Illinois P-20 Council and Illinois Early Learning CouncilKindergarten Transition Advisory Committee

Tuesday, April 17, 2018, 3-5 PMThe Ounce of Prevention Fund

24th Floor, 33 W. Monroe, Chicago, IL 606032800 Montvale Drive, Springfield, IL 62704

Dial-In: 1-650-429-3300 Access code: 639-716-373

Agenda

Attendees: Cristina Pacione-Zayas (Erikson), Cynthia Tate (GOECD), Joyce Weiner (Ounce), Jennifer Jones (IFT), Bryan Stokes (IAFC), Mary Beth Corrigan (DCFS), Tracy Occomy (COFI), Dan Harris (INCCRRA), Donna Emmons (IHSA), Ben Boer (Advance), Ashley Long (B-3rd Continuity Project), Lynn Burgett (ISBE), Cathy Mannen (IFT), Diane Rutledge (LUDA), Kris Pennington (Brigham Elementary), Sam Aigner-Treworgy (City of Chicago), Jason Leahy (IPA), Bethany Patten (GOECD), Wendy Uptain (Teach Plus), Melissa Figueira (Advance)

I. Welcome and Introductions Approval of March meeting minutes Review meeting schedule and structure

Cynthia Tate opened the meeting and called for attendance. Cristina Pacione-Zayas said that the minutes were sent out and requested a motion for approval. Bryan Stokes motioned for approval, Mary Beth Corrigan seconded, and the motion passed unanimously.

Cynthia Tate said that today’s panel would focus on administrator perspectives through the kindergarten transition. The meeting will then turn to developing the report, beginning with a discussion on the terms, principles, and values that will undergird our recommendations. As you frame your questions, please think about how the information we gather from the panelists can help us to formulate recommendations for the final report.

II. Topic: Kindergarten transition from the administrator perspective Context and panel introductions

i. Megan Clarke, Exceptional Learners Collaborativeii. Kristina Davis-Salazar, West Chicago District 33

iii. Dave Deets, Harmony Emge SD 175iv. Andrew McCree, SD 308 Oswegov. Dr. Julie Oziemkowski, CUSD 200 Wheaton

vi. Kris Pennington, McClean County Unit District 5 Panel discussion Committee discussion

Cynthia Tate said that today’s panel would focus on administrator perspectives of the kindergarten transition. This panel was requested by the committee as a result of previous KTAC discussions. Cynthia introduced the panelists.

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Cynthia Tate asked the panelists to highlight the work they do and how they view the most critical components of the transition from pre-k to kindergarten. Cynthia said that the committee would then ask some prompting questions as we go along, but we’ll start with each of you to give an overview.

Megan Clarke said I currently run a special needs co-op with three high achieving school districts. WE work to transition kids from early intervention into early childhood and kindergarten programs in the districts. We have a diverse population, with roughly 46 languages spoken in the schools. Before this I worked in North Chicago School District overseeing their early childhood building and serving as assistant superintendent of student services. That’s a district that was taken over by the state. I came in to correct some of the special education and pre-k issues to ensure kids are ready for kindergarten. We had a Preschool for All grant, and I worked with Sam Aigner-Treworgy to write a Preschool for All Expansion grant. We went to full day early childhood to get our students ready for the transition.

Cynthia Tate asked if you could tell us a few things that you’ve seen contribute to successful transitions.

Megan Clarke said that you have to have a lot of open dialogue with the teams, the serving and receiving teams, as well as parents. We’re working with pre-ks in our community to ensure we get them understanding what it’s like to go from private pre-k to public school with open collaboration. We have many students that are beyond ready to come to kindergarten, and we have other students that don’t have English as their primary language. It can vary.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said I have been in West Chicago for 10 years. A lot of our work is around ensuring equity for students. About 80% of students experience opportunity gaps before they get to us. We focus not only on academic achievement but also on filling those opportunity gaps, and a lot of that happens in pre-k. We bring in mental health services and other resources for parents. A lot of work is helping parents navigate the American education system. We have a heavy language-based program. We’ve expanded our DLL program from pre-k through 8th grade to ensure its enrichment rather than compensatory. We moved to full day kindergarten to ensure we had opportunities to bring in play-based learning. We’ve spent time on play based learning in pre-k and k and want to roll that up to second grade. We’ve had folks spend time in our district to help us move to DRDP. KIDS is our assessment and informational tool, and that’s aligned to DRDP. This helps us to speak the same language across the transition. We moved to both those tools at the same time. We try to bring in resources. That’s our biggest challenge: finding the resources we need to close those gaps. Ensuring that parents can do simple things like finding a child’s report card online; a lot of parent education. A lot of our credit is to having a full service community school system.

Andrew McCree said I have been the principal at Brokaw Elementary for six years, and prior that I was a preschool teacher in a blended setting on the east side of Joliet. The transition into kindergarten is a focus for us. We work to have vertical and horizontal articulation within the district. We do have the challenge of only a certain percentage of our cohort entering kindergarten from another place within the district; we must get all the kids in the community on the same page. I believe that the kindergarten transition doesn’t happen at age 4, it happens right after birth if not before. Some barriers include ensuring that families know what best practices are and what they can be doing at home. Parents want to do what’s best but don’t necessarily know what that is or have the resources to provide. We have an outreach, we set up opportunities for the community to come into our program, we have a facility where families can check out books and resources, but we need to find those families who want to be in

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the door to do that. Sometimes the families seeking those resources aren’t necessarily those who need them most. We have to locate those who aren’t actively searching for how to support their children.

Cynthia Tate said that a lot of this focuses on access to external resources. I’m hearing also a common theme of supporting the transition for children who have previously been part of the education system versus those who have not been part of the system. What have you experienced that works to help identify those families and their needs?

Andrew McCree said that part of it is finding hot spots in the community; looking at data from various resources including survey data, police reports; testing data to locate different pockets in our community, and what can we do to remove the barriers that still exist even though we’ve located those individuals. For each community it’ll be different. We try to find the venue to allow for feedback from families, building the relationship before we have a relationship with them. Anytime we can offer free things, people like that. Free food, free resources, books, toys, that’s an incentive for families to participate. Beyond that, it’s being able to help them understand that this is a trusting relationship and we have the best intentions to help them succeed. It’s the actions and the conversations to build that trusting relationship.

Dave Deets said you have a lot of districts including mine with a high mobility rate. There’s no identifying kids at an early age because they move in to your school district at kindergarten level. We’ve never had a chance to identify them or get them into any of our services. We adjoin East St. Louis and Cahokia. Granite City has an 80% mobility rate which doesn’t allow us to identify kids at an early age. We get a lot of families coming in at kindergarten with zero education background. This is mixed with our students where there are multiple pre-k blended programs. We know our kids are ready to go into kindergarten, but to account for the mobility rate is very hard.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said that we experience the same thing. This year we’re trying a Kindercamp that we’re running for kids who have never been in preschool through our registration process. If they haven’t registered, we’re putting out mailers and flyers to help identify students through mental health services and resources. We’re also trying welcome baskets at the hospital with our school name on it, to welcome their baby to the community. We want to give a positive message at birth. We’re trying to flip the switch to show that learning starts now. I credit our community school network, our home school liaisons, and lots of resources to do that. We can partner to make those things happen.

Julie Oziemkowski said that that the report she shared goes back to 2012, when we first established our collaborative. When we applied for a collaborative, we knew we’d be too affluent, but we have 25% low income. Some of our low income neighborhoods will have high mobility, but others are coming in from kindergarten. This is a report we do for our early childhood collaborative. We track lots of things, including all day kindergarten. With KIDS data, on page two we can narrow down the KIDS indicators where kids from low income neighborhoods where there was a significant discrepancy from other neighborhoods. There were some areas where kids are close to equal across different socioeconomic statuses. Other areas, however, there are gaps. We shared this with our collaborative. Each neighborhood is listed here with a map to allow agencies to work closely with neighborhoods. They then know that kids are really needing particular supports. The KIDS assessment has been a treasure trove of new data. Over the summer, we’ll disaggregate by private preschool. You can then say, “here’s where your students are strong compared to other kids.” We don’t have a lot of resources, but we have an analytics tool. We use Excel, and I made this report in a Google Doc. We also watch our other

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neighborhoods, emerging neighborhoods, where low income kids live but they’re not in kindergarten yet. I try to be a conduit to get early childhood up to school targets, but we also share with kindergarten grades what’s being done in early childhood. The appetite for data in our district is what drives our work. The biggest barriers for us, a far as KIDS goes, is that the training model is inflexible. I would like the model to be broken up for multiple trainings, and I’d like to be a trainer. A lot of the kindergarten grants are for staff, which helps us work with providers, but if there were funds for facilities to retrofit an elementary classroom to offer more, that’d be helpful. We could serve at least another 100 students due to facilities barriers. We tried a referendum but it failed. If the grant could come with facilities enhancement, we could take advantage of more preschool expansion money.

Kris Pennington that one of the most advantageous things we’ve done is to utilize family educators, not only at the pre-k level but at the elementary level as well. These educators have the power to connect with family and build relationships. We’ve added six the in past year and we’ll add two more soon. This has helped us to bridge the gap between the level of services that our kids in ECE get versus in elementary school. That’s been a real advantage for us. We’re working with our PFA and PFA-E grants and title grants to make that happen. Another thing is that we’ve developed an electronic data wall. Students we have in ECE, we can pass their info along to elementary pretty easily. That shifted how they’re starting interventions in kindergarten. In the past, we were under the assumption that nobody had been to school yet and we allowed time before conducting interventions in Kindergarten. We didn’t start interventions until January. With this data wall, we can see that some have been in ECE for more than two years. For these kids, we can start interventions that are developmentally appropriate right away. Finally, having collaboration time between early childhood teachers and kindergarten staff has been helpful. Sometimes it’s assumed that kindergarten staff know what’s going on in ECE and vice versa; we found that it’s surface level information. When we have time to have collaboration, it’s building another relationship.

Diane Rutledge asked how that time is created.

Kris Pennington said we do it during the school year. Also in addition, we have time for them to observe one another. We’ve used the grant and title grant to meet that.

Cynthia said that this is a theme we’ve been hearing. Throughout the panel series, we’ve heard how critical it is to have collaboration and to find the time and support to make that happen. I want to go back to Dave and to see if you wanted to add anything to your previous comments.

Dave said we do provide time for pre-k and kindergarten teachers, teacher institute days. What we’re doing with our intermediate grades doesn’t always apply because it’s content specific, so we give them time to collaborate and work together, and talk about students and data. We are very fortunate in our area that we’re a suburban metro but a smaller district. We developed a good network in our community of the private and other pre-k programs, and they meet monthly. We have a good idea of at least students in our district who will be coming. It’s hard to account for mobility, but we have a good collaborative group

Cristina said that each of you have touched on best practices around professional development and data. If you didn’t get to cover that, please add that in. I’m also curious about the conditions and policies that were in place that allowed you to implement these best practices. Were there changes that had to happen at the systems level for you to be effective in implementing these practices?

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Julie Oziemkowski said that establishing the collaborative was a change in our district policy. Our superintendent was supportive because he knew it was student centered. It’s given us a vehicle for communicating with everybody. We’re noticing that a group of students were refugees from World Relief and weren’t prepared. World Relief was running a preschool, and so we talked to them and saw results. They were able to then come back to us with suggestions and questions. We obtained the grant for the collaboration in 2012 through the DuPage Family Foundation. It’s made my work more efficient in getting information to one group.

Kris Pennington said that for our district, we had to make a district level change. What really led another change for us was that it become glaringly clear that we weren’t developmentally appropriate at the kindergarten level. That came as a result of talking about interventions and RTI. For us, that led to another systems change of getting back to the right place in kindergarten. We’re going to push that up to first grade too.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said that funding is a challenge. We never know whether we can or should RIF (reduction in force) all of our staff. We need bilingual and SPED pre-k teachers, and so funding uncertainty is a challenge. When we receive the funding, it’s everything that we need. We also need high quality staff. The certification process is a barrier. Certifying the staff and the rigor around certification when we have folks in program or en route to get people in our system. This is an opportunity but also a challenge because of the uncertainty and change.

Megan Clarke said that in North Chicago we knew there was a systems issue with getting kids ready for kindergarten. We discussed building our ECE program up, but funding was an issue. We had great community partnerships with a corporation that did a lot for us, but that was because that CEO felt strongly to make sure he kept his workers in the local community. They put in a playground, painted the schools, brought in equipment. We knew we needed to start at ECE to make a change, but we were unique in that we had a big pharma industry that gave a lot to the community. In terms of policy, the new early entrance into kindergarten policy is going to play an interesting role, we’ll see how that goes. We currently have a lot of families who want to enter early into kindergarten. How will you develop teams to ensure that kids are truly ready to come to kindergarten a year younger than their peers?

Kristina Davis-Salazar said we have a similar challenge: many of our families are simply looking for full day care. We offer full day kindergarten, so many come to us early to get that care. For us it’s an equity issue: how to we appropriately assess students, and how to we figure out who can get in and who can’t? We need more guidance around that, and a committee to determine what’s appropriate to make that decision across different types of students. We need help figuring out what readiness is given all the opportunity gaps. We need more research around that with regards to age groups. We’re all calling each other asking what we all have around this. We said we’re trying to set up measurements in May and hoping this doesn’t become a mess because we have so many families calling us. Some kids are really ready, and some just need support and child care. This is policy that we wish could’ve been more thought through. We offer breakfast, lunch, and after school meals, and lots of that is necessary to get kids into school.

Megan Clarke said that we were given this policy without additional funding. Schools are on summer break, but the law says we have to bring in staff to do the assessments during the summer.

Cynthia Tate said that this sounds like a policy that could use an equity impact analysis.

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Dave Deets said that he’s glad someone brought up the issue of funding. We’re fully blended with pre-k and ECE, and we keep expanding with the grants we’re given, but we have to RIF every year because we’re not sure what we’ll be getting. A lot of our local funding is having to be used to support local pre-k and the expansion grants that we receive. We should be getting in money as promised, but the uncertainty is tough for a district like ours where we’re getting by year by year. We made a big commitment toward pre-k, and we keep expanding, and we now have three other public schools in neighboring districts that we wrote under our grant, but we’re paying those bills as well. The uncertainty is tough.

Julie Oziemkowski said that the unanticipated cost is tough. We have a substitute shortage, and we’re the least affluent in our tier for the equity based funding. We did our own KIDS training, and so I would have preferred to break it into bits, but I’ve been directed by KIDS to not do this. That’s going to cost $3-5K by itself to have to use this method, and that money could have benefitted students. I would have rather seen that money to be used for a book giveaway in targeted neighborhoods. It’s those little things and the unanticipated cost to districts.

Dave Deets said I have trouble finding substitutes.

Julie Oziemkowski said that it could be the principal, but we do have retired teachers who help with that too. I have to schedule training a certain day a week or stipend it in the summer. It’s one of those things where the money has to come from somewhere, but my proposed way would have been cheaper.

Andrew McCree said that the transition from Early Intervention into ECE has been successful. It’s an ingrained process and in our district we’ve seen a smooth transition. It’s a law, and it’s been practiced for so long, that it’s helpful. Having that transition meeting and process and system in place has proven to be successful from EI into ECE. I’m not sure what that’d look like into kindergarten.

Cynthia Tate said that someone else has mentioned that there might be components of that EI policy that might help to facilitate the transition from pre-k to K. That seems to be a process that’s working well.

Andrew McCree said that there’s an immense amount of time and money that’s gone into setting up that process. That funding is very important to make those possible.

Megan Clarke said that I like the transition part of it, but as a school team we have to work really hard with EI to explain the differences and similarities and it takes a lot of staff time to educate those people to say, “that’s not how a public school works.” We’re trying to merge the systems, but there’s still a disconnect. Sometimes it’s not the parent we’re having the concern with, it’s educating the EI providers, and sometimes there’s not always EI providers because they’re not there.

Andrew McCree said that Kris Pennington mentioned that ECE teachers sometimes have a perception of what happens in kindergarten and vice versa. That relationship and open communication helps facilitate that.

Julie Oziemkowski said that having the TS GOLD observation protocol helps. I’m excited about the crosswalk that’s coming, because it’s helps to tell the data story. Having the TS GOLD protocol and the TS GOLD to KIDS crosswalk should help jumpstart the transition to kindergarten.

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Andrew McCree said that Julie Oziemkowski bringing up the crosswalk is good. Right now in kindergarten everyone is using KIDS, but each local ECE agency has the choice to pick assessment. Where there’s high mobility, without consistent data collection at ECE you’re not sure where that may go. The idea of the preschool level of KIDS provided through PFA or PFA-E would allow for that mobility and for everybody again to have a common language of what the expectations are. Pairing that with Illinois having a definition of what kindergarten readiness is would take us great steps in the right direction.

Mary Beth Corrigan asked if you allow enrollment all year. Our kids come in and dates fluctuate. Do you have date caps for kids who are mobile? What does this look like for a child welfare child?

Julie Oziemkowski said that we do have spots as kids move out. There are dozens of kids out there who we could still reach. Our ECE program enrolls on an ongoing basis. We can test one day a week.

Mary Beth Corrigan said that my experience is that lots of programs are full when child welfare children come in, or that they won’t be screened until next year.

Julie Oziemkowski said that we screen on an ongoing basis.

Mary Beth Corrigan said about preparation, you have kids in the southern region with lots of mobility who don’t have a lot of pre-k experience; how are you getting them caught up with others? What are you doing to get everyone on the same playing field?

Kristina Davis-Salazar said we match our programming to the majority of our students. Most of our students are English Language Learners, so we’ve flipped our district so that students are offered dual language education automatically. It’s proven that if you run the program well, in 5-7 years you should see gaps closing. We’ve flipped the whole model to work around the students that have the most needs. The other part of our community school network is to get the family educators out to families early and to bring them into the building. We have community school workers in all of our buildings now, a food bank in our building, anyone can walk in off the street to get resources. Same goes for mental health services. We’ve developed our curriculum around thematic, inquiry based instruction to ensure that it’s language heavy to build oracy before moving into literacy. We spend a lot of training time on this with all of our teachers, teaching for biliteracy models. This is for all kids. A lot of it is shifting our programming to meet children’s needs. We’ve also brought in a lot of after school programming that is more culturally and linguistically relevant to our kids. We have a full mariachi band, over 200 students in our ballet folklorico, we have a parent group that performs with the students. Those are surface level but getting them in the door, we use those opportunities to educate our parents.

Dave Deets said that the question you asked are some of the biggest challenges we face, the diversity of learners. When our kids come in, whether in kindergarten with no pre-k or in 5 th grade from a different district, you’ll always have kids at different levels. Differentiated instruction is tough, and closing those gaps are our biggest challenge. In kindergarten we have a lot of resources in RTI with interventionists. I think people talk about what the school is doing to catch kids up, but what’s not raised enough is what the home is doing to catch kids up. I’ve been in the district for eight years and have seen my kids progress, and I’m the curriculum coordinator for the entire district, and I know these students. Those who have caught up have tremendous home support, and that’s important. When different groups consider this, we need to think about what communities and home are doing. We’re doing just about

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everything we can with our funding, what can we do to support parents at home? You can’t close those gaps with only one entity doing the job.

Jennifer Jones said there’s been a lot of talk about scarcity of resources. Knowing that we have many districts with better resources than others, are there practices that you can point to that are successful and don’t require additional resources?

Dave Deets said that hiring great teachers is most important.

Julie Oziemkowski said that every testing window I take our test scores and adjust them for demographics to compare. We seek out those teachers and figure out what they’re doing. We do the same for those who are underperforming and seek them out to provide additional support. Because of the high flyers, we can connect them to those who are struggling so they can learn from each other. Teachers would often rather learn from each other.

Dave Deets said we are implementing professional learning communities next year. We’re doing an hour early every Wednesday for the first year. We have a lot to catch up on. We are having early dismissal for the first year every Wednesday. We’d like to have pre-k and kindergarten have this time, and I can’t find subs, so I can’t cover multiple rooms at a time. We’re hoping to have them collaborate horizontally and vertically, to have one day devoted to data, etc.

Diane Rutledge said that research tells us the two more influential things in student achievement are the quality of the teacher and the quality of the leader. Our policy implications should include that, that higher education is preparing folks and PD is supporting them. It’s a state policy decision to discuss school calendar. For those that are able, locally, to develop a model to do a consistent community of practice for teachers, to do things Dave described, is something that should happen statewide without them having to figure it out individually.

Megan Clarke said I work in an affluent community with PLCs that most of our superintendents talk about across the country. I couldn’t agree more with having the right building leader and teachers and having time to talk. We also have a lower number of students in our classrooms, so it’s easier to differentiate in pre-k and kindergarten because of this. The variability might be just as wide, but we can differentiate better. Our ECE classrooms have 10 students, rather than North Chicago which had 20. We have the ability to retain and keep really good teachers in our system so we don’t have teacher turnover. In North Chicago, every year we’d try to find teachers. It was a cycle of trying to find and keep really good teachers. There isn’t any magic that we do in our districts, but parents are a huge component to our system. We’ve now spent a lot of time making sure that for those parents who aren’t involved, we are supporting them through our process because we’re such a high achieving school district. Our parents are looking at Stevenson and how is my child going to manage at that big school.

Cristina Pacione-Zayas said most of you started in early childhood, but I’m sure that you ‘ve encountered colleagues who didn’t, particularly in leadership. What were their turning points to prioritize ECE, and how can we identify what made people turn on to ECE and see it as a lever for school improvement?

Julie Oziemkowski said I wasn’t an ECE person, I was late elementary and middle school. What convinced me was the outcome data. In a matching survey of students with similar demographics, those with ECE typically have stronger outcomes. The data reinforced that it does matter, and it tells a message to the community to show the power. It’s empowering to our ECE providers too.

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Cynthia Tate said that for people who question whether we can demonstrate outcomes for ECE, which two or three outcomes would you point to?

Julie Oziemkowski said it’s the KIDS assessment. Previously, we could see it in letter sounds and other measures. Now, with KIDS, I assume we’ll see it in those indicators too. We’ll know this summer where it is in our district. People don’t understand the investment opportunity in ECE.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said that we saw a shift when we moved to play-based. We’ve been for three or four years now training our teachers on play-based. Now, we pay more attention to self-regulation, dramatic play. We’ve seen a difference with our kindergarten teachers saying kids are coming in more prepared, and that’s largely due to our focus on those skills that we didn’t look at previously. When common core first came out, we had a curriculum fully articulated across the grades and we were so focused on guided reading and literacy skills. We then shifted to authentic assessment and play based learning and teachers getting on the same level as kids. Moving to inquiry based learning, even in pre-k, we’re seeing the difference in our data. We picked the measures for our district scorecard, and top of the list was self-regulation and play. Looking at the research now, those skills are important. The KIDS helped us to make that revelation. Having the kindergarten teachers talk with pre-k teachers to support them helped to bring them on board to see the difference. We put letter sound fluency to the side for our DLLs because it’s phonetic. We focus more on oracy and language.

Julie Oziemkowski said I’m looking forward to linking KIDS SEL data and discipline data. I’m really excited about that.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said that the KIDS and DRDP has shifted our instruction. I wish the state would do the same thing with PARCC. Give us an authentic tool that we can use in the classroom on a daily basis. The teachers have seen the importance of KIDS and DRDP. With PARCC, children are sitting for hours on end and it’s not taking kids to a place of readiness. I talked to someone from ISBE about this, and he said we’re aware of that. but moving to an assessment K-3 in an articulated aligned way would be a game changer for schools.

Cristina Pacione-Zayas asked if DRDP was adopted by your district?

Kristina Davis-Salazar said we moved to that. We were using TS GOLD, but we moved to DRDP because it’s aligned to KIDS.

Julie Oziemkowski said KIDS was created from DRDP.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said we had KIDS first, then we moved to DRDP.

Dave Deets said don’t suggest any more assessments or anything new. The last thing we need is more assessments. As a practitioner and a principal, I’m all for data and collecting data, but please no more assessments.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said I’m suggesting we replace the current assessment with something that makes more sense.

Andrew McCree said that oftentimes schools and educators are rule followers. Whenever you’re testing something, that’s where we’ll turn our attention. Be aware of the secondary and tertiary effects that has

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on schools. Make sure that’s really what we want students to know and be able to do, because that’s what schools will focus on.

Bryan Stokes said we’ve heard that in prior panels there are things folks would like to do but that there are rules or perceptions of rules that prevent best practices from happening. What are the current policy barriers to improving transitions, and what are the best practices that you’d like to implement?

Julie Oziemkowski said I’d love to see a Data Sharing Agreement that is plug and play and we wouldn’t have to pay attorneys for. Even making it easier to get data from PFA-E grants. Then we wouldn’t have to pay our attorneys to share data. The flow of data would be better then.

Andrew McCree said that students registering for school have barriers to acquiring birth certificates, and that’s in the state system already. If there was an agreement that could be made to make that easier, that’d help.

Mary Beth Corrigan agreed, since lots of kids in care don’t have those documents.

Dave Deets said that in terms of policy, especially as our low-income rates climb, is truancy. The fact that kindergarten isn’t compulsory means that there’s no teeth to truancy challenges. The attendance challenges we face are great, but kindergarten isn’t mandatory so there’s nothing we can do about it. That needs to be discussed. If you enroll in kindergarten, you shouldn’t be able to come and go. We have a problem with chronic truancy in kindergarten that we can’t do anything about.

Ben Boer said that we often talk about mandatory kindergarten, and the idea that if you enroll there are certain rules is different from actually requiring enrollment. I wonder if that’s a different question.

Mary Beth Corrigan said we see that with kids in care, where foster parents will remove the child where they’re already enrolled. The fact that we have a suspension/expulsion law but we don’t have compulsory kindergarten education makes that challenging.

Tracy Occomy said that we did training with West Chicago, and so I appreciate the idea that community schools are embracing at an early age the families to get them the support they need to help them make it through the day and week. About what Dave Deets said, that it’s not just the school but the parents that have to support, in East St. Louis we work with a group of parents in Vivian Adams. We do leadership development with them and they’ve changed some policies to provide more transportation and access for those students. I’m excited about what those parents are bringing to the table around early learning. I want to throw out that it’s not always going to be that parents are going to be super helpful in supporting academically what their children are doing. There’s a wide range of ways to support their education. Some parents there’s only a certain point that they’ll be able to do that at. Everyone is trying to play their part in the way that they can. We’ll try to fill in the gaps.

Andrew McCree said that what goes along with that is that schools have to prepare kids for kindergarten, and what is the community doing to prepare kids. I just found out that there’s a law that allows individuals to miss work to go to school activities. Things like that are lesser known that communities can be involved in this preparation. I don’t know if this group can help to build a movement around that.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said that’s something we have to get across down to the teacher. Engaging our parents in school doesn’t necessarily mean reading to the class or helping with homework. There are so

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many different ways to engage. We try to provide after school activities where parent can be present in the school, but it’s not necessarily what teachers think is engagement. As long as kids see their parents involved, that’s what most important. I appreciate that. We sometimes forget that engagement comes in different forms.

Sam Aigner-Treworgy asked where the other systems that support families, libraries, parks, how have you been able to partner with them to think about family engagement in different ways across the birth to eight continuum?

Julie Oziemkowski said that with our library they’ve moved barriers. A lot of our English learners can get library cards more readily, some of the rules have been waived. They have an EL section for adults and kids, and I see a lot of our ELs in the library. We have a group of parents that works with the park district to squeeze scholarships out of them for summer camps and transportation. Activities are something we’re working more on, to plug kids into them.

Andrew McCree said we started to implement Learning in the Community a few years ago. This takes place on partial attendance days. I had a group of teachers identifying free resources in the community, and rather than coming to school that day they’d meet us at those places. It was more of a parent education piece than a field trip. Teachers would be around with resources for parents that can be used in that place but also in other places, like grocery stores.

Kristina Davis-Salazar said that we’re fortunate to have the community school network. Our schools are the community for our parents. In our schools you can find everything. Parents know that if they have a question, or need something, our schools have become that place. Once people come, there are so many people offering support, and so we work to coordinate all of that. It’s turned now to that parents are engaged, they walk to the schools to find everything. They know that during school hours, the school is open. They can go to the doctor, get their taxes done, get mental health services, etc. If that could help to ease the transition from pre-k to kindergarten, to make that available to everyone, that’d be helpful. Even in a high income community, there may be families with few resources. My parents didn’t know how to navigate schools. Community schools are for every community, and I wish that’d be a higher priority of investment. That would be the great equalizer. The funding is tricky, but it can be done.

Cristina Pacione-Zayas said when I was in a community schools model, I tried to make the connection to early childhood. Can you talk about how you’ve integrated an ECE focus into a community schools model?

Kristina Davis-Salazar said I didn’t even know that. To me, it’s always been that way. Our parent education starts at birth to three. We also have inclusive leadership – our leaders in all of our areas are part of that work. We have a full time person doing partnerships. She ensures that all of those partnerships are there. If it was a responsibility tucked into another department, it wouldn’t be as successful. There’s also been a lot of time spent educating our board on the importance of ECE. Our person dedicated to that came in from a grant, but once our district saw the success we decided to pay her from the district. Making that the priority was key.

III. Developing a shared framework for the report: key terms, principles, and values; assemble background information

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Report development process:i. Identify and define key terms, principles, and values

ii. Assemble background information from panels, panelist materials, and review of academic literature and best practices in the field; review House Joint Resolution charge

iii. Synthesize information to identify key factors critical to a successful kindergarten transition

iv. Identify correlated policy levers or best practices that can be used to ensure key factors are present for Illinois children

v. Assemble report detailing these findings and recommendations.

Cynthia Tate said that for the next series of meetings leading up to September we must first define the terms. Then, we’ll try to articulate a set of values and principles upon which the recommendations will be based. Then we’ll try to organize recommendations based on those involved in the system. We’ll take into consideration the things that have come up today. We’ll try to extract those recommendations and organize them into a report for the general assembly.

Cristina Pacione-Zayas said that all of our panelists have been helpful to contextualize the literature that’s been put out. We want to make sure we’ve got information from the literature and how that’s operationalized on the front lines. We may be reaching back out to you to get some feedback to see if we’ve accurately captured what you’ve shared. The last thing we want is to recommend something that isn’t supportive for you. In your agenda, you’ll see the report development process. We’re engaged in the first two segments of it. We want to finalize the second sheet in your agenda, which has the terms and definitions. These were initially outlined in our September meeting, the meeting from last month helped us to refine them. We want to see where folks stand on these. Then that can go into informing how we begin to articulate the principles and values. Are there any additional terms to define? Do you have any reservations about the document as it currently stands?

Jennifer Jones said that I have a few IFT recommendations on fine tuning wording.

Wendy Uptain said that how early childhood / early learning is defined is confusing.

Joyce Weiner said she sent in language to edit that.

Roger Eddy said that he’s seen early elementary grades defined differently. Are we talking through grade three here?

Joyce Weiner said that nationally, most organizations have adopted a birth to third grade stance. In our licensure system, it’s birth to second grade. That is probably for further discussion.

Ben Boer said we may want to be consistent with how the state defines it in ESSA. In ESSA, it’s P-2 and 3-8.

Joyce Weiner said that there may be a lack of continuity at the state level.

Ashley Long said that in the PFA-E grant, it says B-3rd grade continuity.

Sam Aigner-Treworgy said that the first part of the definition Joyce Weiner gave made sense, but we need to separate early childhood (the stage) from early learning (the learning taking place). Your

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definition seemed to be the learning component, while early childhood may be the time period. In addition, we switched the continuity of care definition to continuity of relationship. We found that for folks on the ground, continuity of care had implications around eligibility. We want to discuss setting up systems to provide continuity of relationship.

Roger Eddy said that for the family engagement definition, we may want to broaden that to include more than just services. Are you also talking about practices or activities that bring the family into the process that aren’t necessarily services but that establish that connection?

Diane Rutledge said could we include something about community engagement or community supports in that as well.

Joyce Weiner said that under family engagement and readiness, we could revise use of the word “successful.” That’s too subjective. Sent revisions.

Cynthia Tate said that Kristina Davis-Salazar also used the word thrive.

Bryan Stokes said that in family engagement, we could replace successful with “allowing families to meet their goals.” If families are always at the center of the process, however they’re able to contribute or be present should be recognized.

Ashley Long said that the definition of transition should say “the experience of children, schools, families, and communities.”

Jenifer Jones requested that the definitions be sent with track changes.

Bryan Stokes said that in the definition of continuity of relationships, we leave out the early elementary grades outside of special needs.

Sam Aigner-Treworgy said that we need to detangle these concepts and have terminology that encapsulates each one. I heard here the continuity between pre-k and kindergarten. Depending on the makeup of the district, that continuity that a child experiences may be a critical point for alignment and transition that needs to be worked into recommendations.

Cristina Pacione-Zayas said that on the back side of the page are values and principals. Please digest these over the next month. For our next meeting, come prepared to react to these.

IV. Adjourn Our next meeting will take place on Monday, May 14 from 1-3 PM at INCCRRA in

Bloomington.i. 1226 Towanda Place, Bloomington, IL 61701

ii. Dial-In: 701-801-1220 | Access code: 279-788-438

Cynthia Tate said that we’ll start our next meeting with a working synthesis of all of our panels. We’ll share that before the next meeting. Advance Illinois has developed a literature review as well. We’ll have those two pieces that will be sent out in advance so you can come prepared to discuss them during the meeting.

Sam Aigner-Treworgy said that before you get too big into synthesizing, we should look also at the different levels as an organizational structure. For example, classroom, building, district, etc. Those

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recommendations will likely be different from one another. I think it’d help to parse out what level we mean, and articulate that.

Cristina Pacione-Zayas asked for motion to adjourn, Joyce made the motion, Sam seconded the motion, and the motion passed unanimously.

iii.

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Kindergarten Transition Advisory Committee

Meeting Structure and Timeline

Date Time Location Topic

Tuesday, September 26 12-2 PM Chicago; Erikson Intro

Tuesday, October 24 1-3 PM Springfield; IASB Self-Regulation & Social and Emotional Development

Tuesday, November 14 1-3 PM Bloomington; INCCRRA Language and Literacy Development & Cognition: Math

Tuesday, December 19 2-4 PM Chicago; the Ounce Transitions: Birth to Five Perspectives

Tuesday, January 16 1-3 PM Chicago/Springfield Transitions: Kindergarten Perspectives

Tuesday, February 27 1-3 PM Bloomington; INCCRRA Family and Community Engagement

Tuesday, March 27 3-5 PM Chicago/Springfield; ISBE Assessments and Data

Tuesday, April 17 3-5 PM Chicago/Springfield; ISBE Transitions: Administrator Perspectives

Monday, May 14 1-3 PM Bloomington; INCCRRA Develop report

Tuesday, June 26 3-5 PM Chicago/Springfield; ISBE Develop report

Tuesday, July 24 3-5 PM Chicago/Springfield; ISBE Develop report

Tuesday, August 28 1-3 PM Bloomington; INCCRRA Develop report

Tuesday, September 25 3-5 PM Chicago/Springfield; ISBE (Tentative) Develop report

September 29, 2018 Submit report

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