first. Next step would be to have your principal talk with Mr. Burris.

Tennise Lucas, Valley View

·  Calendar - Those who have given input want the week at Thanksgiving and a full 2 weeks at Christmas with the students coming back a day after we do, like this year.

·  Can we please change CPI back to PLC or come up with something else? It is confusing because of the Nonviolent Crisis Intervention (CPI) we are involved in.

·  Thank you for sending the Crisis team to VV after Char's horrible tragedy.

·  2 local attorneys, Doug Jones-Witt and Jared Kallunki, visited with our 4th and 5th graders on Constitution Day.

·  Reading night was a huge success.

·  CPI meetings are productive and going very well.

·  Thank you Pat Lujan for sending us AbbieSmith. She has been so helpful and supportive.

·  I was wondering about the money Karla was talking about some teachers getting because of their evaluations- she said I was not included. I know Burris mentioned that he was looking into something for ancillary staff…has he found a way to make this equitable for ALL staff?

·  I was also wondering about the money for the school grade …we went from an A to a B- will there be any money for that ?, if so are all staff (who worked here at that time ) included?...those who were not here would not get anything- right!

·  The bathrooms at the Wool Bowl need work- is it the district’s responsibility?

Edulastic...The following is from comments across grade level.

·  Why did they take away Discovery and replace with Edulastic without doing extensive research. Why would one person in our district decide such an impacting decision and no teachers were part of the committee?Dr. Romero – as we moved away from Discovery there is not that many vendors out there that do this. Price and the amount of questions were looked at.

·  As far as Edulastic with the kinders....it is really hard for them to navigate the test. They understand multiple choice, but are really struggling with drop-down menus, and drag and drop questions. That's what I've noticed from being in the lab.

·  1st grade, some good old training or time to explore Edulastic would be great. I noticed that for some of the standards we want to assess, there are no "already made assessments". It takes time to make these assessments ..also..unless I haven't figured it out yet, not sure how to make a hard copy of the assessment.. I do like how Edulastic configures which % of students, and exactly which students missed a particular question..this has been helpful for interventions..

·  In 2ndgrade, we have created 6 assessments. The students have taken 4. It is time consuming to create all of the assessments, but we feel that it gives us a better picture of where students are in relation to the standards than our previous assessments (Pearson Reading Street) did. We do have to take into account navigation of the test, but our students have really improved in that area since the first assessment.

·  The test penalizes kids for attempting to answer questions. We mostly see this problem when the question requires students to categorize items. (For example, students had to sort even/odd numbers. There were 8 numbers total. If students only sorted 2 numbers and left all of the other numbers on the side bar, they scored 2.5 points. However, if students sorted all 8 numbers, but only placed 2 of those numbers in the correct category, then students only received 1.33 points.) As a grade level, we decided to manually adjust students’ points for that particular question. Our concern is that on other assessments, students will not be scored fairly.

·  there are not questions for all of the standards. As teachers who are also creating our own curriculum and aligning it to the district’s leveled standards, we do not have time to create completely new assessments that would meet those needs-particularly for the literature standards. Creating a question not only involves writing the question, we also have to create a story to go with it. We cannot pull a story from any other source without written consent due to copyright law. When we tried to create a literature test, we found only 4 questions in the program contained passages. (And in our professional opinions, you cannot test comprehension without providing the text. If you just ask questions over a story students have already read, then you are testing their memory-not their comprehension.) 1 question contained an Information passage, so it had been incorrectly categorized. The other 3 passages covered aspects of the standards not taught during the first quarter according to our RISD Instructional Guide. We tried to add in Language questions to our test, only to discover there are 0 questions in the program for the 2nd grade Language standard 2.6. (Well, now there are 2 because we created them.

·  We have found that there is quite the learning curve for students, so we understand the benefit of having them use this testing site prior to the district assessments. However, we request that someone please write questions to assist us.

·  Very child unfriendly: dragging, clicking, drop-downs,: so much to think about – they are not thinking about what the question is asking nor the answer. They are too busy just trying to navigate the system.

·  The format is very confusing - no distinct colorful text boxes...ECT.

·  I give Edulastic a failing grade

·  The ONLY thing that Edulastic has that Discovery did not was the way it LOOKS. Yes, as far as image, Edulastic looks like PARCC, however, we are all taught that as long as we teach what needs to be taught the students will excel on their tests. We still have to go in and grade the open ended questions manually on Edulastic. Speaking for VV and I am most certain for all testing grades around the district, we still made the students write and taught them how to answer open and extended response questions. We have typing pal that teaches them to type. They do not need Edulastic to do this.

·  Discovery was easy to use. It had wonderful resources to pull from, both online and print. We do not have that with this new program.

·  The mistakes on Edulastic are huge. Several questions state they are worth 5 points and yet they are only 1 point questions. There was 2 mistakes in regards to the correct answers during one of the assignments.

·  There is NOT ENOUGH material to assign different questions to the students like Discovery. There is only 5 total questions dealing with central idea. That is NOT ENOUGH information for students to master.

·  No teacher answer key. John Chen from Edulastic stated it would be Christmas or later until a teacher answer key was developed. We DO NOT have time to read all these stories and create answer keys in addition to all the other things on our plate.

·  This system is not a full picture of what is expected for PARCC and 5th grade scores for PARCC at Valley Viewreflected that Discovery worked. We beat the state and district in both reading/language arts and came 2nd in math for the district.

·  Our teachers are frustrated, becasue it is always told to us that "you teachers are the ones in the classrooms, working with the kids and we value your opinion. You all do such an amazing job." But, on a decision like this we were not involved. Dr. Romero said there is not one tool out there that will solve all of our issues. Edulastic is meant as a tool that you can use to make it easier for you to build assessments. Dr. Romero said the district purchased form a third party test bank questions which increased the number of test questions for the district. The problem with that is the pop up advertisements. Please give Dr. Romero feedback on the advertisements.

Andrea Batista, UHS

Brian Morales, Sunset

Sandra Whitlow, Sierra

·  Insurance has increased by 8% this year. Teachers have not received a raise in several years. Is there a possibility for a pay increase? Mr. Burris said this is a discussion he will have to have with the school board and also it would have to go through collective bargaining. He has said this will be a tough year. The state is looking at significant cuts. They have already have cut 5% of the budgets and that produced $50 million. We hear they are $600 million still short. One of their options is cash reserves. Title I employees are paid just like we are but then the district submits a request for reimbursement to get our money back. We would like to make sure we can get through the end of the year, the cash reserve would do that.

·  Many of us are wondering how the district can justify a zero pay increase, but are offering sign on incentives to bring teacher here? Several have left due to not receiving even a reasonable pay increase over several years. What are you doing to keep teachers here in Roswell? Mr. Burris – we have spent money on relocation incentives but he does not think it is $10,000. Mr. Ramirez said it was a little more than $10,000. Mr. Burris said we have to get our teachers here. When we first started with Superintendent’s Advisory we had 65 open positions and today we have 31 1/2 .