Fall Creek Village Ordinances Snapshot – 05.20.2022

Fall Creek Village Ordinances Snapshot – 05.20.2022

The Village of Fall Creek provides all of their ordinances to the public here on their website. This is excellent, and is necessary transparency. However, for the regular citizen that is trying to find a specific ordinance pertaining to a certain subject, trying to browse and navigate these ordinances one by one to find the specific appropriate ordinance can be… challenging. That’s why I also think it’s important that these ordinances be combined as well into a single, searchable document.

I have provided such a document below. Now, keep in mind that this document is a “snapshot in time” of the Village Ordinances at the moment that I downloaded and merged the individual PDFs. Ideally, the Village would also perform these steps and provide a merged document on their website alongside the “navigatable” individual PDFs whenever any single change is made to any of the ordinances. I will shortly contact Tim Raap and Jared McKee to request and see if this service can be provided.

For reference, the merging of PDFs is a service that’s provided online for free by Adobe, the original creators of the PDF file format. You can find that merge functionality here. I literally just downloaded the individual files and then pushed them onto their website to get the final product below. It took me longer to download the individual files one by one, than it took to merge them, by far.

Fall-Creek-Village-Ordinances-Snapshot-05.20.2022Download
Fall Creek Village Board Meeting 05.10.2022 (video stopped prematurely)

Fall Creek Village Board Meeting 05.10.2022 (video stopped prematurely)

As stated at the end of this video, I hadn’t accounted for the meeting lasting as long as it did, so this is roughly the first half of the meeting, as I had a prior obligation, so had to stop recording. I will, next time, clear my schedule for the entire evening. As per Ryan Aylesworth, the meeting didn’t end until 10PM, for a total of four hours.

However, I was able to get my hands on a professional audio recorder, so I was able to get much better audio than on my last video, to match the HD video.

Fully Funded

Fully Funded

Since apparently my posts are now being automatically declined in the Fall Creek Connections page:

Why? Because our educators are doing important work, and they should receive all of the resources that they need to accomplish that work. Period.

By The Numbers… Prime Metrics – FC vs. WI

By The Numbers… Prime Metrics – FC vs. WI

I’m going to be making a series of posts looking over the metrics that the DPI has provided, and comparing Fall Creek to both the state as a whole, as well as to other individual districts, to see where we stack up, and to see where we do well, and where we don’t.

I will start this series by looking at the overall five main metrics provided by the DPI, and here is a refresher from my DPI page:

  • Overall Accountability Score – which is based upon a calculation derived from the other four scores
  • School/Student Achievement Score – students’ level of knowledge and skills attained compared against state academic standards in English language arts (ELA) and mathematics
  • School/Student Growth Score – how rapidly students are gaining knowledge and skills from year to year, focusing on the pace of improvement in students’ performance
  • School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – outcomes for students with the lowest test scores in their school – the Target Group. Outcomes are displayed for achievement, growth, chronic absenteeism, and attendance or graduation rate
  • School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – how successfully students are achieving educational milestones that predict later success

Fall Creek Elementary School

Overall Accountability – Fall Creek Elementary started off slightly above the overall State Average in 2011 (when they started keeping track of these things). It then started to far surpass the state average, peaking in the 2016-2017 school year, until losing steam and meeting back up with the state in the last few years. Notably, this trend began before COVID hit.
School/Student Achievement Score – FCE has been consistently above State Average in terms of Student Achievement. This shows that the school is excellent at teaching the fundamentals of “reading, writing, and ‘rithmatic”.
School/Student Growth Score – Note from the description of this metric that it has nothing to do with how much the school itself grows, but rather, how good the school is at slowly improving students’ skills over time, from year to year, and building on previous foundations laid. Ideally, as with most metrics, we want to see this slowly increase over time in a consistent manner. However, unlike the State Average, which is doing this, the Elementary’s track record of improving students’ skills from year to year is… inconsistent. This suggests to me that there is some inconsistency in the curriculum from year to year. It doesn’t tell us a whole lot, but it does open up some questions… such as: “What’s changing year to year?” “Is staff consistent?” “Is there proper handoff from one teacher to the next of knowledge of students’ capabilities?” These are the questions we (and the school), should be asking of ourselves.
School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – These results show us that Fall Creek Elementary is very good at “closing the gaps” between the higher achievers and lower achievers. This is excellent. Nothing more to comment on here, except the expected dip with the onset of COVID.
School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – Now, you wouldn’t think that this has any relevance to an Elementary School, but that would be incorrect. It’s important for students to be achieving certain FUNDAMENTAL milestones by certain times, to be successful in future grades, and all the way into college. The Elementary School has shown that it is EXCELLENT when it comes to facilitating the achievement of these milestones.

Conclusion – Overall, it appears that Fall Creek Elementary is doing fairly well, with the possible exception of the “hand-off” of students from one year to the next. We should consider how to better improve that and make that aspect of our children’s education a bit more stable.

Fall Creek Middle School

Overall Accountability Score – Fall Creek Middle started off the last decade in a rough place in terms of overall accountability. From 2012-2016, it was well below State Average. Then, as you can see, there was a dramatic improvement starting in the 2017-2018 school year. Then after a few good years, an expected COVID dip. We’ll need to watch this going forward and see if the school can bring that back up again.
School/Student Achievement Score – As with the Elementary School, the Middle School has been solidly slightly above State Average when it comes to teaching the basic, core, crucial subjects. This is a very good thing.
School/Student Growth Score – The Middle School has an ABYSMAL record when it comes to students being able to build on their previous year’s education. This suggests to me that the Middle School needs to spend a lot of time focusing on what they can do to prevent Summer Learning Loss, and to keep kids growing their skills beyond rehashing what they learned the last year.
School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – The Middle School has had a poor record at the beginning of the last decade with getting lower achieving students “caught up” with the high achievers. This started to improve in the 2017-2018 school year, until a COVID dip. The Middle School needs to work harder to keep pushing this up, and to make sure that those students that have a harder time get the support that they need.
School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – As you can tell, this has been a “roller-coaster” for the Middle School. The decade started off great, then had a drastic drop to below average when the State started to improve, and then started bringing this up again until COVID. Let’s hope that it can push past the pandemic and get our Middle Schoolers back on track to graduate!

Conclusion – The Middle School has had a very hard time in the last decade with keeping its students’ education and skill levels from “slipping” from year to year, and has also in the recent past had troubles with getting students to the milestones necessary for successful graduation and being prepared for what lies beyond that. It has improved recently in saving “Target” students, and getting those students what they need to catch up to others, but we need the school to push past the “COVID dip”.

Fall Creek High School

Overall Accountability Score – The High School started off doing well, but then had an extreme nose dive for a period of three school years, before starting to bring itself back up again. It’s now positioned to do much better than average in a post-COVID world. Let’s hope it can keep it that way, and we don’t have any further dips!
School/Student Achievement Score – It appears that the High School has been “dancing” with the State Average in regards to the fundamentals. There’s not much to say here, except that it appears that the High School has been consistently “middle of the road” when it comes to teaching the basics. We can’t complain, but we don’t really have much to be proud of in this category.
School/Student Growth Score – For some reason, we have no data on this metric from before 2018. I did a double check, and it appears that the DPI was not recording this metric for about 2/3rds of the High Schools until that year. This is slightly concerning, because we can’t use this metric to see how well students have been retaining and building on their knowledge from previous years.
School/Student Target Group Outcomes Score (known in previous years as the “Closing Gaps” Score) – As with Student Growth scores, Fall Creek High was one of the 2/3rds of high schools where this data wasn’t recorded until 2018. However, it is good to see that in the two school years that the data for these two scores were measured, the school has substantially improved above and beyond State Average. Let’s hope it can keep it that way. This is the score that I’m going to be watching most carefully over the next few years, because it’s at the high school level where we’ll see the results of almost a decade of education in the district, to see if the schools can catch those that “fall between the cracks” and push them back up to ensure that they get the same education, the same chances, as those high achievers that things come more naturally to. It is far too easy for those that “fall behind” to stay behind and diverge further.
School/Student School On-Track (to Graduation) and Postsecondary Readiness Score – Here is a place where we can be PROUD of our High School. It does a very good job (at least since 2013) of getting our students what they need to push them out the door and set them up for success in post-secondary education. I am very happy to see that Fall Creek looks like it’s working it’s way to the top of the list of schools that get their kids graduated and pushed on to college!

Conclusion – Our High School is good at getting students graduated and ready for college, but we don’t have a lot of data to determine a whole lot else about it. I suspect that this lack of data is what has caused the school’s Overall Accountability to swing drastically and rapidly in both directions over the years. I hope that with the other two metrics starting to be collected, we’ll have a better picture in a few years’ time about where our high school stands in regards to other schools in the state.

Final Conclusions and Thoughts

After looking at the Prime Metrics, and comparing them to the State Averages, we can get a better picture of how well our schools are doing when compared to the 2600+ other schools in the state. By using the State Average as a baseline, it allows us to moderate the outliers at both the top and bottom of the list, to let us know much better just how we stack up in comparison to the rest of the state.

It appears that our Elementary School is doing a very good job at being consistently above average in most ways.

Our High School is good at getting our kids out of school at the end of their education, and pushing them to the next level of learning, but we don’t have enough information to really tell how well the intervening years are working, all we can see is the “final product” at the end.

The Middle School, however, is another story. It has had a rough and rocky time in the past decade, having troubles with both keeping student’s educational levels consistent and growing them over the years, as well as catching up low performers with their peers. Of most concern is the seeming downward trend of not being able to prepare our students for High School graduation and beyond, making the job of the High School that much harder to get our kids ready. However, it seems that things have improved in this area in recent years, so time will tell.

Out of all the schools, I think it would be in the District’s best interest to maintain the status quo for both the Elementary School (which has performed consistently well), and the High School (which we don’t have enough data for, so “stay the course”), and to focus any additional resources it may have on helping to pick up the Middle School’s “slack”, for the lack of a better word. After the Middle School has been “picked back up again”, then we can start talking about making a movement towards upwards mobility, and a push for academic excellence, for all of the schools in the District.

I don’t know about you, but I for one would like to see the Fall Creek School District become the BEST school district in the state. As it stands now, we’ve got a ways to go before we can attempt to get there. It’ll require a lot of work, focus, and some tough conversations, but if we want things to get better, those are the things that we’ll have to do.

DPI Data Errors

I’m currently writing a program that will let me take in all of the DPI’s spreadsheet data, aggregate it, and calculate the state average and ranking for the five main metrics – Overall Score, Student Achievement Score, Student Growth Score, Closing Gaps, and School On-Track and Postsecondary Readiness Score.

However, during debugging the program and getting it ready for release, I’ve found some… issues with the data. Not only are the column headers inconsistent (sometimes it’s called “On-Track”, sometimes it’s called “On Track”), but I’ve also found something completely unexpected:

Apparently, in the 2017-18 school year, the school “Blessed Savior Catholic School” managed to obtain TWO separate rows of scoring data, including two completely different “Exceeds Expectations” Overall Accountability Scores.

What a lucky school, to Exceed Expectations so well, that they get a double score!!!

04.18.2022 School Board Meeting Commentary

04.18.2022 School Board Meeting Commentary

This will just be a bit of a meandering commentary as I watch the video a second time. I’ll try to provide a timestamp so that you know where I’m at.

5:48 – Good to see the Pledge of Allegiance. Proud to see my country still being represented in official functions as “low on the totem pole” as the local School Board. I’m curious to learn whether this is done as well in all classrooms, or just some. Does the school have an official policy on this, or is it left to the teacher’s to decide?

7:36 – The board goes through a “Consent Agenda”, which is basically just a quick way, allowed through Robert’s Rules of Order, to push through a whole bunch of more mundane and uninteresting items that would normally take many motions and take up way too much time. This is just fine, although I have contacted Ms. Brunett, the District’s Business Director, to see if I could get a copy of the Financial Statement, Monthly Receipts and Checks, and Student Activity Account Receipts and Checks. If they are supposed to be publicly accessible information, that is. The strange thing is, I don’t see on the Minutes from the previous month that they had actually covered those items in the previous board meeting (which I was unable to attend) in any detail. Also, during the course of this meeting, they didn’t go through similar items for the current month of April. So, that makes me wonder if these are “boring” day-to-day things that Ms. Brunett just handles herself, and while the board officially “approves” these items, they never actually go through the items individually to verify them. I understand in trusting someone to do their job, but at the same time, part of the reason why the Board exists is to act as a check and balance, to ensure that there is oversight on these kinds of things, right? If the Board is just approving these items and is NOT actually performing oversight? That slightly concerns me. Not that I don’t trust Ms. Brunett to do her job, but that if there’s SUPPOSED to be oversight, then there should BE oversight. If there’s not supposed to be oversight by the Board, then you might as well just take those items off the Agenda anyway, if they are never going to be investigated or discussed. Why have it on the Agenda if it’s not looked at and discussed? Just my two cents on that.

08:26 – I was VERY impressed with the way Ashley Mason presented the Curriculum Committee Meeting Report. She was very articulate, and brought up a whole lot of concepts and terms that I’ll now have to spend the next month looking into and learning about. It was very informative, and I could see the enthusiasm for teaching our children in her voice. She does appear to have been an excellent pick to run the Elementary School. That being said, however, I would have liked to have heard some perspective from the Middle and High School Principals, Messrs. Goodman and Ceranski. I can understand that one person in a committee can speak for the committee, but surely they must have had slightly different perspectives on things and additional insight to add? People aren’t a hive mind, you know, at least I hope they aren’t. I may have to talk with these two gentlemen a bit more as my children start to get older, as I’m a bit concerned about the position of the Middle and High Schools when compared to the Elementary School, as there appears to be a bit of a discrepancy and drop off in results at those higher levels.

16:20 – This is fantastic that our teachers appear to have a great and flexible insurance plan, at a decent cost! It was very wise to join the Co-op to get a better deal on this. Good job to the District on taking care of our teachers in this way! Another medal for Ms. Brunett who still did the due diligence on going out to bid to make SURE that the District got the very best deal possible.

20:20 – Again, it’s good to see Ms. Brunett being on top of the Budget Forecast. While we don’t have a “final” budget, it’s a great idea to put together preliminary ones and constantly adjust them as the situation on the ground changes. This gives us a greater flexibility to adapt to change, as well as a lot more power by not being “blindsided” by unexpected things. I do wonder if this budget is available to be seen by the public anywhere though…

21:45 – Student Parent Handbooks – I know that ultimately it’s the board’s decision what gets approved to be in these, but wouldn’t it be nice if the preliminary handbooks were published for all to see so that the public could contact their Board members and give their opinions on the handbooks directly? Right now, it seems that it just goes to the Board members, and the public never sees them until after they’ve been approved and published. We should always seek to allow for greater transparency as well as greater community engagement. That way, we can all win together.

22:52 – As with the other financial statements above, I’ve asked Ms. Brunett (and also Ms. Reetz in this case) to see if the public could have a copy of this 10 year plan for Facilities. It would be good for all of us to be able to see “how the sausage is made”. It’s also good to hear that the District appears to be adjusting that budget smartly and making as much use out of old equipment for as long as possible to save money! As a side note, I had actually asked Ms. Kneifl for a copy of the school’s budget, since she contacted me about three weeks ago regarding another subject, but I still haven’t heard back from her about that yet. I just poked her again just now on that, and I’m hoping to hear back about it soon!

28:42 – Consideration of Revisions to the 2022-2023 Employee Handbook – Again, another document that it’d be good for the public to be able to see! Otherwise, we have no clue what the board is even talking about. Ideally, it would be nice if the whole “packet” that the School Board receives at the start of the meeting is provided digitally the day before the meeting on the school’s website, so that the public has a little time to look at it and consume it, so that they can provide informed feedback.

29:20 – It is at this point in the meeting, when I see the board members and others assembled flipping through papers, I wonder if the board members are not even receiving any of this information until the day of the meeting? If so, then this would be concerning to me, because from outside appearances, it seems the board members are given perhaps a minute or two to read quickly through a document that’s who knows how long before they’re given a chance to ask questions about that document, and then vote on it. I think such deliberations should give the Board members ample time to consume the information in front of them so that they can make a fully informed decision. It’s good that Super Joe (as I call him) gave an “executive summary” of the changes, however, it’d be better if the board had a day or so to view and mull these things over. Even better if the public got a day or more, so that they could look it over as well and contact their board members about it before it’s voted on!

33:58 – It’s good to hear about our educators and students being recognized for their accomplishments by other groups and organizations. We do need more of this. I would like to see more things like this, but done internally. For example, when I was attending Sedgefield Middle School in Goose Creek, SC, the school had an awards program where they recognized not just their athletic stars, but also publicly recognized their academic stars. Awards were given, and appreciated by all students who received them. I don’t know if Fall Creek does anything like that currently – I only have kids in second grade, but I don’t recall being invited to any awards ceremonies so far. I’d like to see something similar to this at the Fall Creek Schools, and even to go one step further – we should be celebrating academic achievement as much as, if not more than, athletic achievement by providing spaces in a place of honor within the High School’s Foyer/Commons space. Because a school should be a SCHOOL first, and an athletic program second. If you walk through that commons area, you’d think it was the opposite. I know that there are a couple of “dull” brass/copper plaques out there in random hallways and entrances that seem to blend in with the brick surrounding them, but these seem like an afterthought, to be honest. I’d rather see these kinds of things displayed in the well-lit trophy cases that the athletics awards appear to receive. I’d like to see visitors and alumni to Fall Creek to come into that area and see that education is the #1 priority of the schools and district by having it celebrated in the same way that other things are.

38:40 – Yes, that is me going to talk to Super Joe. I was confused why it seemed like almost everybody was leaving. Not because I didn’t understand the concept of a Closed Session, but because according to the Agenda, there was to be more of an Open Session after the Closed Session was completed. So, it just surprised and confused me that the majority of the people that were in attendance weren’t sticking around to finish up the meeting after the Closed Session was over! And, for anyone wondering, the mask wasn’t because of any COVID “stuff”, it was because I had a really nasty cold, my nose would NOT stop running, and I’d hate to spread that nasty bug to others!

Conclusion

Overall, I felt that the session was run very professionally by Mr. Wright. You can tell he’s been doing this a long time. However, I would have liked to have seen a lot more interaction and discussion between those involved. There was a lot of “monologue” reporting, which I expected, but not very much discussion about the things that had to be voted on before they were voted on. I attribute much of this (unless I’m wrong), to it being that the Board members don’t seem to receive much of the information about what they’ll be voting on until they’re actually in the meeting and have a pamphlet in front of them. It’s hard to have a discussion about something that you are uninformed about.

I would love to be wrong about this, and if any board member would like to contact me and let me know, I’d be curious to know if the contents of these pamphlets are actually provided to Board members in advance, and if so, in what format and how long before the meeting actually commences.

Fall Creek School Board Meeting 04.18.2022

Fall Creek School Board Meeting 04.18.2022

Please forgive the issues with this very first recording. As I’ve never done anything like this before, I’ll be learning as I go. It appears that I need a better downwards angle so that half of the image isn’t just the top of the wall, and you can see more of the people at the table. Also, the audio quality on the camera is HORRENDOUS, so I have a professional audio recorder on order. It should be available in time for the next meeting.

I apologize for any issues that this may cause. Full commentary coming soon.