Coraggio Consulting
Loudoun County School Board, Student Behavior and Accountability Committee Meeting, Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Place: Loudoun County Public Schools / School Board meeting (see BoardDocs / LCPS-TV)
Length: 1h 5m (video)
Official meeting video (Vimeo / LCPS-TV): https://player.vimeo.com/video/868947448?rel=0
BoardDocs (School Board): https://go.boarddocs.com/vsba/loudoun/Board.nsf/Public

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-21. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:02:10] Good evening. I am calling to order the September 27, 2023 Student Behavior and Accountability Committee meeting. This evening I am joined by fellow committee members Harris Mejedevi and Tiffany Polifko. I've been informed that there are no public comments this evening, so we'll move to item 3.01, approval of the August 28th draft minutes. Is there a motion?

[00:02:38] I move that the committee approve the meeting minutes from August 28, 2023. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor of approving the minutes, please raise your hand and say aye.

[00:02:54] Aye. Any nays? Abstentions? Thank you. That will pass 2-1 with Ms. Polifco abstaining. We will now move forward to the action items.

[00:03:10] I would like to take -- I would like to make a motion that we table policy 8205, Discipline Authority, pending receipt of feedback from SEAC.

[00:03:29] As I understand, they have their next meeting and will be planning on providing feedback after the October 4th meeting, which aligns for us to then have that feedback in time to take action in October. So I'd like to make a motion to table that pending feedback.

[00:03:48] Is there a second? Second. All those in favor of tabling this, please raise your hand and say aye. Aye. Those opposed? I don't know why I was like listening for the nay and not looking for the hand.

[00:04:05] That will pass 2 to 1 with Mr. Mahedovee objecting. - The next item we have is item 4.02, feedback on the discipline data that we had seen in August.

[00:04:25] - Okay, we're gonna turn it over to Dr. Tyler at this time. - Good evening, the last meeting, we had an opportunity to share this information with two of our board members, and our third board member is able to join us this evening. So it'll be presenting the data to fresh eyes for one and a review for two of our board members.

[00:04:46] So it is the same, yes.

[00:05:07] - So for clarification, we're actually reviewing the bus referral data, and we want to get feedback from all three board members. We're preparing the technology and bullying data for the next meeting, but we want to get feedback. Are we using the same format for the data we shared and give Ms. Polifco an opportunity to see this data, discuss it for the first time?

[00:05:29] So that was the agreement. So it's a review for two, and it's a fresh presentation for one, and we'll talk about what we want to see with the technology and bullying data the next time and continue the review. - Okay, thank you for the clarification.

[00:05:48] - So you'll remember in May, next slide please. In May of this year, we looked at the discipline data and we looked at some patterns. And while we were seeing the idea that we were not seeing escalations in the level of discipline data, I believe Ms. Polisco had mentioned that, for example, the Teach Advisory Committee and through the surveys, we were hearing feedback from teachers that they were seeing issues of student behaviors.

[00:06:18] And the idea of could we then dig into some of the feedback from the Teacher Advisory Council, and the surveys from teachers to kind of delve into what are we seeing with student behaviors, the level of support and consistency across the adults in the building and how they're managing it, and what we're seeing in some of the patterns.

[00:06:40] And of course, as we go deeper into this, looking at the format, it's always important for us to know what is most meaningful to school board members when they're looking at data. What types of visuals really make the point? How should we analyze it? So when we move further with looking at bullying and technology and use of cell phones, the format will fit your needs.

[00:07:01] So if you look at the next slide, it's okay. So our annual stakeholder survey for staff is administered in the late winter, early spring of every year. And these are selected items for feedback from staff related to the topic of discipline and student behaviors.

[00:07:23] And you'll see here while, when you look at the actual results that we have posted on the website and the reports with the visualizations, we typically see the level of agreement from teachers at 80 and 85% on items like leadership from the school and what it's like to work within the school.

[00:07:41] If there's an area where we have some of the lower percentages from teachers as far as level of agreement, it does deal with looking at student behaviors. So while these percentages are above 50%, they're some of our lowest numbers as far as feedback from teachers, meaning whereas almost 70% of staff feel that the administrator set high expectations for all students and that support is being provided for teachers and students know how the school defines appropriate behavior, we see it's just over half of teachers agree that students know that there are consequences.

[00:08:15] for breaking school rules per the Student Code of Conduct, and that there's consistent enforcement of those rules. So you may say what's still the majority to see that 30 to 40% of teachers are disagreeing, meaning they're not seeing consistency, they're not seeing the idea of rules being enforced at a consistent level.

[00:08:36] Any percentage represents teachers that are not satisfied with the practice. That's important, but these are the areas you may say are greatest areas for growth for us. The next slide shows, and this was from spring of last year, and over 4,700 teachers responded.

[00:08:54] Where teachers feel overwhelmingly that students are recognized with positive behavior and their supports to help students develop positive behavior, you see on the previous slide, there's still inconsistencies as far as how it's managed, when students are not engaging in positive behavior.

[00:09:11] So the next slide. So Ms. Polifco had mentioned the Teacher Advisory Council. They meet monthly, and there are, I believe, 120 or so teachers who are handpicked to give feedback to the superintendent on a number of topics. And during one of those meetings, there was discussion of kind of an open-ended survey that allowed teachers to fill in a lot of open-ended comments and to identify some themes.

[00:09:38] And one of the most common themes amongst those 120 or so teachers was students having a lot of behavioral issues. And now this was what teachers actually responded to in an open-ended comment. So we pulled a theme that teachers didn't necessarily have a structured question.

[00:09:56] They actually volunteered this. They inserted this. And also consequences being ineffective or nonexistent. And students missing a lot of school need to be caught up. Students use the cell phone, still prominent there. So this is not quite at that.

[00:10:12] It's kind of at that level what we saw from the stakeholder surveys. 40, 50% of teachers seen, 30, 40% seen behavior issues or seen maybe a disconnect between how adults are consistently managing, supporting those behaviors. So the student, the teacher surveys and the actual feedback from the teacher advisory council in more of kind of a large focus group-like setting saw similar themes.

[00:10:41] - Next slide, please. - So that was in response to the board members' questions about what are we seeing as far as teachers' experiences with dealing with some of the discipline behaviors we're seeing. So I think confirms what some of the board members are wondering about teachers' experiences.

[00:11:01] So looking at the bus-related discipline referrals, which was another topic, and the idea of looking at some historical data, specifically the last year before the pandemic and then the most recent year, what patterns are we seeing in bus referrals? And as a reminder, whenever we're looking at discipline data, There's at least four ways to look at it.

[00:11:25] Number of students referred or suspended, the number of incidents, the number of violations, and the number of discipline outcomes. Any way you look at this could give you different levels of data. It just depends upon what your level of focus is. In this particular case, we're looking at a few categories when it comes to bus referrals.

[00:11:43] So the differences between in-school restrictions and out-of-school suspensions are explained here, I think, from the perspective of educators. it gets down to our students missing significant instructional time.

[00:12:00] Out of school isolates the student from the building, but also the idea of in-school restriction could be a disruption of instructional time, even with an effectively managed environment there. So both are important. Slide, please.

[00:12:16] So this horizontal bar chart gives you a different way of kind of separating out, looking at referrals in green, meaning four years ago to last year, We actually had fewer office discipline referrals when it comes to bus violations, 1,146 compared to 1,040.

[00:12:36] We actually had more, and that orange is in-school suspensions, the ISS, and then the blue are the actual out-of-school suspensions. We might need to add a code to that to explain that. So in-school suspensions were actually up this last year, and the out-of-school suspensions were actually higher four years ago for bus violations and you see the nature of the bus violations understanding that the actual coding of the discipline behaviors and the behaviors of students changed and you actually see that we had

[00:13:13] disorderly conduct was most prominent and that can include anything from the idea of a disruption student to student it could be a student responding to an adult and there are ways that we could break that down but it gives you an idea of the overwhelming majority of the bus violations whether it could be a dispute or a disagreement between the students student and adult but we did have some cases of situations where we had fighting and we had tobacco offenses most prominent was disorderly conduct and the

[00:13:48] next slide will show you I believe a donut chart kind of displaying that now we updated it for last year and you'll see the actual codes on the next slide are different meaning you see the categories are different behaviors of safety concern was most prominent at 45% relationship behaviors and then school and then school operations and what we'll do on I think the second slide after this will explain the actual categories what does that actually mean and there's the donut chart there the next slide will actually show you behaviors of safety concerns pushing and shoving reckless behaviors fighting

[00:14:28] uh tobacco and vaping alcohol drug possession so you see that in this particular case it's hard to do those year-to-year comparisons because the categories are different but we do see a range of interactions and issues between students but actually bringing items onto the bus where there's it's not discretionary there are actions you have to take for the safety of students when you when there's drugs and alcohol involved in some of those cases. Relationship behaviors, contact between students, speaking in a disrespectful manner, in the disorderly conduct, what was most prominent

[00:15:06] four years ago was the idea of speaking back to an adult in a way that was disruptive of a classroom or in this case a bus setting, transporting students. So give you an opportunity to look at the different categories of the nature of the bus referrals from last year. So the next slide, It gets to the question of, whenever we're looking at data, the idea of equitable treatment of students.

[00:15:43] If students are engaging in the same behavior in the same context, are we seeing similar outcomes across student groups? And you know historically, I believe it was nine years ago, when we had the Discipline Task Force, and we first started formally analyzing disproportionality, not just by race, but also students of IEPs, English learners, and other categories there.

[00:16:06] Whenever you see a risk ratio that compares the referral rate for that student group to all other students, anything that gets to a level of 1.5 to 1 shows some level of disproportionality. When you get to 2 to 1, it's disproportionate and it reaches a Department of Justice level of this is disproportionate.

[00:16:26] Now, if there are factors that explain it outside of possible bias, then it may be disproportionate because one student group is engaging in more serious behaviors that may not allow for discretion. But if the students are engaging in the same behaviors and you see consistent disproportionality, it's a question of is there a matter of bias or the idea of years ago, it was a teacher dealing with a student who is five feet tall, weighs 120 pounds versus a student who is six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds engaging in the same behavior can be perceived differently.

[00:17:04] Particularly if you're a teacher dealing with a student who is an imposing physical figure and the idea of other biases as well. So we had no disproportionality four years ago for referrals regarding bus incidents. And you go to the next slide. And we didn't see that again in the risk ratios for last year.

[00:17:23] This is referrals where it's reported, but there's no particular discipline outcome or disposition like a suspension. When you go to the next slide, you'll see when we were looking at suspensions, a case in which we had seven students who were American Indian students with referrals, two of them received suspensions, it actually produced disproportionality.

[00:17:47] We understand that small numbers can easily produce disproportionate outcomes, and that's where Dr. Fulton and others who work with schools. In those cases, if that suspension involved something that did not allow a lot of discretion for the adults, meaning there were drugs involved, there were suspensions where for the safety of students and other factors, you may have to engage in that disposition.

[00:18:11] And it approached disproportionality for black African-American students and Hispanic students. In last year's data on the next slide, you'll see again that disproportionate for American Indian students, one out of the three students with incidents were suspended, so it produced disproportionality.

[00:18:32] And it approached it for the same two ethnic groups and for students of IEPs, those of you who remember that our most challenging disproportionality when it comes to discipline is students of IEPs, where the ratio typically is three and a half or four to one, even when we're factoring in the nature of the actual behaviors. And it's disproportionate, but not as much for black and Hispanic students where it hovers between like 1.8 to 1 and 2 to 1.

[00:19:03] Nine years ago, it was a case students of IP is the most disproportionate and that remains the case today. The next slide. So the question today, now that Ms. Belifco has had an opportunity to review it, does the format work for you when we look at technology and bullying data next month?

[00:19:27] Are there different views we want to look at, different methodology we want to use? Part of the challenge with doing this work is that there's what data visualizations, data visual experts would say is great that you see in the Wall Street Journal, but what conversations we have internally is that the school board members have to make decisions.

[00:19:47] So what data visualizations work for them? So it's always helpful for us to know when you're looking at data, what is most effective? What helps to tell the story? So any feedback you may have for that as far as what you've seen today and maybe further analysis of this data and then how you want to proceed when we're crunching the numbers for technology and bullying discipline data.

[00:20:10] So we have the raw data, but how do you want to look at it? How do you want to review it? What angle do you want to take moving forward? I think that might be the last slide here. Okay, I'll let others go first. Do you have, yes, Mr. I'm ahead of you.

[00:20:26] Thank you, Chair. So Dr. Tyler, I guess for me, I mean, this is two years of data that we're looking at. I mean, again, you can say it doesn't really give you the breadth of the trend to, I mean, for me i'm comparing between 19 and 20 22 so one is pre-covered and one is sort of coming out of covet it's i mean it gives you some angle but i think if i want to see i like to see like maybe a

[00:20:55] i mean if you were to go back to the slide before this or yeah this is a um yeah so even if you take this maybe on on this particular slide yeah the numbers are important the column with students within the bus incidents with suspensions and the rate but i think obviously the outliers we're looking up here are the risk ratios and so what is a trend like you had the same thing with 2019

[00:21:29] but look going back maybe two three years back to see how we were improving or did we have challenge going back to let's say starting with six like two three years back i'm not asking like we go 10 years back but what was a trend looking like i mean were we consistently reducing the numbers or we're not reducing numbers and so it'll give us at least a better sort of view on the trend is moving in a good direction. I know COVID was a challenge so we're ignoring the data

[00:22:04] but coming back to 2022 and hopefully 23 as you present to the you know as you continue presenting this we can then hopefully have a good sample of a trend to see did it do better in 23. If it didn't do better than I think then obviously board needs to take a little more direction with the policy so that's my hope but more or less all the slides I think that you had the one for that the I know the the categories were different the violation categories were different between 19 and but maybe you

[00:22:42] can buy I know since you've tried to categorize on slide number my slide number. What are the most common behavioral violations of the category where you had those three? Maybe you do take a shot at grouping the previous ones. I don't know if you can do it or not, but that would be my hope with the same thing too, to see what the trend looks like for that as well. That's my whole thing. I think just to see if the things that we're doing as a board, Is it helping, not helping?

[00:23:19] So that's that. And the last thing is on the survey of, I mean, I think I shared this in the last meeting too, where you had the teacher advisory council where students are having a lot of behavioral issues.

[00:23:35] I think I spoke at the last meeting too, because that's the feedback I was getting that I think where at least the teachers were expressing that we are seeing, teachers are seeing a lot of behavioral issues. And not only that, they just don't have enough tools to address them.

[00:23:54] That's the feedback that I was getting. So it seems on that particular teacher advisory council, it seems to be consistent with what the message we're getting. Now the survey part of a bigger group of where it's, I think that the students 60% or 59% of the students understand their responsibility.

[00:24:12] So there's still improvement to be done with that. So those are just from a structural perspective. Then I'll have more questions, but I'll pause for that. Thank you. Ms. Plifko. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[00:24:30] I want to just briefly go back to the teachers' experiences with student behavior for a moment since I wasn't here at the last committee meeting. And you did a breakdown of the advisory council results where you have students having a lot of behavioral issues, consequences are either ineffective or non-existent. Those are the two that stand out to me.

[00:24:53] And I think what we need to be asking ourselves is it the application of the division-wide approaches to handling behavior? The numbers are there. We have the statistical data, but I think what we're not understanding is whether or not our applications are effective.

[00:25:15] And we can measure the effectiveness of the application by maybe breaking it down further and finding out what's being done in each instance. And I know that's teasing the data down really far, but in order for us to understand if what we're doing is effective, I think that's the approach that we're going to have to take.

[00:25:33] Because we can continue to record frequency data all day long, but frequency data is just frequency data. It's not telling us what is surrounding that behavior. It's not telling us whether or not the consequences that are being applied to that behavior are actually doing what we are intending them to do.

[00:25:51] Because consequences can do both things. They can increase behavior and they can decrease behavior. And I think that's kind of a little bit of a misnomer. When we think about consequences, we automatically think, well, if someone gets a consequence for something, then that behavior is going to diminish.

[00:26:07] We think of it as a punishment. But consequences can actually positively reinforce behavior as well. And so if we don't really understand as a division whether or not those applications that we're using are actually, if we want to see a behavior decreasing, is that behavior really decreasing as a result of the application of that consequence?

[00:26:27] Or are we inadvertently positively reinforcing behavior that we don't want to see? So, I mean, and this is me putting my BCBA hat on here, and I realize that we don't have very many of those to go around the school division.

[00:26:43] I don't know how often you all are able to pull in BCBAs to provide that type of feedback. I mean, I know we often reserve BCBAs for special education, but a behavior analyst can provide amazing training to individuals who, I mean, across all spectrums.

[00:27:04] It's not just special education, it's behavior. And that type of, I think if we were able to provide that type of training for our teachers, not just our special education teachers, our general education teachers, our administrators, it would go a long way because it's very easy to apply the principles of behavior analysis.

[00:27:22] And once people understand the antecedents to a behavior and the consequences to a behavior, then you know what the function of a behavior is. If we don't understand what the function of the behavior is, if we don't know why kids are behaving the way that they're behaving on the bus or why they're doing the behavior that we're doing, If teachers don't understand that, we can give them packages and programs all day long and say, you know, here, apply this, or here, do this.

[00:27:47] But if they don't know why, that application may be non-functional, or it might be having the reverse effect. So that's why I bring that up. But also I wonder, with the buses, have we, or maybe some schools have, I don't know what every school individually is doing, But have schools looked at applying a positive reinforcement system for kids that are riding the bus?

[00:28:10] And this might be more effective at the elementary level than it would be at the middle school and high school level. But even at the middle school and high school level, I would think that administrators could come up with some kind of a motivating positive reinforcement system in place where it's like, hey, if we have X amount of referrals this month or whatever, If we decrease by this much, then you're going to earn X, Y, Z.

[00:28:36] And that could actually function as a way to get everyone who's on that bus to work together as a contingent group to produce that positive behavior. And it could be a really good thing for our students. It's just something that I'm thinking about off the top of my head.

[00:28:51] So I think along with some of those thoughts that I really appreciate, in last night's board meeting, one of the comments we were talking about in response to the strategic plan updates.

[00:29:11] There was some data that was shared, and one of the responses about kind of a mitigating strategy would be further rollout of restorative practices. And so I think one of the questions that I have is, where are we with that?

[00:29:31] And how are we doing, like, with consistent approaches for how we're handling discipline in all of our buildings? So that comment last night kind of struck me. I thought, oh, okay, so where are we with that? And with any of this data, the benefit is really in understanding more of the why and the so what.

[00:29:54] So now that we know this, what are we doing with this? And then how does this data help us to respond and continue to improve what we're doing? So I'll pause there.

[00:30:12] There's a lot to address. I'll try my best. I just want to introduce Dr. Carlin Floyd, who's our new supervisor for the Office of School Administration. One of her roles, and this kind of ties in with what Ms. Polipko said, one thing is, you know, I'll talk a lot about I don't want to operate in silos.

[00:30:28] So our office works with multi-tiered systems of support, our behavioral specialists, our special education staff that work with their mental health staff, our substance use specialists. All that becomes part of our program when we work with a student. So every time a student is addressed behavior and it's entered in the student information system, instructional behavioral strategies are supposed to be entered in there, too.

[00:30:49] They're also entered in a multi-tiered system that's placed in there. Anytime we do have level meetings or meetings concerning about behavior, we invite multiple parties to the table to address that as to put a plan in place. The things we don't know is how effective those were because it's like how effective were stop signs in making people stop them for any accidents you don't know.

[00:31:12] You only know the accidents that have occurred. So I do think a lot of our staff have worked very well at putting these together and worked with students that are more preventative of future behavior and recidivant rates of students who constantly go back to the same consequence and problems that occur.

[00:31:31] Along the other question, one of the things that OSA did and I did is we reached out. We met with the bus drivers when the bus drivers returned. Part of the challenge with data is prior to last year, there were a lot of different ways data or incidents were sent to school administrators, including paper.

[00:31:49] So we don't know how accurate that data was all the time and why that's collected. So we've talked about that. Sometimes last year, administrators were a little confused about entering it because the one place that they could enter the incident they could enter in Phoenix required them to notify law enforcement, and they looked at some of these issues as not being required.

[00:32:06] So we adjusted that, gave them a single entry that they go into, and the administrator then determines what the offense or disposition is by the SBAR. We streamlined the process, and we also talked to bus drivers about the importance of reporting it out when in doubt, report it out.

[00:32:22] If you have something, share it with it. It may not be a discipline or behavioral issue, but it's something else that's dealing with student mental health or other concerns that the school is putting together, and we try to take those silos out of this information is over here and this information is over here. Also, the use of our comprehensive student support plan, which is required by policy and protective orders. We have schools doing that whenever there are conflicts between students.

[00:32:46] They can be used for an offender, alleged offender, a victim, an alleged victim. Anybody in that part of it can do it so that we work in some of those practices and support, including restorative practices. State code does not allow us to use restorative practices as a discipline measure.

[00:33:01] because that would create inequities on who does it. And there's different research about the effectiveness of restorative practices, too. There's research that is not really effective a lot of times for young boys, too, where we have some of this conflict in doing so. But it is used and it is offered, and if both parties agree that there is a restorative practice that's used, and often we will see that when we're dealing with conflict.

[00:33:23] You know, the conflicts that we met with administrators and AP sometimes go from late elementary to middle school all the way up to high school where you have a group of students who can change back and forth about who they're angry at, but it's disrupting their learning in that process. And the way we build some instructional strategies and behavioral strategies in place for those students, and then we continue to document them in the group's meeting.

[00:33:47] Our new SSAs, which are a FTE position at the high school level and stipend at the middle school, and we'd love to have a full position at the middle school, one of their roles is we're looking at all these students in the tier strategies and multi-tier support and the tier three students and maybe those tier two students whose behavior is drifting into an area where it's going to be addressed is what are those instructional behavioral strategies we're applying across the board and if we have to have some mental health support some other counseling support maybe our substance counselors need to talk to that student and work with that student so they're trying to pull those pieces together so that they are addressing that behavior before it comes to

[00:34:26] the point where you know we have a lot of different measures that people look at you know there's some people who want us to suspend every single kid that comes in and when they do something and others to say well we've got to look at why we're suspending and we're worried about again we really look at the time students are out of the classroom and that's an in-school restriction or out of school suspension we really don't want numbers high there we try to say okay there's a standard or something that's done become a safety issue or a are at risk towards others, that that is a reason for that student to be removed from that classroom. Otherwise, we want to look at providing instructional strategies and

[00:35:02] behavioral strategies that keep that student engaged and in the classroom because we know the negative of the time out of the classroom, it's hard to replace. And we do review every single discipline consequence that involves a suspension and every 82-40 violation that involves a drug and alcohol violation. Other in-school violations don't come to our office so we don't get reported, but every single one of those come to our office and they're submitted by school, and we go through them, so we look through consistency.

[00:35:28] So if we have a school that has suspended two students for fighting without injury and it's their first incidence, we overturn it and say no. Our level approach is that the first offense here is an in-school restriction for those students, not suspension without injury, and so that we're consistent across the board.

[00:35:46] I would say in being a principal and being in this division for quite a while, we're more consistent than we ever have been, what those consequences are, because we have a lot of conversations where we can't tell an administrator what to do, but we say, here's your level of response that you can have based on this violation, and that you have to look at those processes.

[00:36:03] I hope I hit a lot of the questions that you asked. If I missed one, just let me know, and I'll go back and look at it. I think the other thing is, and I know in the spring we also had some conversations. I know Ms. Polifko has brought up some information about her professional experience, and I often you nodding your head in response to some of the things that she's brought up so I'm wondering you know is incorporation of more resources that have this expertise planned or being thought about for requests for resources yes we are asking for more resources we're asking for more staffing we're

[00:36:42] also asking for more alternative settings for schools and looking at that to provide some of of those more intensive supports for students who do it, whose behavior can become disruptive for others, and they're struggling with their own academic access to the curriculum in doing that.

[00:36:58] So we are looking at that. What we're really doing, though, is constantly, while we're waiting for that, is we're planning meetings and plannings and how we can support a student to do that so that they can be safe in the building and others can be safe around them. And as we mentioned, a lot of times when students are dealing with difficulties, they've become very attentive.

[00:37:14] And a lot of times, and I've said this before, I was a teacher in my first year of teaching, everybody told me the principals never respond to discipline. And that was in 1985. So it's not a new story for me. But when we were working with one of these students and dealing with them, often we might be dealing with family conflict, mental health issue, there might be substance use, there's some other, it's never usually a problem that's in a bubble and it's only one isolated incident.

[00:37:43] It's multiple layers they're working with. And those behaviors become very, draw a lot of attention. So, you know, a bad accident on the interstate draws a lot of attention and everybody's a horrible driver on the interstate, but it's one bad accident that might have been caused by it.

[00:38:01] You know, most of our students do a very good job in the school navigating it. Most of them are very tolerant of other students and accepting of other students. But there is behavior at times that we need to have that next level of addressing. And there's other behaviors that we can see and principals and others can see is developing towards that, and we want to put those strategies in place.

[00:38:20] And one of the things is, is when we have those meetings, is in bringing them back to the teachers and the bus drivers on what your proper response is when this behavior does occur. I think that's what you alluded to, is that we're addressing it when it occurs, not later on and trying to correct it after the fact.

[00:38:36] Yes. The other piece of the work with the SSA is I've only been on the job seven days, so I for a little grace and welcome thanks but I have started with the survey of our SSAs who are new well they're all new and looking at their level of comfort and knowledge in the different areas around their responsibilities so that we can provide targeted specific trainings for example in the world of MTSS or quite possibly around some of the behavior strategies with FBAs and developing VIPs and the importance of understanding the ABCs of our of the

[00:39:15] behaviors in which we're working with our students along with some of the relationship development different strategies that they can do to do that to front load some of those relationships because we all know that in order to succeed you have to have three positive assets to succeed and so many of our students don't have that that positive adult in the high school with whom that they connect and so we want to make sure that we're giving the SSA is the tools it's not just hi here's your new job go forth and do but we want to make sure that they have the tools in order to be the most successful to really be able to

[00:39:53] reach the kids that we know either are already struggling or who are probably at risk or struggling we're also fortunate Dr. Floyd besides being a former principal also worked with special ed and worked in alternative school settings. I've had experience working in juvenile detention center settings, so we understand some of that behavior and all the structures that are there, and not to call too much attention to it, but we do have a principal here working with one of our families and students that's struggling, and the work that that school and the staff is doing to try to support that student because they realize

[00:40:32] it's very important for that student in those middle school years to develop that and they will do a lot of things and work with the teachers as to what the response is and what the support for the student even when they have setbacks that are not their own doing um and they just do an incredible job working even when what i missed that even when they have setbacks that are not their own doing things that happen off campus that they have to deal with and respond to and i think that gets me to there's a couple of minor things with the data but i think um that gets me to

[00:41:05] my kind of bigger question every time I see the data is okay now what so we know we all care about eliminating disparities but you know and I but specifically what are we doing and where do we think that you know like where do we go from here and and especially when we see you know and acknowledging it's consistent so you know and I think to Mr. Mejedevi's point not I think the

[00:41:43] desire to go pre-COVID was smart because the COVID years it's just the data's all over the place I know I struggle with that in my day job in higher ed looking at data we just kind of say we're like just ignore that on we built dashboards we ignore that data but um but maybe being able to look a couple, you know, if we have some additional data so that we can see how are we trending? Are we really flat? Are we up? Are we down? And then what does that say about our strategies and how

[00:42:16] we've tried to address this? And if it's not working, what else can we do? So to paraphrase the idea of 2019-20, three quarters of the year, three quarters of the way into the year, we went into emergency distance learning. We know that the discipline data was skewed for that 2020-20 2021, mostly in a hybrid setting, 21, 22, 22, 23, 18, 19, and then maybe a few years before

[00:42:49] 2018, 19, maybe going back to 2016, 17, maybe five clean data points and just having that as kind of a standard, kind of working around the pandemic, looking at discipline data. Okay. And I think I really like the charts where you have all of the columns and it, so it'd be helpful to have the detailed charts, but then maybe take, I don't know if it's the risk ratios probably, and plot those on a trend line where we can see the multiple years on the same graph.

[00:43:21] I think that would be helpful. I would also just caution, prior to the change in the SBAR and the requirement, now every administrative response is required to be entered in Phoenix. That wasn't the case prior to the SBAR, and I know the categories are also different, and what those offenses are, but we also, I think, are much stronger in reporting everything now than we were previously.

[00:43:47] And that's the challenge, too. I mean, that was, I think you showed us some slides, right? The categories change, practices change, things weren't mandatory, now they're mandatory. So everything has a caveat and a footnote. You know, you can add a footnote on the slide that, you know, pre-18, 19, it wasn't mandatory or there were different categories.

[00:44:10] A couple of small data things on the slide with the teacher's experiences with student behavior. We have a number there, and I know you verbally said there are around 120 teachers who participated, but that would be helpful to actually have that number on the slide for reference.

[00:44:29] So you can have a sense of proportionally how many students we're talking about. And I think that's it, because we covered the scope and comparative data that we think would be helpful.

[00:44:50] So then to the question about, you know, the type of data for technology and bullying referrals. I mean, this to me, I mean, this has been informative. I think that this type of format works when we have the year-over-year. It is always helpful to see graphically how those are trending together on a line where we can see that year-over-year data.

[00:45:16] But I think it's also, it's all in the, what do we think this means and then what are we doing because of what we think it means that I'm really most interested in? Because the data by itself is to inform that, you know, that pivot, so to speak, and where we go next.

[00:45:36] MR. Thank you, Chair. So, Dr. Tyler, I think one of the things, you know, I've spoken in different committee meetings and you know having a tag cloud um helps but in the case of this um you know how you had the pie chart maybe a bubble chart might be more appropriate given the sizes of those types of categories and how many violations or how many incidents we're reporting i think that could give

[00:46:10] us a a better view on what's what's really bubbling up i mean that's my thing um so that's for the thing my overall comment on on this and and Mr. Fulton you can you can speak to this but I think in the last two three or this last three four years the journey has been a to collect the data and to be able to have the data in a way we as a board we as a community we can all see the

[00:46:46] same data and understand the data and then hopefully create good programs and policies to help fix that I mean I would see I mean it's a logical steps to that and I think what you address that we didn't have a data clean data and the previously and I think to share with my colleagues to similar to how we have the data on a racial incidents we never had the data before so when I'm initially when I met with MSAC and we talked about a lot of the issues,

[00:47:23] my first thing was saying, well, I can, like, I think there's, for example, the teacher data is a, it's a good reference data, but it's not, you know, you can't really put a thumb on it in terms of from an incidence perspective to have, you know, good objective data.

[00:47:44] but now we have good data to look at how many um racial words incidents we're having and hopefully the board can then figure out with the staff in terms of what path we take it i see this the same way at least we're looking at the data we're having a better view on categorizing the issues and so so first foremost was just to look at the data and understand that um but i think from here

[00:48:11] The second sort of path, I think, looking forward and working with the chair or working with the staff, I mean, working with the board, this or future board, is to have looking at all those different strategies that we are putting in place.

[00:48:28] I think that's something, as a board, I think you mentioned a lot of things, and I can't speak for my fellow colleagues here, but I think having those things in the time of when we have that, not only that we're doing this, but when we started that, I think could also, because now you have a data, now you have a trend.

[00:48:48] when did we introduce just example I think Ms. Polifko had a good point last night about what is social emotional learning that we're teaching what is the impact quantifiably it's there is no data right now but to say well we introduced social emotional learning let's say post-COVID now because I think everything in the world now is post-COVID and we see the trend and we see because I think one of the slides you talk about I think in the new category is I think where you

[00:49:22] talk about one of the most common behavioral violations, and I see relationship behaviors at 32%. Yes, I mean, I think parents have a responsibility, but I think you talk about conflict resolution. Schools do play a role.

[00:49:38] Teachers and administrators do play a role in resolving them. And so what tools we're offering not only the staff, but also students to be able to not get into conflict and be able to resolve that. So I think, you know, I think what I heard from my colleague, I think there are many opportunities, many things we're doing.

[00:49:57] I don't know, again, we only have three, four months left, but I would at least have a view on where we could look at at least as a committee to look at what are things that we are putting in place, whether it's training, whether it's program, et cetera, that are geared towards discipline.

[00:50:17] and sorry, behavior issues and not discipline. Improving the behavior and have, and then hopefully in the future that gets sort of mapped into what the trend analysis looks like, how much you're resting. And then maybe we make adjustments.

[00:50:33] I mean, if some programs are not working, then we can look at it and say, hey, this program is not really helping and then make appropriate corrections from that. So my hope was just to look at the data right now, which is helpful, so that's all, thank you.

[00:50:53] - Thank you so much. Moving on to number five, information items. The first item is 5.01, policy 8260, reporting of student conduct.

[00:51:16] This is the policy that had been previously approved by the board last April, I believe. We brought it, needed to bring it back because of a change in state code that required a 24 hour notice for any incident that involved bullying.

[00:51:35] so the language is added. Along the way, though, we wanted to correct some things to make it more aligned with how other policies look, so there are other smaller corrections that are placed in there also. The big change is lines 133 through 138, where we adopted the requirement for the 24-hour notice in there, and so this one we wanted to bring back before the committee to see if this could get approved, because besides the minor changes to align it with other policies, we've

[00:52:14] only added one Division Council approved section in there, so it aligns with state code. So I have one question. So because this went through revisions very recently, did it go through public comment? It did. Okay. And I guess my question is, considering that this is really just to bring it in line with state code, do we need to send it for public comment again?

[00:52:40] From what I understand, we do not. Okay. Would that be something for discussion? I mean, I would appreciate the other committee members' take on that as well. Mr. Mejedevi. Thank you, Chair. So, all good.

[00:52:58] My question is, if this policy were, I mean, what's the timeliness of this policy? So, let's say this policy were to get approved tomorrow. - Would this go into effect Friday? Or are we looking at the next calendar?

[00:53:14] - With the state code, it's already in effect. We have already adopted measures and a protocol, a standard operating procedures for responding to bullying incidents. So we've already put those in place. It was just suggested through Division Council that we needed to update the policy so that it aligns and reflects that.

[00:53:35] - So Division's already complying with the 24-hour rule and then just bringing the policy updated with the code itself. - That is correct. - Do you have thoughts on the need to send for public comment versus, I mean, perhaps even suspending the rules and moving this forward?

[00:53:53] Okay, yep. - Ms. Plifko. - Thank you, Madam Chair. That's actually what I was gonna bring up, was just the idea that if we don't need to put this through public comment, we could suspend the rules tonight and then push it forward to the board for information.

[00:54:08] - Okay, is there a motion? - I move to suspend the rules for policy 80 to 60. - Second. - All those in favor of suspending the rules, please raise your hand and say aye.

[00:54:24] The motion to suspend the rules has been, has passed unanimously with all committee members present. There are motion related to this policy. - I move that this committee approve this policy and send it to the full board as an information item.

[00:54:42] - Second. - All those in favor of the motion, please raise your hand and say aye. That motion passes unanimously. So we can move this forward to the full board as an information item. That brings us to our last item, which is item 5.02, student use of social media.

[00:55:10] - One of the things that we brought up and we wanted to request is what kind of data were you looking for? The idea was that we were gonna present some data in the October meeting about student use of social media. I know there's another committee that's looking at the cell phone policy.

[00:55:27] Ours was to provide any kind of discipline data was going to be requested about social media use that you really so I think when we had this discussion before it was just getting a sense of how much of our in-school disciplinary issues are related to use of cell phones and or social media I think we all hear anecdotally about students posting videos on tick-tock and so forth and how that contributes to negative hostile environments

[00:56:04] at times. And so I know that it's tricky because it's not necessarily coded as such. So this is kind of the challenge for you then is to figure out how to surface information to help give us a sense of how much of this is a problem. It's hard to, you don't want to base all of your reactions on the anecdotal stories. So we're trying to get some data around that. Anyone else?

[00:56:30] Would you also like to do previous years going back to 18, 19, and just look at the last year? We'll take as much data as you have. And again, I think that multiple-year look back is always helpful.

[00:56:50] It's hard, especially, again, not to say it again and again, but with the COVID years being outliers for so many things, it's just helpful to have multiple years. It's hard for some of these things to base a full opinion on just one year compared to one other year.

[00:57:13] It's helpful to see trends over time. Okay. Thank you. Anything else? Yes. Ms. Polifko. Thank you, Madam Chair. I think that the idea of collecting this data is good in theory.

[00:57:31] I think my only concern is that it's probably not going to end up giving us the true information that we need because when kids are on their phones a lot of times it's when they can be on their phones you know because they have access to them because they're not in a situation where they're not able to use their phones because they can take them to schools you know we have a better lockdown on phones at some of the middle schools and obviously the elementary schools but when it comes to the high schools they have a lot of unencumbered time on their devices because they just do because they're able to and so I think my concern is that their access to social media is happening when they're walking through the hallway, when they, you know, and those are times

[00:58:11] that we can't necessarily measure and we won't have any statistical data on any sort of behavioral infractions related to that. So while we might get a few instances where it's been documented, my worry is that, and I think it's good to, I think if we can collect it, I think it's good because I think it's good information to have. I just think that it won't give us, it's going to absolutely underestimate it's going to it's going to be an underestimate of the type of behavior that's occurring on social media and and really this just goes back to the fact that kids have

[00:58:45] their phones so i think in if we eliminate if we eliminate the phones then we don't have that problem but until we do that we can't we can't account for that on those instances any new business if i could offer i'll look at um another option which is bright bites which is a survey that is administered in the spring and it has a heavy technology focus and the idea of digital citizenship is a theme among students incidents they've seen

[00:59:21] of students mistreating each other in an online environment so that's not incident data but it's perceptual data from students about what they see so I can I can take a look at that and see how prevalent that is and we have maybe six or seven years of that data so that would be great thank you yes thank you Chair. So my question is, I think, Mr. Fulton, this committee is going to review the cell phone policy when it comes to it? So my understanding is, so there's a couple of things. I think a number of board members brought up the desire to talk about cell phone policy. So we had a

[01:00:00] conversation here that I feel like went a little bit sideways, and then the technology committee also took it up however Dr. Spence has indicated that he has asked staff to help to organize focus group conversations to gather feedback from the community to help inform what the eventual policy would be and I've shared that I feel like this policy while it may start with technology should also come through this committee because there will be behavioral expectations related to cell

[01:00:36] use. Okay, with no new business, we are adjourned. Thank you.

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