Board of Education Meeting Recap

We are proud to welcome Officer Brad Stoll as the School Resource Officer (SRO) serving the students, staff, and families of the VASD beginning in the 2025-26 school year. Officer Stoll emerged as the top candidate for the position after an interview conducted by VASD Administration and members of the Verona Police Department Command Staff. Additionally, Officer Stoll demonstrated strong leadership and rapport with students and staff while serving as a temporary SRO at VAHS this spring. The position was developed in close collaboration with the Verona Police Department (VPD), VASD Administration, and the VASD Board of Education.

Officer Stoll was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and a minor in communication studies. While attending college, Brad completed an internship with the Altoona, Wisconsin, Police Department and was a student employee of the UW–Eau Claire Police Department. Brad graduated from the Blackhawk Technical College Law Enforcement Academy in October 2018 and began his career with the Verona Police Department that same year. Brad is currently assigned to the night shift from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.. He is also an Evidence Technician, drone operator, and a certified State of Wisconsin Law Enforcement Instructor in Vehicle Contacts.

Officer Stoll is looking forward to being the School Resource Officer for the Verona Police Department because of his strong desire to ensure that the next generation of youth has the safety, security, and mentorship necessary to allow students to pursue their goals and contribute to their communities. He believes all students should have the opportunity to feel safe expressing themselves, and he looks forward to helping to create such an environment.

Extended Learning Pathways Foundations Update

Relevant Policy: Results (R) 2: Academic Achievement; Operational Expectation 10: Learning Environment/Student Behavior; Operational Expectation (OE) 11: Instructional Program

Executive Director of Student Services Dr. Angela Hawkins, Director of Special Education Dr. Sara Halberg, and Foundations Lead Special Educator Carli Adams shared promising progress from the Extended Learning Pathways program, which supports students with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) in Grades 1–8 through structured environments focused on regulation, de-escalation, and skill transfer. It is a partial day program; students split their school day between Foundations and their neighborhood or charter school. It is located at a stand-alone site within district boundaries. Foundations aims to provide students access to grade-level academic and social-emotional standards within scaffolded learning routines. Educators provide explicit instruction in Social Emotional Learning and promote regulation and stamina in a structured, supportive setting.

One of the goals of Foundations is to teach students the skills they need to be successful in a smaller environment and help them transfer their new skills to the classroom setting. The outcome of students acquiring these skills is a reduction in seclusions and restraints district-wide, as shown in the data below.

The district is expanding this work to secondary grades, emphasizing reduction in seclusion, staff injuries, and office discipline referrals. The specific next steps are as follows:

• Guidance for the Continuum of Support for Behavior

• Continue partial day programming at Foundations, in order to continue student access to students’ neighborhood schools

• Prepare guidance documentation for Fall 2025

• Refinement and Expansion to Secondary Level

• Middle school refinement

• High school off-site option

• Continued research and Implementation of emerging information and best practices

• Pathological Demand Avoidance

• Mental health support

• Ukeru, Nonviolent Crisis Intervention - Advanced Physical Skills

• Creating a more formalized process for sharing the program model and on-site observations with visitors from other districts

• National conference presentation

• Neighboring district walk-thrus

• Research collaboration with universities

Achievement Gap Reduction Reports

Executive Director of Academic Services Amy Engelkins and Director of Elementary Education Theresa Taylor shared that the Achievement Gap Reduction (AGR) program was established in the 2015-16 school year and fully replaced the Student Achievement Guarantee in Education program (SAGE) at the end of the 2017-18 school year. The AGR program allows a participating school to meet the obligations of its five-year contract by implementing one of three strategies, or a combination of these strategies, in every kindergarten through grade three classroom: 1:1 tutoring, instructional coaching for teachers, or maintaining 18:1 or 30:2 classroom ratios and providing professional development on small group instruction. State aid is provided to schools that comply with AGR requirements. Each AGR school is required to set performance objectives for the year and submit an annual report to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). A new contract cycle is about to begin on July 1, 2025, and will run through June 30, 2030. The Board acknowledged receipt of the required AGR reports and plans to continue participation through the next five-year contract cycle.

End-of-Year Site Visits

The BOE spent time debriefing the End-of-Year visits to schools. These visits provide BOE members and VASD leaders with the opportunity to hear from schools about their goals and progress in various domains over the school year, as well as their areas for growth and plans for the future. School visitors spend time in classrooms seeing education in action.

The BOE extended warm appreciation to all of the schools for welcoming them to learn from our schools in action and gain perspectives that they bring with them to their responsibilities and duties as BOE members. They acknowledged the real work of education happening in small and big ways in the classroom. The BOE discussed the scheduling complexities of the End-of-Year visits during the school day, when many of the BOE members have full-time jobs, which precludes their attendance or makes it difficult. They raised the ideas of visiting schools at other times, spreading visits throughout the year, or separating the data summaries and classroom observations into separate visits, not having their visits tied to schools’ Continuous Improvement Process (CIP) reporting, and having a grounding document prior to school visits on the purpose, content, and expected outcomes of the visit. The BOE members emphasized that they highly value school visits. Dr. Clardy shared that there are two main objectives for visits: to provide observations and information that can help inform the BOE and their decisions, and to provide evidence of the implementation and outcomes of previous decisions. For example, End of the Year visits provided evidence of the implementation of work completed during Professional Learning Communities and the implementation of the Savass curriculum.

The purpose of a Board Workshop is to provide a publicly available venue in which the BOE discusses current issues. While no BOE action is taken during a workshop, the conversation may impact future BOE decisions.

Public Comment Policy

The BOE discussed a draft Governance Culture (GC) Public Comment at Board Meetings policy. The BOE addressed the notion of reading public comments submitted prior to a BOE meeting, noting that the practice started during the COVID-19 pandemic. The BOE discussed an overall limit of thirty minutes for public comment, limiting individual comments to three minutes per person, and commenters speaking on a “first-come, first-served” basis. The group clarified that the policy can state that public comments may not include a complaint or grievance against an individual staff member, and that it must state where a person may share concerns or information about an individual staff member. The policy will also address the BOE's response to public comments, clarifying that it will be allowable to respond to public comments, but BOE action may not be taken on something that has not been noticed on the agenda. They also clarified information on repetitive content over time by the same person or by multiple commenters in a row at the same meeting. The group worked together to make specific edits. The BOE will engage in a second reading of the policy at the June 16, 2025, BOE meeting.

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