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the summer food service program increased there's an extension through december so we may receive more funding for that launch program once we extend that offer that to our families and then a lot of the grants have changed when we do the tentative budget it they were based on last year's grants and then when we get the origin the real ones then we update it the best we can so this one shows you at the very bottom the new esser grant the elementary and secondary school emergency relief grant that's the cares act that's what we've been allotted for for for the cares act which is covid related more revenue revisions these are the o m fund transportation fund in imrf just changes in the corporate personal property taxes and transportation transportation amount came in a little bit different expenditures um a lot of the expenditures are just personnel changes some of them are moving um shifting buildings or um you know people leaving and new people coming in this whole first page is um person mostly personnel changes a little bit of instructional supplies towards the bottom of the page for project lead the way expenses this next slide shows more adjustments mostly for personnel all still related to the education fund this next slide a lot of it is splitting it district wide so ell supplies and psych supplies and social work supplies we've had them in their their actual they were all in a district-wide account so this year i'm splitting them out so that way each school will have them in the proper schools that helps with the evidence-based funding report we have to do at the end of the year we have to split all the expenditures by school it gives a more accurate number of how much supplies are being spent at each building they get this money anyway it was just recorded in a summary account and now we're just splitting them out so nothing's nothing's being lost there or changed it's just kind of putting it in the school's control this next slide is more of the same there's your speech supplies and some dues and fees with some more personnel changes um more salaries this slide actually shows you the secretary the new secretary assistants that were added to each building and then at the very bottom there is the final payout for that fiber infrastructure project that we've been working on for two years um that should be adjusted to the actual final hopefully we're done with fiber and then these last few pages just show you grants so this is all the grant supplies broken out to the latest grant numbers cares act supplies at the very top that seventy-five thousand dollars that was added this is kind of for um to go along with stewart's question on on how i'm gonna track expenditures we're obviously gonna go over our 280 000 that were allotted for the cares act but i needed a placeholder for things related to this in each fund so that way we can find and track those numbers easier and then this is the um the final slide for changes in the expenditures this is um more grants title ii grants and then the esr grant which is the cares act so you can see that those are all split out so the net of changes for the education fund was three hundred sixty four thousand nine hundred ninety nine hundred ninety dollars operations and maintenance fund salaries changed to account for the custodians that were added to each building and then the cares act supply account at the very bottom in the middle of the page you can see there's 400 000 was added to o m for ppe supplies and all of the hand sprayers and everything that that's going to go along with it i think over the year we're going to spend a lot more than that we've spent almost 200 in this already for the first three months and that was probably building up a bunch of our supplies and getting the plastic dividers and masks and everything just up and running but some of that money will be reimbursed by the fema so once i get the fema in i didn't know how i didn't know how to project how much fema so i kind of netted it out of this expense so if we had you know four hundred thousand we might be might be maybe eight hundred but hopefully fifty percent of that will qualify and be able to get for fema reimbursement and then the transportation fund adjustments were made for the routes and changes for the midday elementary routes added more money to our budget and then i added that cares act supply account for that fund as well so those changes was 375 000 for the o m fund and 114 000 for the transportation fund so the grand total changes for revisions to expenditures 854 955.
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this slide is nothing changed on here since the tentative except for the state categoricals i had three payments budgeted for special ed i dropped that down to two to be consistent with the rest of the state categoricals um i'm not sure why i had three but everybody else had two so i dropped that to two and then the transition fees at the bottom changed to eighty thousand instead of the fifty thousand that originally was this slide i left in here but it was minimal changes for the percentages um but you can see it by fund and then this is our fun summary so um you can see that we the revenues in four of our accounts are coming in less than what we are planning to spend education funds got a deficit of 693 thousand dollars o m's 1.18 million transportation 659 million and then the rest are are positive or flat then on this final page you can see our fund balances um and then with the deficits or surpluses in the middle column to kind of give you where the final fund balances are going to land um right now we have a it's called an unbalanced budget because we have more deficits in each fund than having revenues and expenditures equal so for the budget it's going to say that it's unbalanced but there's no deficit plan required because we have fund reserves that we're dipping into to keep us positive at this point so right now it's just it'll be it shows as an unbalanced budget and then i also did one more quick thing for um to answer the questions for last month's meeting we have a budget summary for the the months reserves that we have on hand i kind of did it if you look at this is what where our budget shows we will be for each of these funds so we have five months reserves in the ed fund eight months with o m five months for debt service nine months transportation over a year in imrf eight months in tort so kind of averaging them all we have about seven months in fund balances for all funds if you take out our early tax receipts you can see quickly that it drops down to almost nothing for we have one month in the ed fund four months in o m nothing in debt service six months transportation seven months imrf and then two months in torque so you go from seven months down to three months really quickly if we without that those receipts and those receipts are intended for next budget year so i think that answers jeff's question from last time and then to answer stewart's question from last time i put together covid19 financial implications and i literally went through the budget and picked out the highlights the high accounts that were mainly reduced or increased because of covid i could go through the nurses accounts everything in nurses is due to covid but there's that's the normal stuff in their budget so i kind of just picked up the highlights i have a whole page worth of revenues i'm not going to go through every single one of them and then i also have the expenditures side and so on the expenditure side i listed the category on the left and the account numbers that it ties to kind of where those numbers my total calculations come from in the budget and then also inside of your budget in the back of your packet i color-coded a blue line for those exact things so if you wanted to see exactly where these these are coming from they're right here in the budget so you can see those lines in the far back spreadsheet um so from here if you were to look at all the different things so your total expenditures related to covid about 1.8 million dollars and that includes some staffing that includes all the ppe equipment all of the the new custodians health insurance is going up our lunches we still have salaries to pay and on the revenue side you'll see that we don't have the revenues coming in because a la carte sales is huge for us and we're not doing a la carte sales and then you'll so you can kind of go through this whole entire list the only thing that i did not have in here for new staffing we had 5.71 new fte because of covid i only put in 1.71 for the total dollar amount here because four of them will be recaptured in the um this this number so of the 280 thousand dollar grant um that we get for teachers will be covered in there yes yep so just summarizing words words of half a syllable that work for me right we have actively invested 1.85 million dollars in additional expenditure to make this whole thing work right correct and we're losing 1.1 and on the revenue side yes the revenue side um i kind of went through and showed you the the decrease in interest and lunches and everything that we're we were planning on that receiving and then the cares grant that we're getting so if you netted all of that we're going to lose 1.1 million in revenues that we normally would get okay so that loss in revenues of a million 1.1 plus the expenditures of the 1.8 would be yeah it's like less possibly a recovery of maybe some fema funds of maybe 300 correct right yep so that's the next thing we just literally got the paperwork in the mail from todd got it um last friday so now we're gonna just get the paperwork and start seeing how much we can recoup well with remembering that's all i got thank you thank you all right closed okay we turn that one move to the next one it's called tonight's meeting to order pam can you take
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good evening let's call the order and have a roll call nancy kupka here mike davenport here dan nicholas here terry pavisage here rick coming out here joanna vazquez drexler here zoey boy here sam thank you let's stand for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all the first element of business is the approval of minutes i need a motion to approve the minutes from august 17th 2020 business meeting september 14th 2020 workshop meeting and september 14th 2024's meeting hi mike davenport hi dan nicholas hi rick kavanagh hi nancy pepco aye motion carries uh we move on then to the first reception of visitors the meeting agenda includes two opportunities from comments from the audience this first reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board with about any agenda item on which the board will vote and i think you're going to post those items we're voting on tonight the second reception of visitors is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors with equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs snyder visitors addressing the board need to come to the microphone and state their full name the proceedings are being taped recorded for the purpose of producing the accurate meeting minutes the board's presiding officer myself i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant audience observation of these protocols is appreciated does anybody wish to address the board on any topic on which we're voting tonight hearing none we'll move on to the recommendations and reports of this different time all right so we'll start out with our two new student board members uh seated on the other side of the room here and what we're going to do is just allow them to introduce themselves so we'll start with sam yeah let's use the mic they're saying yeah okay uh my name is sam bull and i the most notable things about me are that i'm the editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper the dj omega and i play soccer for the high school and my local club team i'm the captain of both and i'm just very very excited to be here a little bit nervous but also very excited because [Music] since i've entered high school i've been interested in impacting my community in any way that i can and this is kind of i see this as a grassroots government position and i think that the things i can do here can help impact and help the student body and the community in a positive way so i'm very excited and thank you so much for having me here thank you welcome st zoe hi there i'm zoe i'm a senior here at south and something about me is i really love music and art i do speech and i'm the president of the mask and gamble club here at south and yeah same as sam i'm really excited to be here and it's been nice meeting some of you hopefully i'll get to know all of you welcome thank you for joining us we're always happy to have our student board members and we really appreciate all the information you can give us so welcome welcome welcome welcome yes welcome aboard all right uh the next item that we have is the 2021 school plan updated the continual work on trying to return students to in-person learning my remote doesn't like to work on the first flip from here so as we've started each of the meetings just review of how we've gotten here i know the board is seen the slide many times but to just review a lot of work over the summer and since we met the last time this is all of the guidance that has come in since the school year started and since we met last week we've received updated guidance from the cdc on school metrics and i'll explain kind of how that fits into the larger picture later on this evening all right so just a quick update on the changes in the school guidance no it's just has trouble making it all the way from here so i've provided this to the board and you've been able to see how the crosswalk works through this we went through all of this last week as to how there's kind of the three categories of the state level substantial is the lowest possibility of bringing all students back then moderate would be in the middle obviously and then minimal is what we kind of designed our plan towards not knowing it because these didn't exist in the summer to bring students back so what we're trying to do tonight is to present a pathway to bring students to school in moderate or minimal the guidelines that came out from the cdc this week just put these up here this is just to help you understand how this continues to develop this is similar to guidance that we received at the state level but not exactly the same as we've seen all along the guidance from the three different uh organizations don't always match up between the cdc the ibph and the dupage county health department this just helped it's another piece of data to help us and another set of guidelines especially as we move towards substantial as we start trying to make the decision when we would no longer be able to bring students in you know in the future it's just another another set of information as we sit down and talk with the dupage county health department about what we should do next to help shape our decisions we will rely more on the illinois department of public health and the dupage county health department education in the united states is driven first by the state level in almost all other cases so that's we're going to look at illinois department of public health as our number one metric but these will help influence us since the way that it works in the state ultimately they have left it up to the superintendent to determine if schools are open or not and how that works so you know we'll work on the state level first with if i advice from the county level the leaders at the health leaders at the county level are factoring in the cdc information as well this is the slide that i brought you last week and we've continued to work on it and develop it really uh what it comes down to and the the key uh take away that folks should have from this is that really as long as we're in moderate or minimal we're striving to build a schedule that allows students to come back in in those ranges as soon as we move into substantial we're going to have to have some serious conversations with the health department if it's appropriate to continue to bring all students back to school for a hybrid model and if it's appropriate to continue doing things like activities athletics and those kinds of things however for our students that are most at risk we are continuing to try to build programming so that as long as we are in phase four or higher that those students can continue to come in and receive services on a regular basis so hank before we leave this page where are we at if you had to put a star or a dot on this chart it's where we are at today where are we at we are right in the middle of moderate right okay okay right in the middle of the issue right so that's where uh the current dupage county health department metrics are as of today and in comparison when we were here a week ago the numbers have actually improved in the last week they've gone in the correct direction and we greatly appreciate the community doing their part to keep those metrics going in the right direction that's the best the best way that the community can help us get students to school and keep them here at school is to wear a mask wash their hands keep their six feet of social distance and do all those things that the health professionals are saying to do so if if we go back dan at all times not just in school at all times at all times uh so we'd be right in between the low and high moderate right now i i would have said a week ago we were starting to trend towards high moderate and now we're starting to trend back the other way so we're definitely in the space where bringing students back to school is something we should be considering doing all right i'm going to have somebody else click this in all right so what does this mean for our schedule coming back and what we're trying to do here so let's go back to what we talked about this summer and as we looked at a hybrid schedule this summer these were our three top priorities obviously following the safety health and safety guidelines trying to come up with schedule where every student has the opportunity to see every teacher each week and that we were scheduling remote learning experiences separate from in-person learning from those two experiences we administratively we're scheduling those times separate from one another as we've looked at the health guidelines and have tried to figure out how to do this in minimal and moderate transmission levels our our priorities have changed a little bit here obviously following the safety guidelines social distancing but a new factor that was introduced under these new set of guidelines is limiting the mixing of groups so in our old schedule students changed their class periods four times each day that they were here so that's four times that the groups mix uh you're going to see on the new schedule we've cut that number down to meet this new requirement that's in there this new guideline we in order to do that we have to you're not going to see as many teachers as frequently so we can't see every teacher every week but we still want a regular cycle of where you see each teacher and then we want to simplify the schedule that's a major piece of feedback that we've heard about the old hybrid schedule versus coming back now that it was too complex too many moving parts so that has become more of a priority than separating in-person remote learning structurally it has become simplifying the schedule has kind of risen up as a greater priority okay all right so hybrid is what we talked about over the summer and you can see those priorities and now you can see how they compare and the modifi modified hybrid so this just allows you to see them side by side what i just told you you know good teaching tell them and then tell them again okay so what we're going to have in this modified hybrid is this combination class period this combination of in-person and remote learning happening in the same time frame so the first class of the day will have students attending in person and we'll have some time in that class period where students are attending remotely so group a will be there in person on some days while group b is still interacting with that class period in in that class in that time but from home okay and our remote learners are always learning from home right so uh they're combined in the same time but work in different spaces in that time there's going to be a combination of interactive and independent work just like there is in a regular class period there's times where the teacher is directly interacting with a student or a group of students and there is time when they're working on their own independently that will be mixed within a class period so that the teachers spending time with the students that are there in person but also spending time with students working remotely there's also possibilities in this model for a student that's in the classroom to be paired up with a remote student and them to be working at the same time so if that pair needs help the in-person student could call the teacher over and and ask the question and work that way the idea is that there are going to be learning activities for all students every class period that that class is meeting what it looks like could be different from class to class we'll always take attendance for all learners at the beginning of each class period and then at the end of each class period we wrap up that class and move on to the next class i have a question yeah can i ask you yeah so i know that we're going to look at a sample schedule from the teacher's perspective of how they're going to lay this out for their day but what kind of activities are we doing for professional development for our teachers because i'm sure there are some that are not they're comfortable doing this and there are others that frankly are so yeah you're stealing my thunderbolt we will definitely put that development yeah yeah absolutely we'll get there all right so here's the big concepts for this new schedule right that we were able to do when transmission levels are in minimal or moderate um that we have always six feet of distancing between people right we're building that into the planning that we have all the health and safety protocols in place that we are going to follow the remote learning schedule is kind of our base okay we're going to build off of that if you remember that is a schedule that was designed with the committee of teachers over the summer after the hybrid was debuted when we pulled together a group of teachers to work on fully remote so we're going to try to stick to that schedule as close as we can and i'll explain some of the factors that play into that in a little bit um one of the things that this allows is that students would initially come in for half days in that half day meeting there'd be two class periods so when remember last week we started talking about a student's cohort and a staff member's cohort we want to limit the number of people in somebody's environment throughout the course of a day right we're trying to keep that number under 50.
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all right we're going to review the second budget changes [Music] dana would you like to present on the the king county region 110 efe budget so this budget nothing has changed except for the unaudited beginning fund balance so when i was working with u46 to get their numbers they're still being they're still going through their audit just like we are but they're ending numbers where they were coming up with change from the 600 000 to 770.
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we are live okay so i put it out there hopefully [Applause] oh yep two people watching okay all right give it a minute okay i'm going to do instead of being this awkward is i'm going to remove us from the screen so we'll just be able to communicate versus the chat okay so people theoretically watching us do that sit here yeah okay that works yeah i do have a quorum so i figured i'd bring folks back on yep and i um just heard from brenda that she's running late uh you have the youtube on so you want to um so ron i think you want to close the screen that has the youtube link that you were on so you only have this link up i've muted you ron because if you have both links up you're going to hear the feedback from the other one i did was sign in one link because if you have both links up yep oh ron were you able to find the youtube link or the youtube i let me tell you what i did i pulled up the agenda ron were you able to find the youtube link or the youtube so i just muted ron again because he's yeah another screen open um i am not sure how else to instruct him yeah hey ron can i give you um can i give you some advice is to um sure how else save this link open up your browser again nice reactor but close oh there we go okay okay i think that's the best we could do i just heard from brenda that she's running late so she that was just fine and um she might not even be here before we're done okay anything from margaret or no i haven't sarah best did you get my email with where i resent the link this morning okay so it did um can you hear me now right yep it seems like you solved the problem i just got out and got in again sometimes with all you need to do all right we're going to move through this quickly we are short on all right we're gonna move through this quickly we are short on time okay ron do you know do you know what internet browser you're in do you know what that is okay close chrome just close all of chrome all the tabs in it the whole thing you'll you'll get knocked off that's okay just close all of it okay hello hi okay so right now mike now you're muted sorry we'll know what about eight seconds with this on the screen okay so right now mike now you're related sorry we'll know what about eight seconds on the screen so my i don't know if it's worth so we have eight minutes left till the region meets do you think that uh when it's time for ron to speak we can pause and ron can speak but it will keep him muted because of the background noise yeah let's let's do that because i think we really need to do this i think it will be quick and um so yes let's do that all right so i'm gonna get going um all right see in the presence of a quorum i'll call to order this meeting of the pelham school committee at 6 22.
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it just limits the number of opportunities you have to come in contact with somebody that may have kovit so the idea of a single passing period then has one time each day where all students mix that period of time is five minutes or less because that's the length of a passing period during that time we will not have all of the students in the building we'd have half and then we have all of the safety measures in place the face coverings the face shield encouraging people to have social distancing no congregating in hallways no use of the washroom during passing periods no lockers right students go from point a to point b so it should be far less than five minutes that anybody would be mixing with the larger group of students in the conversations with walking these models through with the dupage county health department they felt that that was absolutely appropriate in the moderate and minimal transmission levels then the other two times where they could come in contact with student just large groups of students would be upon arrival that's always staggered and remember as part of the plan students come in and go directly to their classroom there's no gathering in the hallways there's nothing in the cafeterias students come in go directly to their first class for that day and go to their their seat then at the end of the day we would release students similar to how we do for assemblies and those kinds of things which is could be by floor it could be by floor even in odd classrooms those kinds of things so that not every student is coming out of the classroom at the exact same time right to make it easier for people to maintain their social distancing as they leave the building at the end of that day in the model you're about to see students coming into school for two days a week for half days this is initially right we get this in place hopefully metrics continue to improve and we're able to expand that over time over a two-week period they will meet in all of their classes and see all of their teachers and we will continue to run specific programs or activities so tcd the way that it's running activities athletics and t99 okay so we will continue those additional opportunities for our students so in this model if you are a there we go an in-person learner trying to keep all my screens lined up here um it's very important that students and families know that we are very serious about following all of those safety guidelines and the only way that a student can continue to come to school is to follow those safety guidelines wearing the ppe wearing the shield during the hallways and on the buses so social distancing hand hygiene cleaning and disinfecting the symptom checks before they come to school those are all of the things that must happen for a student to continue to attend school in person while they're here we want to maximize their learning experience as much as possible and try to tailor in the things that really can only happen while they're here at school and then there's a lot of remote learning time as well in this we'll talk about what happens in that that time in a second but if you remember last week when we talked uh one of the challenges is when we come back to in person a reduction in the amount of time right because right now all students are virtual they have the entire class period all to the teacher once we move to this model and we can only bring in half the students at a time so you're going to have some students learning remotely and some students learning in person there's naturally going to be a reduction in the effectiveness of the minutes during that time everything is trade-offs right so for the time the students are here though we want to maximize that time and have experiences that would be very difficult to have remotely while they're in person and then shift the things that do work remotely to the remote sessions the idea here obviously is about relationships and strengthening those with the teacher with other students actually with the building itself and the community and and those kinds of things uh during this time it's also it's very difficult to do quick formative assessments check-ins and those kinds of things in in a remote fashion some of them that you need them to do so especially performance based so some of those will shift back into the in-person time as i said earlier our in-person students might be collaborating with other students that are there in person but they might also be collaborating with someone that's remotely in some ways it's easier to social distance if you're collaborating with a remote learner if you're an in-person learner um yeah bubbles or remote learners still have i mean there will be office hours in that so remote controllers can still we'll still have the resource periods we'll still have the office hours yep students are going to have to then bring their chromebook and headphones and microphone to class because they could be participating with a remote learner while they're there and this is also one of the great challenges we have right now is getting materials to students and getting materials back this naturally then creates a cycle where that can occur for remote learners remember in this model nearly everybody is a remote learner for some of the time and an in-person learner for some of the time except for families that have chosen to be fully remote if you're a remote if you're remote learning in either of those ways as the hybrid going back and forth or a fully remote learner you'll be participating in direct instruction learning activities in the same class period as the in-person learners so you remember the model from this summer those two were separate now they're brought into the same space and it our teachers will be deciding how that time and space flows and i'll show you some examples of how that might work in a second the structure types and timings of activity is going to differ from subject area to subject area from teacher to teacher class to class depending on what that individual class needs both based on their curriculum and based on the students that are in there and remember we're going to have some classes where more students might be fully remote because they choose to do that and some might be slightly more in person and the teacher is going to have to adjust for those variables as well students and teachers are responsible for meeting the instructional goals when remote learning just like when they are in person learning and then are fully reno remote learners so those that aren't coming back for in-person will have an opportunity to participate within with that in-person group they'll sign in just like everybody else is and then activities will be structured for them and it it might make sense in one class for that remote learner to be a remote in-person learner that day like participating with the in-person class and doing the same activities that the in-person students are doing or a modification of those on one day it might make sense that they're not with the in-person learners that day and they're participating with the remote learners that day it's very dependent on what's happening in the class which is why we're we're not administratively carving out separate times for remote learners in in person we're turning it over to the professional in the classroom to determine how that should flow within that class period all right so a reminder that's what the fully remote learning schedule looks like now okay so two periods in one half of the day the other two periods in the other half of the day rotating through odd and even number class periods monday is fully remote and that's the one day a week where uh in the moving forward in the hybrid model that was the one day a week where a teacher got to see all of their kids at one time just dedicated to them in the same format right all fully remote so in the propose in this proposed modified hybrid in week one group a would come in on tuesday and wednesday and go through half of their courses over those two days they would see their cohort of people that they would be coming in contact with would consist of whoever they went to school with transportation wise walking riding the bus in a car any of those kinds of things plus the students in two of their classes that are cut in half and is the number of students that are there while they're in those classes they'll be participating with the rest of the students in that same class in different shapes and format during that same time period can um i'm sorry yeah can you just remind me because it's going to be two periods and two periods period zero is is uh our zero hour period which um it's like the early bird class there's not a lot of students that are involved in that but we have a few a couple handfuls or yeah okay it's a very small number of zero hour classes then the next week group a would come once again tuesday and wednesday so their days of the week stay the same remember we're trying to keep things as consistent as possible in a world full of inconsistencies so their day remains it's tuesday and wednesday but in the second week they come in the afternoons and do their afternoon courses if you're in group b it's the same kind of experience except you come in on tuesday or thursday and friday week one and do your morning classes and then you come back the next week on thursday and friday in the afternoons and do your afternoon classes and that's kind of the field now we've presented this using the times that are on the remote learning schedule and we hope to stick as close to those as possible however as i'll explain later one of our major challenges is transportation and folding our transportation in with 68 and 58 may cause us to have to that break in the middle kind of push those minutes around between those two class periods so that buses will run and match up with the other two school districts so some examples of how this might work in the flow of a class period so here's the first example and up here i i've put for you what's occurring for the in-person learners and the remote learners and a sample duration right just to get a feel for how this might actually work so the beginning of every class is all of the students there in person and remotely so attendance can be taken expectations can be set for the class period everybody knows when they're coming and going and what the schedule is for that class then in this example we start with the remote learners getting some individual practice maybe they already got the learning before they're coming in they're getting to work and getting help from the teachers they work through whatever they're doing you know they can call for the teacher to come over at certain points while the teacher is doing direct instruction you might think how does that work well it might be that the the teacher is teaching this remote group and then they have a time where the students practice there now they can go check on their other in-person students in that middle period of time and then we flip those two groups where one is doing the practice and the other is getting direct instruction then we get a little break in the middle of it one of the things that we've heard is that these 80 minute periods teachers really need to try to build in a time for getting up stretching taking a break those kinds of things so trying to build that into their scheduling and planning and then in this model it just flips back the other way for the other half of the class period so this is a very simple example of trading off instruction and practice they could get more complex than that you know here's an example of an activity going on with the in-person learners so we start off the class period and then the in-person learners are getting their materials together they're going and doing that whatever hands-on activity that they're working on while the teacher is working with the remote learners okay so obviously they've set up the activity the kids are ready to go and they just go and work over on the side now during that direct teacher instruction the teacher might have to take a break and go check on all the students right might have to pause those kinds of things and then after that activity is done now we're going to work with the in-person group to do a little class discussion about the experience and while they're doing that the remote learners are working on some independent activities right and they get their break in that time and now the the teachers back working with the in-person students and then at the end we now turn it back over the in-person students are working on their individual wrap up from that activity their own individual assignments while the teacher goes back and checks in on the remote learners and maybe provides a demonstration of the activity that just happened with the in-person students then we wrap everything up and that's the end of a class period so hopefully you're seeing kind of how there's could be these trade-offs back and forth but in the final example here but even in a room students are not working they're not sharing materials if they're working in small groups if they're sharing materials that wipe down between each student and those kinds of things yeah yeah uh here's another example of trading back and forth but it i'm giving you three kind of examples so you can kind of see the trade-offs but at any point you could blend those and combine those uh activities so maybe in this one you can see how they trade back and forth homework check video instruction while they do homework check it might be appropriate in another day to do uh all the homework check for all the students at the same time right we're just going to go over homework with the kids that are in class and the kids that are remote and then we're going to go into some direct instruction and me as the teacher i'm going to teach the students that are in person and the students that are remote at the same time i might choose to do it that way or i might choose to do it this way where i break the groups up either way it's going to be up to me to determine as the classroom teacher what the appropriate flow and breakup of the groups and an activity is throughout that course of the class period which is i mean very different from how we do it during normal school but it's also very similar in the fact that the teacher has the autonomy in every class period to figure out how they're working with different groups of students what activities are going on how the structure works in any class period so what we're looking at is this schedule for the remainder of the semester so what you're going to see is a flow here of once we get up and going of a remote week followed by week one followed by week two and then a remote week week one week two remote week week one week two then a remote week to end out the semester there's some logic as to why this is happening the first thing is we're we're trying for the rest of the semester here to balance out minutes is one of the reasons right and in the fully remote as we said before students get the most minutes of content in the fully remote because every student's getting the same thing in that same time and space once we start getting into hybrid now we're trading off groups right in many of the classrooms so the uh the experience is very different the direct minutes that you're getting from a teacher are very different so by combining the two of having some periods of remote learning and some periods of hybrid learning we try to bolster the amount of time available for a teacher over and a student over the course of the rest of the semester some of the other things in play here are we also want some time to adjust so after we go through a two week rotation then we have an adjustment period and then we have a two week rotation and we have an adjustment period those other remote weeks are also weeks in which the schedule is abnormal to begin with so october 12th is the week of monday is off tuesday we're in session wednesday is sat testing for seniors thursday we're back in session but some of our seniors have accommodations and have extended time for testing so that day will be altered for some of our students and then friday is parent-teacher conferences thursday night and friday during the day or parent-teacher conferences so that that's a week that's already uh challenging so we didn't want to get into the full cycle until we had a chance to do back-to-back weeks just so the teachers can consistently plan between all of their classes kids can have a common experience so as we look at that that makes october 19th our first opportunity to get a normal cycle back to back of week one week two what we're starting to talk about and you know first we're planning for all students and now we're backing up to that first week of october we would like to try to do a dry run that week of week one and potentially bring in ninth grade only for that week and i i can't promise that we're going to make that happen yet we still have a lot of logistics some which i'll explain to you in a second to work through but that's our goal is to bring students in in that fashion that would allow us to test transportation and to see how it all works and learn from it before we bring all of our students back but i'll get into the limiting factors that we have to work through critically before that that's able to occur once we're up and going beginning october 19th we plan on following this all the way up to winter break in this rotation cycle we want families to know this is the plan as long as we are out not in substantial this is how we will continue to work for the rest of the semester we'll evaluate as this is going on to see if we can modify change improve going into second semester but we just want everybody to be able to have it on their calendar they know when they're coming to school teachers know what to plan for like everybody we heard from our students last week the unpredictability the uncertainty that like they want our students want to know what's coming next i'm sure our families do as well and i know our teachers do this provides a pathway forward for the rest of the semester for how that could work all right so a lot of planning and logistics between now and when that happens the first is making sure that all of our classrooms we can maintain social distance again as we've explained over the summer we have many classrooms across the district that are relatively small and we put smaller classes in them but even so when half of our students could potentially show up in one of those classrooms they won't fit and maintain six feet of social distancing so one of the things we did this summer by asking families to commit to remote learning was to then lower the number of students in classrooms because of fully remote learners and some of those classroom classes then fit other ones still didn't fit but then we were able to swap other classrooms around so that every student every class had a classroom where students could maintain social distancing well we got to restart that again because we don't know who's going to now that they see this plan and how it works and they know where we are in the world and everything else something that somebody committed to in august they might think differently about now so we need to recycle through that process and give families the opportunity to decide are they coming back for the hybrid model here for the rest of the semester or would like they like to stay or or be in a fully remote learning model we're going to send that form out tomorrow and ask families to commit to one model to fully remote learning or coming back in person by friday so that we can start all of that scheduling process over the next week to try to set everything up for students to come back that is a lot of work to do in just a couple of weeks here so the idea of bringing back 9th graders on the week of october 5th if we can get through all of that everybody responds the more people that respond to the form that goes out tomorrow the faster this will go because if somebody doesn't respond then we have to follow up with each student and and find out if they're coming or not so the a lot of this depends on the responsiveness of our school community in helping us get the information that we need we already sent out information about busing last week so that we can start to work on our transportation because we have to make sure our routes can maintain as much social distancing as possible we also have to coordinate those routes with our partner elementary district so all of this trying to get freshmen back on the fifth is a lot of it depends if we get all of the information we need in a timely fashion and we can make all of the puzzle pieces fit together in enough time so that families know who's coming in when how the buses are working everything's in place and we have to make sure that that fits together with the elementary schools with all of our timing and our routes and everything else so there is a lot of work left to do over the next couple of weeks at the same time to go back to your question earlier nancy we have a lot of professional development planning and supports to put in place for our teachers obviously now they have a new schedule for the remainder of the semester they have curriculum that they have built out to right now be working in fully remote learning that needs to now be restructured to work in this they also now have this new responsibility to plan for classes where learning is happening in person and also happening remotely that there might be some interactive learning in that time period with in-person learners and remote learners but there's also going to be independent time built into that space so teachers need time to to lesson plan and put that all together and we we want to avoid this dip that we talked about last week where if we make this happen too quickly teachers aren't going to have enough time to plan to learn to be effective in this new model and then we see a dip in the the progress we don't we want students to come back to teachers that are prepared for this new learning model we also want to make sure we have opportunity to do some professional development on trauma sensitive professional learning some professional learning on trauma sensitivity as we know that students are going to come back in very different spots with the way that the world is right now and we want to be able to respond to student needs we also have some technology that we're putting in place every teacher is going to be issued their own voice amplification device so it's a little headset and a speaker that sits on their hip that amplifies their voice like this microphone is doing for me now because we know hearing people with a mask on is a challenge and then also if you're trying teachers that might try to do work with both groups at the same time that would be even more challenging if their voice wasn't amplified so those are arriving right now and are coming in as you can imagine there's a lot of demand for that kind of technology so we placed orders for that weeks ago when they're arriving now so that expands the possibilities of students being able to understand what's going on in the classroom both in person and remotely and then we started to look at today the possibility of earbuds and microphones for all students we know that some students are just working from their speakers and their microphone on their chromebook at home without that additional technology we're we're trying to find out if we can get a deal to just make sure that every student has that that supply as they come through the door so that's something that we started talking about today and hope to know more about that but it's something that we're trying to see if we can investigate and figure out as you can imagine there's been a great run on earbuds and microphones as well so uh that's actually in bulk a difficult piece of technology to get a hold of so a lot to work through as we try to get good students back all right so that's where we're at questions from the board so and then the last piece for the professional development is there going to be the department chairs do we have certain teachers have already been identified as examples how's that it'll be a combination of instruction that we provide a professional development that we provide for all teachers at the same time as well as the other things that we have in place with instructional coaches lunch and learns drop-in sessions one-on-one coaching so it'll be the full breadth of what we offer you know it's a tough balance with teachers because teachers also are going to want that time that they have to plan and prepare and get everything in order if we're making them all attend professional development that some teachers need and others may not then we're actually wasting teacher time for some people right so it's a balance of determining what professional learning do all teachers need in this new model versus what are the ones that people need to self-select and go to you know and it's a difficult balance to know exactly what that is but you know this district has dedicated a lot of resources to instructional coaching uh our librarians that don't have students back yet have been doing a lot of student support virtually but they've also been doing a lot of staff support uh for you know virtually and in person uh working as coaches as well um and we have a lot of staff resources to help teachers learn i i just have a couple of quick questions um jack could you use your microphone oh i'm sorry before i thought i was too loud but um are we putting um groups of students together so that let's say freshmen you know that they're going to be in you know english math and and social studies and having them kind of together so that if there is students that come with covered that we can kind of quarantine a group together yeah so uh no because that would require us to completely rebuild the schedule which yeah i mean that that's a three to six month process to build student schedules instead that's the whole idea of this schedule model is to limit the number of students that somebody could come in contact with on a daily basis and to design the format so that close contact doesn't happen right that social distance is maintained and as long as somebody is not within six feet of a person that has coveted for 15 minutes or more it's considered low risk of them of them picking it up from somebody who has it so we're trying to build the conditions so that close contacts don't happen and then my other thing is uh you said that uh they weren't going to be using the bathrooms during during passing periods so what if they want to wash their hands and use the facilities so in every that's a great question in every class classroom we have hand sanitizer so we've put a hand sanitizer dispenser this summer in every classroom in the building so they can at least do hand hygiene as they move from place to place and then that's the idea of teachers building in somewhere in that class period a break time so that students can either also you know they can allow students to freely go during a period of time or you know they'd have to individually dismiss students to go during the class period but the idea then is that students are in you know fewer students are pressuring the washrooms at the exact same time and it's less likely that they're in that same space with a lot of people at the same time okay and then my last question is um i know that you're in contact with 58 and 68 because of the bus schedules and all of that um any idea when they can firm up whether or not they're going to be using yeah we hope that's you know they're going i think both of them are next week i believe at least 58 goes to the public next week with what they're thinking of doing so they're still working on their planning as well and they're talking to us obviously we're getting some advanced insight as to what's going on but that's firming up this week as well okay so by the end of the week we should i would say by the end of this week yeah we should have a good idea if it fits in you know one of the one of the things that we're trying to avoid is one of the possibilities here the the difficult part in feathering the buses together is that middle in the bus runs in the middle depending on when 58-68 are picking up and dropping off students the mid-day bus run is where there could be a lot of congestion depending on when class days are beginning ending moving you know if other school districts are looking at half day model you know that there's all of these models that are out there like ours are and as we try to fit them together one of the possibilities could be the only option available to us is an am slot or a pm slot that the mid days don't match up right so there is a possibility that we have to mess with the schedule but all the classes always happening in the morning or all of the classes always happening in the afternoon we're trying very hard to avoid that right we want this to like you always know for the rest of the semester when period one is happening right you always know when period five is happening we wanna we wanna add complexity of pm classes happening in the am and all these other different iterations that could happen so that's why it's it's taking time to make sure that our schedule fits inside a 58 schedule fits inside a 68 schedule and theirs is moving shifting while ours is moving and shifting so the logistics of the busing is very challenging two questions do you guys know what 50 and 68 are are you feeling okay so so uh 58 is primarily the elementary schools and and middle schools in downers grow and 68 is woodridge and some downers grove and some other folks in there so this with our elementary schools we share both and we share bus service between the three school districts so this is a big tetris puzzle that has to fit together so when we ask people if they're going to come in and i should know this i'm sorry at least people are going to commit to coming in for hybrid are we also asking them if they're committing to bus service or if they're going to get their children here we already asked about bus service last week because we you know as we said last week it's a chicken and egg problem right you need to know certain things so you can plan certain things so we have we asked families not even knowing what the schedule would look like and said we're working on a schedule where students could need to be bussed in the morning in the middle of the day at the end of the day based on that are you still interested in bus service and if so when would you need service beginning of the day mid of the day you know select all that apply so that we could start looking at what our bus numbers are so we know what our utilization could be so that then we could go to the bus company and start talking about do these any of these schedules work you know so we already asked for that information last week this week we'll ask for are you returning to in person or remote and that's the next piece we need to build the actual class schedules within the building um you know and then we try to get all these moving pieces to kind of solidify and gel together any other questions are you uh are we still trying to split the kids alphabetically if you will so how is that going to work in a class where three quarters of the classes is um in one side versus the other so i mean i mean like i'm just what if you had a class where 80 90 of the kids their their last names start with you know typically don't believe it or not the ones that it is a little skewed one way or the other the remote learners have helped us balance it out or that's one of the reasons why we've had to shift classes because it might have been a small class but on one of the days 60 percent of the kids are coming and on the other day it's 30 percent so that's why we have to carefully look at the rosters for every class period and make sure that they fit socially distanced into the classroom in which they're assigned so that work that we did in august to get ready to come back under the old plan we need to redo now because i think it's unfair to assume that somebody that committed to hybrid or remote under the plan that we proposed in the summer it's not fair to make them commit to this new plan now based on how they committed before we need to give families the opportunity to select plus everybody knows more about covid now everybody has seen the metrics now there's more information that might make somebody feel more comfortable sending or they've also experienced remote learning at home you know you might have a student right now that is ready they're afraid to come back in august but they're ready to come back now right you could have the opposite you could have a family that in august thought i'm sending my student to school i hated remote learning in the spring and now they're looking at it going well this is working for uh for my child so i think we're just gonna keep riding remote right so we don't want to make those assumptions for our families we want our families to choose and select and tell us what model of learning is best for them this this plan that we're looking at right now is the result of a great deal of work by not only our administrative staff but teachers have been involved in this as well yes the scheduling committee that formed the fully hybrid or the fully remote schedule in july and august are the ones we went back to and we presented two different schedule models to them that it wouldn't be fair to say that they built this from scratch but it's based on their work from this summer and we brought them this model that you see or a different model and said based on this what what do you think works best we also took that to our department chairs which are also teaching in the classroom teaching and of course the administrative team reviewed this as well right so because i know you just need your reaction trying to have some students in class and have kids remote on the surface that seems like it could be a little complicated but your examples i think show how that might happen and we've had teacher feedback to say yeah we can do this yeah the the other models require us to decide for the classroom teacher how much time is going to an in-person group and how much time is going to a remote group and you likely think naturally you should make that equal so you split it down the middle but as you see in these examples on a day-to-day basis that might not be what each group needs right um it might not match the goals and curriculum of the teacher in that classroom on that day and any variety or the needs of the actual students that are in front of them and if administratively we build a schedule like we did this summer where we try to separate those two groups it becomes much more complex it becomes much more difficult to follow and then everybody has to fit into that same box when we do it this way it does require more planning i think from our teachers right but it allows our teachers the autonomy to determine how time and activity should be structured inside of the class period so it's a it's all trade-offs there there is no great model right now what we're all trying to do is to choose the best of the worst i mean that that's really the world that we're living in right now and and i think when we stack up all the pros and cons and put them together and we looked at it over models that were intentionally separating in person from remote learners or putting them together in the same kind of time frame and working with them the advantages of this model outweighed the advantages of the other model we have examples of schools that are using this teaching both in in-person and online at the same time yes we do um it's hard to compare because they're not the exact models it's also hard to compare because it's different teaching staffs it might be a k-8 school versus you know high school district but there's definitely professional forums out there and professional organizations that are providing best practices tips ways to make it work i think we are how we are definitely an advantage over the fact that we have pretty good technology in this district comparison to other districts in the country we're supplementing this with the voice amplification devices which is something that we've heard from other schools that you know it's difficult to hear sometimes that teacher across you know the video chat if their voice isn't amplified we also know it's difficult to hear it in the classroom through a mask if it's not amplified so uh we have taken this opportunity to learn many things from our peers but we have a lot to learn ourselves so last uh last time we were together some concerns brought up about the minutes and um uh and then we're hearing now with this plan we're trading off right um uh i think the point i made was that uh in the end the goal is of course safety for all concerned but ultimately we have a curriculum that we're trying to get through effectively and as long as we can get over that that goal line um that's what really counts um because the minute is in a minute is a minute right so um so is i'm assuming there's still great confidence in this plan even with that trade-off that that we can get over that goal line yeah and the importance is that students are learning and progressing and we're meeting their needs and as i've said all along there's trade-offs here in those things i i think that in the fully remote model there's definitely some needs and some experiences that we we just can't effectively offer right and this model although causing a jumble in the minutes and maybe a reduction in minutes may increase the experience right so what we do know from all of the research on minutes it's all the research points to it's what happens in those minutes the quality of instruction in those minutes fully outpaces the raw number now look you got to have enough right you've got to teach to what's there but the experience and the quality of the teacher and the quality of the instruction is far of far greater importance than the raw number i i don't you know obviously you have to have enough but i think that we're doing a nice job here of of trying to balance them and then providing you know that teacher autonomy in the classroom to determine what their students need for who's in front of them and what they're trying to teach is trying to hit that that sweet spot by having those rotating weeks of fully remote in there because of the weird scheduling and calendar and those kinds of things allows a couple of weeks where you could infuse minutes back in for all students and hopefully the learning is bolstered by those in person experiences in between and you know we sent out our first round of surveys for feedback over the last week students got theirs today we'll be presenting on that the next time we meet in october and we'll continue to survey staff students families on their experience and adapt and change and get better as a result of it so we heard last week that i believe starting last week there are a group of students at both north and south that would be doing their classes remotely but from school because of major technology issues when we go to this new hybrid schedule if those students are here anyway will they be in class all day following their schedule or still following a remote schedule in a separate room or separate area it depends on what this family is selected and what they're doing right but likely for the classes that are meeting in person they'll go in to their in-person group right we don't want students crossing between group a and group b we want to keep those as their unique cohorts so if they're in the first half of the alphabet they'll go into their in-person classes assuming that that's what their family is selected for one week the mornings and then the next week the afternoons on tuesday and thursday but then when they're not in those in-person classes they would go somewhere in the building while the rest of their classes are learning remotely and continue to work remotely because obviously sending them home at that point they don't have the resources right we don't want to i just want to make sure we weren't exposing those kids to additional cohorts correct you have to be done they'd still be in kind of their small cohort they're working in small settings right now it's not large groups of students in any of these these settings any other questions well i know this works although you've summed it up in less than an hour this really does represent hey nancy one of our student board members oh i'm sorry sorry i didn't see your hand that's okay don't be shy no so i understand that transportation's already been a challenge but i wanted to know is there a plan in place for overseeing safety procedures like to and from school on the bus yeah there is a procedure in place for bus ridership to make sure safety procedures are followed so if if we're going to go through like a day in the life of a student as they ride the bus they should arrive at their bus stop with their self-certification slip there will be an adult on that bus that will check to make sure that everybody has on their ppe their face covering and their shield and has their slip and they will come in and be seated in a seat by themselves and any student that doesn't have their self-certification slip we will take their temperatures and make sure they're not running a temperature and ask them if they're experiencing any of the culvert-like symptoms if they are they won't be allowed to board the bus and will have to go home assuming that they pass the symptom check then they get on the bus with their ppe and face shield if they don't have that we will provide a temporary one for them then they go to school and they get in and then at the end of the day they board the bus just the opposite way we don't have to do symptom checks at that point and they head on back home there will be both the bus driver and a bus monitor on every bus to make sure that that happens effectively at least for the first six weeks here we will staff it that way and see how it goes you know the first six weeks of hybrid rotations and instead of having a sheet of paper couldn't they just fill out a google form and show them on their phone yeah we talked through that but there's some equity issues there's tech issues there's all of that those kinds of pieces when we broke it all down just the slip was some people don't have a printer in it no we've we issued that we're going to shoot a booklet of slips to every student at the start of the year so we made we made kind of the hall pass idea for every student to come to school speaking of symptoms you mentioned a couple weeks ago three weeks ago or three meetings ago they all blend together now there were some rules from the health department that if you had symptoms you couldn't go back to school without testing and there's all sorts of are those rules still in place they are still in place uh however the change that i referenced last week was that for many of the symptoms it's if they're new so if there are ongoing known symptoms like you have migraines and it feels like a migraine it's just another migraine that's not a new symptom that doesn't prevent you from returning to school assuming you can come to school and learn with a migraine right same thing for allergies or those kinds of things if it's a brand new symptom then you have to go through your 10-day isolation period or you need to get your doctor to say this isn't related to kovid but it is some other ailment and you're supposed to test negative using one of two specific tests to then come back before the the 10 days is up how are we going to monitor that so that's uh we have our nurses team in the building and then we've also contracted an additional outside agency nurse at uh north south and t99 to help with the volume of work that we expect will come with that so simply test having a negative test is not enough to come back you need to have a provider say yes or no because not all you can you can be positive you can have covariate and have a negative test so they'll also have to see a provider one of the concerns that uh came up somebody else you actually see him yeah sam said his hand up first stand please he just has been bashful you gotta go in there sam please i just had a quick question about the self-certification slips um what is the significance of that besides like is there anything other than just the students trust that we're basing that on is there like a parent signature involved or anything yeah yeah sam your parents are supposed to initial that before you come to school but yes it is built on trust right and more than anything what it uh it's attempting to do is to get people in the habit of monitoring their symptoms so that if something changes they've been doing a self-check every day and i'll wait a second something's different today maybe i shouldn't go into school right uh theoretically the safety measures are built assuming that somebody maybe may have covid and be in school right because we have people that are asymptomatic that aren't displaying symptoms yet they might not display symptoms at all so that's why all of the safety measures of the six feet of social distancing the masks the shields the hand hygiene all of those things the disinfecting of the schools the air exchange all of those things are in place assuming that somebody in school has copied my questions yes so i was going to ask parents some parents concerned about how we were handling contact tracing and also transparency and how we're going to be communicating to our parents and our students you know if they've come in contact with somebody so just a refresh on that yeah so we follow all of the guidance and procedures outlined by the dupage county health department and really if somebody in your space your building your club your activity whatever ends up with covid you'll receive one of two types of contacts the one that most people will get and should get if everybody's following our safety procedures and protocols both at school and at home would be a low risk letter which means somebody in your space at some point has been diagnosed positively with covet however we believe that you were following all the safety protocols all the safety protocols were followed and as a result you are not at a high risk of having covet however double down on your symptom checking and make sure you're keeping track just in case something got through right the opposite would be somebody you know was diagnosed with covid and you were declared a close contact so after talking to that person we're like hey you know were you ever in six feet of somebody for 15 minutes or more that shouldn't be happening within the programs we've built at school right and they're like well yeah you know we hung out before school or you know we sat next to each other on the bus even though we weren't supposed to and what okay so you spent you were within six feet of somebody for 15 or more minutes that other person is now a close contact and they would get a close contact phone call so somebody who is at risk at that higher risk is deemed as a close contact we have a whole whole protocol for reaching out to them and making a personal contact so that they know all the process procedures things that they should watch out for there's a whole communication protocol that comes from the dupage county health department so when people first get that low risk letter they're going to completely freak out and they they probably shouldn't they should just you should assume if you're out in the world life is low risk right now if you're following all of the safety protocols and if for some reason we believe that you're at a greater risk you'll get a personal contact from us and we'll walk through that with you so but tracking sorry the tracking we're doing though is only the tracing contract tracing if a student comes out with covet we will do contact tracing for their activities related to school we don't do it for their activities overall for the past 10 days we actually partner with the dupage county health department and work through that whole process so because i want because and we're seeing there's lots of people lots of kids out with groups without masks so it'd be much more comfortable if the contact racing would be all-encompassing and not just during their yes it is yeah and we do that like i said with the dupage county health department there's a whole process for that but it you know if people don't want to end up in isolation quarantine yeah they should wear their masks keep six feet of social distance do all of the things that we're doing at school they should do when they're not at school because then there's a there's two things that happen greater chance that you get covered which is the worst case scenario and the next worst case scenario is you're identified as a close contact and you have to isolate or quarantine and worry about it for that next 10 to 14 days well and i would also just so everybody is aware if you are a family member if you live with a close contact family member front whatever if you live with the close contact very few of us and we have our our families we live with our families um if you're living with a close contact that may actually impact whether or not you can be if if you're living with somebody who shows signs who's shown signs of coded or who is a close contact and has been told to isolate or test it may very well impact whether or not you'll be allowed in your workplace so it really does go beyond our students so you really are at a you really should encourage your kids to socially distance more masks i know we send people home all the time who are close contact relatives for 14 days it's the same thing here if you're yeah close contact of a relative you know we're talking a lot about covet contracting it but uh the flu season is coming upon us and um you know heaven forbid this would happen but uh if teachers get coveted or the flu who's going to be teaching those classes yeah so it'll work very similar to how it does now there'd be a sub for the in-person portion having two classes a day helps us meet the safety guidelines but it also does help us in subbing right it's a lot easier to find subs for two classes than four even though it's the same amount of time it's just the complexity of folding everything together right so we do have our normal pool of subs we also have in our contract that we signed with the dga last year the ability for every teacher to be assigned two periods of subbing throughout the year so that's an additional pool of subbing resources that we have and then you know we'll work through through those two things but we believe we're confident we have enough subs available at the beginning here to get us started now there is a chance obviously that if all of a sudden cases take off and they grow or we spike amongst the staff that we could end up where we can't continue in-person learning or a lot of people end up with iso long isolation periods or quarantine periods because they're not practicing all of these things away from school then yeah we could end up in a situation where we can't staff the building and we have to go we have to go fully remote for a period of time an example of this is i have a colleague that staff member had a wedding over a weekend people attended didn't social distance didn't wear masks they just attended the wedding and then somebody was positive at that wedding and nearly the entire staff in a building had to then isolate for quarantine for 14 days so they had to move to fully remote learning for 14 days while everybody quarantined so that's why we keep say it's important that everybody follows these procedures all the time so that we don't end up in a period of time where we lose large groups of students or large groups of staff members because they could have potentially come in close contact with somebody i have another just real quick question on related services have those being um some kids have those mandated minutes how are you delivering those services yeah we've worked through we're working through each individual family and their iep plan and how that would work with their iep team and putting together a remote we have put together remote learning plans for students that way okay so you know it's very obviously as an iep is it's very different from student to student but the iep teams have worked through that okay any other questions seeing that again thank you to you and all this stuff because again this yeah this represents many nights and weekends and hours and as i was working i have to commend you because i think you know when we last voted for the hybrid plan it was with the understanding that if it was not a safe situation based on what idph ultimately came up with we would not go forward and to your credit and everybody on your team's credit we did not go forward and now we have something that is more in line with what idph is sanctioning and i for one i'm sure i speak for everybody i hope it's because we appreciate the work of everybody who's done that i will continue to say if we would have had these guidelines and i know it's a novel virus and everything's changing but i will continue to stand on that soapbox and and tell you had we had the information that we have now in june we'd already be back i understand that yeah and i know people say i'm pointing fingers but it's just it's the fact of the situation yeah but we've listed this i mean if you're old enough you've lived through this with the aids epidemic we've seen it with sars we've seen it with h1n1 it's evolving it changes and these people idph see if they're all running as fast as they can just as weird so it is what it is but i agree i understand okay hearing another more of the comments we're going to go move on to uh the 2021 concussion oversight team oh i skipped that one in my slides so this is up for approval in the uh consent agenda this evening this comes to the board every year at the start of the school year we're one month behind just because of everything else that was going on but we do have a concussion oversight team according to board policy the board has to approve that every year uh it's you know the same type of roles that have been there in the past several years as we've done this and those are in everybody those names are in the board packet yes any questions on concession concussions no uh grant allocations 2021.
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so with that unaudited balance and then you have the revenues and expenditures that kind of net to the same amount you see that they're going to probably land at that so right now at later in the meeting you'll see that i have a resolution to open up a checking account um they did cut a check for 450 of this 700 to me while they're balancing out the last of the expenditures that are trickling through and then they're going to cut that difference back to us but for budget wise nothing's changed revenues or expenditures are still the same that was presented in the tentative budget and when i asked where that reserve balance came from it's always been there um i think the big thing and exactly for the same reason that we're in right now they probably had that balance sitting there in reserves to cover these tough years that when we don't have the state coming through with our payments so there was one one point where they did have to they did have negative balance and so if you kind of estimate that 700 as opposed to their 1.8 million or 1.08 in expenditures it's about five months reserves so um i think this year we probably leave it as is for now and then we'll readjust maybe next year and see if we want to start dropping some of that down or not performance is pretty good questionable sometimes having a fun thank you dana all right so we'll adjourn that one all in favor aye opposed and now we'll go into our regularly scheduled board roll meetings been taken um i'm gonna make an amendment to the agenda um we're gonna we got a new system so there was a glitch in it and we made an error so there's a couple things that the public doesn't have we're gonna move items four five through four eight into information um i'm not aware of those and then we're adding i missed that five three and then we have to add information items five three and five four so um for those of you watching remotely uh the board and community we use a program called board book board book has moved to a new format called board book premier this is the first month of using that so the board book premier packet that the board of education has and that i have is different than the packet that was the agenda that was posted that was noticed at 5 30 tonight therefore the action items have to be moved to information because they have to be posted for 48 hours so we will move those action items to information along with adding the information items that were missed thank you for your understanding you need motion second for that amended agenda second yes yes yes yes please join us with in saying the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all i like to welcome everybody who's attending and everybody at home uh tonight's the first time we've actually done a live stream so we'll be live on video hopefully we're a little bigger than this on your screen but thank you everybody for joining us i'd also like to thank the administrators for the commitment to our community working tirelessly to get our students back in school we've accomplished what extremely few districts have been able to do so as a result of that others are now looking at central to guide their hybrid plans i'd also like to thank the teachers for their commitment to the district and students for adapting their lesson plans under these difficult circumstances and we appreciate the challenges of teaching a hybrid educational model i think i can speak for the whole community and expressing our appreciation on making a return to school a success thanks to our support staff and substitute teachers for your flexibility and willingness to step in as needed thanks to the building ground staff for cleaning doing a little more cleaning and net cleaning some more so the additional effort put forth has not gone unnoticed thanks to our transportation team for managing this new schedule seamlessly we appreciate all that you do we're extremely proud of our central students their patience and perseverance it's great to see you back at school our students have adapted to learning methods while overcoming occasional technological issues our students are listening learning and making the most of these unusual circumstances and thank you to our parents for your patience while we finalize the return to school this fall we appreciate many of you are juggling your commitments and careers while monitoring remote learning and jumping in to assist with questions and technical wizardry the school year has brought many challenges and we appreciate your continued support personally i appreciate that none of this is ideal 2020 has brought unprecedented difficulties changes and more patience than we could have anticipated as we started the year many of us are juggling schedules and putting in additional hours at work trying to make the impossible possible but we are preserving working together and getting through these challenging times the return to in-person learning has provided consistency structure and some normalcy for our students for this i'm grateful while our plan remains fluid we continue to hope and strive toward increasing educational and athletic opportunities so that the spring is a step or two closer to resembling the new normal we knew thank you for all your continued support in making it central now we'll move on to public comment we have a couple people here i'd like to speak first dave chapman good morning uh thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak i want to start off first by saying it's been nice being back educating our students after summer break as educators we got into the profession to help our our students grow and learn as as students and we always want to do what's best for them our executive board met last week and we were just openly discussing how the beginning of the school year were some of the pros and cons and from what we were hearing ec through five the am pm model seems to be working very well for our educators just some some some things that they would like to see improved are just more accessibility to resources to better meet the needs of their their students i know there are some resources they've used in prior years that they would like to have more maybe have access to that again or maybe be provided with additional resources some additional things too our educators are asking to be able to have those tuesdays team meetings back where they could collaborate with people in their grade level so that they can continue to work on their curriculum and make sure they are meeting the needs of their their students because i know recently that was changed so resources and having that time to collaborate is kind of the thing that we're hearing at the ec through 5 level but overall the structure you know people are very pleased with that but i did want to talk about the 6 through 12 model and i know i've i emailed the school board regarding this you know as we've completed three weeks of student attendance it really has become apparent that the simultaneous live instruction is not a sustainable model we don't feel it's equitable or effective as we've mentioned before we did recently survey our educators 6 through 12 and those who completed the survey 83 of them said that they didn't find this to be a sustainable equitable and effective education for our students our educators are incredibly overwhelmed and stressed 6 through 12. that's the big thing we're hearing we have seen more educators in tears than ever before teachers i've never ever seen cry before are crying there's enormous amount of work that's being added to their plate we do really worry about the long-term well-being of our staff under this model and the burnout that it's already causing we worry about the equity and effectiveness of simultaneous live instruction for our students especially as we're going to be entering into our curriculum and as we start testing them this is compounded with some of the the technological issues that we're seeing and the difficulties in building and maintaining relationships with our students while instructing two to three different groups at the same time so again we we really see some major issues in being able to sustain this long term as we're already seeing major issues just three weeks in with our with our educators so we do feel that there could be a more effective model that could be put in place and i do want to note that ca is not opposed to in-person learning at all we just feel that we could have a more equitable and sustainable uh model for six through 12.
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the only item on the agenda is the superintendent evaluation um the summary of the results and the memo to the superintendent was circulated um so this obviously was done a little bit differently this year because everything about this year was just really different um so i guess just for other um committee members any questions comments concerns about the memo or voting on it or anything at all questions comments concerns about the the memo or voting on it or okay sarah bess is good ron if you would like to speak give a thumbs up and we'll unmute you and you can and click on say that one more time around should i just leave the meeting it's a meeting if you leave we don't have a program we can't meet a meeting my advice is if ron is okay voting without commenting you know he can indicate that uh with a thumbs up if he wants to speak we can figure out an alternate method of calling in okay so ron is giving the thumbs up um okay great so i i guess the only thing i will say is you really stepped up and that is reflected in all of the evaluations um proficient is seen as as you know very good that is really good um and you were more than proficient in many areas um obviously the progress on various things had less meaning for a lot of reasons um but i think what really came across in the various ratings and in the written comments was just a huge amount of confidence in your ability to deal with year-to-year things that need to happen for student learning but also just in a crisis knowing what to prioritize and when how to communicate about it and how to you know connect the right people the right committees um there were a lot of comments about people feeling lucky to have you as the leader of the district um and during a time when there's a complete crisis of leadership in many areas that really means a lot um so thank you and i know that this does not mean you get to just like put your feet up and phone it in like this is you still this is not like um but it was noticed and it matters and thank you uh would anyone like to sorry i'm not going to even give you a chance to talk because i know you have to go okay just you can give me a thumbs up too um all right is there a motion to approve the evaluations as drafted i move we approve the evaluations as drafted i second that i will do a roll call vote uh mr menino great uh miss kenny kenny yay and hall i is approved uh i move to adjourn the pound school committee second all right roll call vote ron menino thumbs up for an eye sarah best i'm kenny hi we are adjourned bye
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all right uh this is one that also just is an information item for the board that comes every year as to the total amount of allocations we're receiving through all of the different federal grants so these are available for your review in here gina is the one that puts together this information for you every year there's really questions on this it's more of just an information item but if you do have questions uh you approve them tonight saying that you've seen them and that's kind of what you're you're doing since these are all determined at the federal level anyway it is a substantial amount of money uh district so thank you any questions is 2.260 revised and 2.265 newton boy i'm out of order here um there we go did we skip that one or am i out over the do we have the teacher administrative benefit report that's later that's later yeah well i can't order slides obviously an opportunity to review did anybody i know i had a little question so here's the yeah here are the two policies that are there so title nine changed over this summer next month we're going to come back and share what some of those changes are and we've just been really focused with the board on return uh to in-person learning but uh what used to happen was in 2.260 sat all of the grievance policies including title ix as a result of the changes in legislation and the recommendations of our legal team we've ada we have added 2.265 which pulls out title ix grievance procedures and sets it aside so somebody could have a uniform grievance claim they could also have a title nine claim they aren't uh absolutely mutually exclusive um we're asking the board to do the taking unusual action tonight to just wave the first reading and just adopt these policies there it's at the recommendation of our legal team that we do so it's all written by our attorneys you know the administration has had no oversight over these policies and they recommend because this law already is in place that we just adopt these immediately the administration's been trained on all these procedures between all the other work we've done gina herself has sat through more than 12 or 15 hours of training on this herself so that we are in compliance for all the training that goes along with this every administrator in the district has received multiple rounds of training on this over the last two months and next month we'll come and tell you what that was all about very good any questions or okay uh the 2021 school calendar campuses all right this is uh any change that we make in the calendar needs to come before the board one of the things we did was because that week of the non-attendance day on monday that we've talked about that october 12th week was already messed up we decided to just mess up the whole week and move parent teacher conferences off of the following week and back to the week before information on scheduling those and how they work i mean they'll all be remotely and how that all happens will be coming but essentially the important part tonight is that the board approves that amended calendar that reflects that it keeps us on our two weeks right keeps that the rotation fits inside of there any questions hearing none the next administrator teacher salary benefits i already skipped past that slide but every year that gets updated on the website and we are required to inform the board at a public meeting that we updated it on our website and we did did you have a question okay any questions the asc condensing unit uh this is the part of the uh air conditioning unit major part of the air conditioning unit at the administrative service center yeah this is like what does the majority of the work uh it is a 28 year old piece of equipment that jim is holding together macgyver style with duct tape and paper clips not literally but you know what i mean yeah and uh and it is reached it is more than reached the end of its life uh so jim went out for bids on this and is recommending that the board accept tonight under action the lowest acceptable bid and we get this work done [Music] all right this is the last week i brought you update on actual progress this week i'm bringing you an update on the budget this is the monthly budget report on the master facility plan the key variables that we look at is we're still hitting our gmax contract values so the amount that we told the public that this was going to cost is still the number that we're inside of that 122 million one hundred thirty five thousand eight hundred thirty dollars inside of that we have nearly did out everything that's where you can see unless you know we're down to about 1.3 million dollars worth of items to bid out over the next year so what that tells you is this is we're getting really close to what the absolute price is on this you could see the contingency adjusted a little bit off of work that was completed over the last month but we're still very healthy at 3.258 million dollars if you remember white was the construction group was asking for us to make sure that there was one million dollars in there for the final summer of work so we're well above that owner budget costs continue to increase which is due to things mostly uh related to found asbestos or lead paint and removing that so as the board is already well aware we have removed far more of those two substances from our building that we ever expected to but it's good that those things are gone uh you can see the contingency up there remaining ff e allowance that is uh furniture fixtures and equipment there will be a lot of that next year because both commons come online next summer that is a lot of furniture and equipment so you can see we have a little over half of that allowance remaining for that last part of the project now inside of that you know we've got a lot of the steam stuff done at both sides of town in phase a and b right the science technology engineering and math if you walk up past these classrooms at the end of the night you'll see a lot of that displayed and then the last bit of allowances that could become contingency if they're not used phase a 110 000 sitting there and that's about ready to come back because we're almost done with sprinklers and fire alarms phase b was the work that was completed this summer so allowances remaining after this summer's work are 194 000 so after we get through all of the final bills and punch lists and hours that is the amount that could come back to us it should be close to that when we're done and then you can see if they see is a large amount of allowances out because the majority of that work has not begun yet so we have another 1.305 million in allowances that if not spent now remember we're anticipating we'll need to spend all of that right but any amount of that that is not spent would also come back to the contingency at the end of the summer next year uh site improvements we have about 105 000 left in sight improvements and those are wrapping up as well so uh we sit pretty healthy so far as contingency and allowances sit uh i well ahead of budget or you know better than expected with our budget so hank not directly related to the budget but made me think of it by october 19th when the new hybrid schedule kicks in will the new science labs and that whole new ex extension at north be ready yeah the the southeast steam edition it's going to be really close to that time now that's not holding us back that's not influencing or we we're fully prepared to open school with that work going on it should be wow making sure you're all awake uh it should be right around that time that it's finishing up so it'll be right as they're coming back for that or just after they come back but it's in that window you know it depends on how the next couple of weeks go you know you saw it a few weeks ago and it was really steel at that point mike's on on friday and all the walls are up you know so you know they move really fast you know in that work once they once they move inside it it's crazy how fast they move do we have workout to bid right now uh yeah some some of that last dollar amount which is really case work for phase c has there's been a considerable increase in cost material costs this year thanks to covid correct and london right now is about 60 percent higher than it was in january i mean how are we how are we faring with dealing with those increased costs and and supply chain issues uh well the majority of our stuff was bit out before we hit the you know the real effects of covid i asked if we had things out to bid right now but the stuff that's out to bid is you know 1.3 million in the you know is what's left you know so in the whole scope of the entire project that's a very small you know it's less than one percent um so we're not concerned about that okay you know it's from i'm sure the the folks bidding on that are a lot of the same folks that have been bidding on case work throughout the entire project it's not raised any red flags amongst the team i'm glad we have a lot of contingency just in case so yeah you know it did it was a lot of tripping over one another or not tripping over that was the problem this summer is we couldn't trip over one another we had to stagger all the deliveries and arrivals and and that made it a far more complex summary that's another point too um you know to put to bed the myth that somehow you know uh that we we haven't had schools open so that we could get more work done that's that's not the case and as well um uh we haven't really haven't been able to accelerate much because of the you know these issues of keeping people apart and and you know we would have been able to open in that first week of school exactly the way that we anticipated right you know before the summer began the projects that are still going on like the dunham street circle here the steam edition at north or all projects that we knew would extend into the start of the school year but the the fact that the schools have been closed hasn't assisted us greatly in accelerating the process of cons the construction no it helped us early right like in the spring it allowed us to get footings in the ground earlier and those kinds of things things that we wouldn't have been able to do if students were on campus yes but then the complexity of having to maintain social distancing and separation over the course of the summer slowed us down so at the end we kind of just ended up where we thought we would be right i know this you know this i want to make sure everyone else knows too so anything else in distillery yes we have and they're available on our website that's how you can get to those five year financial projections all right mark's going to take most of this just a reminder for the board the reason for the five-year financial projection is that it really provides the best view of the financial stability long range as far out as we could reasonably be expected to project this is your starting point for next year's budget in the cycle and this is the first opportunity for the next year for the board to direct me and then ultimately the administration that our priorities are wrong in some way and are not matching with the mission and vision of the district or the board's expectations things that mark will talk about today three things that run through this presentation are obviously financial challenges due to the pandemic remember we ran a deficit a slight deficit at the end of the last school year mostly related to non-collected fees the need for working cash bonds because of that deficit that occurred last year in a projected deficit this year and then how long term were bolstered by expiring tips so that's your preview and i will turn it over to mark to talk about more of the specifics okay so the pandemic had its effect on our budget pretty heavily last last quarter of last year um and as as hank had mentioned it put us into a negative spot and it wasn't just the waiver fees actually it was one of them just one of the items interest rates anything that was tied to the economy dropped and came in lower than we expected in last year and really we're planning for that going forward so i'm going to start with a five year projection and there's a rather lengthy memo that goes along with this in the board packet and i encourage you to read that for the full details i'm just going to hit the highlights but we're going to start with the five year projection and then we'll discuss a working cash bond issuance we had a hearing for that and a few months ago and and we are proposing that and i'll get into some detail for that and then roll it into the budget for the next year that we'll be asking you to prove tonight the uh first one there you see this in your board packet as a much longer sheet this is just the top section of it and it's also in front of you important members you have yeah you should have the full sheet in front of you um the key thing here is that really the new construction value that we've had historically is has been pretty low really the since the recession we haven't had any great spurts in that area um but um we do expect at least i expect that with this pandemic and then with the economy right now that it won't be as high as it's been on average and at least starting out for the first year the the forecast to have a 0.7 cpi i'm sorry new construction value for for projecting our tax revenues which are highly dependent upon the cpi and the new construction together um the eav change really doesn't have a big impact on our revenue source it changes our tax rate that's all because the property tax caps have actually unhinged um our tax extension and assessed values as one of the problems i would say with the with the tax caps just one of them um there's really not too many key things on this sheet but it's just to let you know what assumptions were in place so that if we were to change those around it would have an impact on it anything with the gray grey shade with white lettering is going to have a high impact because it's going to have a direct uh impact on the on the forecast and more immediately so the second middle section here are the key variables uh the top line uh the projected enrollment we use a an outside um estimation by john casardo who's a does our enrollment projections he does it for almost all the schools in dupage county nationally as well you can see that for 2021 our current year it's actually up a little bit that affected our fte count and things like that because if you look below that we try and keep a consistent program which using this new metric that we started with last year is the average class size but also a couple of rows down the fte ratio of 12.2 that's that's not just certified teachers but it's all certified support staff as well and we try to maintain the program um in terms of the consistent experience for students of course this is a very strange year but going forward we assume we're going to keep the same quality programming in place gray areas with the white uh font here again are with if we were to change that fte ratio the ratio of certified staff to students or um below that they can't capital outlay for the annual capital outlay for projects and with the uh ms to facility plan kind of culminating next summer we're we've allowed that to drop down by a couple hundred thousand dollars but typically we try and keep that at 1.2 million dollars for out throughout the forecast and one adjustment that i may do this typically i use a five-year average for the consumer price index for property taxes but if you look at the lowest row there right now we've been watching it we track it every month and it kind of implies that we could be down as low as one percent so i'm using that as the estimation for the impact on property taxes um for the 21 22 22 fiscal year if we're going out to the um next page there's some tips that are really important and um have big impact on us um we have a fourth tip which is not um not even coming due yet won't end until the 2029 20 30 fiscal year so it's not really in the picture here but um the woodridge james avenue tip is and tip is a a protected area in terms of its uh it's a evaluation districts are aren't really enabled we the it's an area that is possibly blighted or as has a lack of growth in in areas so it'd be like an area where the buildings are vacant possibly and um james avenue was a tiffin wood ridge where um what happens it's a tax tax increment financing situation where um they freeze the value of the tax taxes to us in terms of assessed valuation access to those to make taxes on it and then they use the they still pay taxes but it's kept by the village instead of coming to the school district and they make improvements in that area over a period of time and it can last as long as 23 24 years and that's so these are really long-term plans um when they do it and so we have one that in woodridge that ended at the end of 2019 the new construction value that accrued from the last 23 years will now be released back to us and so instead of paying taxes and it being held by the municipality it'll come to us and so it's a boost in our assessed valuation i'm sorry our levy and our extensions for taxes um but we won't see that until the next fiscal year to us which is the the 20 uh or the calendar year 20 20 21 we won't see it until the 21-22 fiscal year because we defer our early taxes so i want to just lay this out so you could see the lag that develops between when the tif expires new construction hits the tax rules the next year and then the following year is when we actually see it in our budget and so the downgraders group downtown tax tip is uh expires at the end of this calendar year december 31st new construction will be added in 2012 2021 and then the taxes we'll see it would be the two collections or the series of collections we have in our calendar year 2022.
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overall though we understand the challenges this year and what it was going to bring but as mr gorman said you know there is fluidity and flexibility here and so we hope that we could make some changes to better the education of our students and have a sustainable and reasonable plan for our educators we do encourage that the board review all of these items and you know make necessary changes so that we can provide the best educational opportunities for our students thank you so much for the time and have a great night all right stacy reagan good evening my name is [Laughter] yeah uh my name is stacy reagan for those of you who don't know me i'm an instructional coach for the district this is gail stover one of the instructional coaches i'm writing this on behalf of our instructional coaching team i've been teaching at central 301 for 26 years and during my time i've certainly witnessed many changes to the district and this year is no exception to change i would first like to take this opportunity to thank the board for providing our teachers the invaluable professional development time before school started the collaboration teamwork and problem solving during the professional development among staff members in the same building as well as across the district was amazing without this time our teachers would not have been prepared to start on august 31st with students as an instructional coaching team we witness teachers rolling up their sleeves to learn new skills and collaborate with colleagues to find ways to instruct students in a foreign environment we watch teacher teams pushing the envelope to be creative problem solvers with the parameters set before them we watch teachers excited by the prospects of new ways to do school with their students and we watch teachers warmly welcoming students back into their rooms eager to start the school year but we also saw other things happening we worked with teachers who worked tirelessly all day in their canvas accounts to find some of what they completed was lost the next day due to unforeseen circumstances with technology through sheer grit and determination they wiped their tears and dug in to do the hard work and anticipation of seeing their student succeed we observed overwhelmed teachers adjusting to the new normal to do their job at the level they are used to doing we witness teachers stress to a level we have never seen the first week back is always stressful however this has added a stress beyond compare what we witnessed over the last few weeks was our 301 teachers working extremely hard to learn new skills out of their comfort zones to adjust to a non-traditional model of teaching that no one ever envisioned let alone was trained for during their undergraduate or master's programs we want you and the community at large to know and understand that the support staff the teachers and the administrators of district 301 have worked tirelessly to make this return to school be successful community support during this time is crucial for the success of the year when we see public comments on social media platforms that are negative it damages the morale of our staff and does nothing to move us all in a positive direction we know we cannot help what others write but we are asking the community for grace for our 301 staff as we navigate through this exceptional time in our history there will be bumps in the road as we navigate this new normal there will be failures and there will be successes through it all we grow and learn we have asked or we have tasked our teachers administrators and support staff to solve a puzzle with missing pieces and like any good teacher they were able to patch together and create pieces to fit where none existed simply stated our teachers our administrators and our support staff have given their all because they care for the students they serve again we would like to thank you for providing critical past professional development time as well as future dates for that professional development which will prove time to be well spent for our teachers and it's signed by our seven instructional coaches so thank you thank you thank you we'll move on to action items uh we need a motion second to discuss and approve the consent agenda but the revenue and expenditure summary reports are in your board packet revenues are currently at 11.09 compared to 9.18 a year ago expenditures are at 10.88 percent compared to 11.84 a year ago since the last board meeting the district received three months worth of impact fees totaling 347 thousand 259.17 for 62 new home starts june's figures came in at 123 782 for 26 new home starts july's came in at 785 for 21 home starts and august came in at 97 hundred and ninety dollars with for fifteen new home starts um this puts us at four hundred and one thousand four forty nine of our six hundred seventy five thousand dollar budget um transition fees also came in at forty four 000.090 and 18 cents um so the year-to-date transition fees came are at 54 000 905 which puts us over my tentative budget of 50 000 and that's why i increased it to 80.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
and then the last one is an ogden avenue tiff which is a large tip um frozen octane by by the downers grove uh village it expires in 2024 so it is that's the only activity during this five-year period that we'll really see we won't see that until um 2026 calendar years ended in our fiscal year 26-27 so i wanted you just to see the picture because these are really rare we only have one other tiff and that's an oak brook again that won't expire until 2029 but from a financial impact if you go back up to the woodridge there's two things that we'll see that will help our our five-year forecast there's a 430 thousand dollar balance um that's our portion of the ending fund balance so there were stiff funds that were pushed into it by the village or collected by the village but they didn't spend it all by the time that they're expiring and so our relative share of that along with all the other tax taxing bodies is 430 000 it's a one-time hit but you'll see it in our in our financial forecast and then the annual increase that we'll we'll experience from the the property tax evaluation increases coming back to us will give us about a 96 000 a year boost in our taxation tax extension look at the middle one this is really the big one that we've we've known about and have been watching and working with the village on and that's the downtown to they issued bonds to do all the work in the tip they don't so they don't have a ton of money and they the money that comes into the tif is used for those to pay off those bonds and principal and interest and it it has and typically does exceed uh the cost of the bonds principal interest exceeds the amount that's been collected so the villages had to cover that difference so there's really no fun balance that's available there like there was with the woodridge tip but the impact to our chest valuation is going to be really large 1.2 percent increase it'll generate about a million a year in additional revenue for the district so these are things that we've been watching when we do a five year we know that there's been in the future where it gives us some some a safety net and the fact that you'll hear me use that term several times there's several different safety nets that we have that are coming into play here for the next one that's the bottom section of the the long form that's projected financial data and again the area in gray with the white is the key stuff that's unusual but if you look for the the second column fiscal year 2021 our revenues we expect to go up 1.6 percent that might be a little optimistic but we're hoping that they do still grow primarily property taxes but but we have if you noticed on the schedule that showed all the different uh federal uh programs and titles that we're in um you notice it's been dropping every year and so so is some of the state money that we're concerned very concerned about the state of economy in illinois and their ability to maintain the level of support that they've been giving us and so we have um very high concerns about that but so the budget that we have gives us about 1.6 percent revenues for this year for the 2021 budget expenditures 95.2 million and excess of revenues actually 377 thousand dollars the next line down is called transfers to other funds and this is something we started i would actually i think it was in 2004 2005 we started doing projects out of our operating funds instead of issuing bonds to do it we would issue debt certificates which are payable out of an operating fund and then we would not have to increase our tax to taxpayers but knowing that this this cost to pay those bonds would end someday knew that at some point we would have um excess room in our operating funds uh as kind of a safety net into the future and we we've done some serious things with this we we purchased land under this mechanism next to the north campus all the expansion of the north campus was done through death certificates and paying it out of the educational and other operating funds instead of issuing bonds and having taxable bonds to our taxpayers the norfolk extension to continue norfolk across from dunham to to springside was done with that kind of funding and also some other large projects inside the buildings we've done the same way knowing that someday that that would kind of go down and if you look at the transfers you can see that it does drop drastically in 2223 it's going to go from 3.8 million dollars of money coming out of the operating funds to pay for some construction and other things down to 663 and that 600 is largely stuff that we do put off um that's where our chromebook costs and other things that we use some small leasing projects for that and so that's a that's a big positive for our five-year forecast so it tells us even if you look at our change in operating fund balance and that's what i usually point have the point of the pioneer to the board look at the change in operating fund balance that tells us where we are we lost about a million dollars last year kind of unusual we usually don't have losses like that but all of our local revenues interest some some of us a waiver of these corporate personal property replacement tax which is something that's it's based on the economy in terms of taxpayers uh corporate taxpayers paying money that comes to us well if they earn less money a lot of shops are closed a lot of businesses are closed there's going to be less corporate personal property replacement tax available so there's we have two years after uh this year 2021 we're going to lose we project 2.3 million and in 2122 with 3 million which if we don't do anything would leave us with a negative fund balance you can see um where we would be that so what in the current year of 2021 you'll see in the gray box a 10 million dollar bond issuance and that's been recommended to the board of education um to issue working cash bonds so that we could bolster our reserves and have dollars available for the next couple years when we really don't know exactly i mean we're guessing it at these lost numbers the state of illinois is our biggest concern at least mine and that there's a lot of push for a progressive tax rate and if that's not passed there's discussion that all state budgets would have to start you know getting cut so we really don't know exactly where some things are going to go with especially at the national level certainly the presidential election is an unknown that could have an impact on the economy as well so this is where it leaves us actually it puts us in good condition we've always maintained a relatively low fund balance things have been predictable enough that we've been able to survive that way districts around us have up to 50 60 percent reserves which my philosophy has always been it's kind of like how corporations work it's the shareholders regarding the money in their pocket than sitting in the corporation's pocket and if we can um get by with the low low uh reserve level i'd like to do that but i think we're gonna we're going into some kind of unknown territory and i'm recommending a little bit higher balance is still very prudent um and that's where we would end up probably by the end of this five-year forecast if all this pans out the right the same way it's it's very um lean compared to you look at surrounding districts and others other schools so that's really the key things about the the forecast so um the next action is is an action any questions your mark yeah yeah can you go back back to that slide sure so in your the transfer to other funds we talked about the two seven and the three eight the next two years if you look at the excess revenue for this year at 377 there's still a lot of unknowns for this year we've been talking about tonight is there any piece of that two seven that could be delayed or pushed into future years like 22 23 or 23 24 when we look like we're in a better situation because i mean this this these numbers are good because of the the bonds that you're going to talk about now but if that 377 goes negative on us which it really could because of what's going on i don't know do we want to have more flexibility the candles be pushed out could you tell me where the two seven which one you're the 377 on the excess revenue okay right and then so i'm just wondering if that two seven the 2.73 transfers to other funds in the 3.837 in 2020 and 2021 do we have flexibility to push that out to future years where it looks like we're in a little bit better financial shape we can it would cost it would be a refinancing at this point you know and trying to stretch it out it'd be refinancing those are death certificates um we can but the the again the we think the safest solution is actually let them just mature on their own um and even with the 10 million baht and bob which i've talked to you several times about that and the the economy is getting very jumpy right now and even uh you know a lot of the a couple banks aren't going to bid on it and they've already told us that they aren't going to bid because they don't know what's going on with the state of illinois and they think that that's going to directly impact us and so it may not be a great time just to re to refinance those i mean we could we could but i i i was really thinking it would be better to leave that off go ahead and issue the bonds that we we talked about and calculated and then go that way yes it's just stretching it out and paying more interest over the long term but yeah they just yeah there's just yeah seems to be a lot of uncertainty next year things get really terrible again that might be a solution to to free up that you know somehow stretch it out over three or four years or something okay any other questions again there's i think i think a fairly thorough write-up on that whole five years so in the in the board packet so please um refer to that memo for more details if you walk away from here and have questions at all reach out to me and mark and i'll show you the answer soon so the next item that i have to present is the working cash bond resolution and we've again preparing to issue a one point 10.3 million working cash fund bonds the purpose of these funds would be to support the district's operating funds reserves which have fallen below three percent uh due to changes in the economy caused by the covet 19 pandemic we just broke through it to 2.6 last year and i believe the year prior to that we were right on the 2.9 level as well working cash bonds if you don't know their issue for working cash fund purposes to enable the district to have in its treasury at all times sufficient money to meet the demands for expenditures for corporate purposes the procedure that working cash fund bonds will be deposited at the working cash fund at closing and will be available for inter-fund loans accordingly they are not able to be issued as exempt from federal taxes if you issue bonds for money you're going to hold on to you can't measure them as as non-taxable or tax-exempt bonds that we use for our master facility plan where we know we're going to spend them on a schedule those those were able to be issued on a tax-exempt basis but the market is so tight right now that it's it's not that much of a spread between taxable and non-taxable bond bonds so it's it's still worth it to to go to the market now um this resolution is a parameters resolution it's because of specific parameters that are listed in it that um and and give the board president myself together to agree on whether the parameters are met and that we would have the authorization to sign and close the documents for the bonds bonds the documents needed to for the bonds the key parameters are 10.3 million maximum bond issuance maximum annual principal of 2.5 million dollars for the bonds to be spread out to not extend the annual debt service beyond 2028 uh to sell the bonds no later than march 21st of 2021 gives us quite a window if we have a bad market we can just wait uh for a while and it says a maximum interest rate of five percent that's a standard if you if we go to um a different type of sale but we expect it again we expect interest rates to be below two percent on this one but the bond council always puts five percent in there of course um so and i mentioned that the parameters resolution further authorizes the board presidents and me to approve the sale final sale of the bonds as long as the parameters within this resolution are being met um we're going to use a competitive bid process which is um we have contacted and sent out term sheets to banks that have bought bonds in the past who support schools we also there's other mechanisms those township treasures in different counties in cook county that buy school bonds and and are very competitive and so we will have a they all turn them in they're all closed bids they turn them into our underwriters and then we review them for uh making sure they meet their parameters and they also we would take obviously the lowest cost issuing uh let's see is anything else up there that i should make sure i cover in terms of eight years um the thing oh you know and the thing that kind of goes into the next piece is the um the debt service extension base that's you know i think uh anyway we've got that piece i wanted you to see it graphically because i've talked about it before how a dead service extension base works you see the blue line that's on you know that's towards the bottom going all the way across when the tax caps came out there was a realization that schools still have to do life safety work and would need is working cash bonds and there's a third item which is i think tort judgment bonds which is if you had some kind of a judgment against the district you could issue bonds for that to help pay off that cost but they realized that we needed a mechanism and so they allowed for a while it was just whatever that dollar amount was when they do the tax caps whatever it was i think it was 2.2 million for us at that time um you could issue bonds for 2.2 million per year in terms of debt payment so you couldn't cross that line but you could levy up to it and initiate bonds up to that um and so you look in the far left uh where we right now it's it's about 2.5 million now um and we assume the same amount going across we it actually can increase by cpi but we for this purpose haven't increased it with this calculation of the cost of the bonds um so the first three first two columns are already filled with life safety bonds from the past the third orange line has a little teeny bit of light orange in there that's going to be part of this bond issuance so we're going to fill in um going forward up for seven years the the the that service extension base we're going to use it and quite honestly because life safety is a cyclical thing every 10 years typically this is a base that's always going to be in our taxes i mean it can drop and it you know over time but it typically isn't because you know as soon as you're done doing the work for life safety new rules come out do you have to sprinkle areas that you didn't have to sprinkle before different life safety things are in place um i'm amazed at how they can always find new things but um so that's that's what we'd be doing we'd be filling in the orange keeping it to that same tax level so the taxpayer won't see a drop that they might have seen if we didn't do this uh starting with the 2023 i'm sorry 2021 uh school year by a little bit the average across of those is going to be about 30 dollars it's on the average taxpayer for net for a 300 000 home i think i've miscalculated it before and i said 12 so it's closer to 30 on average i think they're paying right now with our first year is about 48 so that's the highest annual impact when we pick up the full orange bars but over the life of this it's about dollars a year for three hundred thousand dollars and that's um an important factor we have to understand that we we are very careful with our tax rate we still have maintained i checked with all the other uh high schools in japanese county we have the second lowest in this in the county of uh for tax rate a total operating tax rate and that's an important part and i i try to be a good steward of that and um that's why we'd like to just spread this out and not let it increase and try and have the at least try and minimize the impact to taxpayers as much as possible so just to be clear it's taxes that could potentially drop in the future that we are leaving at their current amount and not dropping to withstand the impacts of the pandemic here and i mean people will see their same property tax bill as a result of it and not less uh it is likely though due to this being used for other things like life safety projects and capital improvements and things related to that that we would have continued to do that kind of work in this space in the future anyway this is that emergency fund for when emergency projects develop that's what it was put there for by the state of illinois and that's what we're proposing to continue to use it for all right the next item is a is a budget hearing and i'll do a quick presentation and then you can maybe open it open it for hearing um so the first uh slide there is a revenue there we go uh this is a revenue that's we've um we've put it out in at the august 17th board meeting and had the board approved to be issued is a tentative budget it's been on display for more than 30 days so we're now at the point of being able to prove it and have it be our formal budget for the 20 21 school year fiscal year um i highlighted the bond proceeds in there this that's that's something that you know very obviously changes that exhibit by issuing 10 million dollars in bond proceeds it would really be shown as another financial source but in the final formal documents but i put it in there so you can see it does have a big impact on our on our combined revenue percent change it's up at 12.2 percent well that's why because it's his 10 million dollar bond in it um without that it's about a 1.5 percent increase and if you look at the replacement taxes that's the second line down under the fiscal year 2021 the orange topping there's property taxes 2.1 and this is one of the reasons states like i don't know use property taxes because they are not going to wither away and can go down when a recession or pandemic or something like this hits uh and changes the sets values it it helps the programs be better and consistent more consistent placement taxes that all the local things that have impact based on the economy are dropping replacement taxes 17 and that's a hard number that we got from the department of revenue that's not an estimate interest income is is going to drop some more it's it's dropped you look at on the right-hand side where a fiscal year last year was is starting to drop but we typically earn more than a million dollars a year in interest income and now we're down to 342 000 food services we do expect an increase in waivers because of what's happening in the economy with unemployment it's just something that we expect so we're expecting to lose money with food services in terms of um when we you know the program itself isn't even running right now so that's part of the problem we typically do based on just this the state support and the meal prices which are very low meal prices actually cover our costs of the food and and helps us cover some costs of just custodial care and other kitchen and replacing equipment in the kitchen and things like that that that it takes to run the cafeteria um but we won't we don't think we'll be taking in that much at all this year maybe half a year if we're lucky with with um if we can open the kitchen let's say the second semester and i doubt that that's going to happen but when we started putting the budget together that was our projection for it um registration fees again that's going to be affected by waivers and just other local revenues which typically involves rental income and things like that which have been disturbed right now too we're not renting out our property to large groups so overall the budget without the bond proceeds is about 1 1.5 1.6 uh of an increase and that's really almost totally attributable to to taxes the last two items general and state aid the state portion of that is largely a reimbursement of last year's transportation which was up much higher because of an increase in tuition students and the federal aid is that 300 000 forty thousand of the federal increase of three hundred fifty three thousand is covered related reimbursements we expect to get and we're applying for a grant with the iema illinois um emergency fund so we can get some dollars and recover some rubber costs for the ppe and um other things like that related to the pandemic so so those aren't really we hope we would love to see those costs go away and then the revenue reimbursement go away too we'd like to be back to normal so if we move on to expenditures um the fte the first item is salaries and the the fte uh accounts for about 1.3 percent of that we have some because of enrollment changes but we also have things like the nurses that we're contracting or being paid out of there out of that line item so we have we've crossed also related to the pandemic there but the without that it's about a 1.7 increase for existing staff about 90 of our uh salaries are tied to collective bargaining agreements and and so they go up and down with whatever cpi is for the most part and um and so we and we're in the middle of a five year or after this first full year of a five year agreement with our teachers and uh we'll be finishing one with our support staff but um we'll be working on a new one this later this year um benefits 3.6 increase um really typically the we budget budget six percent but we're having a real good year right now it's it's uh some of that i think is because of colbit or uh people who who would normally getting elected electoral surgeries are not having it done um and so our plan hasn't paid out so much but um 3.6 is our our estimated increase for that and yeah really nothing too exciting here the capital outlay is is down because we bought some activity buses last year and again we're trying to just tailor it down a little bit because of all the other construction going on in the area so the bottom line is really what it does to this last exhibit which is the fund balances you we just sort it all together for you so there's a beginning um and if you i guess the line to look at is that on the lower section the tentative budget totals we have about 408 thousand dollars in the operating funds exclusive of the health benefit accounts so there's a the health trust is 1.8 million dollars below that so we have 2.2 million dollars in the in the total operating funds for the district but we keep the health benefit out because it's only used for that purpose it's not like it could be used for anything else and if we do issue the bond and we hope that that happens you can see the last grouping right above that orange line is a working cash fund we'll be establishing a working cash fund which will now be part of the operating funds so you'll be able to see where it is every year and every month when we report to you but now we can track it you know where it's going tentative budget totals would be eight million dollars for the operating fund in the in the for the current year and so you can see we need to dip into that ten million dollar bond right away because we'll be about two million dollars short in the operating funds uh by the end of this year that's that's the item so now if you would like you could if you have any questions any questions from the board before we do the public hearing and open it up to anybody who would like to comment on but nope all right at this point no we had all this ahead of time at this point we can move into the public hearing nancy so this is a public hearing on the 2020 2021 tentative budget the tentative budget has been on display for 30 days as required by law now the administration brings the tentative budget forward to the board for final approval this is the final opportunity for the public to provide feedback on the tentative budget before the board takes action later this evening does anybody want to address the board come on come on up to the dear members of the board of education my name is scott o'connell i'm a member of the downers grove watch unfortunately our president tom sleeter is unavailable to be here tonight so i will be representing the watch for this hearing therefore i'll also be providing testimony and asking questions of various witnesses at this time while i'm concluding this opening statement i ask that the individual controlling the white screen here at the meeting in this and the screen available to those viewing the meeting remotely locate two pdf files additionally i ask that members of the board take a moment to locate and open the same records on their laptop computers i'll be referencing pages from the following two documents the first record that should be made available to the audience is the pdf file containing the isbe excel budget form for fiscal year 2021 as found on the district's web page the pdf file is 21 pages this record can be located by starting on the district's home page with the top line menu item labeled departments then business then financial information under the subheading budget information the second record that should be open at this time in anticipation of its eventual viewing is the record found within tonight's agenda at 7c entitled financial pages the pdf file is 24 pages with the first page being the monthly treasurer's report signed by school treasurer eric wagner at this time i wish to remind the elected members of the board that participation by members of the audience during a hearing such as this one is distinctly different from the public comment period that is required under the open meetings act to be a part of every agenda of every meeting held by the public body a hearing is not just another meeting held by the board in front of the community a hearing allows relevant statements both oral statements and written statements to be made by members of the community to the board so that those statements can be considered before the full board takes final action on a critical matter these statements are often referred to as testimony in addition to testimony from the community the structure of a hearing allows for questions to be asked by members of the audience of various witnesses in attendance additionally the structure of the hearing allows um i'm sorry it is additionally the structure of the hearing allows for questions to be asked by members of the board of various witnesses in attendance it is critical that each individual board member understand that during a hearing your position is modified to being at times a witness being asked a question by the audience administrators may also be called as witnesses and ask questions additionally if there are any other individuals who are considered to be expert witnesses those witnesses can be called forward for questioning during a hearing all witnesses including the chair of this hearing along with the other six members of the board should consider each of their answers to be the equivalent to testimony given under oath either answers given during a deposition or an open court i would like to remind each witness that i call that your answer should be related to the question asked and that the answer be truthful to the best of your knowledge and belief finally during the time that i have the floor whether i am providing testimony or questioning any witness i fully expect that the cheer of the hearing will maintain decorum and will immediately address anyone attempting to interfere with the hearing by informing them that interruptions will not be tolerated please go on there simply consulting i just wanted to to wait until they were done talking so i could be heard additionally under the criminal code of illinois if anyone interferes with the witness who is answering a question that person can be arrested and charged with interfering with a public hearing that warning is applicable to everyone including board members witnesses such as administrators and members of the audience that concludes my opening statement please confirm consider the following to be my written testimony and questions on the proposed budget for fiscal year 2021 i will be providing of this written testimony and my drafted questions to the secretary of the board of education in order for her to place both within the record of this hearing as previously stated my comments will directly reference various pages and cells found within the isbe budget form 50-36 for fiscal year 2021 at this time i ask that the pdf file containing the august treasures report and the other 23 pages be shown to the audience and be viewed by the board and administrators could you is there no we are not prepared to buy that nor will we ask that in advance therefore we will not be presenting it however i can if you send me an email requesting that i can float it to the board of education okay well on the treasures on the august treasurer's report um my first question was directed to board member drexler do you have the treasures report open no we don't you don't okay now mr o'connell there's no requirement the board members have any of these documentations that you're requesting open available or at their disposal at this time you can claim that that's the case but there is no requirement that they have access to these materials they have been provided access to these materials in advance of tonight's board meeting well let me tell you what's on the treasurer's report this is page two of the check register page f8 of the treasures report if you have the ability to access this you will be approving this in the consent agenda fruit later tonight um the third entry on page 8 begins with check number 223936 that line represents one of the bills that you and the board will be escalated this evening to approve the title of the fund and that bill is life safety on page on page 13 the 20th entry also is number 224 mr o'connell can you raise your mask please on page 13 i'm sorry on page 13 the 20th entry is also titled in the fund life safety in the amount of 773 dollars now these two entries um record the fact that later this evening the superintendent the chief school business official will be asking that this board approved the expenditure of 41 hundred forty eight dollars and thirty five cents out of the life safety fund a fund which has been labored by the isbe is the 90 fund now at the top of page seven of 24 the third entry on page seven is life safety as i've said um well i'm sorry page seven is the [Music] earlier in the treasures report where it's f7 it's showing the expenses the accounts payable check registered fund totals and the title is life safety 41 548 dollars and 35 cents my next question is to um is that a question well since you you don't nobody is going to open this up because you don't want to um the name of that fund is the capital projects fund now [Music] if a fund is labeled within this records the capital projects fund a record presumed to be drafted by the administration and one that you are likely to sign under penalty perjury is it the is it the actual fire prevention and life safety fund of the district is anybody aware of what fund is are you aware of what fund that those expenses are being approved from i'm going to take that as a no okay now is for controller stale one of your duties is to establish record keeping that properly accounts for the various funds of the district as such you keep a set of books and the school treasurer eric wagner keeps a set of books so witness stand are you the administrator that overseas on a monthly basis this production of this record yes i am yes you are witness stalin is the fund label within this record as the capital projects fund actually the fire prevention and life safety fund of the district and a fund that has been designated by the isbe as the 90 fund yeah the fire prevention and life safety fund is a capital projects fund so we use that name that title for it as well in the short messages on those the answer the answer to the question is yes if it says life safety coming from it yes i would say it's a capital project fund life safety yes now on the very first page of your um statement of financial position you list the funds and there is a an mfp capital projects fund and there is a capital projects fund that has 316 000 dollars in it that is what you are claiming is the life safety fund yes yes okay thank you can i ask what this has to do with the budget itself correct this is this is supposed to be a public hearing on the tentative budget i'm getting this i'm assuming this will connect back to that assuming you're not interrupting me are you you're asking actually i'm asking yes i'm trying to figure out if this is related to the matter of the hand of the board of education which is a public hearing on the 2021 tentative budget or if this is you grandstanding on some other matter because if it's not related to the public hearing on the 2021 tentative budget the appropriate time to address the board would be at the end under public comment you would be restricted to three minutes now i'd like you to look at can you clarify if we are talking about the 2021 tentative budget i am about to go to the budget so on the budget that you're about to put about to approve and let's start with page two the fire prevention and safety fund at the beginning of this fiscal year july 1st 2020 shows it has zero money in it and zero expenses that is in direct contact is their comments are to us or that that's for tax levy if we issue the tax levy for life safety which we do not we would use that that account for that not a capital project like that so in the capital project group by law the proceeds from bonds for fire prevention safety pers purposes are required to be placed in the 90 fund which is the fire prevention and safety fund and expenses are supposed to be accounted for life safety purposes from the fire protection safety and if you said that on your treasures report that you're accounting for those out of a separate fund that's in direct conflict with the budget no and that was the fund is used a massive facility plan is taking care of the rest of the referendum and the capital projects fund with the further life prevention life safety is in a separate fund well it may you may state it's in a separate fund but it's not on your budget and even tonight you're approving expenditures from the fps fund the fire prevention safety fund which are not included in the budget you're about to no they have to approve can you allow him to answer i'd like to hear mr stanley i'm sorry i can't understand the thing you're saying i'd like to know mr stalin's answer mr stanley what were you going to say no there's there's capital projects funds and there are separate ones we use a 60 type fund for that there's a 61 62 63 different capital project funds the life safeties and sep is one of those they only give one column for all of our capital project funds that we use and that's once again and that's the ispe requires those to be kept separate we'll call them fps funds let me finish please the isbe the school code requires money acquired for fps purposes to be accounted for separately in an fps fund it is and on the budget it's not included no it's included in the capital project group well it's not it's not in the fund where it is required by the isbe to be our auditors don't have a problem with it and it's all yours so you have combined the life safety fund in the capital projects fund for accounting purposes thank you that was one of my questions in the campaign's group of funds it's one of them section 17-211 s states the following when any taxes levied or bonds issued for fps for fire prevention safety energy conservation and school security purposes such proceed proceeds shall be deposited and accounted for separately within the fire prevention and safety fund i will repeat the key phrase such proceeds shall be deposited and accounted for separately within the fire prevention and safety fund that's the 90 fund and not the 60 fund based upon the evidence presented this evening it's clear that this tentative budget must be rejected by this board due to the fact that controller stalin has not presented the accounts of the various district funds in accordance with the school code additionally the donors growth watch urges each member of this board to review the last six budgets prepared by controllers stalin and approved by various boards you will find a pattern and practice of seated boards accepting at face value the work product of controller stalin as it relates to the life safety fund the tentative budget misinterpret misrepresents deliberately we believe the district's finances it is the opinion of the dollars grove watch the controller stalin's actions are intentional and not an accident or a simple oversight the life safety section of the school code is clear and unambiguous and yet both the school treasurer and the school controller have established a set of books that are not in compliance with the law therefore this budget must be rejected and this hearing must be suspended by proper motion until such time when it can be reconvened on or before september 30th during the interim the superintendent must take responsibility for the production of a tentative budget that's drafted by in compliance with the law during the interim the chair must take responsibility for the availability of the school treasurer eric wagner to answer questions as a critical witness to the financial condition of the district that concludes my written statement in the life safety fund and is absence within the tentative budget now i would like to move on to a second issue the watch beliefs must be reviewed at this budget hearing i promise that the issue will not take very much time will only involve questions addressed to one individual who is physically present at tonight's hearing i do have prepared questions for treasurer wagner but i will submit that and write submit them in writing to the chair so that he can provide written answers prior to this budget hearing being reconvened at a later date so he has prepared the on page one of the tentative budget the upper left hand corner um please pay attention look at the upper left hand corner controller stalin has prepared this budget utilizing the accrual method of accounting for most of you that fact in its significance may not mean much that is not intended as an insult it is simply a fact that if one is not trained in finance and accounting you would never be expected to understand what controller stalin and superintendent teal have done with this tentative budget what they have done is simple they have attempted to use this tentative budget to convince this board of education the members of the waltz in this community that there is evidence to support a 10 million dollar working cash fund bond sale within the final approval approved budget for fiscal year 2021.
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the bills payable report is typical for september this is the month where we get caught up on all of our bills for this over the summer and it's always consistently the largest month for our bills paid and then next month we will have sheridan jurgensen from eder and casella at our next board meeting to present the audit report questions for dana yeah where are these new homes coming from did somebody start like a builder start a new subdivision i mean that's like huge compared to the past we have um we have a couple home starts that have started in burlington uh but still the vast majority of our home starts are in the west elgin corridor have they already started we've gotten impactful from tall oaks yet the new section between the current townhomes and west point gardens where they've just demolished all that stuff across from klein's that's gonna be all single-family homes finishing some of the townhomes there's gonna be more single-family homes there the streets are all plowed out right now i don't know it's probably too early to get those it will continue to development continues to move forward um based on our impact fee amounts that are coming in based on the starts these are the majority are for single family homes yeah and probably the ones on mcdonald road whatever that subdivision is some of those homes have been up for a while where do we tend to get those is it after closing and i think it's permitting is that permits yeah so that's no yeah yeah it's way before that's why i was wondering well the city sits on it for a while and then it distributes it out correct yeah those kids will hit us in the spring all right pam secular needed to discuss and approve the 2020 to 2021 budget so at our public hearing that was held at 5 45 earlier this evening i went through all of the revisions and had the opportunity for public comments nobody was here we went through the revisions so i just asked that you approve the adoption of the fy 21 final budget great question to discuss and approve the 2020 to 2021 northern kane regional vocational system efe 110 budget same with this budget we held our public hearing at 5 55 a little bit late today no public was here and the only revision was the fund balance so i ask that you approve this final budget and then we'll post it to the websites and and deliver them to the counties right sounds good yes yes yes hey yes next we need a motion in a second to discuss and improve the purchase of a new economics textbook this was on display estrone over as jeff said it was on display for 30 days no parents came to view uh the said economics book there is obviously i presented last night there's no new information so i'm just asking for the so we can purchase the books and get in the hands of the teachers who are teaching economics all right pam yes yes yes and we'll move on to information items so first is the donation to ffa activity you want to do the we'll want to move that first or you want to do them last whatever you can go over the professional development presentation first why don't we do the professional development presentation first move those items to the end yeah that's a plug yeah here you want this right here we have one right here we weren't sure how this was gonna all right oh that [Music] yeah i always have a hard time with connecting i guess while we wait for stacey and gail to set up the computer they are uh for the people that are out in the audience they are ptosis so there are teachers on special assignments so what what the district has done is they've taken some of the best teachers that we have and puts them on special assignment to help teach other teachers you want to talk about that gail or i'm just trying to fill some dead air sure i'm gail stover and i've been an instructional coach now i believe this is the start of year seven prior to that i was a classroom teacher of kindergarten second grade and fifth grade so this has been a great opportunity that we now are able to deliver support to not only the teachers but the students within each class so at the elementary level we have two of us plus we have dave branstrom who is a k-12 special more of a special ed focus for the entire district so leah harold and myself handled the elementary stacy who's with me her and vince neil handled the high school kim paulus and mike doyle handled the middle school we do also have two math coaches um erica schneider and rachel priola so it's been a great opportunity that we can provide the pd that our teachers need especially since when you think about where we were five years ago when we didn't have chromebooks we didn't have google we did not have canvas so that's been a huge change and we're so proud of the way our teachers have handled all the change and everything that's been thrown at them and thank you again to the board for always supporting us well thanks guy i didn't mean to put you on the spot it's just you know all of us in the room know exactly what you're doing we can see what you're doing and we've all seen the great strides that the teachers have made because of your assistance i just wanted to give the two people out there listening to us thanks for more information so we're here to talk about the teacher pd that went on the week before school and actually we also threw in um september 16th was a full day of pd for teachers and i think we wanted for you to see exactly what we built for teachers and the things the activities that they went through on those days so i'm not going to bore you with a ton of adult learning theory here but this is kind of what we really kind of go by as far as offering pd to our teachers we like to make sure that it's content focused that it incorporates active learning so we like to give them something teach them something and then give them time to actually practice that we also really believe in supporting collaboration and we like to model effective strategies so we do a lot of practice what we preach so it was really important for us for this first week to model for teachers how to build a canvas course that would you know maybe mirror some of the things that they would be doing during the course of the year in fact i did have one teacher say to me how you guys set it up is exactly how i want to run my class so i thought that was positive and then of course we also like to provide that coaching and extra support and opportunities for feedback and reflection and of course anything that is a value should be over a sustained duration so esther gave us a pretty big task as she always does and just says this is what i want do it so we definitely had a challenge because over the summer we do work extra hours however it was still there was still a lot of uncertainty as to what the school year was going to look like so building something for us was really tough because we didn't know exactly what we were going to be dealing with when we came back but we definitely wanted to develop intentional purposeful professional development we also wanted to provide clear learning targets for teachers we wanted pd that was actionable and we also wanted to model what that hybrid remote learning instruction and canvas organization would look like we also wanted to allow for team collaboration and then provide those ongoing coaching practices and then allow for some time for feedback and reflection and we had to do this all while social distancing so just as our students and our teachers are now i mean we did have teachers who were remote only they were dialing it in so we also had to think about at the high school and the different buildings how are we going to do this while keeping numbers of teachers into small groups because esther is always very adamant that we look at research-based practices we looked at the distance learning playbook by a couple of really big names in educational research this is actually a 2021 copyright which i don't know how that's possible but it is something that they actually looked at what happened in the spring across the country and came up with some strategies and resources and the focus is really about developing class policies and procedures and establishing those relationships with students and creating engaging student tasks so we used a lot of the distance learning playbook for some of our activities we also identified pd needs based on the spring assessment so what did teachers tell us they were needing more of so monday we started um i think in the morning there were building meetings and then the afternoon was dedicated to professional development so we wanted teachers to understand how the isbe befall guidelines would be implemented we wanted them to identify strategies and tools for asynchronous and synchronous learning understand the formative assessment and feedback process and that we wanted them to engage in learning about targeting essential standards so this was kind of the foundational kind of course if you will for um that kind of set us up for wednesday and thursday and then also september 16th so we definitely modeled how to create those modules and embedded activities and the course on monday was designed like i said to be foundational information to take us into deeper dives the next few days and we did have positive feedback from the teachers and gail's going to walk you through the canvas course and what that actually looked like so we went ahead because like stay said that we want to model for our teachers exactly what we would like with our students so we build it all in a campus course for a couple reasons number one they could use it they become the students so now they experience canvas through the eyes of a student not the teacher and number two is that now this is always available to them you know we can only absorb so much in a day or in a training so now they always have this to go back and look at so we break our items down by modules and so think of a module as like a file folder what is it you're going to put in that folder and we want to start with something we called a week at a glance and this is again what we've asked our teachers to do ec 12 through the instructional committee that met throughout the summer that was one of the things that we heard is that we needed something consistent for our parents when they signed into canvas it would look the same no matter if i'm sending in as a kindergarten student to a 12th grade so we have a week at a glance and this is then how we went ahead and structured and continued to structure everything so again not only do we give them general information we did focus on our learning targets so they knew exactly what they were going to be doing by the day if we had a google meet that they were going to be involved in we went ahead and linked it there and i can speak to elementary i know on those conversations alone we anticipated it to be about a 15 minute you know answer any questions we have and an hour and a half later we were still asking answering questions for them so we found this to be really really valuable and i think at the high school middle school also you guys spent quite a bit of time and it was great because everybody was hearing the same message at the same time and again on thursday so again we set everything up in modules and you can see um we broke them down into again what stacy said we we felt were the necessary items that our teachers needed so we started with our essential standards and what does that look like and again it's by grade level how you should set up lesson design and you'll notice that every one of these slide items in here is another document that we referred them back to and it was broken down by grade level for them we actually gave them some videos as well um if that we felt that it was something we felt that they needed as well we would have discussion questions built in along the way so once they've done a couple modules they had to stop and then confer with their neighbors and kind of put their thoughts out there everything was designed in a way in prerequisites so i had to do step one before they could get to two to three so we could make sure that everybody had the opportunity to see everything we moved on to formative assessment and we know how important formative assessment is is to check that understanding along the way it's not just at the end we got to see where we're going and those are some tools that we gave our teachers and how they could do that we gave them maybe a list of digital tools they could do as well and then once you have that formative assessment what kind of feedback could you give so again we gave them different tools to use and these every one of these pages is full of information for them to go back into at a later date if they could not absorb it all at that point synchronous learning strategies we had a whole module on that as well as asynchronous down to then um if we felt as they were doing asynchronous i can just write down here we've got how they could use we video how could you use screencastify.com so we really tried to provide them with all the necessary resources that they would need we've had numerous people say this is so great because they went back and referred to something that maybe they had heard about it but it really didn't sink in it wasn't they weren't ready for that in their classroom and now they can see a need for that is going forward then fast forward to what the actual day look like on wednesday so this is okay sorry and okay sorry all of that that gail went over was actually just monday so that was a ton for them um tuesday we broke them into um their teams to do vertical articulation and then wednesday is when we really kind of got more into the nitty-gritty of synchronous learning and so we had them develop classroom management plans um we wanted them to establish classroom norms and then build like how are you going to build relationships um with your students and that day every grade level started like gail said with a google meet and then each team building grade level department collaborated on each module in the morning and then the ics met with teams and departments and so gail kind of explained what um wednesday looked like and the bitmoji was before i got a haircut so that's why it has long blonde hair oh and i had an office theme going all week so but so again the information i've already explained really and stace mentioned it that was day one that's what we had so as you can see it was a ton of information um going forward then on wednesday so this is how it was actually laid out so they would have their learning target they would have um the expectation and they would literally walk through this they could do it um individually but we really did encourage teams to work together um there's a lot to be learned from your um your teammate we always had an activity um that we asked them to do and to reflect on that as we went through it so everybody um when i say everybody how this was put together i'm gonna jump back out for that so you can see it more if i had my glasses that would really help there we go so you can see these are all the different areas that we went through it was that stay said the behavior management the stoic review overview how do you online online how do you manage those behaviors we gave them strategies for that establishing norms for your classroom what does that really look like and keep in mind remember we know what we had kids that were 100 face-to-face we had other classes at the elementary that were 100 remote we had 6 through 12 that was the combination so we were trying to provide um information for all levels um to go through that so you want anything um no i mean it's it was a lot i i think we could sell this course and make a lot of money what do you guys think and that's wednesday thursday we went on and we went into more some breakout rooms with um through google meets we had engaging tasks that we had people do we definitely had built-ins places to stop and discuss with your teammates and again continue that conversation you can see we've supplied them with quite a few breakout rooms and how do you do jamboard how do you do google slides it's just not a presentation but how do you make that interactive with your students so um that was the second day that was our thursday right and i will just kind of fast forward um our survey results so i i didn't put all of our survey results what i found was the most telling for me was i asked did we meet our learning targets for the for those two days and you can see like an overwhelming majority definitely said we did and um thursday was even higher i think thursday we got more into some of the tech tools you know that they would actually be using i mean you guys were it was a lot right i mean we didn't leave you hanging without anything you know as far as support for professional development and then just recently on the 16th we actually kind of changed it up a little bit and we're keeping everything in the course so the teachers don't have to keep going out and looking for things and what we did on this day we started with team meetings and esther and todd also kind of took the show on the road on google meat road and met with on the different levels and so we um we had that opportunity and then this is where we wanted that reflective practices to kind of come in in the morning we asked them to work together with their teams first we asked them to take a reflective survey which was um definitely i think a good practice for them to actually think about some of the things that have you know been going on and actually for some people saying it out loud or what you know we ask what's something you can celebrate and then we ask them to create a student survey because how are you going to inform your practice unless you are asking you know the students you're serving so they did that to give to their students and then we wanted to take that target out a little bit more and have them work in their teams and do that reflective practice together so that they could collaborate and troubleshoot on some things and um then we went and did um breakout sessions so each instructional coach took like an area um and teachers just jumped on our google meets for the hour and so we had doc hub wevideo canvas mastery paths otis creating instructional videos um engagement strategies google slides so different things in canvas and so we spent an hour well actually was two hours because we did instruction and then we wanted them to have time to actually go and try things and um i know i stayed on my google meets and people would jump back in and like hey i'm having a problem doing this so um i thought that was very um useful and we offered that in the morning and then again in the afternoon right yeah i think that's it are there any questions for us do you think you could get three million dollars hey listen i i think if we have the right marketing uh strategy we might have a marketing major obviously we've got a lot you've covered a lot of ground there and great thank you i mean that's i think these you sort of try to try to try to anticipate what problems might be coming that people aren't used to and that's that's brilliant but obviously more what is the plan going forward i mean how how are we going to deal with this next week the week after the month after that right because obviously new issues will arise and um how is there going to be a additional training so we have two additional pd's coming up uh we have one on the 30th of september and then one october 21st those will be looking at pd partly what we're talking about we'll talk a little bit in the reopening plan one of the things we keep hearing from staff is that they need time they need time to actually look at what they've done try to improve what they've done have time to research time to implement some of those things so we are considering the 30th not doing new pd but providing them with the time necessary to actually engage with their grade level team with their own department team with themselves if that's what it is to try to develop some lessons or to hone some lessons a little bit more we haven't refined that we're going to talk on thursday we're meeting as an instructional coach team on thursday to talk more clearly about defining that and what that will look like i'm never for taking a pd and just letting it be a free-for-all so i like to as these guys know i like to have it be somewhat in guiding it in whatever that looks like so we'll be talking about what that will look like october 21st again we'll survey we always survey at the end to get ideas on what teachers felt went well and what they felt didn't go well and what they felt they needed to have additional assistance the instructional coaches are always out and about in the buildings working with teachers they're consistently pushing in and working with those teachers to help them hone it along the way but we continue to look at what the needs of the staff are and based on our um input based on the surveys we're getting some of those information that we're getting we're always having conversation and reflecting and trying to determine what's best for the staff based on the information you've got back so far i mean what is the biggest concern from selfies time just you mentioned time is probably the number one um overload middle school i think it's managing the different groups managing the most effective way to instruct those different groups at the same time getting better at the tools of remote learning and what works better for synchronous versus asynchronous and then of course each teacher has to know their own pedagogy and what they're good at so i think those are the if i were to do the top three it'd be time would be number one for sure two would be the instructional strategies or apps that they're utilizing and we'll talk a little about that in the next one as well and why we're doing what we're doing and then i would say maybe the collaboration piece with their own peers yeah i would echo that being in the buildings i think time is the biggest thing i've had quite a few teachers say to me i wish i had time to go back just even in the resources we gave them to really dig in i know you know a few people said i went down the rabbit hole and you know we're in like one night for seven hours you know and it's it's definitely um i think time is our number one um issue and we are i can speak through elementary we are setting up um sandbag courses like at the elementary level in canvas where teachers then can go in and share amongst themselves like especially like our remote teachers they're kind of on an island even though they're very closely with the the people across the hallway their kids are face to face so it is still different and so then across the district we've set up sandbag courses where they can work together and then share out some ideas it's not a hundred percent that everybody's going to use exactly the same thing but we do all have the same scope and sequences and so then that gives you a starting point of some things right well and even collaboration even things get updated you know just when you don't aren't expecting it for example google meets is updating slowly with some new features that are going to be vital for our teachers and we're really excited about that but then again like when are we going to have time to actually help them learn that how how are we going to use this and you know those sorts of issues pop up i mean canvas updates on things that we're not even aware of sometimes just even little bitty things that make a a big deal you know are you actively searching for feedback saying you know what what can we do better yes absolutely and if it's something that's it's really massive we try to make sure that that all call goes out to people that we can you know we share what we know um yeah and even like our pd from the first week from the feedback we had we really used that to shape what we did on the 16th so and really changed kind of things up on how we did so just a parting words or slide here we just wanted to show you um i guess we could say the growth in our teachers utilizing our digital tools so march 23rd to 27th that was kind of our first week of remote learning and you could see that google meet was 55th on the list of app use and this comes from learn platform and august 31st to september 4th our first week of school it was actually second behind canvas so you can see the numbers now the numbers of teachers for google meets would be a little less than you know what our total number of teachers are because most of the elementary teachers aren't using google meets because they see their kids face to face with the exception of specials and remote only teachers right so um i'm i'm certainly proud of the work our teachers have done i'm you know i i can't say enough good things about the things that they've been really trying to work through so i have a few questions here so um for this past wednesday um so that we sought feedback from that and then do they have a full scheduled day wednesday last wednesday for the pd yes okay is there any in speaking to a few teachers kind of before that and after that is there any way to leave any of this next wednesday open for them to work with their teams as they see fit or that be another fully structured [Music] so wednesday we'll be looking at trying to provide a lot more time for them to work in a structured way right on whatever you're yeah and then given that especially with 612 they have wednesdays right now which are clearly meant to be synchronous in some capacity and i recognize that but do we take advantage of some of that time for some of our teams who maybe do need more support i think when we talk about the reopening plan next in the industry we'll talk about how to use that time creatively i understand and i'm saying do we have ways to use those wednesdays since students aren't in person to hey they can do asynchronous this whole these person second period so it gives you guys the opportunity to work with them potentially in some way but i'll table that other questions for them they do a great job no they do thank you for all this because putting a teacher hat on and coming into a first week of school with you don't know what's coming from where or what you're doing the overwhelm and they're still overwhelming now but how overwhelmed they were i can see this bringing down their focus and grounding a focus when their brain is probably going in a million different directions so i think it has to be very useful and helpful so thank you very much i'm very thankful too that todd and esther didn't move us back into the classroom like other districts did and they moved i believe st charles might have been i could be not speaking correctly but they moved their instructional coaches back into the classrooms without any support batavia did as well yeah so it's you know i i am very thankful and i'm sure our teachers are thankful that we stayed where we were during this time when it could have been just as easy to slip us back into the classroom but um you know i know our teachers are appreciative of that we kind of like to call it the concierge instructional coaching service i mean i get calls at nine o'clock i know you do too at nine o'clock at night sure i'll help you yeah and i would like to personally thank our instructional coaches for their can-do attitude and we know that you're you're facing challenges like everyone else um you always look at those challenges as opportunities to grow i'm very appreciative of that thank you you weren't on the mic what was that again gail say that is mike again one more time gail all righty thanks gail thank you as we um go into the next item with the reopening plan focus maybe director polloway you can prepare your presentation on sanitation so our next information item is the reopening plan status report just today uh dr manga and i were talking and were like can you believe it's going to be october already you know it just seems like everything has been just a whirlwind of activity at all levels in our district to make a successful reopening plan for our families and our community first of all i'd like to echo the words that our instructional coaches said that i'm very proud of the work that our teachers have done and how they've stepped up to meet the needs of our students in this challenging time i'd also have to i'd be remiss without giving a major shout out to some of my new best friends in the district which are our district nurses [Laughter] under this current environment i work very closely with the district nurses um they're like wow we have your direct line and we talk on a regular basis about what's happening along with the administrative teams and in the in the district and um we're so the new reality is that we're filing reports on a daily basis on every student and every staff member that's exhibiting symptoms so our new friends to the district are members of the king county health department and members of the regional office of education who are also in daily contact i cannot stress enough to the community i want to thank you for being diligent in your self-certification it means so much that if any member of your household has any symptoms of covet that you please stay home it is vital that anyone exhibiting these symptoms do not come to school if you do come to school with symptoms you will be sent home and then we have to monitor so every time a student or staff member exhibit symptoms a report is filed with the kane county health department these reports are called red cap reports because that's the system that they use to monitor then along with that not only do we monitor the symptoms but if they're siblings in the building those siblings would also have to go home and then as long as you're exhibiting symptoms you cannot return to work unless you receive an alternative diagnosis or a negative test if you do neither if you have no alternative diagnosis you have no negative test then you're going to be out for 10 days and then you need to be fever and symptom free and fever-free without a fever-reducing medication for 24 hours before returning to school um at this time we've done a we've done a great job uh overall with the three w's and the three w's are wash your hands watch your distance and wear your mask and while all are important the one that gets emphasized the most by the king county health department is watching your distance that maintaining that six foot social distancing i'm trying to maintain minimal exposure for for 15 minutes or less cumulative and working hard with that i have to give a another shout out to our transportation department that's been very diligent about following up and monitoring and disinfecting especially also our custodians who are going to hear a bill a little bit about their work coming up and the work that they've done to help keep us open and very grateful to all of them along with our board of education they had the courage in the foresight to try to do what they believed was best for kids just this weekend i participated in a community event in memory of jacob frazier one of our graduates and the overwhelming response from our community members was thank you thank you thank you to the board to the teachers to everyone involved that you're giving our students an opportunity to face to face instruction it comes with our challenges but we're four weeks in we're four weeks in and we're doing well my biggest fear is that our district will not be shut down because of covid my biggest fear is our district will be shut down because there's so many people out with symptoms that we cannot fill the positions with substitute teachers um dr mangan i'd like you to talk a little bit about some of the things you've experienced with with the teachers and some of the feedback that way and some of some of those aspects yeah i want to echo what the instructor coaches have said i think what i'm hearing from community members what i'm hearing from students you know emails that i'm receiving or when i'm talking to community members is i'm hearing nothing but really positive things about the experiences that their students are having that does come at a cost and the cost is that we do have stressed out teachers so to say that we aren't expecting a lot from our teaching staff we'd be remiss if we didn't say that we knew that we were going to expect a lot from them do i believe they can do this yes with some supports but i do think we have to take time sometimes to step back reflect and find out where you didn't do a good job maybe where you missed the ball and then how can we adjust that ball as we move forward i think the teachers are doing the best to keep a positive attitude to continue to chip away at the challenges i don't disagree with what dave said tonight in that i think our elementary is are doing much better than our middle school in high school the middle school and high school are faced with different challenges they're challenged with meeting both face-to-face students and students that are sitting home remote and at the high school level they're also mixing in the remote only students along with that so three different groups in one different setting time is always the nemesis not just this year but ever you know forever anytime you talk to teachers it's always time is the challenge where do you find the time to collaborate education continues to shift education continues to require more collaboration more time to work together how do we provide that time i'm going to recommend the board a shift i think you know as i look back and reflect when you're trying to put together a plan you're going to miss some things one of the things i missed was i should have provided more plan time for our middle school and high school teachers i did not i can't go backwards now you know i can't take instruction away but i do think the wednesday as you talked about dr nolan was is an option opportunity for us to capitalize maybe on some additional time not sure the community members will like it but i think it's the best for our teachers so it will be a recommendation i'm bringing forward to the board and that would be to do an early dismissal schedule they're already home but the early dismissal schedule that we followed last year at the middle school level which would mean each class period about 20 minutes or so and they would go through their full schedule in synchronous learning for those 20 minutes given asynchronous work to work on in the afternoon and once that early dismissal is done they would work at home themselves students and teachers will be working together collaboratively it would give the teachers at least a half a day a little bit better every wednesday to actually give them the necessary time to collaborate work together and to try to be able to implement some of the things that we're asking them to implement on the clock just so people who's ever listening if our teachers are listening as well what does that look like so they start at 7 30.
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on page 5 of 24 of the tentative budget you will see that on the title of the page the summary of cash transactions with in page five of the tenant of budget it appears that comptroller stalin has removed from the various balances found in row three all cash that was actually received by the district from dupage county treasury rent henry for the 2019 tax levy prior to june 30th 2020 to be clear controller stalin has removed cash from the july 1st 2020 balances that has actually been received on or before june 30th 2020.
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i think it the early dismissals around 10 30 11 o'clock at one or two of the buildings so i think it's going to be close to 10 30 11 o'clock uh they would have time maybe to go to an early lunch or to do a little bit of plan time or go use the restroom whatever they need to do go to lunch come back and then would have the time to work i'd have to actually lay that in i have not laid that into a schedule okay we wanted to discuss it tonight first and maybe dave i don't know if dave remembers that only dismissal time he could help there but i don't i don't recall that i haven't been in the buildings yeah okay so it's 11 50 when they start at 8 12.
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that's what one does if utilizing an accrual method of accounting for a budget however the inclusion of a working cash bond sale within the 2021 budget is about cash cash on hand at the time the bills need to be paid another interesting point about controller stalin's fund reporting on page five is that unless comptroller stephen has reason to believe that there will be no distributions of the 2020 extension prior to july 1st 2021 there will in fact be no outstanding working cash fund loan as of june 30th 2021 article 20 the school code expressly requires school treasurer eric wagner to immediately repay that loan upon receipt of any part of the 2020 extension therefore ph 5 is a material is a materially misstated record that actually distorts what will happen with regard to the timely distribution next may and june of the 2020 extension to the district in general and the education fund in particular additionally this intentionally distorted picture of the future is being disseminated in order to support the issue of a totally unnecessary bond sale controller stalin and treasurer wagner each are required to keep a separate set of books this redundancy serves a purpose two sets of books by two individuals builds in a check and balance so that both embezzlement and fraud become more difficult to execute given those subtractions of actual cash with within this cash summary record row 3 does not actually reflect reflect the cash balance on either july 1st 2020 or june 30th 2021 for the education fund within this summary controller stalin has recorded a loan from the working cash fund to the education fund the two cells are c6 and i15 next spring treasurer wagner as the legal custodian of the district's funds will not need to request a lawful order from this board to execute the loan found within this budget that is a fact due to the 2020 extension distribution next spring during may and june the education fund will have approximately 30 million dollars in the fund in cash as of june 30th 2021 if the board president had invited treasurer wagner to be available tonight for questions his hearing would have heard his testimony that as of june 30th 2020 less than three months ago the education fund had 31 million dollars 31 million six hundred eight thousand one hundred eighty four dollars and 24 cents in cash this record was given to each member of the board as part of the july board packet my question is witness stalin in preparing the tentative budget are you in possession of any record drafted by either the office of the dupage county clerk or the office of the dupage county treasurer since february 1st 2020 that addresses the anticipated timing of the certification of the collector's books next april by the clerk or the mailing next may 1st by the treasurer of the 2020 tax bills if so have you provided that record to the members of the board as evidence that this that this district faces a cash flow issue next spring if so can we all see that record right now at this hearing you have to ask the question was so convoluted we are on the cruel basis with the cruel basis you defer and we're elected by that the question is are you in receipt of anything from the county that says the tax receipts won't be timely next june no i don't have you have not the answer is no thank you within the bond transcript for this district's 1996 a working cash fund bond sale is a record entitled statement of need for working cash and tax exemption certificate and agreement within that record it states within section 2.2 the undersigned controller stalin hereby certifying the firms thorough familiarity with the financial books and records of the district end of the fund the undersigned controller stalin has caused the cash flow estimate to be prepared on the basis of revenues reasonably expected to be available and expenditures reasonably expected to be made by the district during the time periods set forth in said table my question has witnessed stala in preparing this tentative budget a budget which includes your recommendation and the recommendation of superintendent teal that the board approved yet another working cash fund bond sale the third since you arrived in the mid 90s have you prepared the same 36-month cash flow summary to support your claim that remains june of 2021 the education fund will be unable to pay its bills based on the accrual basis of accounting yes based on an accrual yeah so the board did you pay your bills on accrual do you pay your bills with cash we record them in our financial statements on the accrual basis but when you cut a check it's cut with cash correct we don't spend next year's cash now we we defer it and that's a general accepted practice auditors have accepted it for my duration well that does it three different types of honor your major report disputes that because you have deficit balances which means you've spent money already and for example in the transportation fund that you didn't have yet so i i don't believe that inaccurate description of what you do well okay then don't believe it well i'm i'm going to trust my eyes i'm not going to trust you so much excuse me excuse me for a minute please um nancy i mean i'm almost done yeah i believe this if you have a question for me please ask me but please don't interrupt i'm wondering how much time we have to give you i already told you i it's as long as i want and if you let me finish i'm almost done i could i could move to close the public hearing couldn't i no that would be illegal why i don't know i i think we should let mr um o'connor finish i will at which point i will emphasize to everyone who is listening and for the record that we have external auditors i literally i know i just i've heard this song advanced before are there other people that we want to hear from too well this is over here we can restrict for three minutes at the end there's no time limit to a hearing but this is an open hearing but i am going to ask you mr clown to please finish there's i am about to finish members of the board of education six years ago this month during a hearing held on september 15 2014 for public comment and questioning on a proposed sale of 1 million 525 thousand of funding bonds i stated at that time that there was no need for the proposed bond sale in fact i call i called the proposed bond sale recommended by then superintendent mcdonald and controller stalin a fraud that sale never took place tonight i'm informing this board that the current superintendent and controller stalin are once again attempting to bully yet another board into yet another unnecessary bond sale that could easily be construed to be fraudulent there is absolutely no demonstrable need for a bond sale to fund a loan fund that will simply sit as yet another tempting source of funds for future expenses i strongly urge each elected individual of this public body to vote no on this tentative budget and send it back to the desk of the superintendent with direction that the unnecessary working cash flow and bond sale be removed and that the life safety fund and all of its assets and expenses be properly reported if this public body persists on the path of approving this budget is presented this elective board of education will force the citizens of this community to conclude that you're using the current climate to sneak a backdoor bond sale under their property tax bills beginning with the 2020 extension that concludes my testimony and my questions thank you for anybody else who wishes to address the board is there anything on the podcast regarding this no but i know online yes i'm sorry oh thank you i'm checked while you're checking i would just like to remind everyone that we not only have external auditors that audit our records annually and we have had never any really substantive finding of any ill use of funds but we did in fact mr o'connell is somewhat correct in that we did lose money on a bond sale and that was because of the assertions the ill-founded assertions of mr o'connell that's right that caused some people who were willing to invest to pull out and in fact he has not only used the resources of this district but has also caused financial harm to this district so i'm sorry that he has left to hear that perhaps he will listen to their tape would you could he agree right he's he threatens what he does now this is something he does so that he can try and threaten that there's a illegality some illegality involved with the issuance of the bond and so that to try and discourage bidders who would come in and foil the project so so he has in fact hurt our community and he may do that he's done it with other schools and he's done it for 51 as well nancy i might add too that in addition to the um the audits that we have every year we're also our practices are recognized every year as being exemplary by outside three weeks ago for 21 years in a row mark and his team were awarded for financial excellence from the association of school board officials and that is actually something that would be picked at by the certificate committee if we were using the wrong fund or um so he's he's reading it you know and i don't even know what year he got some of his his beef information from if it's sometimes it's decades old um so i feel pretty comfortable that we have a solid budget in place where we are he wants us to spend our deferred taxes that we from the next fiscal year um and that's a safety net for the board to defer our taxes we we it makes us operate with a little bit smaller budget because we're taking we're taking our taxes and from this year and moving into the next year and having to work with older taxes so there's a small percentage difference and it gives us a cash flow but only and it's you know if we ever decided not to do this we said we would have to say let's go back to the cash basis of accounting so that we can spend the money that's that's being deferred now so it would weaken us financially and so um and we wouldn't be we wouldn't be following generally accepted accounting principles either so it because you don't do things on a cash basis anymore you do it on the accrual basis and account for things in the right fiscal year i don't have comments from the public i finally found them but i and i wasn't listening very carefully but i i just as the superintendent of schools want to just point out a couple of things about our budgets one we have been rated as a district of distinction for over 20 straight years for financial practices two every year we go through a thorough accounting process the last i think 15 year 10 to 15 years of those audits are available on our district website anybody can go look at those and see if there was any significant deficiency weaknesses or findings in those those are reported to the board every year and then we talk about how we close any deficiencies in the rare case that they are found three we spend the money in this district responsibly after it comes in many school districts spend on borrowed money and when they hit springs like what we hit last year then they are forced to go out and borrow money at high interest rates to close the gap for the remainder of the school year this school district does not end up in that situation the school district monitors its money spends its money after it comes in rather than on loan and many times we are the school district that other school districts come to and borrow from us and then we collect that interest from them at a high rate anybody who goes back through the books for the past decade plus will find that this district this board the financial team here have been excellent stewards of the taxpayers money and i will stand by that any day of the week if the public is shaken by this at all i encourage them to reach out to me and we will happily sit down and answer any of the questions that come our way and on top of that i just want to say that i'm just really disappointed that he didn't stay to hear this last little bit of comments that were made by by our uh superintendent and the other members of the board and mark stalin i think it was very important that when you come in and try to change things to hear both sides of the situation and that was not done and i'm very disappointed that that would be brought forward and not i agree with you and i would also say that i know that different members of administration have spent substantial amount of time amount of time trying to explain this time and time again yes and and if there are things like this uh i feel he had 30 days in order to come forward and this is this is the way he does this i mean i've been this did this raise any other concerns or doubts among board members that you'd like us to address before you take action later this evening no we need to call the closing close i move we close the public hearing michael ii mike terry thank you mike davenport aye terry pavicich aye rick cavanado aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye and nancy kupka aye the hearing is closed we will move on to the consent agenda now i need a motion for oh is there any is there any item that any member of the board wishes to remove from the consent agenda for further discussion now so be hearing none before we move i would just like to call out the thank you and i don't want to mispronounce their names um kevin clinton clementine yeah for their uh lovely donation of a cello and a concert verbal cello and other um supporting things that's that's very kind of them for and for a great boon to our music program yes for for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes a personnel report contract adjustment certified appointments classified e personnel report resignations classified see the financial pages d 2021 concussion oversight team e the amended and 20 2021 school calendar of the acceptance of donation donation from kevin and gina clinton so moved seven moves i'm sorry who seconded thank you very much terry pavich aye mike davenport dan nicholas hi rick cavanado hi joanna vazquez drexler aye and nancy kupka aye the consent agenda passes we're going to move on to the recommendations for reaction first thing we need is a motion for the board of education to approve the 2021 budget as presented so moved that's it mike and joanna thank you michael joanna yes thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick palminato aye nancy kupka aye board member oh good go ahead stay motion here and board members need to sign the budget before they leave this evening we'll do thank you happily next week for the board of education to approve the lowest acceptable bid and award mechanical concepts of illinois contract in the amount of 53 650 for the condensing unit replacement at the asc so i moved second is that you terry secondly was seconded i didn't cherry seconded and mike was the first person thank you mike davenport hi terry pavich aye rick perrinato aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye nancy kupka aye motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the 2020 excuse me 2020 2021 grants as presented so moved second mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick cavanado aye nancy kupka aye motion carries and then we need a motion for the board of education to approve board policy 2.260 the uniform grievance procedure and board policy 2.265 title ix sexual harassment grievance procedure go ahead julian mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye terry pavich aye rick cavanado aye nancy kupka aye motion carries the next item for consideration is the issuance of not to exceed 10 million 300 000 in general obligation limited bonds to be issued by the district pursuant to article 20 of the school code for the purpose of increasing the district's working cash fund the board of education will consider the adoption of a resolution providing for the issue of spend bonds sorry classes are fogging up and the levy the direct annual tax to pay for the principal and interest there on the resolution sets forth the parameters for the issuance of said bonds and sailed thereof by designated officials of the district mark stalin district controller explained that the resolution sets forth the parameters for the issuance of said bonds and sailed thereof by designated officials of the district he summarized the perth in terms of said parameters including the specific parameters governing the manner of sale length of maturity rates of interest purchase price and levees and tax levy for said bonds the title of the revolution of the resolution is resolution providing for the issuance of not to exceed 10 10 million 300 000 taxable general obligation limited school bonds of community high school district number 99 dupage county illinois for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund of said school district providing for the levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest on said bonds and authorizing the proposed sale of said bonds to the purchaser thereof may i have a motion for the board of education to adopt said resolution as presented and read by title so i moved second mike and terry thank you very much any discussion nancy did you mention the last this part of it with private sale or public underwriting with raymond james i'm sorry i didn't hear what you said there's open here there's another part in there that's just in the last reading up on the up on the screen but it says uh in the proposed sale of said bonds through private placement or a public underwriting of raymond james what that does is it it i don't know if you and if you said i didn't i did not thank you i missed it because this is how this is another piece he'll go after he'll say that we didn't um the board didn't approve raymond james being an underwriter for this project so to be clear it's the resolution providing for the issue of not to exceed ten million three hundred thousand dollars taxable general obligation limited school laws for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund providing the levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest on said bonds and authorizing the proposed sale of said bonds through a private replace excuse me a private placement or a public underwriting with raymond james thank you for that thank you that i'm confirming that is my motion that is your motion mike and i second that and terry seconds julie there's no more discussion no so julie please call a role upon the motion to adopt said resolution mike davenport aye terry pavicen aye rick cavanado aye joanna vazquez drexler aye dan nicholas aye and nancy kupka aye the motion is carried and said resolution is duly adopted julie please report this in the records of the board of education of community high school district 99 dupage county illinois thank you moving on to the second reception of visitors this is the second reception of visitors which is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts in writing to the board secretary mrs nydia visitors addressing the board need to come to the microphone and state their full name the proceedings may be tape recorded are being tape recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes the board's presiding officer myself reserves the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant audience observation of these protocols is appreciated would somebody like to address the board [Laughter] appreciate it thank you you've definitely heard your three music failed math too have to listen to that okay my name is carrie swenson i have two kids um i've talked to some of you already i have two kids in district 99 a junior and a senior i had a nice time speech hank you blew it for me because you addressed everything that i had in my speech all my concerns make sense um as a board and as a school district um that signed an oath and i have the verbate the verbiage of your oath right here specifically to what we're dealing with in our community right now i am concerned the numbers are wrong dupage county health department illinois state department of health told me the numbers are triple counted sometimes the numbers um of people not even living near us are coming back here that's directly affecting these kids getting back to school based off of risk management that hank which we all want them to be safe i'm not saying come back guns blazing no mask okay but we can't do that really if we're restricting everything else based off of inaccurate information um i can give you the names and numbers that i've talked to it is a problem other schools are going back less restrictive same populations different counties so as we move forward i see your plan i'm happy with it it's the foot in the door we're getting those kids that need to be back in school back in school and we have the choice for the remote learners however for three months what if the flu season doesn't hit us what if this flattened curve continues to be stagnant what if the numbers change to 80 000 people in illinois instead of that or positive instead of over 200 000 because of the triple quadruple counting so i know you have your metrics moving side to side you know moving up and moving down the fact that there's no room for more time and i understand the scheduling is concerning we can't finish out the year like this are we waiting for the vaccine our numbers aren't that bad so i think as a board and as an administration you need to also be our voice for the community and ask the health department what are these numbers from because dr aziki today specifically said they're counted multiple times for one patient you can only be a risk factor in the neighborhood once you can't be a risk factor three four five times so when we're talking about these metrics it's really important to be using that accurate information you are the stewards to our children and we expect you i have a voice they have a voice you all have voices you are in charge of the education for these kids i'm very happy that we're getting back with what we are we have the foot in the door to show that we can do it right these kids will wear a hazmat suit stand on their head and sing old macdonald if they can go back to school you're not going to have a problem i've talked to administrators i have them in my family they're thrilled to be back so moving forward that's the only thing i didn't see addressed thank you for the timer and thank you for listening to me thank you student board and i do appreciate the work you put into all of this so thank you thank you thank you anybody else wish to address the board it's getting away from sorry i'm having trouble working technology situation is thank you hi um my name is david fisher i have a child at diners grove north um i didn't have anything written or pre-planned i didn't plan on speaking until i signed in tonight and i just wanted to start off by by saying thank you to hank mr fisher it's slipping sorry yeah i just wanted to say thank you to you hank and to the elected officials of the board for handling things the way you've handled things i know you're getting barraged with emails and angry parents and frustrated parents and passionate parents who are simply here to advocate for the wellness of their children and i know that everybody here all has those same goals in mind when we're talking about our children i'm very passionate i'm a very passionate person very passionate about my children so when i see my children on a daily basis going through the motions of what they're going through and i talk to other parents like kerry and groups of other people that are positively for the hybrid plan and returning to school now we all have the same goals in mind so i just wanted to say thank you to to you all i know that you have our students best interests at heart and like kerry said the numbers are bogus they keep telling us that it's up to you guys to make the decision so we're getting this back and forth we feel like we're in the middle so it's either the illinois department of health is making the calls or you guys are making enough calls they're saying you guys need to make this call and i'm glad that you're going back i'm glad that you've got this plan in place and i would say stay the course i also want to thank all the people in the community that have started the facebook grassroots movement of the hybrid learning that started in august as well as the 400 plus families and members and parents that we created just five days ago we went from zero to 400 on a facebook page all in support of returning to school now in district 99 so for all those parents that are watching on youtube and that have supported our little lift please sorry uh we really appreciate it so i just wanted to say that stay the course as long as the numbers are going to remain low we really need our kids back especially the special ed kids that have social emotional needs because they're not getting it with remote learning i don't care what you think or what you might say but remote learning long term doesn't work i have two kids with ieps and i see their struggles and i talk to other parents with kids who don't have ieps and normal kids with straight a grades struggle emotionally and socially in this environment so remote learning long term doesn't work and you're cheating our children out of the rightful proper education by keeping them at home so i'm glad that your plan is to get us back into the classrooms be it a hybrid modified hybrid but the ultimate goal is to get these kids back in school that's all i have to say thank you anybody else like to address the board i'll be brief as well my name is lynn goldminus i have a junior here at downers grove south this year i have a freshman in college that graduated in the spring he's at purdue he's starting his fourth week there working through the hybrid classes and he's very excited to be on campus he had somewhat of an in-person orientation week and he's very excited to still have a roommate and i've been following the numbers looking at the data my background i'm a chemist i've been a substitute teacher in district 58 for many years since my kids have all been in school so again i'm with them looking at the numbers i don't think these numbers are right my youngest son is a sixth grader at st joseph school in downers grove he's back at school he's starting his fourth week this at this time i'm there um i'm working there as well this year and so far we haven't had any problems with my older son my younger son my youngest son and i'm looking forward to this hybrid plan i hope if it happens on the timeline that's set um because last time was really tough to hear the timeline and then within a day or two before it was it was shot down so i'm keep keep praying for uh the truth and the right the right data and the right interpretation so i thank you all for your time and um we're very we've been very happy with district 99 so i hope we can continue and move forward thank you thank you thank you thanks anybody else wish to dress lord okay what um thank you for coming out you know i just want to i i do have a couple of virtual comments oh go ahead i keep reading that yeah okay um let me zoom in so i can actually read it my eyes are getting tired as the night goes on here all right the first comment is from sandy bowl freeberry well i appreciate all the effort by our teachers and administration i can't help but put my child first when i look at the fact that we're delivering eight to ten less weeks of instructional time in any back to school plan but dr thiele said that the curriculum will be eighty percent at most teachers are admitting to teaching content with numbers like 50 to 60 percent and remote learning fatigue will reduce even that i'm having a very difficult time being the positive support i know that my child needs while reconciling the part-time schools she's being provided we already know that we will she will have to repeat chemistry with the nightmare that spring learning was and already feels that you'll have to repeat physics high level science classes are not best taught virtual or halfway and so she struggles to stay engaged it is a throwaway class in her mind and it's part time school i don't know how to find a teacher for her let's be honest a tutor isn't what she needs if she's being provided half the curriculum she doesn't know what she's missing i know the tutor won't know i am dismayed that we haven't been able to find ways to bring critical courses math science lit laying arts to our kids in a way that produces real benefit and not just more busy work and memorization for a test the instructions for ap exams came out and i disregarded there is no way she has learned enough in the last eight months or been brought out of a horrible funk to re-engage her brain critical thinking test-taking skills that we would waste any money or incur through additional depression from poor performance on taking those tests my child has worked so hard since she was three to be a great student and her immobility and disengage mentality has us both crying most every day i don't care if we go back or stay remote i care that one of those plans delivers more than part-time school that we have a plan that has teachers really reaching these kids that there is more support and more engagement today as usual she said she doesn't see the benefit of going to college since nothing means anything anymore my school loving honor role overachieving kid has had the love of learning sucked right out of her and i blame the board of ed for district 99 for that find a solution please [Music] the next comment is from frank d vitale well i'm grateful that i live in a state that takes the pandemic seriously i hope the school board understands that the illinois public health officials prioritize keeping hospital icu beds open over keeping everyone virus free maintaining six feet of distance does not keep everyone safe it merely means that people will get the sick or get sick at a rate that our hospitals can treat furthermore i'd like to remind the school board that the district spends a lot of resources in supporting the young hearts for life program where we celebrate every time we find a young person with an undiagnosed heart problems there is a growing body of evidence that teens and persons of all ages wind up with serious long-term heart and lung problems even if they are asymptomatic because of these reasons i certainly support continuing fully remote learning those are all of the public comments that came in virtually thank you okay um did mrs swanson want to speak again what miss watson did you raise your hand to speak again i'm sorry she said she was joking oh i'm sorry i saw you yes i thought you want to speak again oh okay i'm sorry i just didn't like to i would just like to add you know i know it's frustrating i mean nobody nobody i don't think anybody believes that anything short of in-person education is really what all of our kids would want or deserve but i really want to commend administration because people are doing the best they can under very difficult circumstances incorrect data undoubt you know probably but it's all the only data we have so at the heart of this we have to keep our students safe and we all have to and and if we really want to get back to school in person and we really want to do things the best for our their students we really have to do the only things we know this is a novel virus but the things we have to do are well documented in the medical literature wearing masks staying staying home when you're sick staying staying six feet away it's what we've got and it's got to be done not only in school but outside of school in the community because short of a vaccine you know we can still reverse the tide of the virus and it's only by these concentrated efforts consistently and doggedly by all of us that we will so i just i have to throw that in as a nurse of 40 years who spends 10 hours a day working with patients with covent and in fact had one die today i'm telling you it is out there and it is not something to be trifled with i'm just i'm just giving myself an opportunity but the education system has not been shut down and i would say 240 deaths i don't want one of my children to be one of those deaths i agree i agree anybody else want to say anything before me go on okay moving on let's go to the um reports report on legislative education network of dupage there's been a couple emails this past week i could summarize but i think everybody has them if you if you don't have those lend emails let me know i'll forward them over to you thank you assistant um said uh accepted a gift of 500 face shields from the district 99 foundation so on behalf of sethe i would like to express a heartfelt thanks senset is in the process of its rolling opening uh september 28th was the target date however um it's obvious we're not going to make that target date and it will be october 6 that um to begin with hybrid instruction um let me see all staff are currently providing remote instruction there and there is the possibility of in-person related services most of sasa's staff are currently working from home but do have access to the administration center ppe kits have been prepared for staff and member districts have provided assistance with devices for students and administration and getting them to the students as soon as possible thank you julia a district 99 education foundation yes um we um we wanted to uh let faculty know that we're still doing um mini grants for things that they may need for their classrooms or or for remote learning any anything so please we're going to shorten the form so that they can turn it in faster for their department chairs and for the superintendent to [Music] look at before it comes to us and we are still taking money for the covid uh families in crisis those can be um sent to the um on the on the um foundation theater foundation was huge yeah yeah sorry and um then we also were trying to work on how we can do pizza wars remotely and we may be doing a coupon book or something to that nature and um we really wish we could be doing pete's wars in in real time but with the way things are we don't know and uh we just approved our mission vision and goals and our bylaws were approved so we are on the road i don't think i forgot anything did i no i think you got it all d99ef.org is the website yes thank you thank you thanks tara thanks hank um and uh illinois association school boards yeah um even though the that triple eye has been conference has been cancelled this year the the delegate assembly goes forward virtually so i have um a orientation virtual session i got to go through and another week or so and then then there's two discussion periods that'll take place virtually in october and then in november we'll have our actual delegate assembly but uh they've kind of broken it into some pieces so that we we're not trying to go back and forth with presentations and discussion during the actual assembly as much trying to get that stuff done ahead of time so so that's what i'll be involved in a little bit the next couple months i'll report back in but you know what's going on thanks mike uh upcoming board meetings october 5th 2020 we'll have a workshop at 6 30. i'm assuming it's here uh we're still two children to be determined and then october 19th we'll have our business meeting at 6 30 to be determined yeah we need a motion to we have no close session we need a motion to come out no we have no closed session we need a motion to adjourn i'm sorry so move cherry moves i'll suck at that motion mike seconds all those in favor aye aye aye aye all is opposed thank you all yo remember you
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so you're backing that up 45 minutes so about 10 30 ish and right now we're you guys are seven to 305 is that right yeah okay right so that would i mean that that's you know over four hours as our exists right now after a break and all that so that's puts four hours the other day which i i am in full support of by the way and i think if that's what i perceive i don't have middle schoolers in high school so i'll be curious to see what other board members have to say but i think that is from my perspective um a small concession for what our teachers have been doing again especially at 612 and then that is dedicated to them since our you know our k5 already have their own schedule going on so this would really affect the people that are needing or we're hearing from and that dave aggregated and kira for that matter aggregated you know the comments that they had from the teachers um at the 6 12 primarily with how that was i'm in full support of doing that i think that's a great idea and if that's one thing we can do again for these guys from a team standpoint for the planning at a team level quite frankly for a break which i think we have to acknowledge that that's necessary built in in the middle of the week um so that's my two cents on that and i think instructionally we're not asking too much to change if you remember our criteria was 20 minutes of direct synchronous instruction and so we're still staying at that it's just the way they're going to tweak the lessons of doing a little bit more asynchronous and we're going to shrink it up to say this is all they're going to get that day so that we have some time for our teachers to plan i met with a couple teachers who set up a meeting with me to talk about this which i really appreciated i would recommend any teacher who has concerns that they please would set up a meeting so we can talk about solutions but the two teachers that met with me this was a solution that they recommended this is not my idea it was the idea of those two teachers that um actually reached out to me with me um i think it's it's a good idea i think it's smart you know it's as you step back and look you always want to be flexible and tweak if it's not working and i definitely think our middle school and high school teachers could use additional time to assist them in trying to do the work of what we're asking them to do with the mixed groups in addition to that i'm going to hit up all four areas dave todd and i have the same email he spoke about tonight and i wanted to address those a little bit as part of the reopening plan accessibility to resources our teachers have resources the challenge is this they have apps they have apps and extensions that they use without permission from the district the apps as underneath the new laws sopa soppa it's student privacy there's a new law that by next july we must have a hand on all privacy contracts for any any company that we utilize resources from and we're not just talking about that we have to have a signed contract with them which requires brian tobin myself shane to read through all the contracts to make sure they hit the privacy laws that they must hit underneath sopa we've asked our instructional coaches one from each level in addition to additional technology personnel to sit with us every two weeks to go over the apps that teachers are requesting we did have to shut those down primarily so we could get a handle on meeting the requirements of sopa and coppa which is the top privacy which wasn't a place as well as some of the ferpa laws there's laws out there that protect now student privacy that we must adhere to in order to do that we need time to be able to resource to research the apps to look at them additionally we need to make sure that they're sustainable over time some of the apps that we they're requesting today look free which is great underneath remote learning everybody's offering a free app the problem is if it goes to a paid app is a sustainable for our district to have paid apps for every grade level for every teacher across our district and we all know once you get used to a product and you utilize it it's very difficult to take it away so we want to be proactive and looking at costs of these to make sure it's sustainable over time to make sure we don't already have a product we've purchased and approved through the board of education that can take the place of that and all of that is taking time for us to do that it will continue to take time for us to do it but it's a process we have to go through to stay within the legal limits of what has been put on our plate so that's kind of where we're at with accessibility of resources resources that we have resources that we can purchase we purchase tons of resources you can look at the budget tons of resources for for teachers that told us they needed resources we bought white boards for every child we got markers so they could have them at home we got new brand new desks for early childhood so they could store materials and not have to utilize different locations tons of resources were purchased prior to school so to say that we don't have accessibility resources it's a little just i guess i feel disingenuous in terms of what we just went through prior to school and you can look at the budget dollars that we spend we tuesday team meetings we have compliance issues if you all recall last march when the government shut down schools we could not do our iep reviews and the some of those individual education we tried to meet all those compliance issues we we did the best that we could as a district but we have some catch up the catch it means we have to front load here in the fall and in order to do that we have to pull teachers part of the requirements is that we have to have a general ed teacher special education teacher other related service person on the table to be able to make those to meet those compliance needs to complete the needs of what our staff have to do and to be cognizant of the time frame that the teachers have we said forget the tuesday morning meetings that have been mandatory at the elementary they will find time to work themselves anyway they have more flexibility to really give them flexibility in their schedule not locked into a specific day so we can meet the required guidelines that are established once we get caught up in the compliance which was mentioned in the email that shane berkmar sent out once we get caught up we will reinstitute the tuesday morning meetings but again this year requires flexibility this year requires flexibility for our staff it requires flexibility for our administration and we're trying to build that flexibility in not sustainable or overwhelmed and stressed he's right absolutely they are overwhelmed they are stressed so are we so is everybody so our parents it is a time as an unprecedented time in america we are all doing our best to meet the guidelines our teachers are stepping up they're doing a great job we can be flexible the wednesday solution is about the best i've got right now i'm more than happy to partner with cea to talk about ideas to be solution oriented to be result-driven to have those conversations to listen to ideas to any teacher anybody can come they can call me anytime i believe the solution that these two teachers came up with is a great solution it's one that adheres to what they need but still provides the education that our community members need it's a nice marriage between those two ideas i do believe we provide fluidity and flexibility we are trying to be flexible i met with the department chairs of the high school regarding assessments i brought with the middle school principals and some teachers regarding assessments i'm being as flexible as i can be regarding the outcomes of what we expect i need them to be flexible i understand that it's not going to be the same we can't do summative assessments the way we've always done them and that's okay we want them to take risks we want them to be flexible we want them to try new things we want them to feel like they have that flexibility hence the reason we met on wednesday last week for what we call the town hall meeting todd and i have established every tuesday is tuesday town hall meetings we will take question answers from any staff member on those days we've invited brian tobin dan powy all the administration to be there to answer those questions so that we can be there and staff can hear firsthand any questions or any answers to the questions that they have we don't have the answer we'll find it so effective this next tuesday we have tuesday town hall meetings which we said we would do next wednesday that will be a week by week tuesday town hall meeting with our staff to allow us to answer and address any questions that they may have we heard from elementary teachers some frustration regarding these students that might be going out for quarantine or isolation they have 14 days that they're out trying to cover teaching face to face in the morning and then face to face in the afternoon there's not time to deal with some of those teachers students are out in quarantine isolation in response to that in being flexible i hired two liaisons two long-term subs to be a liaison between the teacher and the families once a student is out more than three days they would go and switch over to the liaison the liaison worked directly with the classroom teacher out of all four buildings and the families to ensure that they have some direct instruction in their education as well as they can work with them on canvas whatever they may need gal stover and leah harold my two instructional coaches at the elementary school level spent last week getting them up to speed in canvas up to speed in skyward helping them set up procedures and parameters meeting with me and the administration on google meets to make sure that we had a good plan in place for these liaisons and that they felt supported we live this is a good solution to decrease the workload of our elementary teachers while providing the service to our community members in doing that i think that it's about communication and collaboration and making sure that they have the time to do so dr jill schreiber at pv has housing those two individuals and she has taken on the responsibility with the other three principles to manage how that's going for our parents day one two and three is still on the classroom teacher to make sure they have asynchronous learning some kind of materials that they're going to be missing for those days as we transfer over why three days what we're finding on average while todd is working with the nurses is about three days is when they get an alternative diagnosis and return back after three days generally speaking they're either out for isolation or quarantine or at least 10 days the parents chose not to go to the doctor so they could be out for 10 days that's why three days i believe we're listening i believe our reopening plan is working do i think it's perfect no do i think there's room to grow yes am i open to listening is todd open to listening absolutely have we heard what people are saying yes are we making adjustments as we go along yes do we have responses to the questions that are coming forward yes if we don't we will find them overall i think it's going great you know if you guys have any questions specifically for us but i'm very pleased with what our teachers are doing what our related services are doing what our custodial staff is doing our transportation as todd said everybody's stepping up to the plate and i can't be more proud of the work and the job that central district 301 is doing clear across the board you're here i agree i do want to give a little feedback so i think uh i know todd knows i spoke to esther a couple times but i went to uh six of the seven schools the friday before we had our first uh day i was not able to make it to the lake um talk to a lot of teachers that day in all the buildings um that i told todd todd had the luxury of um talking and being a phone i was overwhelmed and tearful talking to he and shane burkmaier about something else i can't get sucked into this being super overwhelmed just a parent going in and communicating it was really hard to be in the schools and to see the teachers overwhelmed a friend for 20 years crying with her in her classroom trying to manage that was really hard i know our teachers are struggling i know some are loving it some are in the middle and some are really really having a hard time so that friday before school started was really challenging for me um the next friday i went to all seven schools the first friday of school um which is a very different experience for me personally i was able to speak to again a bunch of teachers some uh three of the buildings had students in them or four of the buildings said students and them three did not so i the students the buildings that had students in i was able to go into some classrooms was able to um talk to students uh in them and and even chatted with some kids online the teachers that chose to have a video and students are very responsive hey there's somebody who wants to talk to you guys they flipped right from the tile because they were they were doing reflective writing flipped right from the tile on to live so i got to say hello to them to me indicates that students were there and doing what they were supposed to be doing at least as the teachers had expected it um i was invited the following friday by sarah martino to come into her classroom because she wanted to sell me something so the following friday i went to ct into her kindergarten classroom and got to see uh some cool things she was doing a sign language because she was part of the nia classroom several years ago as the kindergarten teacher with the sign language uh classroom that we had and some really cool stuff and got to see some kids get excited um got to speak to one of our um our english language learners in spanish which is really cool for me which i appreciated uh and so um and that felt very different than another weekend i i fortunate enough to know enough people to talk to know that again i'm not oblivious the fact that some people are absolutely struggling as again dave and kira are absolutely advocating for them and i think you know you're advocating in a different way we advocate in a different way too and i really think um that from my perspective what you just brought up after those teachers propose that to you i think is a really great way to demonstrate that listening i went from being overwhelmed feeling a little bit better and then being in sarah's classroom this second friday i mean really feeling good about that again we know that ec5 is feeling differently than 68 is feeling differently than 9 12. that's clear and and the data that they shared with us demonstrates that at least those people that chose to show that but i still feel like we are doing what we can with what we have is the bottom line with the resources that we have and the size of our district and the quality of our teachers i think we are doing everything that we can and and what i don't want the community i don't want our teachers i don't want anybody to think that if the school board continues to support the recommendations of the administration but this does not mean that we don't hear the 20 or 30 percent or even 40 percent of teachers are saying i'm drowning it's how can we continue to be creative to support the teachers the people that are not struggling are not struggling as much as others how can we use them to support them and how again can you guys ultimately as todd and esther um you know continue to foster communication in a way that helps our teachers and our community for that matter uh feel like they're being heard even though every decision doesn't have to be what they want right that's we all know that but how can they at least feel like they're being heard and how can we continue to collaborate together we have to do that and i think we've done a pretty good job so far of that and i want to continue to see that happen as long as we can as long as we're allowed to from a health standpoint i suppose moving forward that's the third time i cried awesome i've have a question um the it was mentioned earlier the fact that the the the biggest issue would like you to to think to to come across in the next few weeks is a question of not having enough stuff because of effectively precautionary absences effectively so if if the staff come in and they have a wonderfully fever that's they have to be away for 10 days is there any way we can speed that up in terms of their return by actually maybe giving access to quick testing or is there any way we can actually make that turnaround time for for those who don't actually have you know we've we've continued to work with the kane county health department um they have adjusted some of their guidance uh for a while uh if a student was symptomatic you had to put the student out and their siblings had to go out because the student was symptomatic they could be out for 10 days and then if they don't go for any testing and they don't don't have an alternative diagnosis the person who had the symptoms could come back but under the old guidance the siblings had to be out 14 days even though they were symptom-free the entire time so just last week kane county health department said you know we're readjusting that uh with the guidelines so that if you have a student who's symptomatic and they're out for 10 days and their siblings are out with them once the the student can come back the siblings can come back with them as long as they're symptom free unfortunately taking a very hard line on on the symptoms um you know imagine this as members of our own board and um administrative staff are on the table a symptom you know you have a stomach ache you know you're out you have um congestion you're out you have diarrhea you're out you have symptoms sometimes could be related to allergies you know you're going to be out of runny nose because you have the common cold you're going to be out and so the only way you're going to get back in um before that 10 day period is you're setting up a time to meet with your physician to get either an alternative diagnosis or you're receiving a negative test and there's different types of testing that are out there um you know as the state looks to ramp up more of a rapid test response that would be very very very beneficial one of the things that i've been working with dr mangan on and one of the things that we'd like to pursue and she's investigated this is we would like to be on part of a pilot group uh that works uh with isbee and with the university of illinois as a rapid testing site so that if um students did present symptoms we could do a rapid test right here and have results in 24 hours the cost there is a cost associated with that though it's a cost of twenty dollars twenty dollars uh twenty dollars a test but i still said even with the cost of twenty dollars a test i believe it will help keep us open and therefore i said continue to move forward and hopefully we can be part of that pilot i mean mention the students i mean particularly in terms of the staff i think that will be extremely useful because as opposed to starting out for ten days they're actually maybe after two or three right that will make it significant our staff has been really good about almost all of our all of our staff i don't think there's been one that hasn't went and got a quick test so there are quick tests out there they're going to those so our head staff has been very good very good about going getting a quick test and getting back as soon as they can if in addition we're so sweet add we should do it yep well i think the other thing is too something that i ran into with a friend um you know who's whose student had thrown up overnight and i had to reach out to todd to get specifics on this you know for all of our community members knowing what your pediatrician or primary care doctor is willing and not willing to do there are some pediatricians who are not writing exclusionary diagnoses and others who are waiting 24 hours and that's what i'm doing i've written two so far in the first three weeks of school for my patients that were clearly related to what i would identify was under my scope of practice but i made them wait 24 hours to make sure you know there's nothing else and then i met with the patients and and that's what i chose to do so my patients are asking but i am we already asked we already called my kids pediatrician just to know if we were in that situation or when we were in that situation do we know what to expect and what can we expect the timeline to be and so i think that's important for you know our teachers to know for their primary care physicians our families to know and from that the kids the students primary care physicians as well to help facilitate that because the test can take three days they can tell you 24 hours it can still take three days so the other question have we had any resistance from the students in terms of wearing masks um yes but very few that i've heard about generally speaking what i'm hearing is that a student may pull the mask down below their nose a teacher will tell them to pull it up and then they as soon as the teacher turns her back they pull it back down however i've not heard a lot of mass people being sent to the office we did have one parent i intervened on where we were working directly with the building administration and the parent had a good solution we were able to work a workable solution out there otherwise we have a couple parents who obviously have the mask you know or the student cannot wear the mask but we've worked with them as well but mostly students are wearing the masks but the transportation level they haven't had to deal with that no that's great it's great news really overall that's what i said the the students students want to be in school parents went their students in school people are cooperating people are working together at all levels and um it's really amazing i think that the challenge is when you read the survey results that we were sent by cea the teachers are making statements that people are not wearing masks but i'm not hearing from administration the students are going down to the office so i don't know if they're correcting and it's getting fixed i don't know what the disconnect is there um if maybe they're saying pull them up they do but definitely well we're alerting administration when we hear of mask issues in their building right and so what's the what's the proper course of action if a student doesn't have a mascot first attempt we call home okay second attempt we call home and send them home okay third attempt we tell them to take them and go remote learning they can't wear their mask we we do not want them in the district and you're fine in full compliance you're not i've not we've not had a lot of phone calls from administration i've had one parent so far that i've worked with okay so if a teacher has if a teacher has a child that's not compliant are they supposed to call you no they should be going to the building administration okay but usually once it gets to a level right the parent doesn't want to talk to the building ministry anymore usually they're calling us okay that's how we get involved how about if a teacher's peers aren't wearing a mask what is the proper course they should be going their building administration okay are you hearing anything of that being done i've had two teacher complaints from parents okay and we've invested both okay so one the email that we were sent there was you know blanket statements that masks aren't being worn is that from what we're hearing from you we're not aware of that and when i whenever there's and we have plenty of extra masks so if like there's some reason like hey i lost my mask we have thousands of masks that were provided by the state of illinois every dish every school in our district every facility has extra mass there's no reason um that the rule could not be followed okay so from what we're here and everybody is in compliance as as much as we can be in this state we know yes when we've checked uh right we've dealt with it if we are aware of it we've dealt with it when we talked to administration they say they don't have the same they don't see those issues i guess where's the disconnect i don't know because we're hearing you know it's raining and in those cases where where it was brought up that about a staff member not wearing a mask we requested that the administration spot check and those spot checks it's always been compliance okay yeah because you know before this all started you know there was the the the uh you know it was like the second coming you know that nobody was gonna wear masks you know my how can i get my kid to wear mask like eight hours a day you know i'm wearing a mask eight hours a day i'm not my kids are doing the same thing you know so we we're moving to the new normal so i'm just want to make sure that we're all on the same page from what you're telling me we are kids are in compliance teachers aren't compliant but other information i'm receiving that's not the case but i think it is important that sometimes students say teachers aren't wearing masks and they they need to understand a teacher when they're in their classroom by themselves and they're not students around a teacher does not have to wear a mask when they're in their room by themselves and i don't know sometimes students okay we've heard from students sometimes they need to understand there's a separation there if they're with students they must wear their masks if students are not anywhere near them they do not need to have a mask on what i'm hearing from the survey results i've not heard this personally i just read it in the survey results is that students aren't wearing them in the hallway i've not had that complaint from anybody on a personal level when i've checked on things that i've gotten for complaints i'm being told that's not happening so i don't know where the disconnect is yeah because my kids you know we go out to target or something like that and it's you know they're like little policemen where they'll point out you know somebody that's not compliant with their masks you know you've got the people wearing just the chin guards or the people everything like that so the kids are pretty good at that so and so i've you know i can't assume all kids are good like that but i'm gonna make that assumption and that's the case so we're four weeks four weeks into this right yes um do we have any feeling of how it's going to affect covering the workload and actually covering a normal curriculum or we're going to have to i think one of the things oh absolutely we when you look at the research and the evidence out there uh surrounding any of this pandemic we're under we recognize it's going to take longer to go through material so something that you may have done in one or two days is going to take you maybe four days it's definitely going to go slower we've had that conversation with our staff to understand we recognize we're not going to get 100 to the curriculum we just need to make sure that teachers pick the essential standards the components that are extremely important for them to move to the next grade level make sure they're covering that well and taking the time to do that so students can be successful as they go into their next level of progression so you're in third grade make sure you're covering those standards you know they have to have to be successful in fourth grade algebra one make sure you're covering the standards are essential to make sure they're successful and algebra 2 or in geometry and recognize you do it well take your time do those essential standards and let the other stuff you're just going to pull the stuff away that maybe isn't as essential and not worry about that as much are we giving them giving them access to the additional materials they're not covering yeah well it's all covered because they usually cover 100 of these cover more material we're asking them to slow down the process and not worry about those ones that are maybe not as essential we go back to wednesday is that i mean i understand they're stressed i understand i mean you could you could say everything a teacher is going through is what every american is practically going through these days um i appreciate they need more time to me my initial reaction to that was wow like that's a lot of time so we've already shortened the day from seven to roughly three two thirty i guess 208 at the middle school was 7 to 2 30.
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now we've gone 7 30 to 208 and now we want to get a half day on wednesday in addition to that so is there any way to possibly go 30 minute periods for a month see how it goes then maybe go like in stages um it seems like i know from my experience just with my own kids to have a full 40 minute period is far and few between how many classes do they have every day for them to sit there and say i got five minutes and i got to go to the washroom before i get on my next meet that never has happened yet so to give them and then in addition the cea is saying you know there are three words sustainable equitable effective the wednesday is the only equitable day out there and now we're reducing that by half so i'm i don't know well i wanna i just seems like a lot of time and it's good for the teachers but for the students i don't know i think that as important as academics is social-emotional learning for both our students and our staff so social emotional elements are extremely important for all parties with an educational system there are teachers out there and i know teachers that are out there teaching the entire period with both groups that is happening you just don't have the teacher that's doing it but there are teachers doing that um those are the teachers that are working really really hard that are that definitely need these types of time to be able to do what they need to do i think it's about quality of instruction and where am i going to get the most not quantity but quality how do i ensure that i'm going to have the best quality of instruction for our students how do i ensure that staff have the time necessary to provide that quality instruction and from a curriculum standpoint when i look back the mistake i made was i did not provide the time for teachers to collaborate the way they need to underneath this new norm what we're asking them to do is to develop a lesson that will take them and upwards about one and a half to two times the time it took them before to plan it because what they're what we're requiring them to do now if you looked at what stacey and gail showed you we have a template for our staff many of our staff they did lesson plan books or they did you know less than edu i forget what the website out there is but they have a lesson plan that you can digitally but they've not done this template where they need to do learning targets they need to have lessons that are embedded we want those worksheets or whatever materials are getting embedded in bed and bed in bed pdf take it to a pdf get embedded so students have access to that no matter where they're at that's a new step for teachers that's a new process that takes time so they have to think differently about how they pull everything together so that our parents have access to the material that they're instructing unlike what they've had to do before when you look at a traditional school year teachers have their own classroom their materials are put together face to face they can have it at the end of their desk students can pick it up they can hand them out they can do all those elements underneath this norm our teachers are required to embed everything you know not at the elementary but middle school and high school everything's got to be inside that campus court which requires more time many of them are doing you know their own videos whether it's not synchronous but a synchronous maybe they're doing a screencastify or they're doing a wii video or they're doing some kind of embedding of a video that takes a lot more time than what we did before and to me that's more quality instruction that's what i want to see i don't want to just beat them up face to face because i don't think that's getting us to the level we want to get for rigor and if i want the rigor i want i want those effective practices and i want the research practices they should be utilizing that we're teaching them to do i have to give something to them to be able to have the time to do that so we're paying a price of giving them the time they need to make better instruction to do a better job for our students overall for quality versus the quantity and i think there's a big difference there that's why i'm supporting the recommendation and the discussion i had with the teachers i truly believe um it's going to provide better instruction do you understand as a parent from a parent perspective completely understand where you're coming from but putting my teacher head on as a teacher and wanting to be an effective teacher and one that's actually going to get it through to her students you put on a normal year you put so much time you're not just teaching from 9 to 3 30 or whatever your time frame is you are constantly you're you're not taking lunch or you're eating lunch at your desk because you want to prepare and get ready for your your kids for after and and have everything set up and ready to go we are literally asking them to take what they've been doing and basically they're almost kind of starting over to one preparer and just to have the time to actually be an effective teacher i honestly do support completely i feel like we have to we're giving as a society and community we have to listen to our teachers because we are all having to adjust we have to look at it's great that our kids are getting back into the classroom for mental health purposes but we also have to really look at them and i know so many teachers are struggling and they're giving their all so on a normal regular year a teacher is working all day they're working at night and they're working on weekends elementary high school whatever they're doing that i don't even know how they're doing right now but i know they're trying very hard and it takes way more and i think unless you're really in those shoes you kind of maybe fully don't can't understand it but i completely support doing that and yeah i would love to see my kids have more class more instruction more teacher but i also think we have to stop and pause and give our teachers the time that they do need and compromise a little bit well i think what i keep saying to our staff is i'm a brand new administrator this year this is my first year me being an administrator in this kind of environment you know i'm literally flying by the seat of my pants right i'm lucky to be five minutes ahead of anybody else and making a decision and people look to us to know what's going on we're doing our best and i'm reading feverishly and i'm paying attention to to research and evidence to support instruction but our teachers are brand new this year too every teacher we have is like a brand new first year teacher everybody is teaching in an environment that we have no clue about we're all doing our best and everybody's dealing with it differently but as we're doing that and we're putting and like stacy and gail i have high expectations i would never say i don't i have extra high expectations for myself and for anybody works with me and i have a can-do attitude but i also believe we have to recognize that we have to support people along the way and we want i want what i want and that means i want good rigor i want strong curriculum for our students and our community members our staff can do it but if i want our staff to do that we have to give them some time to be able to do those types of things and that comes at a cost of giving up a little instructional time for our students to be able to provide a better more quality rigorous curriculum for us for our staff to get to be able to do that for our students i figured i'd be out man out so yeah anything else on this one all right buildings and ground sanity sanitization this is something um i asked director polloway to prepare i know there's been a lot of there was a lot of talk in the community and among staff regarding building cleanliness you've heard things brought forward to the board regarding building cleanliness so i asked director polloway to put together a little presentation for the board so the kind of the first thing that i wanted to start with is our staff is working hard our staff has put in the time we've been here for seven months preparing for these last three weeks for that first day of school we were talking about this the first day that all those kids went home to do e-learning we were talking about what do we have to do to support the process of getting those kids back in the classroom so a lot of the things that we've worked on and processes and things we've put in place we're that support function we we know what our role is in the educational environment and and our staff understands that we've been preaching that since i've been in the district that we are a vital support function to that classroom to that classroom teacher to those students to the families so we know what our role is and and we've worked very hard to to make sure we were successful in this endeavor one of the processes i've talked about a lot is our work order process that process is not a new process that process was in the district before i even started it was in its infancy but we've been working with that process for going on nine years now that process allows us the opportunity for feedback when those work orders are submitted we're able to to put information in there and share that information back with the submitter that's why we encourage staff to put in their own work orders we that's an automatic way for us to provide feedback um we found a lot of uh interesting things that have come up and these aren't necessarily things that are just because of the time we're in these things have historically happened but we've we've dealt with them so i just put some a few sample work orders and some things that have have come up and just kind of our response to them and how we look at them how we address them this feedback is provided on on the work order so that staff members see in that feedback we work with our building principles we encourage our teachers that when they're putting in these work orders if they have questions talk to the talk to the building principal i'm not going to read through every every single one of oh them i think it's important to understand when we look at our custodial staff i'm concerned that they receive so much negative publicity so much negative noise that i am concerned for their own social emotional as much as i'm concerned for my staff my teaching staff i'm also concerned for my related service staff and my my custodial staff feel like they can't do anything right they feel like no matter what they're doing no matter how hard they're working they still can't do anything right and it it's really disheartening to think about some of the work orders that have come across the desks of dan that really do show you kind of what's happening out there you know and so i do think it's important that we read these because i want community members and i want other related people i want other teachers whoever's listening to this to hear what our custodial staff has to endure on a day-to-day basis on people who are doing their best to keep the the school sanitized clean and safe for everybody they're working feverishly to do that i tease dane dan that you know they're working their fingers to the bone they're sweating as they're trying to work through their day and we talk about grace and having grace for individuals and then you get these work orders and you wonder you know why like a room not clean because popcorn's on the floor when they do the work order they find that the room was cleaned but the staff member came in afterwards and had popcorn left the popcorn the floor and then the next day said her room wasn't cleaned but they left the popcorn on the floor be like me eating popcorn in my office and saying somebody can clean up the popcorn after me that's not the job of a custodian a java customer is to sanitize to make sure it's clean and to clean up the classroom that should not be left a huge mess when i was a climatic classroom i had my students pick up my own room to make sure it was reasonable there's going to be pencil shapings and those types of things but that was one of the work orders so i do think you need to read through the work orders okay so that that's kind of my first example uh another one is staff bathroom not cleaned and paper on the floor upon investigation we find out that the bathroom was cleaned at the start of the shift but early on staff were here a little bit later on and that bathroom was used after it was cleaned and that was the condition it was left in sinks in classrooms we've definitely encouraged that use of hand washing and utilizing those sinks but we've had work orders that have come in from classrooms that don't have any students that the the sink encounter were never clean for classrooms that were remote only and come to find out that after the staff was in there again somebody in the room used the sink dripped water and left a mess on the counter another one was student bathroom not cleaned and the the indicator was that the toilet seats were left down again worked with the building administrator did some little investigating and then found out the bathroom was clean and sanitized and then our staff left it down because when they used the disinfecting gun the disinfectant was dripping on the floor so to keep that from happening they put the toilet seat down in the classroom this was very recent there was a work order that there was some rice left on the floor and a band-aid left in the sink upon investigating it the following morning we didn't see any evidence of the band-aid and we did find one piece of rice on the floor and the rest of it was cleaned up the night before um there is sometimes we we are not perfect we never claim to be perfect our staff works hard at what they do but there is some sometimes where we have to do some follow-up with our staff so there has been work orders where tables were not cleaned and there was some dried glue and pencil on a table top the teacher took care of that in the morning put in the work order reported it to our principal we followed up with our staff and definitely the detailed cleaning is is a factor of life not that it was never before but it's even a heightened factor now so we addressed that with the staff member we had a concern that a classroom wasn't sanitized in an elementary building between the morning and afternoon session upon investigating that again worked with the building principal talked to our staff it was a new staff member as he was going down the line of rooms the door was locked he didn't think it was his his business to to go in that door because the door was locked so he just went on his routine and the teacher put in the work order so we coached him that we teach with our doors locked to knock on the door or key your way in and say i need to just sanitize real quick and then i'll be on my way another one a woman's staff bathroom needs the sinks and toilets clean again the staff washrooms were cleaned but we coached the new staff member again we've hired a lot of new people and this is a constant coaching time that you know we we want to work with them and a lot of these people don't have custodial experience that they just need to be more detailed in their cleanliness corners and edges and things like that was was what was brought up some things that have come up to uh staff inquiries so not necessarily work orders but whether it's an email request or a request to the principal about hand sanitizer stations not working properly we do have those installed in all the classrooms at the high school so those were filled and those newer units are battery operated and just needed to be primed so if we give it a couple extra seconds for those brand new units that they they do work disinfectant bottles which is in every classroom in the district we've had some requests and and teachers asking to get those filled after they're already empty we just kind of encourage a staff and following up with the principals to you know when your bottle's halfway filled let us know and put a work order in and we will be more than happy to fill it we have plenty plenty of product classroom desk and workstation not cleaned or disinfected um this is something this is not new but again this is the times we're in we're in we found out that you know a lot of times there'll be papers teachers want to set up their room for the next day but are disinfecting guns it just does not work out well with papers on the desks so again this is not a new process but one we have to really really get people to understand that you're whether it's your teacher desk what's your student's desk your counter those can't be sprayed with the disinfecting gun if they have papers on them so our staff has been told that they have to skip those so again when those are brought to our attention we're following up with the building principal to talk to the staff but but this is something that's come up numerous times so i just wanted to to make some mention of that um one other thing before we go to that i want to share that we implemented at the board's request was was our binder that we uh started we took our our task sheets so our staff and i spoke about this before our staff works from task sheets that have been created that are available to to teachers and staff at any time we expanded on those task sheets to give it more detail and more disinfecting specifications and ask them to sign off on this every day and time stamp times when they go into places multiple times so we talk about you know going above and beyond and how everybody's got to do a little bit more this is another thing that that our staff is doing there that that's in every building every custodian is filling one of those out every single day so we have that helps them remember and focus on the things they need to focus on but when we do get a teacher request that her room wasn't cleaned or there was an issue we can go right to that binder and find the staff member that was in there and ask what happened what's going on and have that conversation so we we want our staff to have that opportunity to be able to explain why something is the way it was so again that's just an expanse of the task sheets that we've all we've always used the slides we decided we wanted to take just a few pictures to kind of show and highlight some of the areas of the building our staff has worked hard and proud these are recent pictures these are not pictures from the start of the school year or anything these have all been taken in the last couple days just to show how how proud they are of their buildings and and the hard work they're doing and what our role is again i cannot stress it enough that we've been preaching our staff knows their role and we're all here for the same reason our staff wants to see our kids in those classrooms that's why they're working so hard anybody have any questions just to be clear um we have a system of no ticket no action right correct okay so basically if there's any there's we don't we're no longer dealing with anecdotal evidence we're dealing with real facts correct so the biggest um sin would be to actually not report something as opposed to not correct and we've had that we've had that conversation we've met with numerous staff members and had that conversation the purpose of the work order is not to get somebody in trouble we want to know we want to do the best we can for the staff and students that is our goal that's what we're trying to do so by putting that work order in we're not perfect we never claim to be but we're we're doing the best we can and we're all working hard to make sure that that happens yeah i would equate that to an i.t ticket in the business world you know anytime i need something done with my computer you know it this is a little you know i don't want to you know it's a little bit to the extreme the it guy is not going to do anything until he's got a ticket right ceo so i can see that i guess my question would be you know was brought up to me so is there a check and balance in the wework system meaning so a staff member would send a ticket in and that goes to i don't know who does that go to goes goes through the principal and then goes to our office okay so so it so there's a paper trail that goes from the teacher to the principal to your office correct and then after that what happens then it's assigned by our office to the to the building custodian that would be associated with that area or the maintenance or whoever it should be and that again that's all logged and documented okay and then that person would close it out correct okay and then is there a check and balance after that that ticket automatically goes back when that ticket's closed or that ticket status is changed that goes automatically goes back to the requester okay so that so okay so teacher miss a to protect the innocent has to put in a ticket that goes to the principal the printed or he doesn't have to afford it off or she doesn't have to afford it there's a paperwork trail and then it's closed out and then information is sent to back to the original requester and the building principle okay and then so what happens after that so if it's not done sufficiently or typically if if there's still an issue then they would either submit another request or they would send us an email okay and say this request was closed but whatever xyz wasn't completed can you look at it and then that generates me or one of my supervisors okay so the principles are in the loop okay so there's a problematic problem probably oh okay it's been a long day so if there's an issue there the principal is going to be in the loop so at least it's on his or her radar okay so there's no is is there a possibility that a tick could be a ticket can be submitted and then cleared out without any of these checks and balances no not even possible okay impossible gotcha and then my other question has been brought up so the handset the the sanitizing guns so that's sprayed on all the surfaces and then dries correct is there any residue left after that the original the alpha hp that we used to use historically there was more of a residual effect but there is some some residue even with the new bios there is some residue that's left and what does that look like i mean you wipe your hand on it is your hand going to come back cold it should be it's like a hazy like a hazy film okay it doesn't leave anything uh a water spot a faint water spot correct because the information i was sent you know it's your hand you put your hand on it and your hands are going to be looking if it if it was still wet i mean if it was still wet that would come out with your hand being black no i mean it wouldn't be black okay i'm just i'm just addressing you know we've got the man in charge here so i'm addressing issues that have been and our and just to clarify our our process is a multi-step process so just we don't just run around and blast everything with the guns cleaning is the first priority then disinfecting comes after that and then that's where that wednesday saturday we've we've been in every building every single saturday disinfecting and focusing on distance you're the expert but our process is to clean then disinfect and sanitize okay so and then so that happens every evening still as well correct okay correct everything is disinfected ever every evening okay and that has no well it doesn't have a black residue or anything like that on your hands at all nope okay what could be that black residue that could be left on somebody's hand i sent an email i would i would have to it would have to be is it a table is it a desk where was it i mean we'd have to do some investigating to see why that was yeah was it from a white board okay understood yeah i'm just like i said you're the expert on anything that was addressed i do my best i don't know about expert i try the other thing is obviously i'm assuming that once you build up some data you'll be looking at some kpis and saying you know this this area here is a problem we need to allocate some additional resource or write based on the based on the ticket information right oh absolutely yeah we could definitely we can definitely categorize that stuff and it's going to take time to build up that data correct and with the volume of new staff we're bringing it i mean we've we've brought in i think six new staff members already we want to bring in a couple more i mean we have a lot of new people so have you had any absences in terms of people we have yeah we've had a few we our staff is working overtime our myself our secretary you know joanne all of us are stepping up doing doing extra to me we have covered any vacancy that we've had we've had a body to cover it somebody has covered it oh and dan i probably if my questions that we're coming across as accurate you know accusatory no i'm not the case it's just not at all looking for answers and uh yeah absolutely absolutely that's kind of an open-ended question isn't it hey he put the ball on the tee dan it's your time to take it i mean i think it having the extra staff resources i mean the some of the the items that dr stern was able to get through you know fema and stuff were helpful i mean i think our vendors have stepped up i mean our vendors have been great with getting us supplies i mean we have the support we need i i think we're doing a great job i mean and the only person who knows that is you yeah i mean and we've we talked about that with our staff we're we're looking to hire another second chick second shift supervisor and the goal with that person is to take it we think we're we're great right now but we can always be better so that the goals for that person will be specifically written to to take us to the next step any other questions awesome thank you thanks dan thank you dan since you're already up there you might as well stay so besides custodial work we do do a few other things in the district um we i had worked with with dana on stepping up some of our capital projects we did obviously have the roof failure because of the hvac equipment stuff at the high school with that gym roof which required us to replace that the gym floor and incur quite a bit of damage in the music room which all that was covered by insurance and we took care of all that we thought we had the roof repaired adequately to get us through to next summer and possibly even the next budget year we've had subsequent issues with that roof not that have damaged anything you know besides some ceiling tiles but it's to the point now where my recommendation is we have to do something so we utilize gartland for our as a roofing consultant and they came up with a great alternative which instead of doing a full tear off we can do a roof a multi layer roof coating so they would seal the roof membrane down with batten strips and then do a coating over that roof that could get us up to 20 years at probably it would be a substantially less cost than a full replacement and we could do it right now so i'd work with dana um we can do that project through the joint purchasing alliance where we wouldn't have to put it out to bid so we have vendors working right now and putting proposals together for us and i'll have those proposals by the end of the week and then we can talk about the cost of that is going to be in the neighborhood of 180 000 versus the the full replacement of that which would have been upwards of 300 000 so that would cover the whole gym area and the music area so it as much as we wanted to try to put it off and encompass it with a couple other you know projects for the summer i i don't think we can wait explain the damage again so we had so what happened is we had during a storm um i think it was back in march it was in the spring yeah it was in the spring was right around cova time so we had a storm we had power outage which we you know incur typically we lost a couple of ventilation systems in that gym so the gym pressurized building was all closed doors were all closed we were dumping not membrane available from being adhered lifted in all the roof vent locations pooled with water and then that water ended up in the gym and then and then at the same time we developed it that it tore where the air handler is it's right over the band room so we we took in water there and then as we were investigating that working through that is when we found the gym had four substantial areas of water now is that near the new equipment that was just installed there no this is all this is all old this is all old existing building stuff yes could have blended on someone yeah no nobody to blame it on so we we thought we had it repaired and we had we got the mechanical systems taken care of we got all that done but that roof has just occurred we've had multiple leaks up there and multiple issues and i'm just afraid we're putting a brand new floor in you know we're replacing the bleachers we're gonna we put lights in we're i don't want to i don't want to incur another floor the insurance companies already asking me why three gym floors so any questions about that so the 180 versus the 300 plus so the 300 plus is strip it down and then recoat yeah strip down new new insulation new membrane so what we did with all the rest of the roofs which which is probably the best option but this roof coating if we can get a 20-year roof with just putting a coating over the top of it and do it right now it's well well worth it how long would the new one last about 20 years it would be a 20 to 30 year rough and you typically could get longer but i think they're only guaranteed for up to like correct years yeah yeah the warranty is the same time frame correct right unfortunately i've gotten fairly knowledgeable about it like you have yeah i'm going to be off the board by then the good news is is that one of the things that was not included in the referendum dollars was the original jim bleachers being replaced in the in the original gym and with this with everything else it's like we talked about the expenditure it's like let's get now it's time to get the new bleachers too they had they had to all be removed to be able to do the work on the gym floor and it was just easier and it was time well they'll match the mezzanine and it'll look nice have they been installed yet the new ones it'll be everything will be done by mid mid october yeah the the floor is done we're working on design and then bleachers will be the last thing in mid-october got some time for the roller skating unit and i think that that director polly like even with the floor being ruined um it's they redid all the lights and the painting and i mean you've got the floor out you might as well fix everything the right way um and not have a brand new floor brand new lights and walls and then all of a sudden next year you decide you want to take those bleachers out and scratch all the floors and the walls and have to redo it all so it made sense just to put closure to the whole entire gym and and just be done with it so and then putting the roof on to protect our new investment any other questions no i think i'm done thank you dan republic act 97-256 in public act 97 256 requires that all public school districts post the district website the annual administrator and teacher salary slash benefit report by october 1st of each year so it was included in the board packet and we'll be posting it after this meeting on the district website and public act 970609 um this is also an annual requirement for posting imrf compensation benefit packages and that is within six days of approving the budget which occurred tonight and imrf employer must post a total compensation package for each employee receiving a total compensation that exceeds 75 000 per year so that will also be posted to the website these are annual postings and we can go back to the other items that we had to move to information the ffa donation now we need them 4.5 sure so our first um information item that we'll bring forward next month for action is to accept the donation of ffa activity from the illinois ff from the illinois foundation ffa for a national chapter award building committees so um dr mangan do you want to talk a little bit about this or you want me to take it from the notes okay let's do it i can do it too i know dana's worked with that too go ahead dana um so i we received a check for 600 from being the state winner um in the building communities area for the national chapter when i was talking to buddy to get an explanation of this last summer they took third overall in the state but won this building communities event three of the fundraisers that were part of that was their project dance which was a six hour dance marathon that supported individuals with special needs and they collected monies to help support those kids in special olympics um they had the fan fest which is the football game the first like one of the first football games of the year and they do their sweet corn and their cow pie bingo to help just bring the community together and then they do the bags for vets which is a annual corn hole tournament that raised funds for to support the local american legion post and the veterans so based on those three events and building the community those were what allowed them to win this award for the region so we did get that check and then also included in your board packet was a little write-up that i believe was on facebook that came from um them that kind of talked about the vets and the project dance a little bit more so it was a nice positive write-up for their ffa and then the the money is going to be used for future at community events that they plan to do someday when we can get back out there and just help students with conventions and conferences good so the the next information item is we'll be bringing it back for action is related to the northern king county regional vocation system the efe-110 uh because now we're the new fiscal agent we will be opening up a bank account a separate bank account from the district's account for for those dollars and for that account and then um next issue is we'll be bringing forward next month numerous numerous of veterinarian affiliation agreements remember last year the board had to approve those these are annual renewals so we'll be bringing those forward for the board we'll do one motion to approve all of them and then we'll sign off in october and then the the last the last thing is a donation from enchromia and these are glasses to assist color blind students dr mangan i believe was working with mike schmidt elizabeth todd is an er a social studies teacher at the high school who had the opportunity to get these color blind glasses she thought it was really essential she says that there's many students specifically males that go undetected for color blindness and so she felt it was a huge element for us to be able to have these they range anywhere between 350 to 550 in terms of getting the glasses they're donating six of them for us you can see the proposal that's part here that you can read on your own from elizabeth and mike schmidt that she submitted for me you can see the cross-curricular elements that she felt they could service clear across the high school she felt they could be used in a lot of different areas so students really could have some assistance there it meets the science standards that she was very excited with as well as social studies standards we did work with our legal counsel to get a contract and correct it in terms of elements to make sure that our students were taken care of that were using them for uh photo ops there is some elements that they want some photo opportunity they want to use us for some marketing uh we do have a contract that we've signed to make sure that it's within the limits of what we felt was reasonable in order marketing uh for their free glasses it was basically in conjunction with a marketing for their product but we do recommend and we will bring it forward next month for six of the uh colorblind and chroma glasses donation that rips it up how did we estimate we had 55 students out of curiosity uh she did some research she being emily cott had researches she had done and based on the percentage of nationwide that is colorblind she felt that's how many students we would have that were club line based on that percent all right motion second to adjourn going to executive yes five minute break
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
good evening and welcome to the meeting of the gilbert public schools governing board today is tuesday september the 22nd i would like to call this meeting to order welcome to those of you who are joining us on live stream those of you who are here and in the audience and members of the board this evening miss wood is joining us telephonically so she will be here at roll call we will first have a moment of silence item 1.02 and then we'll move to the pledge of allegiance led by miss eugetti would you please join me in a moment of silence i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you mr judy ms wilson please do the roll call item 1.04 miss humphreys here miss sheila eugetti here miss laurie wood here mr reed carr here dr charles santa cruz here mr president all board members are present you have a quorum thank you miss wilson we'll move to item two approval of this evening's agenda item 2.01 is there a motion i move that we approve the agenda as presented thank you mr jetty is there a second all second thank you mr carr any discussion seeing none hearing none we will vote on approving tonight's agenda all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye those opposed the same motion carries five zero move to item 3 the superintendent's report and we move to item 3.01 and dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz while i switch to the y-die here give me one moment okay thank you dr santa cruz governing board members members of the public tonight our superintendent's report is going to hover around three things one i'm going to talk a little bit about how we are how the decision was made based on a july 28th governing board meeting to start in person full and personal on the 21st and then i'll talk about the current metrics as well as go into uh gilbert public schools coveted 19 dashboard that will hopefully be up and running by tomorrow at some point in time and board members at any point in time feel free to please kick in with any information you'd like to share related to this on july 28th governing board agenda items 7.03 there was a motion that says it is recommended gilbert public schools begin in-person classes upon meeting the arizona department of health services guidelines at such time the board will provide teachers administrators and parents a one-week notice to plan and implement their reopening strategy beginning august 5th and until the guidelines are met courses will be held online the board will reevaluate september 22nd if the criteria has not been previously met and based on that and based on when the current guidelines are out originally maricopa county or the arizona department of health services came out with their dashboard and it was related to you could click on whatever county you lived in and those were the numbers that we were looking at and then subsequently maricopa county came out with one that is specific to school districts and we discussed that in board meeting i think thereafter but originally that's where we were looking at and so as we came to the meetings from then on out we kept looking at both sets of data just understanding that um using both of those to guide us in our decision making and with that um we didn't specify whether it had to be all green or you know how many yellows there had to be we just felt that it when it was we felt it was safe enough to continue based on those guidelines and based on the metrics that were set forth that was the decision made governing board members of my understanding that or would anybody want to kick in with that i believe you're correct there dr mccord i'll defer to mr carr comment yeah dr mccord i think you're exactly right and i would point out first of all this motion was passed before we knew the metrics or the format of the matrix second part of the confusion of the metrics if we call them is that there are actually two and there really are three elements of the metrics but as far as the green and red we were looking at the metrics of did we meet specific benchmarks and that's that's a hundred out of a hundred thousand a hundred and a hundred thousand people that's seven percent and that's five percent depending on which of the metrics it was so we either met that or we didn't and we have referred to those as green or red at the same time the metrics released included a component of risk level for spread and that was either red yellow or green and so the fact that we're using red and green for a specific metric and we're using red and green red yellow and green red and green for a risk level i think is part of what's causing the confusion we authorize you to go forward with the plan i don't i honestly don't feel like it's an issue of whether we're meeting the metrics and again i'm referring to the specific numbers not the range but perhaps we didn't communicate it post fact how we were following those what's red green or what's red yellow green and so we i appreciate that you're going through this in an effort to communicate to the public but i do concur or concur with your statement of we moved forward because we believe we're meeting the metrics and the move forward just to add to that commentary was the authorization that the superintendent based on his communication with board members either during or in previous times past had the authority on our vote to make that decision and dr santa cruz i would like to just say that at the then i remember the evening that we talked there was a discussion about something that was on the town of gilbert website that had to do with the metrics for the town of gilbert but that did not encompass our entire district because a third of our district is in mesa and at that point in time we did not have specific gilbert public schools information i have i think i've made clear that you know throughout this whole thing this makes me nervous all the way around however you know we don't live in a bubble we are in maricopa county we have teachers who live outside of our district we have parents who work outside of our district and so i think that we have done the best that we can based on the information that we've been given from the county i think my biggest frustration is that dr mccord has this information that he has here in front of us but then we get conflicting data from the county or the state and and i think that's some one of the reasons we have parents that send us a chart that says one thing but yet we're going by this and i think that's the biggest frustration for me is that there's conflicting data all the way around and so you know trying to do the very best that we can under circumstances that we don't always have complete information or i don't want to say accurate information because i'm not sure that that's the case but then then we're dealing with the media who gives us certain things so i feel that dr mccord and our cabinet has done the very best that they can am i comfortable with this totally no i've said that from the very beginning but i think that we have to go with what the emotion said which was that we would do the very best that we could according to the information that we were given and this is what we were given and i think dr mccord's actions as you've stated were consistent with the motion as we understand it ms humphreys i did want to add in because i think what is really important is that as we continue forward we all work on those things that we need to do to make it safe for our kids to be in school and that means wearing a mask in school and after they leave school until they get home not taking it off to visit with friends it means staying home when sick student or teacher or staff member if you don't feel well please stay home it means cleaning and washing hands and taking care of those protocols we've put a lot of new protocols into place cafeterias hallways turned off the drinking fountains please send a water bottle in for your child those are all things that we can do individually and as a community so that we can continue the great downward trend that we've had over the last seven weeks we've gone from 110.7 cases per 100 000 residents to i think it was just over 33.79 if i'm remembering correctly this last week so we've been able to do a lot but it depends on our community and it depends on us working together to make things better so i would just encourage all of our gilbert public schools community whatever part you have make sure you're doing your part and make sure that we can continue because we want we want kids to be in school kids want to be there we want them to be there but we want people to feel safe so if your child doesn't feel well please keep them home and do those other things as well please continue dr mccord thank you dr santa cruz this is just a four-week listing of where the what the data looked like for maricopa county as reported by the arizona department of health services and again this is stuff as i've reported out on again we'll post this uh tomorrow just so everybody can see it but that's just a listing of the data and you know in certain areas trending down other areas an uptick here trending back down and then this is for gilbert public schools boundaries and again certain areas going down but others going up and then back down as you notice from uh reported on the 11th which is for the week of august 23rd the 29th and the percent positivity we were at 6.07 and then last week it was reported back down to 3.33 percent and steadily uh holding steady or going down from the beginning is the covet-like illnesses and again the number per hundred thousand cases is steadily declining and dr mccord on the first one and on this one you're matching the colors as published by the sources so the first one was all green because that's how maricopa county is publishing it this one you've got some yellow in it because or sorry how the state is publishing it for maricopa county on this one you're publishing it because the county is publishing it as yellow correct correct that i'm i'm yes i'm just in down what i see and and the difference in the criteria of whether it's green or yellow is the state doing it for the county level is doing it based on whether you met the specific metric of 100 for per 100 000 or 7 positivity or 10 percent covered likeness when you go to the gps boundaries and switch data sources to the county they're coding it to the risk level not to the specific metric and so again that gets to my earlier comment it confuses and we recognize that confusion in the public and it's frankly has been confusing to us until we figured out that difference and so we understand that there is confusion there but highlight that one is based off of the risk level of spread one is the specific metric specific metric excellent um and just to to cap this piece off you know me dr santa cruz i know the board members as well as cabinet members have all been out to campuses since hybrid and since yesterday just seeing how things are going visiting classrooms having conversations with administrators teachers and very positive feedback but more than anything i'm looking for what do i see i see staff wearing their masks i see students wearing their masks but i think it's also important to point out and i think miss humphries talked to a little bit this is a this is definitely a community effort we have to be vigilant about adhering to some of those guidelines and mitigation strategies that we have in place in order to be able to stay in school because if the numbers go south then we have to look back again and make other decisions and so i think it's important to make sure everybody understands that and i i don't think that people don't understand it but we just have to adhere to it and continue to do this because i see a lot of happy students and staff and i said this from the beginning in-person instruction is in my opinion the very best and uh for students and so but we also know that there's there's uh other thoughts and feelings and and and you know we we have to provide online education which is something that you know isn't ideal but we definitely are trying to do the very best we can and we try to tweak as much of it as we're moving through this and so we don't want to with any of these decisions we don't want to create mistrust that's definitely not the intention we're learning as we go along too with certain things and how we need to communicate and if we could wind the clock back a little bit and look at things differently we probably would and and and make some different discussions about how we communicate certain things out more clearly just so people have a clear understanding not everybody will agree or understand we understand that we can appreciate that but as things continue to change as we move through this process whether it's from a state level at district level we have to do the very best job we can with communicating out where we're going and what we're doing so i'll move on to um the yep before you move on and and i don't know if this is even a possibility dr mccord but could maybe um miss frost or somebody um at the district level you take some of the other information that we're getting and try to find out you know the discrepancies between it and i'm i'm talking about the the one um chart that i said that we got today where it showed the county being different than what we got right what we were given here and maybe finding out calling i don't know if you can call any i don't even know if it's possible but i'll ask her because i think it was added to their website but i don't know when it was added on thursday okay but i think if if we could if we could have an answer to that if it's even possible right um because i think that's our our biggest frustration is that at you know at that level we're giving we're being given different pieces of information on what that should look like thank you i will definitely uh have a conversation with her um moving into the benchmarks i've gone through these slides before just the criteria based on each area and then of course where it goes minimal moderates substantial and then looking at um where each level is hybrid traditional and the mitigation strategies that uh are asked in each area and so um i i and to talk this little bit you know um questions are we green or are we yellow well you know in the definition of hybrid i think is having students in person and having students online and we do have both of those but regardless i think if we were even in the green we would probably if you'll notice all these boxes aren't checked and when i say in the green for both gps as well as maricopa county i wouldn't i wouldn't necessarily condone not having masks not doing symptom screenings not you know any of those things so as we approach some of those areas and in my opinion when it says traditional it seems like everything is going to be in the clear and they see it being in the clear for a long time but i just don't think that's going to be the case so we will continue with our mitigation strategies as we move forward and dr mccord getting back to the the masks and the face coverings i know that there was and i don't know what happened with the board of supervisors today i don't know if they made a decision or not i know they were having a meeting and i'm i was going to report this and when i do my insurance trust report but um if we have to have a motion to continue with the masks i would ask that we do that because from everything that i've been hearing that is singly one of the most important things so and i think there's some confusion there with from some of the emails that we've gotten because it doesn't say that you have to continue to wear masks when you're in the green right so i think that we as a board have got to to make a decision one way or the other on that and i i support that we continue to to enforce that thank you thank you the simple reality of if we follow this which our motion does and dr mccord acknowledged what's hybrid what's traditional i believe the actual printed definition some students on online and some students but if we follow this with the risk assessment uh we're we're still a long ways away from the mask recommendation be going away yes we're green in two of the categories but if we look at other states and what's happened with their uh cases per hundred thousand and we look at where we are we have as ms humphreys pointed out declined but the the continuing decline of that bell-shaped curve will be very very gradual so i just candidly i don't see this going away for quite some time based on these recommendations i i do have one question on the cohorting i know you know at elementary we can do that at the secondary levels have we been able to cohort much or basically everybody has their schedule and they go where they need to mostly that last aspect of what you said we we did not cohort it necessarily kids have the option of taking some classes online as well as in person so they can break up their day differently if need be okay that's that's you can't do that at the elementary level yes and i i know um doing secondary schedules it would be a tremendous challenge to cohort students because it's hard enough to make a schedule when you're trying to give every student what they want but to try and give every student what they want and cohort them at the same time i think what this has done more than anything has helped every district take a step back and and not thinking just about today but looking at tomorrow and and a long time from tomorrow and that is what can we do differently in a lot of different situations to help accommodate students regardless of a pandemic so we definitely have some thoughts and ideas moving forward let me finish up with this this is the current data that was reported last thursday again it goes back to the slide the last box in the maricopa county data 43 out of is green it's considered a moderate risk because it's trending down and then criteria two percent positivity is 4.0 and um which is green and then criteria three hospital visits uh 2.0 percent and then looking at gilbert public schools boundary data 33.79 which is yellow at moderate risk and criteria two percent positivity is 33.33 percent uh again minimal risk trending down and criteria three hospital visits 2.0 percent uh trending down uh i believe it'll probably flatten off though at that point but i i could be wrong i i definitely can't make a living out of guessing what the data is going to show each week so we'll just keep our fingers crossed and try to do our best again side by side looking at maricopa county arizona department of health services information in maricopa county related to gps and again those are the same numbers just side by side and then what i want to talk to you about is moving forward i know we've had questions in the past and and we want to be definitely as transparent as possible when it comes to covet cases within our district and don antecenas and her team as well as jen frost have have come together and put together a dashboard that again we will hope will go live tomorrow and i'll kind of walk you through that real quick and i'll read this to you so the purpose of the data included in this dashboard is to provide a transparent summary of reported active positive cobit 19 cases by school an active case can be a student or staff member that has been participating in on-campus activities and attested positive for covid19 upon notification of a positive case extensive procedures and protocols are immediately actioned by our district and campuses including exclusion for participation in any in-person on-campus activity until the registered nurse verifies that the individual meets the return criteria set by state and local health authorities once an individual is cleared to return to campus they are no longer considered an active case and their case is removed from the dashboard count please note parents will be notified if their student has been exposed to a positive case exposure is defined as within six feet or less of someone with a positive diagnosis of copin 19 for 10 minutes or more as according to maricopa county health department full details for this can be looked at under our health services department on our website all cobin 19 data shared by gilbert public schools is for informational purposes only this information is based on reports to the district from other sources which have not been independently verified gps confers the maricopa county health department to track cover 19 cases and the trace uh close contacts dr mccord yes i ask when you say six feet or less does that include like if a student in one class i mean you can't decide if they've been six feet what happens is we give the information to the county um we will they will ask certain questions we will give them as much information as we possibly know from the information we've received from the student and if there are a number of students that need to be contacted that's when the county we turn it over to them to be able to do the investigation because we what we don't want is us making a decision that should be done by a health department for the mere fact that we don't want to air negatively so if the maricopa county comes back and says you need to contact these families and quarantine them for x amount of days then that's what we do and we contact those families and you may not have the answer to this question and not but has maricopa county increased the number of people to help with this i don't know the answer to that but it's a team of people that jennifer works with so it's been consistent in that aspect of it so they're familiar with each other but i don't know if they've increased the number or not i can ask jennifer again the dashboard will be updated weekly and this is what you'll see you'll see those that information i just read to all of you and then you'll also see the school the zip code and we will also put in the number of students and staff on campus and then the number of current active confirmed coveted cases and so you know a school district with 33 000 students 4300 employees you know will will indicate that on where all those folks are distributed there and then again just to reconfirm they'll be active cases and once they're no longer active and returned back to work or school that number will drop off of there just so people have an understanding of what that is and that is my board report for the evening i had one question um not it seems like not everyone who has coveted tests positive sometimes there are cases where people are sick but they do not test positive so they have the symptoms would we count that then as a positive case well these are current active confirmed covet cases okay yep and and dr mccord just to clarify we're putting the zip for reference the numbers have nothing to do with the zip code correct thank you dr santa cruz thank you dr mccord and if i could i would like to exercise a point of personal privilege this evening as a statement as i read the statement i will not presume to speak on behalf of all board members however if they concur with the spirit and the letter of what i am about to read i would certainly welcome their support it is not offered as rationale or as justification it is simply offered as information as we look at perhaps the last five or six months of our involvement with this covet issue it also as i enumerate various points they're not necessarily in rank order or in the order in which they came they were just pieces of information that struck me as i was composing this so if you will i said convo covet 19 is not of our making but we have attempted to address the collateral damage created by this virus decisions regarding how districts should proceed have largely been left to the lo to local boards and municipalities with relatively little guidance from the national and state government over the past five to six months the superintendent staff and governing board have worked to continue to deliver some educational service to our students and families admittedly the virtual format has proven to be a significant challenge for many of our students particularly but not exclusively at the elementary levels the virtual format has also been a source of frustration for many of our educators as well this is not anyone's preferred method of providing opportunity in teaching and learning for our students but we felt that it was necessary to engage our students in learning in the learning process in the safest manner possible and that is as we initially began the process the implementation of the virtual format will continue to be a mode that we will be utilizing within the district but it will be necessary for us to make significant adjustments in order for students and teachers to derive optimal benefit from its use we will do all that we can to tailor the use of this virtual tool to meet the needs of our students and teachers in a manner that is consistent with our district's curriculum goals and standards there are still many obstacles through which the administration the staff and the governing board board must navigate before we can say that we are satisfied with the actions we have placed in motion to address the teaching and learning process for our students and our teachers we will endeavor to do all that we can to address the challenges that continue to arise regarding covet 19.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
a meeting full committee meeting planning committee meeting of the whole september 23rd 2020 uh good evening i'm gonna have vin mastiana run through the roll call for quorum okay plenty committee members andrew martelly here tim white here kathryn halland and then board members mr paragini i see he's here here sorry uh miss arrogan pierre miss ham here and mr griffo here okay mr chairman you do have a forum great all right vin uh could you put the flag up for the pledge of allegiance please i can oh that's not really the one i want but okay can we see that yep all right i pledge allegiance okay okay first item on the agenda is audience um [Music] mr solon or vin are there any emails received um i do not have any but then again i don't have access to that email request and mr solon looks like he's he's on so if he can speak we can hear him and he may be just getting on yeah may have trouble he may have be having trouble getting in i see he's left the meeting okay so we could um we could go back to that i'm sorry i pressed the wrong button yeah no there are no no correspondence no correspondence okay right information sorry just uh jeff if you could just sort that out for future committee meetings just for ones you don't you don't attend sure just something to keep in mind that's all yeah moving forward i'd be happy if you want to afford any email correspondence to me um we can go through them that way yeah we just didn't have any relevant correspondence to this meeting i haven't worked it out but i i'm at the meeting so i didn't send it to ben gotcha understood thank you thank you jeff okay we're gonna move into item number three which is the hummuston building discussion i'm gonna turn it over to vin vin sent out some um items to the committee i'm gonna have him share the screen and walk us through the hummington discussion about the facility okay thank you mr martelly and good evening everyone so hopefully you could see the template that i have on the screen and if andrew can you just confirm you see that so i can move through yes i have it yep so this is a this is a template and it is a draft template so the committee members can you know add to it as we go through the discussion but i did put this together as a way to look at and gain an understanding of hummuston the hummuston building in general when i speak about it in tonight's presentation covers the entire building and the building includes hummuston school which is our alternative high school as well as the central office space that is occupied by all the departments of central office including the superintendent's office so this template just starting at the top left what i listed are the parameters and these are really items to consider these are the major ones that i've identified there may be more so when we look at hummuston building and compare it to any other alternative whether it's it's lease space whether it would be you know a new building the the things that we would want to consider are one the annual operating costs and i'm going to go through these in some more detail but i'll just run them run down the list what are the capital investment costs for hummerstone versus for example if we were to rent new space would there be leasehold improvements that we would have to make to new space to make it adapted for either the hummuston school or central office or both ada compliance is certainly an important factor and especially as it relates to the hummuston building which is not ada compliant for the most part currently the other thing we need to consider is this hummuston building if we vacate it the cost don't go down to zero because you still have to you know maintain the building even though it's to some minimum extent for example in the winter you'd want to keep the heat running at a low temperature just to make sure you don't freeze out the pipes the next item is the cost and time required to remove the use restriction on this building if the plan were to repurpose the building or demolish the building or sell the building the when the building was donated in 1911 the the way it was donated is that julia hummiston put up 30 000 and then as part of the agreement the building was then turned over to the town once it was built and thereafter it had to be used for public school purposes so there's um you know certainly something that would need to be addressed and then hummuston building is in and of itself um part of the greater uh i guess the center of town of cheshire is on the national register of historic places so the hummerstone building is listed you know as part of this center of town that's on that register certainly we want to look at the quality and functionality of this space versus any new space two important things that we'd want to consider one hummuston building is in close proximity to the high school and there are students that you know do move between the two school buildings as well as staff that move between the two school buildings so being 0.9 miles from the high school is certainly a key factor and an advantage to the hummiston building right now and then a kind of a subset of that is this next item the student costs related to hummuston school or the transportation costs related when we move students back and forth the other factor is central office uh being in the center of town you know is is in a really good and convenient spot so that quick access to other schools becomes um easier from from the hummuston building and there are situations you know that aren't necessarily large emergencies but you know times that you know this the superintendent or marlene solano our assistant superintendent or myself do need to move into other buildings quickly so that is another factor and then the last item that i put in this template are [Music] you know and i guess the best way to describe it is hummuston school is roughly occupies about 7 500 square feet central office is about 7 500 square feet relatively small spaces that is part of an overall school modernization plan you know if we decided that we within another building project can fit the alternative high school 7 500 square feet is a lot easier to find space within a larger building project and so hummingston school and central office are really our two smaller spaces so really you know making any moves before the entire school modernization committee's plan recommendation is made you know may not be you know the most efficient use of um you know any money that's invested so that's the basic template that i i wanted to take you through and before i pause for questions i'm going to hit this first line item because i know this has been kind of a big question within school modernization committee and that is you know what are the annual operating costs of of the hummuston building and so i just changed to a spreadsheet that um was developed by rich and i and you could see the columns that we have listed here are 1819 these are the actual costs of of running hummuston and central office 1819 and 1920 in the next column so you could see here we heat with natural gas um and that's been about 22 000 let's let's call it an average of 20 000 per year the last two years electricity is probably an average of about 15 000 if you look at the two years sewer costs 500 you could see water trash plowing you know each several thousand dollars per year and then fire sprinkler testing emergency lighting testing fire extinguisher inspection and um you know integrated pest management is what ipm stands for insect control five hundred dollars so if you look at the recurring expenses of this hummuston building you'll see that we average somewhere around forty seven thousand five hundred forty eight thousand dollars let's call it and then if we take this one step further and look at you know maintenance and and repairs that are non-recurring um you'll see that i'll just cut to the bottom line first 1819 non-recurring expenses were about 000 and 1920 it was about 35 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
in order to provide perspective allow me to identify some of the actions and is not an exhaustive list that have taken that have been taken by the administration and the governing board during this critical time obviously we initially accepted the notion that covet 19 was and continues to be a real threat to our ability to provide educational de uh educational service in our usual manner we resolved to communicate with families and staff consistently and often we organized and convened a 135-member task force to develop plans and procedures to address approximately one dozen critical areas affected by covet 19.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above