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hi this is superintendent mike morris thank you so much for being with us at this evening coffee hour uh we're really i'll introduce our guests in a moment but i just want to thank the community uh for the continued feedback we know this is a challenging time especially as the sun is going down quite a bit soon quite a bit earlier and as the weather turns quite a bit colder last week we had the nice reprieve but unfortunately i don't think we'll have that again for a while uh we really want to do sessions and this is the first of hopefully a series where we can communicate collaborate and share ideas and thoughts about how to support our students through the winter months through this coveted winter as it's being called um so tonight we'll have two guests uh two guest presenters we're gonna talk for you know probably 20 minutes and then we really want to open up for more interactive dialogue uh and question the answer so we can make sure we're addressing the questions that you all have so with that i'll introduce courtney and sarah and they're here today and they work with us uh through our association with the bright program which we have at our middle school in high school but they work with many different districts uh in the area and they're um really i find very helpful in thinking about this so i'm part facilitator but mostly listener and i may come up with my own questions as we go through it because this is such an important topic for us as we head um into the winter so courtney and sarah thank you for joining us we really appreciate you being here this evening and making time in your busy schedule for our community um but why don't i let you introduce yourself and and then you can get started with just some initial thoughts that you want to share sure hi everyone my name is sarah rigney i'm a licensed clinical social worker i live over in florence i'm just across the river from many of you um and i just want to say in addition to being a mental health clinician um for over a decade now i'm also a parent to seven-year-old twins who are also in remote schooling um and so i'm i'm wearing a few different hats tonight um as a clinician as a parent and as someone who's also kind of pretty heavily involved with schools courtney uh hi i'm courtney tucker i'm also a licensed clinical social worker i am actually in northampton massachusetts um and today we're gonna be talking to you about you know what what exactly are we going to be working through what happens now as it gets dark as it gets cold how can we prioritize wellness in the midst of experiencing more uncertainty more darkness almost and more lack of connection like this lack of connection has gone on for so long the other thing is bright is building resilient youth and transition and what it is this is a bridge program that helps students stay in school after they've experienced some sort of mental health crisis so it actually provides a transition or a bridge program so that students are able to gradually integrate and integrate successfully back into the school so um we're super happy to be joining you tonight um you know mike said that we would talk for a little while i want to let folks know that both courtney and i are really actually super interested to hear from you um and it can be any of the questions you have it can be um things that you're observing in your children and maybe you don't know what to make of them but really we're here to kind of be with you in your journey and answer what questions we have give resources make suggestions um talk through any questions or concerns you have um because what's happening for our kids these days is really significant um even for our youngest ones who who may not fully understand everything that's going on um the impact of being out of school is a significant change in their lives and it's a significant change in ours as parents and adults who are close to them so um you know we invite your questions and really hope that you'll engage with us by asking uh talking to us about what thoughts you're having at this point in time courtney anything that you would want to add in terms of other things that we are going to be able to cover tonight so i kind of want to set the context a little bit about what everyone and what we're experiencing right now is i think that initially we would say that we were in the midst initially of just one major storm we would say okay covet 19 hit it changed it rattled our world and now we're like okay what's happening and then we begin to see and recognize more of the institutional racism becoming and that was another storm that hit and then we begin the home having kids at home not being able to connect it hit and that became a whole nother storm jobs became another storm and so right now we just want to acknowledge that it may feel like for a lot of adults and children that you're in the midst of a storm that doesn't seem like it's ever going to end and a storm that creates so much uncertainty that it's really hard for you to plan for the next day the next week or the next hour and so just acknowledging that in this time we're sitting in uncertainty we're sitting in the unknown we're sitting in a place that creates perpetual anxiety we're lacking connection that allows us to say oh i'm okay or oh i'm gonna be okay it's a time where a lot of our identities we're tied to the things we were able to do and so now who are we how are we going to decide who we are how are we going to grow what's next for us and just also just really acknowledging that during this time there's so much uncertainty that even the people we look to that should have answers for us they're like wait i don't i don't have the answers either and they're like you're gonna have to get back with me right so we're in a time where answers to questions aren't coming we're in a time that that consistency isn't there and present for us those benchmarkers that we use to bench out to mark our life like the holidays even like oh if i could just get to thanksgiving i know i'm gonna have a break and it's gonna be well or whoa the christmas holidays is coming can't wait i'm going to hang out with my people i'm going to get my cup filled up and even now we're being told that that's going to be different and so we're in a time that everything that was familiar is different we're in a time where everyone wants to say the new normal but i'm going to say nope it's not new it's next because one day you're you feel like you got a routine some other change happens and you're going into a next normal and so you're really sitting right now in a place of uncertainty we are having uncertainty about our finances we don't know what what's going to cost what's not going to cost whether jobs are going to be stable um we're having insecurity also about like whether or not we're even going to get stuff from the grocery store uh right now people are like do i buy all the toilet tissue i can find do i buy all the paper towels i can find you know you send messages hey i found likes here did you find any over there so we're really in this time that you don't know whether or not you need to hoard or wrap your arms around tight some things or let go but in a time where you know the love and the hugs that you used to get from loved ones you're not getting anymore the smiles even just going throughout your day you're not seeing them anymore so we're definitely in a context where care is really hard to be shown so we want to acknowledge that i would also add that um one of the things that courtney is um talking about is is a phrase we've been using out and on the bray team is the chronic holding of the unknown right there's an ambiguous quality to our situation that's part of what makes it really hard right like as human beings we're not we're not great at actually dealing with ambiguity we'll take a risk a calculated risk um over ambiguity because at least then we can make an informed decision right but every day feels a little bit new and a little bit different and also really static at the same time it's this very um incongruent experience um where it's hard to wrap our head around the fact that nothing's changing and yet everything's changed um and so i just want to also name that that ambiguity is um is a quality we're not necessarily we're not used to experiencing with so much persistence with so much chronicity at this point sorry about that um thank you for that introduction and and uh there's a number of pieces that i took from um what both you what courtney and sarah are saying and um i thought maybe i'd put some prompts out there uh for you to respond to because these are some that i'm certainly receiving from families as is you know faye brady who's in the green room here our student service director um as well as principals and teachers and other staff what they're hearing about and so you know one of the ones that we hear a lot is what would you say you know what would you advise families or caregivers who are worried about their children's mental health particularly with all the variables that you talked about the uncertainty and the the season what would you how would you support or what advice would you give to caregivers in that role in that way um first of all i'd say great job paying attention first of all um you know i think if you're if you're paying attention to your kid you're wanting to notice if anything feels different um you know courtney and i can certainly give you a list of things to kind of be on the lookout for um but one of the best things you can do is be um honest with your kids and talk to them about what's going on um tell them what the parameters are and why you're making some of the choices you're making um and be clear with them about what they can and what they can do which is just as important as what they can't do um sometimes we can get as parents i'm speaking for myself a little here it's easy for me like to say don't do this and don't do that um and it's i have to remind myself to say like yes you can go do this and yes you can go do that and at a time when there seem to be so many structures on everything like it's really important to make sure we we slip in the cans um but a great resource and i'm happy to provide this link to mike afterwards is the national child traumatic stress network they have some great resources for parents on how to talk to your kids about um what's happening and you know washing hands and wearing masks and when to the um why to do that um and to contextualize it in a way that doesn't feel traumatizing but is really direct and informative i would say um one of the things that's really important during that time is to not be afraid to talk to your kids about the effect that the virus is having on them right and to talk to them about the things that they feel like they've lost because they're grieving a sense of normalcy some of them a sense of connection um and so acknowledging that there was a loss but also as you acknowledge the loss think about what opportunities are available for them now like what are new things that they can do that you all can do together as a family that they can look forward to beginning to have conversations with them about okay now there's a lot of stuff that's out of our control that we can't control there's so many things out of our control but within our sphere of influence what are the things that we can control so it could be you're going to take and we're going to enjoy ourselves for 30 minutes a day and we're going to move our bodies and we're going to dance and we're going to listen to our favorite songs we're going to have the house dance party or the house dance off you can even say things like you know what for 30 minutes we're going to do mindfulness i'm going to play some music or even go on um fire stick and go to the relaxed channel and i'm just gonna play something for us to be steel and in that stillness when kids are having a hard time you can do something like ask them okay now what i want you to do as you listen i want you to tell me what are five things you can hear what are four things you can see what are three things you can smell what's something you can taste and so doing things to help ground them and get them to be present versus constantly in their head the other things that you can also do is setting up rituals and routines in your house so what are the things that we can do every morning to establish a sense of normalcy and these are the things we're going to do whether you're in person whether you're partially at home or whether you're at home right but you want to make sure that there is some ritual routine because normally if they were going to school we know what that routine is get your bag get in the car we're leaving at this time we got to be at the house by this time and and that ritual routine is there for kids it really helps to have some sort of ritual and routine that starts their day and then something that ends their day at the same time but as a family even for adults if you all could end the day doing something as a family as a ritual routine even ending the day with everyone just saying what's something that we can be grateful for today what's one thing that we are proud that we're being able to accomplish today right so ending the day with a sense of gratitude versus everyone saying i'm tired this was different i didn't like this but really forcing the mind and the body to think about what was good and what we can control thank you i'm going to i'm going to mix in some questions that i'm seeing come through the chat with some other ones that are some of the frequently asked ones i referenced before so we get a question do you have any recommendations for shielding children from the constant talk about the virus which seems to overshadow so much conversation um and i think that's true i think we all experience that um and i think like many other challenging things um it's for families and this is one i've heard a lot how much to talk i know some of it's and hopefully your recommendations talk a little about the age of children and developmentally where kids are um but you can't turn on the tv uh even if you're watching another show with seeing an ad for the news with some information about uh covet 19 or you know vaccines which might feel like good news to us adults who can make sense of it for young children they may understand what that means um so do you have any thoughts about how to how to help caregivers think about that and how to support them as as they're working with their own children yeah so um i do you think regardless right so kids are really sensitive um and we often do do think adults have a tendency to underestimate um what kids are able to pick up on and so what's really most important um if you have a kid who's who's verbal so even as young as three right we need to find language to talk about the virus to the children and two kids in a way that they're going to understand and that language should be age-appropriate but it kind of ties back into what i was saying earlier which is just um you know the one of the best gifts we can give our children around something like this where there's so much uncertainty is to answer as directly as possible in language that's appropriate um and to also acknowledge when when we don't necessarily know or have an answer um because that's also that's also okay because that's reality um and so the cdc actually has some guidelines around that they have a they have a website that's devoted to talking to kids and also engaging with kids and um i do believe i saw some information on there when i was checking out updating it earlier about let you know language you might use with kids um but i do think the other thing that's totally appropriate is really limiting how much talk there is around the bias right so the thing we focus on always gets bigger and so the more we talk about the more the virus the more it's on our mind um and so it's appropriate to talk about it and also in the same way that you wouldn't let your kids watch certain certain tv or certain movies or even play certain video games um you know putting time limits on things um you know and making sure that certain conversations adult conversations about decision making maybe don't happen in front of the kids um you know it's important to to monitor or put timelines on those things while also still making sure that they feel informed because that gives them a sense of control and agency for even for little ones is super super important i think one of the things that has been helpful for some people right now is this idea and sarah kind of hit on it is about boundaries and so having boundaries around time but also setting aside a time and saying okay we're gonna allow ourselves to talk about this for at this time for 30 minutes during the week and so you can ask all the questions you want you we can watch the shows we can take in the news and then after that we're gonna say we're gonna try to focus on other things that are happening in the world and in our lives and in our family and so really using boundaries for that i think when you think about different kids the other thing to do is to kind of ask them how do they feel when they hear certain words and so for younger kids you could do smiley faces and ask them to point out the emotions and really talk to them about what those emotions mean and how do they feel for older kids you can ask them more and they'll tell you right and so at that point and really dealing with the feelings that are coming up for them um and acknowledging them and honoring them not judging them and not trying to make them go away but holding them acknowledging them um and also making space for you know let's maybe talk about this again because it gives you a check in point if you're feeling this way now like if right if we bring this up again in one to two weeks are you seeing the same thing can i just say add a note for those of you with with teenagers um some of you may have teens who really readily talk to you um some of you have tn2 when you ask them how they're doing will constantly answer you with a four-letter word like i'm fine or i'm good or i'm okay um you know part of the work and having a conversation with with kids who answer us is to say so what is that what does that mean i mean okay okay could mean a lot of different things and i know what okay is for me but what is it for you right so to like you know dig a little bit deeper under the surface with with language like that great um thank you for i see there's a couple more questions i'm gonna mix the questions that come in and some of the ones that i collected beforehand but please do use the chat feature for those i did not introduce that well but on the lower right hand corner of your screen there should be a little cursor and you can type in a question and we'll we'll see it but another one that i'm getting a lot and this came up we recently surveyed families um and and this that this concern came up pretty frequently uh across age level bands which is you know my kid is struggling to engage with schools and peers online uh you know we're in a virtual environment in our district right now um doing distance learning and so you know what what can families do how can they support their children uh who are starting to disengage or their disengagement is is increasing over time especially as they're able to be outside less often that's a great question um i guess i want to i feel inclined to add some context a little bit beforehand which is that you know i think something we almost forget is that in-person schooling is so critical for social development and not just like um reading body cues nonverbal communications right which by the way is incredibly hard to read over a screen especially when all you're getting is this part of the nonverbal communication and we really communicate with our whole bodies right we talk with our hands we we when we move closer to someone it means something when we move farther away from someone it means something right and so kids aren't aren't getting some of that training um remote and that is likely contributing to some of the engagement issues um especially if with younger kids who are very much you know still in the early stages of learning some of those social skills um and so um some of that might be talking through their day and picking out certain pieces and really doing some of the social education with them around like well maybe this person thought that right and playing out scenarios with them so they gain some of those social skills or when you say to them what could you say if this person you know says or does something like that again you know to really support them in learning some of the skills that otherwise they would be getting in person um i think another reality is just that being on a screen is is tough for all of us you know zoom fatigue is a very very real thing um it's it's it's not physically exhausting because you're sitting still but it's actually exhausting because of of what it requires of of our attention and focus um and some kids struggle with that as on a baseline level um but generally um especially our younger kids like they need to be up and moving that is why school tends to be highly interactive so that they can engage and move their bodies and retain their attention much better so um you know that may be if you notice a kid who's struggling to engage that may mean connecting back to the teacher and really thinking about what movement breaks or other engagement tools they have in mind that might support your student and continue to engage more regularly i would say the other thing especially when you start thinking about teenagers in the peer peer group they're missing out normally when you send in a class and everybody's doing work you want to do work you're not going to be the one that's not participating or not involved in a discussion um and so i think one of the things when you see lack of engagement there's also lack of feeling like i'm a part of something right and so as much as you can help teenagers at this point when there's engagement to understand that they're a part of something but also shifting the expectations for engagement um we're recognizing that look they might not be able to say you know what i'm engaged like i'm a comment the entire class but challenging them to say look can you say something in three of your classes today right like can you just say you know what can we get can you tell me three things you said in class today in one class or even getting them to say you know what it's hard for you to do everything you know what if you do for the next 30 minutes you just commit to focusing on these things so it's almost as if you're telling yourself you know what it's hard for sustained engagement so let's try to do smaller chunks and then increase that as you go along i think the other thing that's important to acknowledge is normally if they're in the classroom or they're with their group they're getting feedback on their responses and that feeds self-efficacy that feeds pride that lets me want to keep going and so when it's when you're not getting that then you're like how do i get this internal motivation to do it and so really asking them and inquiring about right now the only thing they can think about is what they're in right now so everyone is very now focused and so if you can tap into some of that what is what do you want to do when you finish because i know this isn't where you want to end right and so really tapping into okay let's put that goal on the wall let me do things to remind you of where you're trying to go and so you can help them get some of that internal motivation that's focused on um external goals or external objectives that they want to achieve can i just add one more thing mike so um some some information came out probably six to eight weeks ago at this rate and it was a study done and it was asking kids what felt most important and the thing that they ranked highest on was peer connection um and kids are just really really grieving the loss of that right now and so um two practical thoughts is that you know as parents is how do you feel facilitate peer connection but in a really safe way so that you know that we're not spreading the virus and so in all the ways that you can do that if that's a viable option for your family if you're not concerned about someone in the home who is you know immunocompromised then playing outdoors with masks you know is actually super important for your kids and um you know and make them wear a lot of layers the colder it gets you know um being outside is actually proven to support like the release of oxytocin and endorphins and it just feels good to us and so it may be something new and really different um but that is a really practical thing i think the other thing is um you know this is where kind of connecting with the school and checking in with you know a homeroom teacher or an advisory um leader or you know um to see what kind what ways are are is the school able to support students in connecting in a social way um or even in a reflective way something that's more meaningful um so that they they feel like they're checking in with each other as opposed to on display which is how a lot of kids feel when they're on zoom right it's this experience so you know of standing at the center at the front of the room all period long that's what it feels like to a lot of kids and so if we can move them back into their so-called seats you know and connect as they would um that will also make a difference in them feeling connected and engaged yeah thank you you know this it's been written about a lot lately the scandinavian expression i think it's there's a there's no bad weather only bad clothing um i'm not saying i personally subscribed to that notion courtney and sarah earlier i am someone who really enjoys um the warmer side of the new england seasons um at the same time i think what you said is true that being outside i mean just in personal experience yesterday was it wasn't terrible but it wasn't lovely but getting outside for a long hike with kids and and everything made a huge difference in everyone's mood um and it's not the same excitement you get when it's nice and warm or even crisp but you get warmer and then sun comes out i mean that wasn't the day it was and the effect was still the same so i want to just put up a couple uh another questions our plan for our district of socially distant or non-academic opportunities for students to connect with each other or staff i'll just that's more for me than for courtney and sarah but i just want to say if there are ideas deborah that you have or anybody has please send them our way i know that there has been some you know between kind of theater department and athletics at the secondary level we've had some opportunities like that um and so if people have ideas please send them to me or your building principal and we'll see what we can do to put something together because i think it's it's really important for all the reasons the siren courtney just said uh we'll we'll do some thinking but it's a great idea and please share thoughts with us about how that might work um another one what about support for parents to learn self-regulation skills this has an effect on our children um you know i'll say that this is another one that um thank you for asking it but uh it's another one that comes up a lot that people have said since this is the most they're spending time with their as a nuclear family since their children were babies and while that that's wonderful in some ways it also brings about challenges um because that hasn't been our routine for a long long time for many people um and um you know it's even just uh talking today to a parent uh who's talking about the concept of space and how different space in the home feels you know they're very accustomed to their space in their home being unoccupied much of the day by everyone and now it brings about some tensions about cleanliness and cleaning and laundry and dishes that that didn't used to exist when when those were much more less frequent issues in the past so i think it's a great question about the self-regulation skills for for adults because i think that's the the person who asked this question that's right that certainly has an effect on kids so i'd love to hear any thoughts you all have about that the first thing i would say is i'm gonna say i we we call it self-care but i'm gonna call it self-repair because the reason i say that is you wouldn't let your battery once your battery gets low you're finding a charger you're plugging it in you're making sure it's good so don't do that to yourself and so one of the things that's really important in that is how do i think about how do i think about you know what do i need to do to make sure i'm grounded because if i'm grounded then the house will be grounded there um and so really thinking about that and one of the ways to do that is through boundaries and so really being okay with saying i'm going to take 30 minutes by myself and it's okay and you know i have a mom that used to say i'm going in this bathroom don't knock on the door don't open it and i will see you all when i get out right and so that was her time i don't you think she was in the bathtub half the time i just think she just was taking a moment from us i think the other thing is recognizing a sphere of influence focusing on what you can control versus what you can't and as you think about more people be in the house really say what's the bare minimum of cleanliness in the house that i can be okay with because it might look different now versus what it looked like before oh sorry go ahead now i was just gonna jump off on that um so moderation is this term that we have been talking about a lot on the bright team and it is this idea that um and i just want to acknowledge like the idea of moderation really flies in the face of a lot of different cultural values um including including some in this country that are about work harder and keep going and push through and you know truck on and that kind of thing and um sometimes those serve us well and sometimes those don't you know and so moderation is the capacity to kind of step back and say you know i gotta dial it back somewhere right this is overwhelming it's too much and recognize that there's a cost to that and that sometimes pushing through is actually not the answer because pushing through actually just makes it worse right and so to courtney's point around like let's be really thoughtful now that my college age child is now back home when we didn't expect her to be and i also have my high school and a middle school and high schooler and maybe even potentially an elementary schooler in the house um yeah i think definitions of cleanliness probably need to shift and change in order to accommodate the fact that there's a lot more people uh living there and not only that like there all the time right like we're not getting the same breaks we used to to like you know it's not the same to just like run to the store to get something right because we're really trying to a lot of folks are really trying to limit the amount of time they spend in public spaces and so um moderation is is really a critical component of maintaining resilience in the face of kind of persistent um uncontrollable stress right kind of like the pandemic is putting on us right because we don't have any control over it and we don't know when it's going to end and so um you know it's important to kind of curb our impulses towards like just pushing and pushing and working harder um that's really not the answer in the face of of this kind of stress we got out we got to be a little gentler with ourselves we got to offer grace to the people around us which is space and compassion um and give that to ourselves as well um take take a minute and say i just need to take a breather and i'm going to step out of this room and i need nobody to talk to me for the next five minutes so i can just gather myself and that's okay and i think the other thing would be extending self-compassion to yourself i think a lot of times what we expected of ourselves as parents and as adults what we've been able to balance the multiple hats we've been wearing and how we've been able to show up for them a lot of times now with the added stress we're not showing up in the same ways but we're still trying to show up in the same way so we're not giving ourselves permission to understand like my best right now can look different than my best was this time last year and so as an adult one that's one of the things that's even important for you and your kid recognizing that our best this time last year and our best this time this year is going to look really different you know putting on the pearls getting dressed and not and not having pajama pants on is amazing right and so just getting to a place that you're recognizing that your best can look different right now and i think as you think about regulation one of the most important things is how to think about what is a way that you can be creative for at least 15 minutes a day because there are studies that show that if you can tap into creativity you can decrease the way stress is experiencing you it could be through coloring it could be having a puzzle um there's a household i know that they leave a puzzle on the table so everybody in the family just comes by and tries to put the puzzle together and they keep doing that but that's a way for them to be present and to feel apart and connected and to also be creative because it forces them to come outside their head you know thinking about what are extra hobbies do you want people since we're not seeing each other are we gonna make gifts for everybody this year instead of buying something right are we gonna how and that that is another way to engage in collective care what do you want to make for your friends what could you send your friends or what could we send them to tell them we're thinking about them and we want to care for them you know do we want to bake cookies and leave them on somebody's porch you know like what are the the little things that you can do to tap into that create creative side will definitely decrease your stress and it'll decrease your child's stress and again just taking moments to breathe throughout the day um i have a friend that has said courtney i tell my kid if we can get to for good so the kid knows if we get to we're good you know the rest of the day i can lay in the chair i cannot look at the camera but i gotta get to this time of the day and so even extending that grace and being able to do that is really important great thank you uh faye brady uh talked about a prompt that she hears a lot from families um that kind of goes like this as a caregiver this during this time of social isolation anxiety and depression uh will that have this time and all its challenges have a lasting impact on my child or myself and what could i help to to make this not so devastating for us not just in the short term but really the focus on long-term implications of the challenges at this moment you know people are i think we sometimes have this as this to see to believe that people are inherently resilient um and they're not we're not born with resilience but the great news is that we can cultivate it right it is it is actually a skill set that we can develop and work on um and so um so i think my immediate my immediate thought or answer to the question is that um yes and no i mean the truth is i don't think any of us will will forget anyone who's been alive to live through this period of time will not forget it um but that doesn't have to be a bad thing right you know life often hands us difficult tasks difficult events things that we have to survive um and um and that contributes to the fullness of our experience right um i'll share with you something i i often say to my clients that life is not a it's not a feelings buffet because if it was we would walk up to the buffet and we would say i would love a lot of happiness and a lot of joy and a dash of excitement and a little bit of surprise but you know what let's take the anger and the grief and the disappointment and the loss and let's just leave those over there because i don't want any of that but we don't have those choices and in some ways it's really important that we don't because the breadth of that emotional experience is what gives us fullness right so to truly experience joy and happiness you actually have to know their opposite right that's actually critical so we want exposure to the full breadth of our of our of human emotion but but then we need the tools to manage the more difficult things right the more difficult emotions like grief and loss sadness anger disappointment frustration right and so that means allowing allowing those feelings to exist acknowledging that they exist that they're human setting parameters when when they start to get a little bit hairy you know as i said to my kids you know it is you are allowed to be angry and you are allowed to tell me that you're angry it's not okay for you to throw something across the room right so it's the both and like what is okay and like where where is the line where is that boundary um but i think going back to this idea of you know um we all encounter hard things the top you know what we have to do in the face of those hard things is actually to to build our skills around resilience in the face of those and those you know resilience is about connection to people around us it is about creating predictability in our lives and that's about you know helping to regulate our nervous system which likes things nice and predictable right so even it feels if it feels rot at least we know it's coming right and that is soothing to our nervous system it's about moderation so it's it's it's gauging what we can tolerate and knowing that our best on a given day looks really different relative to the circumstances around us and it means seeing where we have control and agency and then really embracing that where and when we can even if that means really shrinking the change to something small and very manageable right and again on any given day like you know there's some days where i'm like i can take on the world and then other days i'm like i can clean the dishes in my sink right so and that's okay either way but we need to have enough of that self-compassion that courtney was talking about to really give herself the spaces to to live with that kind of flexibility and i would say the other thing that's important to remember is that in the midst of what we're focusing on social isolation anxiety and depression you can kind of moderate the effects of that if you can find something to look forward to so even if the thing to look forward to is oh i'm gonna i baked this cake i learned this new recipe i cooked this new dish right where you're not completely just focusing on those three things then you you you someone as they as um when they reflect back on the time and the experience they're not just able to point to negative feelings and thoughts but they're able to say in the midst of that oh i played this game with my family that was really fun and that was hilarious or oh i saw my mom do this and that was funny you know so they're able to point to something you all can point to something oh we went for a hike we would have never did that together right um so you can point to what are some of the good things so that when they look back on this time it's not just about the social isolation and anxiety and depression but they can point to moments of connection they can point to moments of joy they can point to moments of happiness that were created by making things happen right and so the thing is it doesn't have to be as devastating it can be uncomfortable and we can acknowledge that this is an uncomfortable time but let's reframe it as this is uncomfortable versus saying this is devastating so even the language we use when we talk to ourselves and we talk to our kids can make a difference about how we experience it in our body if i tell myself this is an uncomfortable time for me i'm like okay i can grow from this but if i say this is a devastating time for me i lose my hope that there can be anything good that comes from this thank you both so i'm just looking at the clock unfortunately and and if anyone has a question or two more um please put them in i have one more that came to me also we are planning this series so if there are specific topics that you know in the next version of this that you want to have please do put them in the chat but the last question that i collected beforehand uh and you sort of addressed it but i want to ask it a little bit differently um is you know everyone seems overwhelmed there's a feeling that there's nothing to look forward to uh you know and this the particular piece that's coming up uh recently is the advice not to travel for the holidays and i'll say you know for me this is the first you know you know my mother loves thanksgiving right and this is there's always a holiday and and it's gonna be really odd to to not have that with my larger family who haven't seen very much you know at all and i'm not alone in in that i think many many people are going through um sort of the awkwardness of the moment and even trying to do like you know zoom thanksgivings or something you know like that's it's probably something we'll do for a bit but you know we're going to keep the cameras on you know indefinitely and pretend to have turkey together that's not it's not gonna be our thing i'm not criticizing anyone else for doing that but you know i think there's really a feeling as we head to the holidays um and these traditions or customs or norms that we have around family and seeing each other in celebration particularly for people who don't live close to family they aren't going to happen and just anything you can do to you know advice you'd give about how folks can take care of themselves during this holiday season i mean first i just want to normalize that um it's a huge loss you know and it's totally appropriate to have feelings of grief i want to acknowledge some people might have feelings of relief at not having to go to some what can sometimes be really um interpersonally or challenging family get-togethers um so that i know that's not a consistent experience for everybody um but i'll be honest you know i i called my my mom and my mother-in-law this weekend and said we're not coming and i cried a lot um and then i felt really you know for myself you know i felt really reassured this morning when i heard some of the news reports and i said we you know we made a good decision um and that's not to say that anybody who's choosing to do differently that it's a bad decision everyone's going to make their own choices um but for those of you who who have decided to stay home and that feels like a really big loss like i think it's really important to name losses loss you know and that there's grief there's a grief process with that um you know um and that's you know i think one thing we don't do terribly well all the time in in this larger society is like acknowledge hard feelings um whether they're hard or uncomfortable or painful um and yet the the only way through those kinds of feelings is to actually allow yourself to have them so i think you know acknowledging that that's what's happening naming it for yourself and or for the folks around you um and then um and then really kind of saying like okay and this is the decision we've made and so how do you how do you make it new how do you plan something that is worth looking forward to and it doesn't have to be fancy right like we're not talking about you know going to extraordinary measures or anything there was one thanksgiving and i've been thinking about replicating this for my kids where my brothers and i we did we like very spontaneously did a thanksgiving olympics on a local like jungle gym you know and it was one of the memories that came up for me the other day when i realized like i wasn't gonna go home and see everyone i was like okay like it's just quirky and it's fun and like we'll get a kick out of it and you know we'll probably remember this thanksgiving because of something like that so um it can be simple and effective i would say it's definitely taking the time to once you get through acknowledging the loss right like i'm thinking i'm gonna miss grandma's sweet potato pies and homemade dressing and you know just even just the laughter in the home of everybody being there right and that and that sense of i think when we say the holidays regardless of whether it was with our birth family or our choice family there's a sense of belonging that we're all missing because we knew we had a place like the holidays signified like you had a place to go to so i think recreating and thinking about well how can i make not the sense of belonging in this how in the house where i am or how can i make it with the in the community i am and it could be creating a different type of ritual routine it could be saying the very people that i reached out to what can i take this day and do something for them and then put it in the middle right um it could be even just saying you know we're going to come up with a dance we're going to listen to music we're going to have a music battle i know one of the things that as you're thinking about memories is i remember the older people and the younger people in my family battled like who had the best music selection so they were playing their songs and we were playing hours and of course you know theirs was better but it was just having that moment where you're doing different things like that that brings a sense of belonging and a sense of identity that people can be a part of and i think it's prioritizing doing that right because it's easy to sit in the grief and the loss the hard part is it's almost like turning turning square wheels it's trying to get your brain to turn over and to think about how do i begin to think about like because you don't want to you're like no i don't i want to go back to what ended i don't think about anything new but being intentional and understanding in that intentionality about what i can do new i feel resilient for me and my family now that's really helpful thank you and i think that happened on on a positive note uh for many families you know i've got some young kids uh you know who for families who celebrate halloween one of the things i heard this year is people were really creative about how to do it and most kids didn't miss the trick-or-treating part as long as the candy part came in right they figure out new ways to get their kids you know my kids sugared up and and um you know i think that's what we've always done uh you know for many families who celebrate you know the halloween um and and you know a lot of people like i don't want to go back right you know like we were able to create you know new traditions and uh it did work well and and so thank you for the some of the the hints and tips about that um it is uh we are at time so i really want to thank all of you for the great questions and comments in the chat courtney and sarah you're wonderful as always so thank you for being with us and sharing your knowledge and background experience and wisdom with us and as i said you know please do share you know thoughts about a future topic that we want to do we want to do a series and you know perhaps the next one might be more focused on a specific idea um that we can dig into on a deeper level but but i learned a lot tonight and really appreciate courtney and sarah and your work with us in the district and thanks everybody for tuning in hope you have
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item 5.2 all right well good evening everyone i do have a few items i'd like to share with you this evening the first is a congratulations to three of our sd 308 employees who are contributing authors in a new book published by brutledge titled the new teacher's guide to 10 common challenges so congratulations to dr sarah curran who is a teacher at homestead elementary beatrice dillman principal's administrative assistant at wolf's crossing elementary and dr amy howerton teacher and english department chairperson at oswego high school the book released on october 30th was written for new teachers induction mentoring programs teacher education courses and those in high school teacher cadet courses and the content will be used in rural urban and suburban school settings so congratulations to sarah beatrice beatrice and amy we're all very proud of you can i add one more author that i don't know that you were aware of that i just received my copy of our staff author's book from amazon called the adventures of super jake mask of power by josh edwards one of our teachers who wrote a story for young children on how to wear masks very neat congratulations that's great and the next item i'm very happy to report is the food drive fill the bus fill the bus to stock the pantry was the seventh annual food drive for district 308 and we collected 139 000 items for the kendall county uh community food pantry and over the last seven years we have donated just under 1 million items over just under 1 million so next year we will break the million mark today i visited all the winning schools handing out the traveling plaques and trophies to the schools which brought in the most items and the following schools won this year's challenge so at elementary churchill elementary wanted out they had 300 items so congratulations to churchill uh junior high plank junior high with 6 327 items and in high school oswego high school with 16 175 items you know it wasn't as exciting today handing out the trophy as it usually was at the crosstown and the 50-yard line in front of 8 000 people but nonetheless people everyone appreciate it and ultimately it's what what the kids with the staff of the community is doing for our our community and that's uh and that's providing this this food so and the all-around winner obviously with what i just said was churchill elementary school so congratulations to the entire community on that one because it is a community event i'd also like to say congratulations to uh teacher cynthia niles who teaches fourth grade at prairie point elementary school cynthia has been in the national guard for 27 years and was recently awarded a military patriot award which acknowledges an outstanding military member who has shown correct courage and determination to fulfill their duties so cynthia thank you for your service to our country and to our students of sd-308 and finally yesterday was board member appreciation day and uh we would like to uh on behalf of the community this you know the staff the administration thank each and every one of you for all of your tireless efforts uh for what you do as board members uh most people don't realize how much time each of you puts into this job and uh most people everyone should know it's voluntary with no compensation so on behalf of administration teachers students and parents of our community i'd like to say thank you for all that you do because what you do does make a big difference so thank you and we'll give you i'll give you a round of applause there and that is my report for this evening thanks okay are there any questions on the consent agenda may i have a motion to approve i make a motion to approve all items under consent including 6.1 minutes from the october 2020 board of education meeting open in closed session and 6.2 to acknowledge the foia request received by the district second mrs moyer aye mr lightfoot mrs croner hi mrs swanson aye mrs doyle aye ms morgan aye item 7.1 financial statements um item 7.1 is financial statements does the board have any questions regarding the financial statements as presented no during nine i'll move on to item 7.2 which is our rsp demographer presentation item 7.2 is an update to the board from our demographer rob schwartz from rsp as you know the district has worked with rsp for some time now in 2016 we worked with them on redrawing our district boundaries and in a district such as ours it's important to keep an eye on our continually changing demographics so rsp provides highly accurate enrollment information and projections and is here to provide the board with information in our five-year enrollment projections as well as to answer any questions the board may have regarding future building usage so with that i'd like to introduce rob schwartz from rsp if we're if we are technology ready are we ready to go mike all right rob it's all yours all right awesome i've heard that i look angelic and since i can't see you i will assume you also look the same this evening what i'm going to talk to you about is a little bit with the enrollments demographics some of the things that may be happening with new developments and then we'll get into the projections and what that means as we look at your capacity and i'll talk a little bit about capacity as it relates to those numbers so that's the agenda tonight and a little bit for those that are tuning in thank you dr sparlin for that introduction i wish i could be there in person but your community like my community is experiencing a influx of new coveted cases and so being safe in this environment is what we're choosing to do but we have done a lot of work with you guys over the last seven to ten years and we really do appreciate the work we've been able to assist you with um a little bit about what i'm gonna present to you this evening so there's a full report what i'm giving you today this evening is what i would call an executive summary there's a lot more information that's in the report that goes into details specifically more about let's say the elementary or the middle school so definitely refer to that what i'm going to talk to you about tonight we'll give you the gist of what we think is going to happen over the next five years so in order for us to do what we've done for the district there are a lot of entities that have worked with us from the counties the villages the cities townships so like every time we do this study a lot of data comes to us a lot of verification a lot of understanding of what we think could happen based on some of those data sets those conversations that we have with the villages and cities so from this hundred thousand foot perspective here on page seven um what we're indicating is that first off your kindergarten is going to be in a range of that 11.50 to 12.50 that will be important when we talk about enrollments down the road here in about 10 slides we also are anticipating much like the last time we did this study and enrollment decrease i'm going to take a moment to explain something that we did with your enrollments moving forward so we believe there's an instructional modality and that's based on how school districts brought their students back into the learning environment at the start of the school year what we've gathered here early on is that there's a difference return to learn or this instructional modality based on whether it was in person hybrid or a virtual online environment and so what that generally means is for kindergarten students we know there may be students that elected not to come into your programming this year so what we're trying to factor in moving forward is next year will they be kindergartners or will they be first graders and how many of them return the other component is when we look at some of your enrollment data is the students that left the district or did not attend your district this school year how many of them come back and so we'll talk about that when we get into the projection so we're still showing generally an enrollment decrease you see the breakdown on this slide of the bulk of the decreases are happening in your secondary but we are going to see some enrollment increase at the elementary so it sounds like a mixed message of your projections we'll show you how that's playing out capacity so one thing and i will talk more about this when we get to the right place but with capacity everything that we've used has been focused on the instructional capacity and our reasoning for the instructional capacity that was established i believe three or four years ago was that is the space that's available for the gen ed programming that occurs in your buildings and more specifically at the elementary level because there's differences in the capacity when we get into junior high and high school that's important because some of these other spaces in each of these buildings they are being taken place with special education ell different pull out spaces so those instructional spaces are needed but just not as gen ed so that's an important thing to think about as we move through this development we know there's a lot of potential for development some of the things that are going to impact our development is really the timing of wolf road how quickly are they able to bring that up to the standard that's required for some of these developments to happen specifically in that oswego aurora era area we also have developments that are down in plainfield and we'll show you that information is as we move through this so in general enrollment's going to see overall a decrease we're going to have some capacity challenges at specific buildings overall we have available capacity throughout the district at all the levels and we know there's great potential for some new developments as we move forward that's 100 000 foot view when we go through the next few slides these are some visuals for you to understand your district i apologize for the size when we take a portrait 11 by 17 map and dump it into the presentation we're shrinking that 17 inch height into eight and a half inches so it's kind of small but generally what we're trying to describe on this map is the city limits or village limits of those entities and how that pertains to the purple line your district boundary we then break that district boundary into the existing elementary boundaries which in this map are represented by the solid colors we do the same thing for the existing five junior high boundaries and of course the two high school boundaries so again the solid color is always representing what that current boundary is we then further break that district into 500 planing areas we've condensed a lot of this is early on when we were working with you we had a first plot a second plan a third plot of some of these developments now made them all one subdivision to decrease the number of planning areas that we look at and so there's about 500 of these that were looking at what changes with enrollment development and demographics of course we have a statistical forecast model again that's just regression um simply stated we're trying to understand these 500 planning areas and what does that mean with even greater detail with that instructional modality that i explained at the beginning some of the information that we look at is contained on this page just to let you know that we're looking at census data different county data sets village data sets really trying to understand what's happening in your community one thing that we really have tried to focus on is live birth data and so if we look at in the instance here on page 15 of kendall county we're trying to understand i'm going to change my pointer so it's a laser so you guys can see some of this stuff that i'm pointing out so if i'm looking at 2010 i had 1789 live bursts and then when i come here to the kindergarten we had 866.
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Arps arps.org uh once you're there you'll be able to click on the link that says Middle School open house and that'll open up a page that'll allow you to scroll down and click on your students team meeting thank you so much hope you have a wonderful time at the rest of the open house for once again if you are still here uh it's time to go to the team meeting in order to go to the team meeting you should go to the website uh for the openhouse that link was sent to everyone in emails um and so you can access it there or you can go to the Arps website arps.org once you're there you can click on the Middle School openhouse link that comes up and then from there you'll be able to click on the team meeting thanks so much the room's almost emptying out um I'm going to be closing this broadcast in just a another minute um but again go ahead and go to the arms Open House website and click on the link for your team meeting there's the meetings for Team Alpha and team Badger which are the two seventh grade teams and then the meeting for team Riptide and team tiger which are the two eighth grade teams thanks again for coming to the open house I appreciate all you do I saw that thank you have a great evening everyone have a good rest of the week for
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so it's lower than what we've seen the last really all the years that we're showing here i'm going back to 1516 but we also know this instructional modality had an impact on the number of kindergartners that we received so again we're trying to understand with live birth data and knowing that it's decreased you look we were in the 1900s in 2007 and here in 2018 it has decreased to just about 1500 like births that impacts the number of kindergartners that we can have in five years we do the same information with will county so i didn't want you to to unders once you understand that we're looking at this for both of the counties in your district when we look at enrollment by grade what's interesting about your enrollments is the fact that we have larger senior classes that are graduating in smaller incoming kindergarten classes that naturally leads to a decrease more going out less coming in and this year it was exacerbated even more because we have one of the smallest kindergarten classes we go back to 2017-18 and then we have to go all the way back to 2004-2005 to have a comparable kindergarten class we're anticipating some of those students come back mostly as first graders in our projections another way to look at that same data is what's been happening year to year with this cohort change where we see red that's where there's been a decrease and you can see the impact of your instructional modality with that choice negatives every single grade all the way through and so what's beautiful about this information is i mean it's bad news that you lost students but as we look at this uh one of the conversations we've had with dr sparlin is that we can now use this and as you move forward and with any options you have with how the students return to learn or if we start to feel more comfortable with pfizer and i can't remember the drug company today that indicated they as well have a vaccination that's that's going to be rolled out that's going to impact what we see and so that's why i keep going back to the instructional modality we don't think you're going to see these type of decreases when we look at into 2122 this is an anomaly and we are planning in everything that we do that students are going to be back in your school buildings for the 21-22 school year a little bit of positive thoughts to that we look at your current situation within migration all we're showing on this map the dots would represent where there are new students that were here in this school year for 2021.
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we look at this table here on the left you can see it's just plummeted we only have about 738 new students where we're averaging probably about almost 1200 students so again the covid impact we look at the out migration of students these are students that were receiving services last school year but not receiving them here in the 2021 school year so again we saw that increase so that the new students in migration decreased out migration increased giving us this horrible number of 506. so again this is part of it when we then now take the senior class that's larger minus the smaller incoming class that's how we come up with that 750 roughly number i think that you saw as a decrease in head count k to and again we're not looking at the early childhood we know they're there but they're not in our forecast one table that we put together from the data the district provided us was reasons for withdrawals and just for you to get a sense of the choices that families made and how that may impact how we look at the future enrollment of your district we do have a map here that's showcasing what's changed over the last five years green areas are a decrease orange areas they've increased the darker the orange the greater the increase so we can see if you see my pointer down here around plainfield all those developments are many more students than what there were five years ago we come up into the core area of us we go look at all that green so this gets into another component that we factor in the subdivision life cycle not all of these areas will decrease not all of them will continue to increase there's there's things that that impact that if we look at this heat map this starts to show you where the concentrations of students are so the red areas are where we see the greatest number of students so up here on the northwest part of your district we have a lot of kiddos and we come down here off wolf road over by um oswego east high school you can see a lot of kids around there as well going to play this heat map on this one so here's a video hopefully our internet's good enough that you can see it kind of move its way through starting back in the 2009 2010 school year and you can see how things have changed over time as we're now into the 17-18 18-19 we start to see where the new developments and we start to emerge into seeing students so really kind of a fascinating way to look at things so in the complete report we have everything related to the intra transfers so these are students that are in the system the dots representing elementary students that chose to go to a different building other than where they would be assigned based on that attendance area so there's there's choice that's happening most of it's related to the programs we've been talking to district administration we know this happens and they're monitoring it and in many cases this act actually positively impacts what you see for staffing or class size in some of these buildings we give a breakdown of what that looks like and so this is really helpful for administration we look at this from the top side this is where the students reside so we know with the intro transfers if i just go in the middle and i look at lakewood creek we have 125 students that reside in lakewood creek that are going to another building and you can see the breakdown where the bulk of them are going to hunt club so again this is just a way for you to see some of that map data as a table it starts to help the administration understand is this related to programs is it a prolonged impact of some of the boundary changes that happens i believe four years ago when we look at developments that are in progress i'm here on page 26 we're just going to list the ones that we know that are active and you can have a place name which we've listed here with the planning area name the paid represents something that we're focusing on with those 500 planning areas the type of developments what elementary is currently assigned to the existing units that have been built and then those that are potentially able to be built over the next five years and maybe even longer depending on some of these developments so we have over a thousand units in queue without any new infrastructure going in place with active developments that are in your district boundaries so it gets a little bit into some of the developments what i added to this table and i think it got to you and your board packets we have three things on here the green line represents the census population estimates it's above zero so that means more people are moving into your community that's a positive we look at the blue line these are certificate of occupancies and you can see it swung highly up here as we went from 2019 to 2020 this is really the multi-family units that came online we look at the red line this is what's been happening with your enrollments and when we're below zero that's where we had decreases and i added this dotted line in because covid the enrollment just dropped off and one of the things that we statistically started to see and we talked about this on your last study is if we follow the building permits or the certificate of occupancy this blue line and then we follow the red line we see that they kind of are following each other and i put this dotted line of where we likely could have ended up where we'd be close to zero or just a little bit above zero with our enrollment change but covet happens and so this instructional modality had a negative impact on what we see so again just trying to give you some explanation of some of the data sets we do look at each of these 500 planning areas on the type of developments so in this case it's single family with the existing elementary attendance areas i focus on that bottom row with the district k5 back in 2007 we averaged 36 k5 students for every 100 single family units you can see over time it increased we got to 39 and that's been steadily decreasing to where here in we're down to 29 k5 students for every 100 units in your district we've brought on about almost 2 000 units since 2007 but this is pretty typical of what we're seeing when we have a little bit of developments but we're seeing a subdivision life cycle that as people have their kids go through the system we're not seeing the turnover that's regenerating students that come into your system the same as when we were going through those years with lots of building activity we do the same thing with the multi-family development you can see back in 2007 we were at 13 k5 kids for every 100 multi-family units in multi-family units is town homes duplexes apartments mobile homes so basically everything is not single family you can see that it increased and then again we've decreased back down to 13 for every 100 units in 2020 and you can see that we've brought on a little over 1700 multi-family units here's a video that i told dr sparlin i would play and it's down by hunt club this is pretty fascinating as we look at this in 2010 as the buildings came online those little buildings um you saw that there was a little bit of delay when we saw enrollments and then as we move into 2018 and 2019 we have a lot more students and what we're trying to show you here is as these developments specifically the number of developments that we have in plainfield as they get belts we're going to start seeing more kids in this area beyond when they actually come online so i thought that visual is kind of helpful in understanding why sometimes there's a delay in what we see for the number of kids with the type of development that's happening all the information that we put together generates this map here of many multiple colors we've highlighted in the table the green areas that are current activity areas where we can see almost 1 000 units that could come online over the next five to seven years if the building environment is conducive right now it's pretty awesome if you can buy a house 2.3 percent interest zero points that is phenomenal if you're in the market to buy but again it has to be something that fits within the financial constraints of the community so not all the variables match up to being a bye bye bye positive again this is a map to help us illustrate what's happening in the district with developments now when you go to the full presentation you'll see a breakdown by each of the junior highs i'm just focusing on binarcik with what information we have been putting together and this is new to your community so table one we're showing the single family development so the orange line represents the orange bar represents the number of units you can see from 16 to 17 we had a whole slew of new single family developments that came online the blue line represents the number of students you can see that's been consistently decreasing really back from all the way down to 2020.
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we're over students we're now down to just a little over 2050 students we go to table two this is looking at the multi-family units which is the orange bar and the blue line representing the students that lived in those multi-family units so we can see it's steadily increased it's been pretty stable over the last three years in this junior high boundary table three is the aggregation of both the single family and the multi-family so all those units all of those kids that are residing in this junior high boundary and you can see what's been happening with that enrollment table four looks at the balance of development in this junior high boundary and so we basically have about 65 percent single family in about 34 multi-family and you can see it's been pretty consistent over the last decade you'll see this for each of the junior high boundaries we thought this was kind of a fascinating way to see how things are changing now i'm going to segue into the projections so as every year the primary colors represent the past and current boundary so the red is the elementary the blue is the junior high green is the high school and then the purple line is the aggregate so you can see we were in this great growth all the way from 2006 07 all the way up to about 1617 then we kind of stabilized saw some decreases and then here we are going from 1920 to 2021 the the table just just fell out right then as we move forward what we are forecasting is you know we're trying to be optimistic and we told dr sparlin we'll circle back around we'll meet with you in the spring to see hey are these vaccinations are they actually moving out are they having the positive effect that we want are people actually taking them what does this mean as we look forward to the 21-22 school year what we're anticipating is with students being back in the buildings we're going to be able to capture a lot of the loss that we had from 1920 to 2021.
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so we're going to increase from the 16 to almost 16 900 kids in the 2122 school year but unfortunately the amount of building activity the change in the inventory that we're seeing with that subdivision life cycle the greater number of secondary students than the incoming kindergarten classes we're going to still see some decreases and when we went back and looked at that last forecast that we had we were actually when we got out to 24-25 we actually were at about 16 900 kids so it's even worse than what we thought last year but a lot of that is because of what we have this decrease what we do know with data when we look at some of the early childhood when we can capture these kids earlier the likelihood of them being in our system is much greater so now that some of these students have moved out and they're in parochial private school or home school we know that we've probably captured the maximum of what we can have with parochial and private school what we don't know is the home school that could be any household that chooses hey i'm going to stay we think once you go back to school and kids are in person that's going to be a little bit different it's going to be more positive for the school district that's why we're showing that uptick from 2021 to 2122.
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we do show your enrollments by building i'm going to describe all of this you're going to want to come back to this page to understand what's in the next three slides basically we start out on the left hand side we have each of the buildings listed we have the grades that are being served there for our projections in this case it's elementary so it's k5 we have this instructional capacity that i mentioned to you and again the huge note on this instructional capacity the programs that are taking up the gen ed space they will need to be somewhere so if i move spaces out of boulder hill that are taking up those gen ed classrooms they're going to go someplace else and impact what that instructional capacity is in that building that's why we switch that instructional capacity to align with the gen ed as well as the special programs that are needed in each of these buildings based on the space based on where the kids are and so on as we move to the right we show the past enrollment the last three school years three different ways the bottom row the blue font is attend says based on the student data did they actually attend that building the middle row green font is reside and that's based on the attendance boundary the number of k5 students that are actually residing in that boundary the res slash att is reset reside slash attend so it's a subset of the reside it's that purple font top row it's the subset they reside it's and they actually attended the building so what does that mean when i look at boulder hill we had 454 k5 students in 2021 that were residing in that boundary but we have 616 that are attending that building you would naturally think that we grew by that roughly 150 kids from the reside to attend what's different than that it's we lost students that went to other buildings of that 454 they went to one of the other elementary buildings to get to that 420 but then the other buildings uh moved into this chose to come to this building to get to this 616.
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that's important because as we move into the projections we've always said follow the reside but we know there's this attends and this gets at the students in seats but you can see that we were at ironically 507 students in 1819 1924 reside we dropped to 454 we're showing that you pick up in boulder hills up to a little over 500 students um over the next five years then you can see how that corresponds with the attends where we see the shading this is where we exceed that instructional capacity so you can see what that means in the past and then as we move forward with fox chase grant park we've known this i think we've had some conversations even last year about hey are there some ways in which we look at this is there a boundary change is it because they're so far on your southeast what can we do do we look at murphy a little differently so there's some different things that we can address with grant park um that's something you as the board can have more discussion on but again this is how the enrollment plays out over the next five years again wanted to state we'll come back to this can i have three or four slides that really delve into this but this instructional capacity at the elementary level we have a little over 8 000 capacity for gen ed students you can see our enrollments we're at roughly we might as well just say it about 7 500 kids so we have about 500 capacity throughout the district based on this instructional capacity for elementary students we look at the secondary same deal with the junior high buildings and the high school the only challenge we have early on is the continuation of trauber junior high but again if you go back to that table we're showing smaller grades work their way into the junior high which will then work their way into the high school so we naturally as we look at this junior high capacity we're at almost 5 000 instructional capacity but you can see we dip down to 3 600 students we look at the high school capacity we're almost 6 300 students you can see we're we're right now at about 56 hundredths and then we're going to dip down to about 53 hundreds this kind of segues into kind of the meat of some of the things that dr sparlin asked for us to delve into in this study is how do we look at our existing inventory and our enrollments and how does that relate to our capacity so in specifically the instructional capacity so our team put together these really cool slides the next three pages for each the elementary the junior high and high school so let me show you what's on this data so first off we have this blue arrow that separates the past enrollment with our projected enrollments we then have this red line and this is the instructional capacity for elementary so this 8025 i then looked at 85 percent of that number and i looked at that number because we ideally want each of our buildings to be at about 85 percent utilization that's where they're at their best place where we have the ability if there's an additional section we have space in the building to to be able to provide that in that building but also to look at do we have the right number of buildings or can we look at something different where maybe we have a building reduction or a building increase and so what's important about that is if we're district-wide 85 capacity we would need to have at least 6 800 capacity for our students for all this to work and you can see where above that through the projection period we dip below that here in 2021 but we're expecting to come back this is where we start to look at these these numbers where we've been decreasing in the elementary we're going to start to see some increases so we want to make sure we have the right space that's the elementary we go to the junior high um the same information with the blue arrow that separates the past enrollment with the projected enrollments this red line is the instructional capacity for the junior high so that's the 4971.
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we did 85 of that to get 4225. now i will tell you straight up if you're a math person this 425 is really a percent of the percent of this 4971 because there is innately a inefficiency with junior high and high school use of the spaces so if we have seven hours in the day we can't ideally use each of those spaces all seven hours it's just something that is almost impossible with the way the spaces are used and how teachers would have to move around in those classrooms we can do it we've seen it done in many other places but it's really really challenging to do that so we have this range and you can see that our junior high enrollment is decreasing from what it was here and a little over 4 000 students you can see we're anticipating a decrease to about 3 600 students so we get under that 85 we have the ability to start thinking about what this would mean and so i took the liberty if we're going to have this type of discussion what could this mean and so i created this junior high capacity scenario what i did it just took the average size of instructional capacity for each of the junior highs that's 994 students and i said okay water let's say we made the change in 2324 what would that look like with the ultimate instructional capacity of that building coming offline and it's one of the buildings and so it's an unnamed building so we dropped from 4971 to 3977 you can see that 85 capacity with that dotted line is 425 drops down to 3 380.
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so we're right in between that 85 and what the 100 is so yeah we could we could maybe think about doing this we're going to be really really tight with how the programs work so can we move some programs can we utilize some of those spaces differently or or better more efficiently absolutely that that could be a possibility um and that's why we're saying yeah you could look at this um we're saying with this ball point you probably couldn't reduce the inventory unrealistically without doing some of these other changes until 25 26. again just trying to show you how this this meets up and how we look at things with all the districts that we work with on whether it's increasing inventory or decreasing inventory we do the same thing with your high school obviously you couldn't go from two to one that would be an impossibility um but we show this that you can see there's there's some inefficiencies in the high school specifically as we move through the projection time period other things that we've spoke about with dr sparlin with things we've learned things have been expedited because high schoolers and with the virtual world that we're living in there may be some some ways that we can utilize the high school buildings even differently than the way we are today and the way we maybe even imagine them being over the next five years so we don't think there's anything you can do with your secondary high school capacity and enrollment so with that i'm not going to read all of these ball points um i'm just going to probably zoom down i think there was one i wanted to focus on and i think was this here this where you see my highlighter determine if and how to address capacity issues and the timing for future school construction remodeling repurposing or new attendance areas so we're saying with the forecasted enrollment change there's going to be likely a need to something with the elementary boundary you know is there some sort of alignments um that we need to do um there's several buildings where we're right at that point where maybe we have to consider that and then we also know there's some significant limitations on how we would go about if we were to repurpose the moth ball for a certain amount of time reduce whatever that is there's going to have to be some other things that we look at in order for that to be an objective that we successfully can implement in your district with that i will listen to your questions comments if i can answer your questions i'll do that this evening if i don't have an answer that i can back up with data or something that i know i'll get back with dr sparlin on an appropriate answer or visual to help you guys with what that means you know it's interesting i was after rob and i were talking i had a conversation with the executive director of the luda the large unit district association and we were talking about the you know the dip in the enrollment this year and uh we were talking about that what does that look like for the 52 luta school districts which are the 52 largest school districts in illinois and he shared that there was over an 18 student reduction in those 52 school districts so you know we're looking at what i was talking about what rob was just talking about with our school district it pretty much coincides with uh the data of the other large unit districts due to i think the reasons that rob mentioned i just thought i'd mention that because he and i just had that conversation all right i'll start um hey rob how are you thank you for the presentation tonight you know what when you talk would you uh maybe you want to just the first time you talk maybe just enunciate your name because he can't see us we can see him but he can't see us then he knows hey rob this is brent lightfoot thanks brent hello um could you jump back to page uh 41 for a second so i look i i i understand how you get your numbers and so some of the data was provided to you but i wanted to kind of question um the percentage what i'm seeing is a percentage on top of a percentage and what i mean by that is we have numbers for these buildings that were um buildings were designed to a certain capacity level right and i understand the difference between design capacity and functional capacity and so tonight you've been sharing with us basically functional capacity i understand that i have another comment about that in a minute our junior high capacity is five thousand four hundred and seventy five okay so if we're at five thousand four hundred and seventy five and we take ninety percent or 80 percent of that isn't that then your dotted line and so the 4971 on the screen here really should be the true capacity and then you're showing functional capacity below that because otherwise you're taking a 10 about a 10 reduction from true capacity to the capacity number that you're using and then you're taking 85 percent of that so now you've cut down to rough math 75 of the capacity of these buildings and what i'm saying is i don't think that that's good data for us to use and to make decisions on does that make sense to you i mean yeah let me let me give you an understanding of how capacities evolved in your district and first we we can put in what i would say is that design capacity or that architectural capacity which is greater than what you see listed on any of these slides so that's the first thing if you as a board want to see that the reason we've evolved to this instructional capacity is because the way in which the building is being used some of those spaces that went into when the buildings were built or how the architect turned that over to the district it's evolved to those spaces are being used for other things that would not be classified as gen ed so it could be for special education it could be for pull-outs for different things let's say english language learners but those spaces are no longer considered part of the gen ed student experience in those particular spaces and that's why we've gone to the 4971 that matches up with the programs that you desire to have in each of these buildings and the 4225 is saying we know we have if 4971 is the maximum for that instructional we can go as low as 4225 in this conversation of where do we reach a point where we can keep the same programming and utilize the space in which the way it's currently being utilized and say something maybe could go offline in order for it to go offline any sooner if that's a consideration we would have to re-examine how those spaces are being utilized meaning that those special programs would have to be put someplace else maybe consolidated maybe more efficiently looked at in how they're distributed across each of the five junior high buildings but good points that you make but there is a difference between what i would call the architect capacity or the building code capacity and then how we're actually utilizing these facilities for the student experience right now i understand and you know my second kind of comment or point here is that i understand your rationale i guess i don't agree with it and the reason why is if we decide that we must close a school then we need to find another school with the same build capacity that can be adjusted to accommodate whatever programs are needed that that's what you basically said and what i'm saying is is that if we have a building that was designed to hold 750 students but it's currently only functional at 595 because of special programs i need to find space for all of those programs which is what you said but i can't be looking at another school that has 595 i've got to look at the total potential capacity and the other thing i would say that we must unfortunately consider is given the budget constrictions that we have in this district right now and the fact that we must find cost savings that might mean that we make some choices that we wouldn't normally make at for the advantage of being able to not cut staff and not reduce services but maybe we decide we have to close some buildings and maybe that isn't at the optimal less less design i'm sorry the optimal function capacity but we might choose to make that trade-off because the alternatives are worse have you ever have you worked with other districts that have been kind of in the same situation yeah unfortunately this is becoming the common conversation that we're having in 2020 going into 2021 so that everyone's in the realization that budgets are going to be different and so how do we use spaces and everything you said i i cannot disagree it's more if this is an objective the board has what we established here is there's more that has to be looked at with some of these other spaces that aren't used for gen ed and can we move them around can they be used differently in order for those programs to be successful right now we know with this instructional capacity we're getting the progress academic success that could occur based on how these spaces are being utilized but you may have to use them differently so i recognize that and if that's a direction we most assuredly can work with your administration on what could that look like and it may not be anything that any of us want to look at but maybe can i jump in real quick because i want to piggyback off something before you move on to a new one i was just going to make a quick comment okay go over it and the last one is just a comment for the for the rest of us specifically when we look at the high school numbers um when we did the additions of both of the high schools we built both high schools to a functional capacity of um uh 3200 right and that was at 85 percent of total capacity so all i'm saying is i don't think we should be reducing again the high school capacity from 64 to 62 because 64 is already a reduced number so that's kind of the question i wanted to pay back off of rob this is lori doyle how are you good to see you again even though you can't see us we do all look angelic you're right so my question for you is um it's the question i think i seem to ask every single time we talk which is um how how was the special education data presented to you um where did you come up with the utilization was it how many classrooms were taken out of the mix how was that data presented i think for capacity that came from the district administration and it was was led by the idea of how we're using those spaces and i know dr sparling can go into the details of class sizes and how some of these other programs were being utilized in those spaces to get at what these numbers are thank you um so my next question and this is actually my last one is is if we were looking here at if this was and this is not this agenda nor is this a decision to be made at this exact point if we were to look at this what i think i heard you say and i just want to make sure i'm hearing you correctly that even though your recommendation in a normal time might be what we were looking at which is that you didn't feel that that was something that would be considered you have seen other districts doing this because of budget constraints and that you do feel that you could work with our administration on creating a workable plan with the capacities we're talking about it looks like at the junior high level absolutely and we would want to work with administration and come up with kind of a checklist that you the board would be able to look at and say yeah this is a direction because what you could literally move different programs and basically put them in a closet right but is that going to be how you want those programs to operate so there's there's some things that we would want to recommend things we'd want to work with administration on how some of those things might look and getting their expertise with special education your ell what are their thoughts about how we're using these spaces to be able to say hey this instructional capacity and let me go back a couple slides of let's say boulder hill elementary we have an instructional capacity of 714 and if that building was designed for 750 we clearly have a couple classrooms that are being utilized for something well if we utilize that for gen ed where are we going to put those programs and do those programs have the right space for those kids to be successful so absolutely we there's room to look at this but i think there's an understanding what i'm hearing and i don't get the the benefit of seeing your facial expressions but it's sounding like everybody understands that we ideally want to keep the way things are but in order as we move forward with some of our budget challenges we're going to have to do things differently and it's going to be different with gen ed it's going to be different with the special education programs it's going to be different altogether i have a couple more down a different track so i'm going to not go down that one but i'm going to come back to it but we have some more over here for you hey this is ruth croner i just had a quick question about the projected enrollment numbers are these projected numbers only for gen ed and i asked that because i think we have seen particularly with our special education programs significant increases in the numbers of students coming into those programs beyond what had originally been projected so i'm just wondering if this is total number of students including all programs or if this is only projections for gen ed my assumption and i'm going to verify this and i'll get back with dr sparlin is it's all students because the students would be in each of these buildings but i think we have the ability to break out that data to know are they a student that's receiving a particular service that requires the space that's in that building for that program use okay thanks who would like to ask next questions i do have another path that i want to go down that's not related to what we're currently on as a discussion path i don't know if anyone else would like to do that before i completely go down a different train of thought okay so here's the other aspect of this that i'm looking at and you're coincidentally right on that elementary projections page i'm seeing here there's there's two things to be talking about one obviously we're looking at budget reductions uh rob this is lori doyle again um and we're looking at cost benefited why not the other track here is that i'm looking at an elementary school that's got two orange bars going all the way across and then another one that in a couple years is going to have a lot of bars too so the other thing here that that i'm seeing is that regardless of if this plays into our budget conversations and trying to figure out what direction to head there i'm seeing that irregardless we're seeing some elementary shifts that may need to occur anyway is that what you're kind of saying rob that's correct there's some things whether we look at this based on where students reside or where they end up attending clearly grand park that was something that was illustrated last go around fox chase we're starting to run into some challenges potentially at 23 24.
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one thing that i do make sure that i caution everyone is with the attend number the administration has a little bit of control over how that gets to or exceeds the capacity that's identified for each building based on being able to say no that can't occur for that student to come into that building so there's a little bit of wiggle room there look at fox chase where it's a 615 capacity and if you look at those attends we're just slightly there or within 15 students in each of the projection numbers so dr sparrow maybe this is a question for you on that data i don't see it split out here so for me looking at these enrollment projections particularly at grand park elementary school um the attend number is the wiggle room enough to make a difference to those two orange bars you know what i'd like to actually go back to that one uh that one uh slide that has the tables where it shows which uh school which schools have kids going to different schools what what the what page is that rob is that the intro transfers i think so reside attend page 25.
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thank you because that was an is it a new page rob that you haven't uh had shared with us before i haven't seen too much of this in your previous reports and so this one's just again another way to look at how we're seeing the students move around how they reside because when you look at grand park you can see that we have 54 kids uh that is it i'm reading that right for grant park 54 kids that are attending there from other schools is that correct i show one student who does not reside in grand park that attends grand park good question this is a great slide rob i really i really appreciate seeing this slide i have to tell you and can we clarify the there's two elementary schools where we have the dual language program and that is hunt club and boulder hill correct well actually well at the elementary and then there's bank at the junior high yeah right but i'm just saying i'm looking at specifically at the elementary slide so that would account for a lot of those numbers for those for two particular schools being higher on the attend you know students who attend there but don't reside there i would assume that a significant number of those are in the dual language program that's correct as opposed to just requested to go to a different building for whatever variety of reasons and you see those two largest numbers uh both at boulder hill and hunt club right 264 and 196.
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yeah that's why i thought this slide was a powerful side that i just don't remember seeing in the past so no i really like that one i think that that helps us determine just the question that i asked so i appreciate you reminding us of that fox chase what what program what special programs are at fox chase instructional skills okay what else faith do you have that list i asked you to have in regards to the different schools so we can just go off of it so again we are limited to 10 people in the room and with the people in the room um faith has uh been participating via phone so that we can maintain proper limits of number of people we're going to give her a call and while you're calling her i'll throw something out too that is a consideration so working with rockford some of this information where you know where programs are so if we reduce inventory and we know where these kids are the type of programming for this dual language is different than other programming right so where these kids are could become part of the conversation of if we have to change boundaries what does that potentially look like and are these the right two facilities where this program should be maintained skills program okay skills okay because that's obviously an area that is a challenge um in terms of housing yeah in terms of where because you know when you it's interesting when you talk about these different capacity numbers it's like you know you could think about like south berry state south berry has a stars program right and they have six sections of stars and you can only have 10 kids per section so that would be 60 kids that could be serviced in those in those six classes as compared to the general ed kids you would service 168 kids in those same six classes well alongside that i do have one question regarding preschool so particularly at the two elementary schools prairie point and long beach where there are a number of the classrooms being utilized for preschool because there's not enough room in there as we have been shifting things around it to kind of adapt to that i know that this year our preschool numbers are about in half of what they've been the year before how rob had you accommodated the functional capacity of a school and picking this because i know at long beach there are more classes that are taking up um classroom space was that were those numbers already factored in as taking that out of the possibility of being functional capacity because they're being utilized for the preschool program i believe your latter statement is correct that the instructional capacity you see on our data is just for k5 so if there are rooms being used for early childhood in those spaces that's not part of that capacity that's something that dr sparlin could validate if that's truly the case so dr spartan so let me just make sure i'm understanding this right because i can get this backwards in my head and i want to make sure i have this right and again a prairie point as well so for example you're saying instructional capacity at long beach elementary is 550 students that has already accounted for the fact that we don't have access to all of those classrooms because of preschool but if we did not have preschool in there the functional capacity would be higher than 550.
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i believe so okay and do we have can is there a way we could find out to what extent that is only because i know that prairie point in long beach and maybe south berry had south berry had a pre-k or was that old post south berry had pre-k last year i know i don't know what's happening this year but i know they had some preschool classrooms last year so that's that's the other consideration i would like some more information on is how is our functional capacity being reduced by having preschool in elementary school buildings if i could make it i think that's kind of what i've a more eloquent way of stating what i was kind of pointing out so maybe if it's as simple as taking these tables and including building capacity and functional capacity on the same line so that we understand what could the building do if we were to move programs out yes so like for example if i think i'm understanding you correctly i've seen in the past and and i might just be pulling this out of many many many many many years ago lakewood creek has been built for 900 students as an architectural capacity um and instructional capacity is listed at 700.
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um so what i think i hear you're saying brent is that what you would like to see is also architectural capacity at 900 instructional capacity at 700. or i think fox chase had had an addition this was probably well you guys were here before i believe they had an addition to that school building to bring them up to either 750 or 900 as a possibility yeah fox chase is 900 but just stepping back lakewood creek in 2011 2012 had 981 reside and 770 attend well so and i'm not saying we repeat that right i'm just saying we've we've had issues that we've resolved over the years and um we found ways to do it but it was using those those larger numbers to kind of get to where we needed to be so go ahead what's the next question no just like so as we're talking about it yeah um specific enrollment related to um the you know whatever special programs and populations are in specific schools would be i think interesting and helpful information to have numbers as well as then i'm interested in like the classroom so we might have the number of classrooms and or space space utilized as well as number of students sorry when we do number of classrooms can we also because like some of the reading rooms at boulder hill are only hold you know six kids and some of the classrooms would hold some would hold 20 some would hold 32 on long beach they're pie shaped which is never going to be a great big number um and i think you're right that's a nuanced thing you know you we may have made i think a lot of creative use out of space in our schools and so you know i think as rob even said you know we might have closets being utilized for some instructional space but that would be helpful information to know that as well right so if i can kind of unless anyone has questions still that they want to ask i'm going to make a suggestion for as a board what i think we could do with this presentation and see where we fall the first thing would be do we want to explore the idea of convening a boundary committee for elementary redistricting to alleviate the growth at grand park elementary and all of those facets that we've talked about would have to be included as part of that discussion process are we as a board looking to explore that idea the second main track that i see going on here is mostly part of our next conversation do we want to utilize this data as a potential savings if our enrollment would allow is that something as a board that we would like to see data manipulated to show in a more concrete way which could be two parts of one boundary committee or do we feel that we would like to leave things as is and not explore that at this time with this data i i don't know i'm sure other people have thoughts i i think those are two separate they are almost two separate conversations yeah yes they can both be handled by a boundary committee but i think i think the board needs to kind of make a decision um are we is the outcome the goal of the boundary committee reduce the number of schools being utilized and balance enrollment in each building right and if it's yes to both then we go in that direction if we say no we're not going to consider taking a school offline then we still have to address boundaries for certain schools and if that's probably going to affect multiple buildings because of all the dominoes and start moving right that is that's my take on it um if if i were to give my opinion my take is that i think that this is going to be necessary regardless of what we choose to do that is completely two separate conversations however what i feel like i see here is that that aspect of things is are we going to ask rob to look at the data that we've just asked for in light of the intention of elementary as a chunk and then i think what i'm seeing was junior high where we wouldn't look at high school necessarily we would just look at elementary or junior high and leave high school off or do we want him to focus on all three or does anybody want to not do that at all that's all i'm asking gloria is this part of the next presentation when we're looking at a cost analysis i know everybody's yeah that's the yeah you can see um if we were to take an elementary offline or if we were to take a junior high offline what the potential cost savings would be to do a you know a comparison is this right do we want to go down this road because it's you know this is the money we can save or well that's exactly what i'm saying so but regardless of that train which is about the savings analysis i'm looking to get a feel for the room if everyone's seeing this the way i am because i don't want to just assume um that we think that we will probably need to rebalance at least elementary at this point i think what we want to do it's not what we need to do necessarily um but just as a regulation i mean i think just looking at these numbers it seems like certainly we're we're gonna have to take a look at the elementary boundaries as much as we don't want to have to do that nobody wants to do that but that's where we're at right i mean it's clear looking at these numbers that we need to figure something out um so i would say yes for for that for sure and for the at the elementary and then we'll talk about the rest yeah going down maybe after the does anyone have anything substantial they want to include in rob to ask for at least rob we know that at this exact moment in the discussion that we want to have you take a look at the elementary projections we'd like to have the architectural capacity included the number of classrooms and this will be administration getting the data to you as well and again thank you very much for these excellent projections as always i i have to admit i i really worry about you guys this year having to make these predictions based on a a situation we've never had before where where all of a sudden we have 560 less students than zero from the year before so thank you very much for the extra work that it takes during this time um and i think that that was the only thing we wanted to add in those two things was there anything can i ask something administratively what happens when we take a building offline like what are the costs associated with that as well we're definitely gonna cover that one next yeah that's in the next presentation yep exactly when you're writing any any other pieces you'd like to see looking at this or not quite yet um this is the time okay i'm seeing a lot of people saying blank stairs going lori just get on with it so i will um okay uh 7.3 goes right into that next presentation are you asking rob to hang on for this no yeah i'll listen to this okay there we go stop my share if that works for you guys okay that would be great thank you all right item 7.3 is an informational presentation to the board and mike you're going to pull that up the administration was asked to provide the information uh that we're going to be providing in just a moment here as we start the conversation to beginning the discussion of mitigating our deficit for the upcoming 21-22 school year and so we're going to begin the slide so you can go ahead and move to the next slide please so as we all know in 2016 we were projecting a combined operating fund deficit of 15.9 million in uh 2020 and since 2016 we've cut over 15 million dollars the budget read up made may i should say made over 15 million dollars of budget reductions and revenue enhancements and it's always been the goal of the board to do our best to stay as far away from the student educational experience as possible the budget deficits due to unanticipated expenses and changes to funding that have again placed district in in the situation that we're in and uh it can largely be contributed to the deficit of uh due to evidence faith evidence-based funding being flat as well as the additional expenses uh in regards to govind and uh as i just mentioned there are uh the administration was asked to provide information in three areas so the three areas that we're going to talk about tonight there's one is the cost savings to eliminate uh or eliminate or how much do we spend in all after-school activities athletics and clubs so that's one area we're going to talk about the second is to provide associated cost savings with taking one or more of our buildings offline and just what we spoke about a minute ago and then what would the savings be with a 10 reduction across the board and and personnel we were also asked to provide the pros and cons what those would be what we felt those would be for each of the three areas that we've been asked to provide information and the next slides will highlight that information that we've been asked to provide so christy you want to take it from there thank you so i'm going to start with um the most current five-year projections and i know you can't see those right very well on that screen but this is if the evidence-based funding begins getting back on track in fiscal year 22 so you can see and i can't even see it so let me pull it up here um if that was to happen the one thing you can see let me find my pointer we would be in a deficit for next year fiscal year 22 which is about 1.5 million dollars and then going forward if evidence-based funding again resumes we would begin seeing surplus budgets again and increase fund balances however if evidence-based funding is flat again next year in fiscal year 22 we would experience deficit budgets through fiscal year 25 before we i'm sorry fiscal year 24 before we begin seeing a surplus again so that's assuming that the evidence-based funding would resume in fiscal year 23 so that we would have another year next year of flat evidence-based funding so we'll start with um looking at eliminating all clubs athletics and ex activities and we're starting with a high school here and i'm sorry the i'm just gonna scoot over because the tv's stipends for high school athletics is about 1.4 million there is an athletic budget at each high school and together that's combined at 490 000 we're estimating transportation to move teams around to where they need to be is about 390 000 and then an estimate on the grounds work that comes with maintaining fields and things like that at about 150.
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that brings athletics to 2.4 million in expenses but that is offset with athletic fees and gait uh collections um and that brings athletics to a net expense of 1.88 million activities uh stipends for those are two hundred and nine thousand dollars we do have uh some theater workers that we pay time sheets um and then that expense comes to 223 but offset by activity fee collections so the net expense is a hundred and eleven thousand clubs we pay about forty thousand in high school uh club stipends but we do collect some club fees and that results in a net expense of about seventeen thousand nine hundred so for the high school level our total extracurriculars is uh just over two million dollars in net expenses moving on to junior high we have stipends for athletics for three hundred and ten thousand dollars offset by athletic fees of a hundred and thirteen thousand which nets out to just under two hundred thousand for junior high athletics activities at that level i was about eighty five thousand in stipends less activity fees nets out at forty nine thousand and clubs about twenty thousand in stipends and less the club fees collected uh just comes to about seventy six hundred and the grand total for junior high extracurriculars is 254 000 in net expenses at the elementary level uh there's no athletics but there are activities um and that nets out to about sixteen thousand eight hundred we're just over uh ninety four thousand in stipends and then activity fees collected and then clubs 63 000 in stipends and 28 000 in collections that's out of 35 000 which brings total elementary extracurriculars to fifty one thousand nine hundred so now as dr spelling said we looked at some pros and cons of each of these and starting with the um extracurriculars the pros really center on eliminating the impact to academics so it voids cuts to instruction it minimizes cuts to staff and it maintains class sizes cons reduces opportunity to expand on curricular interest kids who get interested in their students who get interested in something in their academics don't have the opportunity to expand on that after school puts students at high school students at a disadvantage when they're applying to college and university so colleges look at their applications and see what they were involved in and also that does could impact any scholarships that those students may be eligible for it lessens school engagement you know as students become more involved in their school they feel a better a bigger connection to that school and it also limits opportunities for social and emotional growth so we'll move into closing an elementary or junior high school and on the left side i have elementary and we looked at the the staff that would be reduced if an elementary was to close and that would be the administration clerical nurse custodial extracurricular and crossing guards and a webmaster just kind of some miscellaneous so the staff savings are about 433 thousand dollars at the elementary level in addition there's some uh savings to the building itself as we wouldn't need to use as many utilities and or supplies for custodial supplies so cleaning supplies and things like that and that comes to just under a hundred thousand dollars there would be some additional transportation costs as those students would now need to be bused to another school so we did offset the grand total with that amount which is about 150 just about 154 000 so our estimated savings to close in elementary is just under 380 thousand dollars at the junior high level same thing we took the staff that would could be potentially reduced by closing a junior high and this total staff savings comes to 667 000 again the same building uh savings with custodial and utilities custodial supplies excuse me and that is about 162 000 offset by additional transportation costs of roughly 188 000 brings our total estimated junior high savings to close a junior high excuse me to be about 642 000 what uh what about buildings where and i don't know that this exists but i think it might if we had one of these facilities that we had say 90 percent of the kids were bust already does that is there's still additional transportation costs because of additional distance or is it just the cost of having a bus on the road and a kid on the bus i had that question too how many of these are new transports and how many of them are already getting transported we're just shifting them to a different building well we didn't pick a specific building we really took averages to calculate this so some of these kids could already be could already could yes could already be on a bus and just would be so the potential savings could be bigger correct so again looking at the pros and cons the pros there's a potential to absorb the population at another school building uh it would also reduce eliminate or reduce excuse me future cost for improvements or maintenance obviously if the building's not being used by students you wouldn't maintenance projects may not be as urgent cons connections would be lost to the neighborhood school you know families have a big sense of community with their neighborhood school it would increase bus ride time for students who are moved it raises student to admin ratios we obviously need to redraw boundaries if we were to close a building and while it would have a large impact to students and families there would be a minimal impact to the the budget the savings are not as large as the impact and then finally looking at reducing staff by 10 percent so the numbers here you see here for salaries which is just about 135.5 million dollars that's positions only that doesn't include uh the stipends and extra work and things like that just everybody's uh physician salary employer trs imrf contributions estimating that to be about around um well for trs i'm sorry imrf it's just about just under 10 and trs it depends on the employee and then health benefits we have about 65 percent of our employees participate in our medical plan and that comes to about 18.7 million so take those numbers and work it out to 10 percent and we have 13.5 million in salary savings uh about 650 000 in employer contributions to retirement plans and then about 1.2 million in health benefits so the grand total of the savings would be about 15.4 million dollars there and then we'll go over the pros and cons uh the pros reducing staff by 10 does keep all schools open and it allows us to maintain our current extracurricular opportunities the cons it does increase duties and responsibilities of those remaining staff it increases class sizes and there is a potential to overlook a specific task or responsibility as you divvy that work up there are some timelines you need to consider if you if we move forward with reducing staff if it is a certified staff member the rift notice the reduction in force notice must go be delivered to that staff member 45 calendar days before the end of the school term which right now is april 9th of 2021 and for non-certified staff that are working under a collective bargaining agreement we do have to give them 30 calendar day notice okay thank you a real quick but critical question what is the target number that was that was that was my question very first question to the board brent what is the target number because if i heard you correctly uh christy did you say uh it would be 1.5 million would they have a balanced budget next year if we are fully funded with evidence-based funding and if it's a flat if it's if that if that comes again comes back flat it's 5.8 million that's what i was adding up in my head is that correct or no so it is 1.5 million and let me just i just want to get the big the full size because i can't read it on my screen either but i think it's 5.8 million yes if we don't receive full funding or increase evidence-based funding in fiscal year 22.
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so you were you and i were thinking the same along the same line there brent i think that's the i think mrs doyle that's the first conversation is what is what is the target number that we are going to be looking forward uh for the to mitigate this deficit for next year so i think that's where you that's where i would start the conversation well i appreciate your thoughts on that um i agree we kind of need to know what we're aiming for before we start taking a look here so i i have just a couple questions for you about this target number because i want to just reiterate as this is always a great time to do when we talk about budget cuts is that how how much of this how much of our budget comes from local property tax and how much of our budget comes from state funding um just as a rough average and i'm not expecting a perfect number i'm expecting the the rough average we're about 62 percent of where the state thinks we need to be funded but what percentage is property and what percentage of state funding i can tell you that in two seconds thank you and and that for me helps me decide what kind of gamble i think i want to take on whether or not we get money because we can more accurately predict our property tax revenue then we can predict what any particular state budget might do so we receive 53 percent of our revenue is from local property taxes and other local revenue but primary 53 and then 41 just under 42 from evidence-based funding and other state funding and other state funding is free lunch and early childhood is part of that though federal really federal funding that just looks federal funding separate so six percent then is federal uh just about five percent oh cause those are rough yeah rough numbers 41.
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yeah thank you you're welcome i was gonna guess 37 so it was pretty close it was pretty close yeah well it you know it changes how much it comes from where each time they don't fund us the way they say that they know we need right so it's good to have an updated number on that i feel like our governor had made it fairly clear that if the proposed amendment regarding how we do our state income tax did not pass that our funding situation would be not great um i did hear him say education wouldn't be what we would necessarily want in his statement about that the day after i don't know if anyone else heard that but that was listed as it was as a distinct area of something that they wouldn't cut as something that would be affected by the fact that that uh change didn't happen but i would also but i don't know what that means yet i would also expect that given the financial situation that the state is in that they will still be looking at a tax increase i would agree with that as well i would agree with that assessment as well are they going to be able to generate as much money as they wanted to under the proposed idea probably not but i think either way we're looking at a tax estate tax increase i think you're looking at a state tax increase and some cuts to make up the eight billion dollars that they're the state has the state deficit okay so basically i get you know you you feel like you kind of want the odds what do you think the odds are we're going to be one or the other because there's a lot of difference between 1.5 million and 5.8 million what what do you think christie and your best guess what do you think the odds are that that we're going to get funded at what we're supposed to next year and i know that that's kind of unfair and i'm totally accepted and do not hold you to that because nobody can predict that accurately but you're you're the person in the room with the most expertise in school finance um i would say based on everything i'm hearing about state revenues and how they have been impacted by covid that we would be um we would should not expect an increase in evidence-based funding however the federal government has bailed out the state last year last fiscal year i mean not last calendar year and you know there was talk that that could happen again what what if you were asking if you were just to get the opinion of the expert first um what do you think what do you think is the most likely number that we really need to hit to be in financial health in our district if we needed to reduce to create a more positive trajectory what's your best what's your best estimate i would say then that i would have to go to not receiving it until fiscal year 23 and that's that 5.8 million so in your and you i'm i'm i'm sorry and i know that this but you know that i mean we're talking about budget money and we're relying on your information to be able to do that so i'm so sorry but at the same time i gotta ask you don't think that that will be in any significant way offset by federal bailout even a couple million you don't think that three would be enough it could nobody knows that's the reality but the problem is we've not been here before ever yeah it's never been done before right we haven't it's trying to predict the unpredictable right yeah which is what we've been doing for unfair months now but so here's a question that i have then if if you can't answer that if we decided tonight that we need to look at the 5.8 and we ended up not being in as bad a position could we then could we have like an if then type situation like i don't even know if that's yeah i i don't think that anyone has to go through with every single thing if things that's why we get to do a budget every year i think right right i think i think i see what you're saying and what you're saying is if it turns out that it's a better situation it's it's prepare for the worst hope for the best right so that's what your recommendation would be as well as prepare for the worst hope for the best i mean i mean the good thing is one positive is that our um you know we we budgeted for opening november first and that's not happening so every month and i don't want to use a closure as a cost savings but it does end up to be that way so that will impact i'm sorry it won't impact budget next year but it will impact fund balance okay and that leads me right into my question which is i've been wanting to ask this question for a while when we look at the monthly pills for payment who is it that's responsible for making sure that we are cutting back on monthly bills for payment as much as possible and looking at what goes through there and saying some of this stuff needs to slow down or stop who is responsible for that that is the budget administrator so all you know all purchases are going through a requisition now and that is eventually approved or at some point approved by that budget administrator so they are looking at that and i think because of where we started the first slide that we've been through many years of budget reductions i think every administrator is well aware of the you're shaking i i'm shaking my head just because christy i see when i look through these i'm like why are we buying post-its we have posted somewhere in the district why are we not sharing well i i see many many items on here that i'm just i cannot believe that we need to put that money out to that degree there are some things that look very legit like things that are for repairs for the schools and stuff but there's other stuff and i just i i cannot sit here and look at those things and not wonder about some of this does that make sense yes and so let me office supplies and classroom supplies and things like that are bought at the building level and stay at the building level so there's not a it's not like custodial supplies where we do have a warehouse of cleaning supplies where we just you know that's how you restock your building those kinds of things though office supplies are managed at the building level yeah but i i really feel i don't know who can make this process tighter but if i had to choose between going through that bills for payment for the month with a fine-tooth comb and saying goodbye to athletics or after-school activities there's things on here and i really really have been looking at it and i just well i don't know what the board can do about that but if there's anything that we can do about it we should i have a thought which i would hope that they've been doing that for the last five years i would hope because well i know where you're coming from i really really do i really do i am a long time follower of the bills for payment myself um that being said my understanding and i might be completely wrong is that even with that that wouldn't come close to making up this kind of dollar wait but it needs to happen anyway that's every elementary school activity so to me we've got to look at that part i i don't know why we have never had that discussion at a board meeting we have it just was at the beginning of the budget cut thing that was the first thing we'd looked at and that was also part of and it was i it might have been done before i i was on the board but when we created the central purchasing department and i remember that and i remember that that increased efficiency as far as purchasing of some of the things but what i see is money going out that is money that is not for things that you could not live without but i don't think that that i think that our part is to approve the budget and have the administration decide those details yep i get that i get that but we've got to tighten up that process whether it's just the board saying somebody somewhere needs to look more carefully at what they're putting on this thing tony you know you know over the last four years we've we have cut the building budgets at least once if not twice twice twice in regards to the number of dollars that they receive to purchase the items that they do need to have at the at the at the building so i mean that's i mean and can i just put in perspective so we overall all supplies that would be for ed fund transportation fund and operations fund we budgeted 13.1 million this year and that's about six percent of our budget our overall operating budget so and i i would say the bulk of those are in the operations fund i'm just going to say that if i see it and then but i look at the flip side of that also and i go at what point do i want my teacher to be so frustrated that she can't get a post-it pad of course you can though because there's all kinds of stuff hanging around and in a year where we're not supposed to be using paper because we're doing so much electronically some of this stuff should be way down way down in cost i saw stuff on here a billion things for a bulletin board why are we doing bulletin boards when nobody's in the school because we've been planning for kids to go back i did bulletin boards it's cool and it made people happy well i would like people to be happy too but here's what i'll say again if i have to choose between happy because you got a bulletin board and happy because you got to have a sports team or an activity which we have had tons of kids in here speaking before the board talking about what a lifeline that is for them in their school experience and so i'd rather have that experience than a million post-its to be honest you can just use scrap paper i can totally appreciate what you're saying i can totally as a sports parent i know i'm not the only one in here can appreciate you know like i kind of i kind of looked at this as kind of a jumping off point like how much do i need to cut what else can i cut where else can i make and you know i'm going to say something that's going to ruffle a lot of feathers but in my jumping off point i know that in my district we took a freeze and i realized that we just passed and i don't know the ins and outs of their contract i know the doubts of my contract but i guess i mean if i was a teacher in this district and i was looking at a school closing and my class size is increasing by eight kids per section i might consider taking a freeze for a year you know maybe we'd take a freeze for a year and and put one you know instead of what did we give them a three-year contract make it a four-year contract but this year we have to take a freeze because we're in such trouble so i think that that's something that actually is at this more macro level that i think is our responsibility to stay a little bit more toward i think that what i'm hearing from tony is that you'd like us to consider as part of the reduction not just a reduction in staff but a reduction in operations budget yeah and it's not to us to decide if they spend it on pencils somebody somewhere has to go through but what you're what i hear you're saying at the board level is that you're thinking operations uh operations budget yeah and i don't want to say completely because i know that some of this other stuff has to go on honestly right now looking at it i would reduce staff sooner than i would reduce student activities because even though i know those are extra i also know from the testimony of a billion students well maybe not a billion many well i'm gonna go down that path too soon but i i would say i completely agree with you especially right now well is the pandemic has shown us how much more than academics right but really the past too soon when we're i thought are we at the stage where we're discussing i think we're looking at how much address the budget we think we want to do and then which way to go so let's try and agree upon a number are we saying that we need to go for the 5.8 or are you would you rather go somewhere in the middle i say in the middle like 4 million because the thing is realistically you're not going to get the money all right let me keep track of this yep i agree with you on that i'm i'm with tony um and you say 4 million ruth heather where would you be at um uh four million yeah like a split the difference kind of a situation four million ally brent i'm i understand why you would want to split the difference but i also think that times are tough and i you know i think you prepare for the worst i would go the whole thing would you agree ellie to something like 4 million plus some ideas of how it would get to 6 million if necessary i would struggle with it but i i mean again i'm only one vote right no it doesn't matter if you're one vote the idea is i mean if you're asking i think i'm just asking to get yeah if you're asking for honesty we don't have five people here looking for one and a half million right i mean i don't have five people here looking for the full 5.8 or six um obviously you know this is just where it's great to have an odd number of people um when we're trying to get a straw poll but i think that where we're at with this is that i also feel like preparing for the worst hoping for the best is how i feel most comfortable right now but we don't need to decide for sure because we're not going to decide for sure we're not voting on anything tonight this and so obviously mr bauman will need a chance to weigh in at the final presentation and i'm sure he's following along if he's able but for me i think what we can safely say is we certainly want to look at something that's big enough to encompass at least one of these choices if not a fourth choice or some combination thereof can i can i ask a couple questions about this real quick though so on um i think it was slide 11.
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site 11 talked about building savings and i know we're kind of kicking around several ideas about this but this one closing a school yeah so maybe like slide 14 stuck out to me where you put potential to overlook tasks or responsibilities and i as i i'm not sure where we were headed down that road or what we were thinking about when we said potential to overlook specific tests are we going to ask teachers to do more we already are i think that's an example of cutting the administration by 33 what we're sitting there well it's you know it it can be you know it can be anywhere but one of them students i would imagine yeah well i think it's also i think an example of that is we've already experienced it from cutting 33 percent of the district administration and the you know and the uh the issues that we've gone through with having so so much fewer people and noticing well so and so used to do this and making sure that for where everything that needs to get done is getting done and then reallocating all the different responsibilities because there's so many things that different people do that you just may not know they did and it and that's that's kind of an example of what we're doing along those lines that's where i got on slide 11.
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