Kirk C. Watkins, Peak to Peak. The Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) District Accountability Committee (DAC) meeting took place on December 1, 2020, via Zoom. 

The DAC Chairperson, Ralph Frid, called the meeting to order at 6:22 p.m. 

Kitty Sargent said that the Board of Education (BOE) had retired the policy “ECAB,” which commits to penalizing acts of vandalism to the utmost extent, since the elements had been addressed by other policies.  

Sargent stated that a resolution was adopted that addressed equitable discipline. It included ending the current Student Resource Officer (SRO) program and ensuring equitable disciplinary actions. It also seeks to create a broadly inclusive standard of equity within underrepresented populations. The resolution also gives a mandate requiring quarterly updates on the progress, and a completion date of May 1, 2021. 

Sargent also spoke about the bond construction project at New Vista. It had been delayed due to a potential sale of the University Hill building to CU. Although the sale did not happen, it had effectively pushed New Vista to the bottom of the priority list. Costs have gone up since, but the district has reallocated funds to cover expenses and to deliver to the voters what was initially promised. 

There is a new working group in which BVSD is represented and is made up of parents, Governor Polis, school districts, and public health to try to get children back to in-person learning. 

Dr. Rob Anderson gave the Superintendent’s report. He said that the highest priority is getting children back into school, and much of the effort from the BOE is directed towards that goal. 

Anderson also addressed the staffing gap, stating that they were poised to create a “classroom monitor” position, which would be a person on site who would provide assistance to staff that were unable to be in the classroom due to quarantining requirements. The teachers would still be teaching from home while they quarantined, and the monitor would be in the classroom supervising the students.

Anderson introduced the idea of contacting absent students in order to direct them to testing facilities for Covid-19, and that the testing costs would be covered by BVSD. 

He also said that the DAC and other school organizations would be called upon to help recruit staff to fill gaps created by the epidemic. He added that with the retirement of teachers possibly rising due to Covid-19 there was probably going to be a greater than normal need to hire more teachers and staff following the end of the school year. 

Dr. Anderson went over the strategic plan initiatives involving systems level changes that are designed to create conditions helping make teachers and schools more successful. The plan is designed with thirteen initiatives to be worked out over a five-year period. In the first year, six of the initiatives have begun. 

Initiative 1a: “Create a standards-based scope and sequence for PK-12.”

Previous to the strategic plan, priorities were decided at the school level so there was little consistency across the district. The issue, he continued, was that in most districts there was a high level of mobility, resulting in one in three students not attending their home school. This resulted in not having clear feeder patterns. He said that the change needed to be systemic in scope and sequence.

Initiative 1b: “Defining and implementing common and aligned instructional models and practices.” 

Initiative 3a: “Create a tiered system of school requirements, supports and accountability metrics which drive the allocation of resources.” 

Initiative 3c: “Create a system to monitor and assess academic return on investment (ROI).” The challenge going forward will be the lack of data due to Covid-19 and the interruption of data collection. 

Initiative 5a: “Establish a system for strategically managing existing partnerships and building new partnerships.” 

Initiative 6a: “Define and put into place culturally responsive principles and best practices that challenge inequity and bias.” This aligns with the “Excellence through Equity” work being done in the district. 

Anderson noted that encouraging progress had been made towards development of an instructional infrastructure which will help to develop people who would be able to help, coach, guide, develop, and hold accountable the teachers in the district, developing leadership competencies in BVSD. This is intended to address a lack of district-wide consistency regarding professional standards for teachers and staff. Anderson intends on conducting the first leadership institute this summer, which will focus on leadership training at BVSD. 

He discussed a program, called a “turnaround program”, that was developed by the University of Virginia, UVa, that helps teachers to develop teaching plans to tie in with the social and emotional health of their students. BVSD has purchased the program for use in the district.

Dr. Anderson said that the district had rated very poorly on its instructional infrastructure at the initial audit. He said that the district had always had a high level of autonomy, which works well for a certain population, but not for more vulnerable members of the community. With that recognition, the goal of developing instructional infrastructure will attempt to equalize access. 

Dr. Anderson discussed the summer school program being primarily used this year to focus on literacy and math for the younger children, and some credit recovery for older students rather than an enrichment program for S.T.E.M. students as it had been in the past.

He talked about benchmark data testing and the difficulty in getting reliable results. Anderson said that the data system had been developed and had been implemented, citing disciplinary inconsistencies and the findings of equity imbalances previous to the pandemic. However, the system that had been implemented needed to be maintained for it to be effective and doing so in a virtual environment had proven to be a difficult challenge to overcome. 

When asked about this year’s goals for the data subcommittee, Anderson said that there was federal legislation which dictated that some of these data collection efforts were mandatory, but that with a new administration and a new Secretary of Education there may be different legislative mandates to be met.

A parent remarked that a way to assess the children’s mental health may be to ask the teachers that spent the greatest amount of time with the students, and if that had been considered. Dr. Anderson said the systems had not been created to allow for that, but it was an idea with merit. It was also stated that even if the district wide system was not in place, that on a school level the School Accountability Committee (SAC) could work with the local population to share information and data.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:41 p.m.

The next DAC meeting is on Tuesday January 5, 2021, 6:15 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. online.

(Originally published in the December 17, 2020, edition of The Mountain-Ear.)