ready to order when we um and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice um so our first order of business is public comment and we do have a letter um from mr jeff bester and it does pertain to an item later on in the agenda having to do with um its item informational item at point a um what students are reading at the elementary level and what skills are they learning and so earlier today mr bester wrote they said in light of tonight's agenda discussion of what elementary students are reading it is also important to identify how much time students are reading on electronic devices digital literacy versus reading on hard copy printed books research is revealing that reading digital materials is very different from reading hard copy text the differences are found in attention uninterrupted concentration analytical understanding and critical thinking these points and many others have been made by dr marianne wolf a neuroscientist and educator in her book reader come home and by dr mary i'm sorry naomi veron um a linguist professor and educator in either of her books how we read now and words on screen i recommend them highly to anyone concerned about the state of reading and our schools and he followed up with two quotes from dr wolf's book it takes years for deep reading processes to be formed and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development and our young from a very early age it's from page 38 and then what concerns me as a scientist is whether expert readers like us after multiple hours and years of daily screen reading are subtly changing the allocation of our attention to key processes when reading longer more demanding texts will the quality of attention and reading the basis of the quality of our thought change inexorably as our cultural as our culture transitions away from a prince-based culture toward a digital one what are the cognitive threats to end the promises of such a transition um so um that ends his letter and i'm sure that um some of these points will be uh raised when we get into that live that subject and our agenda so um thank you mr bester um yeah we do have okay so i'll summarize this a letter was from a parent ashley palumbo she currently has two pre-k students at darcy and was concerned about hearing that perhaps the elementary schools do not have the same curriculum and was reaching out to learn more about that so we um responded to her and have given her a couple different avenues that we can help her find out more about a k-12 curriculum once her kids get into kindergarten first grade we had another parent reach out who wishes to remain anonymous who had a similar comment you just elaborate a little bit on that in terms of the differences without going into life okay all right um next item on the agenda is uh review the minutes of october 18 2021 hope they were in your pocket and um hopefully we all had a chance to review them um do we have any changes the corrections to the minutes as we read them no okay um do i have a motion to approve the minutes of the october 18th 2021 meeting do you have a second i'll start okay they look good so all in favor aye okay um mr daniel stains all right moving on to um item number three new business uh we're going to hear a presentation tonight on mental health first date all right thank you miss ham and good evening everybody well that's the problem so uh anyway good evening a little something just wanna make sure everybody's awake here but um first of all i i want to thank the number of guests we have joining us this evening to talk about what's really an important issue and it's mental health of our students and i want to begin by just highlighting that you know again six years ago we identified social emotional development as a marquee goal of our school system one of two the other being complex thinking and i just want to underscore the fact that since we've tried to have a balanced focus on social emotional development and complex thinking our scores have just dramatically improved over time i can't say that there's direct causation other than to know that going back is is foundational a skill or foundational theory is maslow's hierarchy of needs is pretty well pretty broadly accepted that our students can't find success that we as humans can't really thrive until we have basic human needs met things like esteem and belonging basic human needs and health is taken for granted in that equation that you know you'll have your physical health but your mental health is just as important and so i want to just quickly revisit our social emotional learning goal that if the cheshire public schools consciously focus on the social emotional development of our students then school practices will demonstrate a clear focus on social emotional growth and students will demonstrate self-awareness self-management skills cultural awareness relationship skills and responsible decision making the program that we're going to talk about this evening really does speak to social emotional growth heavy reliance on self-awareness and self-management relationship skills and responsible decision-making and that's teen mental health first aid i mentioned that we have a few guests with us this evening and i'm excited to welcome our director of the cheshire social services mrs michelle picarillo who can tell you a little bit about what mental health first aid is about youth and team and why it's important michelle good evening and thanks for having me i'm sorry that i can't be there in person this evening this feels a little bit uncomfortable to me so um so i first just want to share that mental health has been a priority not just for our public school system but across our community and across the lifespan for several years now um and we have been i think really successful in implementing um training programs throughout the community at different agencies local businesses and whatnot to help educate lay people on identifying what a mental mental health crisis is and how to respond and what resources are available to respond so mental health first aid is one of those trainings the other training i'm just going to speak briefly about is qpr which is question persuade refer and that is an evidence-based suicide prevention training that has been widely delivered throughout our community and throughout our school staff um community as well um and so that that lays a wonderful framework and then the mental health for staying trainings are designed to educate lay people who are not trained clinically or necessarily support people to identify what a mental health crisis is and to be able to respond to it in the moment and get the person the help that they need and so youth mental health first aid trains lay people to identify that in a young person and then teen mental health first aid actually helps young people identify their own mental health needs identify mental health needs in their peers but also helps them to identify when they see somebody who needs help when it's beyond their capability to help them right so we have a lot of um situations where there's a peer-to-peer support relationship where young people find themselves trying to help somebody who is in a mental health crisis and they're not really equipped to do so so this teen mental health first aid program also helps them identify what their limits are and how to identify a trusted adult that they can go to to get support for their peer or their friend as well as to again help manage their own mental health needs there is no question that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis at this point all that you need to do is really try to find a provider um particularly in our area and i think across the state there there's there's no availability anywhere and it's really become um an urgent need to to provide more mental health support in particular for young people at this difficult time thank you very much michelle and you know to just kind of elaborate on what people are sharing the team mental health first aid or mental health first aid program in general focuses on five steps and of course i think by law now we have to have an acronym and there's this a-l-g-e-e which includes assessing risk respect respectful listening to and supporting the individual in prices identifying appropriate professional help and other supports so uh basically we in this program the participants learn how to identify as michelle crisis and get them to support that they need it's not any sort of treatment anything like that it's the the individuals that are trained are not responsible or expected to or even encourage to be that the person that solves this issue it's how to get them to the support that they need which is really critical in exploring this it was interesting to look at the peer-reviewed case studies that talk about students part of people who participate grow their knowledge of science symptoms and risk factors of mental illness and addiction can identify multiple types of professional and self-help resources for individuals increase their confidence in the likelihood of helping an individual in distress which is really powerful as michelle said we have you know plenty of circumstances mind you both kids and adults where you know somebody's in crisis but don't really know what to do and you kind of therefore paralyzed this helps educate those folks as well as the fact that those who participate in this show in increased mental wellness themselves so all really positive components that and of its own right i think is really important and a critical consideration in supporting our students with this this skill there's another side of it that i hate to even consider but it is a reality and we hear about it more and more every day and for that i want to introduce cheshire high school parent and our consultant for security mr tom debut give you a little bit of background on his background and then how this dovetails with school security thank you jeff good evening everybody i i know many of you but my name is tom vivia i uh i retired from the fbi's behavioral analysis unit in 2017.
[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow [Music] yeah test one two three four tests one two three again test one two three four test one two three [Music] [Applause] [Music] no [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] oh okay call the meeting to order this is the december 14th meeting of the board of trustees um [Music] i'll we'll call roll call here we have brian o'neill al-jabbar katherine smith and myself okay do i have a motion for the adoption of the agenda second i have a motion and a second all in favor aye aye motion passes public comments closed session items do we have any seeing none we will then adjourn to close session at 2 47.
call the meeting to order wait wait he's going to start you call the meeting to order public comments board bylaws 9323 meeting conduct is available at the signing table whenever a member of the public initiates specific complaints or charges against an individual employee the board president shall inform the complainant of complaint procedure of 13 12.1 complaints concerning district employees kylie do we have any public comments pertaining to closed session not to close session we have no cost for public comments um roll call [Music] marielle cara present rick rawley here wilson so here dennis bender christopher nunes here now can we please rise for the pledge of allegiance mr raleigh will you please lead us in the pledge please join me play you okay so we're going to be going into closed session but prior to that i'm going to read read what we're going to go into number one pupil personnel explosion cases exp number 10 21 22.
oh state revenue per student yes good question anything else i'm going to approve the driver education fees for the summer of 2022 at 100 per resident student and 300 for non-resident student admitted to the program next item is the concrete bid um okay we did have two vendors bid for concrete projects within the district again with that you'll see a document coming up on there um we will um again to actually as you can see the bids are very very close in relationship to you know the projects and what it was done uh what we asked to have in bid to be done um we did uh have a pre-dead meeting with both companies uh met with brad griffin and reviewed and looked over all pieces of information there's also two other things that we requested in the bid process to include and we asked them to include a copy of bid bond if over a hundred thousand dollars as well as a copy of certificate of insurance burlington construction provided both those items precision did not with that and they like i said they presented themselves well um you know in the time they met with brad so again two very reputable companies but uh one filled both you know items that we asked to include and the other one did not so i'm you know all about selecting local vendors as much as we can and the county does a thing where that's percentage good question christy and i spent a lot of time on this so there's a one percent rule in the state of kansas if you if you have these if let's say for example they both provided both documents you would have a one percent rule that you could go back to the local vendor and ask them if they would meet that price of an out-of-town vendor and and if they will if it's if both bids are within one percent then you can do that but that's the state that's okay that's that's the statement [Music] city and county are different some people five percent something to go ten percent it's it just depends you're right good question yes other questions that you have no i just wondered about the alternate or i missed the one through sevens right i've been talking with brad griffin we're gonna go ahead and go my recommend our recommendation would be to go with items projects one through seven um this is uh a little more than we did last year but we were going to do a little less last year if you remember in concrete um and uh but it's actually a little bit less than what we've done in years past we've done upwards of 170 180 190 000 in concrete just depends on the year depends on if you've got you know a harsh winter and the concrete's you know getting hammered and salt can obviously deteriorate concrete and there are other factors as well but uh so this baseball dung out not the softball this is the baseball there's an area around uh real close to the baseball area that is a it's a mowing issue for our crew the most it's like kind of like a zigzag it's hard to get into the outside so we're going to get rid of that and also it's a mud it's a place where mud collapse so it's a small it's a it's not a huge area but it's going to help it's going to help our our staff not our ground staff to go in and be able to they won't have to go in and mow around there they won't have to deal with again the the coaches and the players won't have to deal with mud that just piles up and collects in this area the elementary school front entrance is uh remember if we remember when we talked about the board retreat we talked about maybe getting rid of that area in there where it's like uh it's a garden right now we're not based on just some informations and thoughts we just don't know maybe um you know what the future might hold with that area and so having said that we're going to hold off on that we may end up doing something with that we can come back later if we later in the summer if you decide but for right now we just aren't sure about a couple of things you said no no no sums it up nicely yeah okay some other ideas yes so what do we have budgeted for this this year and so uh i i roughly 150 000.
the score for the middle school was 78. that smally was 75 at lafayette was 77 and then finally at lamont was 7 was 77. now keep in mind as i said at the previous board meeting with the pandemic last year led to a lot of remote and hybrid learning with the with the students not here physically that cut down on our hiv numbers uh considerably last year that being said even with the hybrid instruction we still had uh hiv investigations that that we conducted and these scores reflect us any questions uh so what were the things that we did less than perfect [Music] um there were just a couple of things here and there that each school um thought um they could do better um i have the specifics in my in my bag and i think you have i think you have the reports as well on an attachment and i don't think i have this okay i could get that i could get you the complete scores okay that'd be great thank you yeah okay anything else okay thank you thank you uh um how many students a year are we averaging well it depends on the year depending on how we accepted each particular year right now we're at probably 35 days and i think we have the next year so the question is [Music] it's [Music] um [Music] our thought process and our plan was to get this category done and move into an extension unlocked and you don't see vote tech taking more students we've seen taking less students every night vote technically the other 400 kids now my first game here was 1400 yeah so they they've gone down quite a bit i have no idea what the plan [Music] but we did bring in a large group recently so right now i have numbers that we signed about 131 full time six share time is our estimate last year was 106.
it wasn't until august they ended they turned around and indicated that they're not going to hold us harmless and that they were going to reduce us to the 2021 year so because of that reason we have to reduce the budget overall and that took another half a million dollar decrease so overall we're having to reduce the emino budget approximately 1.5 million dollars so on the capital side we're having to reduce eight hundred and twelve thousand eight hundred and twelve thousand dollars and that's about a six thousand dollar decrease and that's because of declining enrollment so if you want to go to the next page the second portion of page seven of eight is some good news there on line 8c the budget balance carry forward i've always notified the board that we're going to have a carryover in a carryover from the 2021 to the 2122 year when the board adopted the budget i had estimated about 759 thousand dollars carry over and that's because we're still operating 2021 we weren't finished with the fiscal year yet but now that we're finished with the fiscal year we're actually carrying over approximately 1.1 million dollars about a 356 thousand dollar increase we're so we're actually carrying over more than what we had anticipated to carry over which is good because now it cuts into the 1.5 million dollar carry or or decrease that we're going to have and then down on line 9 or line 10 you'll see that the estimated prop through prop 123 allocation we're going to have to decrease hundred by 7 four dollars and that's because of the fact that we had declining enrollment as well page seven of eight lines eleven this is your general budget limit or what we call the gbl or the maintenance and operation budget capacity the adopted gbl was fourteen million nine hundred and ten thousand three hundred and ninety nine dollars this revised limit is now thirteen million seven hundred and twenty two thousand five hundred and seventy five dollars an over d overall decrease of one million one hundred and eighty seven thousand eight hundred and twenty four dollars and then on the capital side we're looking at a decrease of six thousand eight hundred and five dollars and then on page eight of eight which is the calculation of the capital budget limit if you take a look at line seven unexpected the actual expenditures for fy fy21 for capital the carryover we only had a hundred and seventeen thousand again now we have the true carryover balance we're carrying over a hundred and ninety six thousand dollars an increase of eighty four thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars so now we have a little over a million dollars in capital a million twenty seven thousand two hundred and eighty six dollars again we were still operating now we have a true value of what our carryover is do you have any questions in regards to our budget revision for 21-22 questions from anyone so just to be clear it was like we had to reduce our budget but we had to carry over from last year basically helped us with that reduction not totally but the majority of that it helped offset some of the offset yes okay and this is just a function of record i mean complying with the state and uh resubmitting that budget yes it is dr wright if i might add brenda pointed out a really important factor and that is current year funding we're having to guess how many kids are going to be here eight months in advance we have no idea especially on the heels of a covet we didn't really know so we had to set the tax rate sufficient to support up to 2 000 kids and so the number that we had to create would be that then you have to kind of do a worst case scenario and so we probably anticipated making a six or seven hundred thousand dollar cut if the 2000 didn't come in and we budgeted accordingly but then when we didn't at the state just said we might hold you harmless we might not that was a half a million dollar shift that's the biggest thing and so this current year funding model is problematic to say the least and then i think brenda did a fantastic job of just trying to take the data we had making the best budget we could but i think it's important to note we're not in financial crisis it wasn't because we overspent it wasn't because we hadn't planned these are just formulas that are dictated to us by the state and we must comply and so while like i said 500 000 of it was a surprise 700 really wasn't 600 of it wasn't so i i just want to come in brenda for the effort uh despite what it might look like if you're not familiar with school finance it's very complicated and she's done a very good job of managing through it thank you so and current year funding just so everyone understands is the number of kids you have in the seats that day we have to report that we get paid for that that day so we can't anticipate and speculate like we used to in a hundred year on a hundred day count and that was what our budget was set on we have to adjust our budget almost daily but the number of kids that attend school under account of that day right yes that's what current year funding is yes it is previously we're able to budget based upon 100th day of the previous year so we were able to build our budget based upon previous year so we're able to estimate what our budget was now we're we have to build our budget on how many kids are actually sitting in the seats so that could change from day to day yeah that's a nuisance isn't it in addition it creates more employees to handle that too and what complicates it further is that we have it's it's hard to find qualified teachers so we're trying to take a shot at how many teachers do we need the last thing we wanted to do is end up with overcrowded schools classroom sizes that were too large and so brenda working with the principals and us working with the departments i think we landed on a pretty good number we're pretty close so i i just wanted to add that it's not it's not it's not that didn't say that big of a deal it's not that big of a surprise yeah any other questions or comments anything all right so if there are no questions or comments or discussion from the board we'll just adjourn this public hearing and we'll stop for five minutes
so if i'm keeping you informed when margin 2022 comes hopefully we've really stabilized by then for membership membership and there won't be any surprises we'll be within say ten students and we'll be within three thousand dollars for our budget the good news is our final adopted budget last year we did a revision in march april and may 21 all three months and every time we do a revision the department of ed would write one of these little pledge 25 reports and they'd say these are your real numbers so i'd amend it and close the gap may 15th king we did another one in may of 2021 and we ended the year exactly with the same budget that he said 14.4 million the good news is that was based on 2057 students that 2400 equates to 22.15 so we gained about 160 students this year and the budget increased for our operating fund for 14.44 16.38 so about one point one point nine million almost for the operating increase capital budget went from a million twenty last year to a million one twenty eight this year based on again those numbers and they use the prior district enrollment for that district additional assistance for capital so that last year's lower numbers are driving this year's capital one more thing i'd like to bring up was the classroom site fund they've added another 308 dollars i gave you a memo on that based on a march jlbc estimate and that took our revenue projected from 1 million 150 000 last year to over 1.7 million issues yeah i saw that and i understand exactly where did that money come from why did we get a month like that well you could say there's a projected bump in sales tax that they knew about back in march that's what they just there is also a correction this is there's a one-time correction for past underpayment so we won't get this same amount next year it's going to be appreciably lower next year so a lot of that there is some increase in sales tax but a lot of that is a one as a one-time corruption it was a big bump that's why the numbers were really big yeah okay well shoot i thought there's something worth it because for years certain districts were budgeted according to the budget not according to cash here's what you owed us based on our student account i don't think this just ever did that it's kind of a risky thing because the county will still cut you off if you don't have cash in your accounts so that's like a since 2001 catch-up paid for some of that so those numbers are quite healthy we've been paying out the goal is to pay up 9 000 gross pay per certified staff full-time this year and then have enough to equalize that as revenues make are there any other questions anyone have a question on it wonderful then with that we'll have a motion to close our public hearing thank you item 7a is our student council report is let's let's do this this year and then i just wanted to update you guys on a few things that we're doing um some future things that are coming up in may and some things that we've just passed or have done so about we recently started our winter dance that we only budgeted 500 since we haven't done it in four years and we actually profited one thousand dollars from that and from that money we wanted to instead of just buying freshmen incoming freshmen t-shirts that are bought by the school we wanted to buy one for every kid so like we would buy the juniors or junior color class t-shirts so that they could wear for like the next year's spirit week for like skittles day or something and that's the money we're gonna use anticipating that um we had culinary participate they had good sales as well and then we only for our concessions that dance we only sold drinks and we still made about three hundred dollars just on drinks and then that was all the winter dance it was a very successful dance and then last tuesday we with we partnered with miss marley and we went to walmart and we had our students choose from like numbers of students and we had a wish list so we went christmas shopping for them and then we budgeted about 100 to 150 150 per kid and then that was all paid for by the press get radiology wise and then it was about 17 kids that we bought christmas presents for that's all for that and then soon we just started a new fundraiser it's like a year-round fundraiser it's called wreaths across america um alexandra teammate wanted to start that and then um for every 15 so each wreath costs 15 and for every week we sell we get five dollars back and then it's just an ongoing fundraiser and then it's we wanted to do it to recognize our veterans and then for next year we have our senior trip planned we had a vote through google foreign we chose disneyland however there's still so many covet restrictions and we had sabrina lopez call today to see what that would look like because we don't know if we want to go on a date where it's all like other other schools go as well it's not just it's not open to the public but we still have not figured that out we want we're expecting to go we hope we go but um yes uh we did disneyland and then we had many kids sign up already so the more kids sign up the less it's going to be to go to the to the trip all right and then prom so we have two dates for prom it's april 22nd or april 29th we don't know yet it really depends on um athletics if anyone has something going on that day but as of right now nothing is scheduled for those two dates so that's what we're thinking the chairperson for that is shay daniels and then it's sixty dollars per person we've done that for a while and we're not um looking to change that we have budgeted around six thousand dollars it's one of our biggest fundraisers and when and then we use all that money to bring back to the school and then we look for a senior gift without money we're still looking for venues and then we have scholarships for students that will not be able to afford those students and then as of right now that's everything thank you miss leslie finished up the state cross country meet quite thank you yes thank you the december superintendent report first of all i want to report on the thanksgiving beasts most of you attended at least one of them we served over 2 000 of over 2050 students out of the 2200 that we have so over 90 percent of the students were served lunch of turkey mashed potatoes gravy vegetables pie roll everything else the number that i'm happy with is the 900 parents that came onto campus and and ate with their kids i think that number is fantastic in it it was a neat process to see um we did territorial over two days which is something that i think we want to continue just because the higher engraved you get the less parent participation so we just had a ton of participation at territorial and splitting it into two days made it much more manageable so it's something that i've gotten feedback from our food service director that that's something he'd like to continue along with mrs cox so real happy with that i want to thank the board members parents staff students and community members that helped serve we had athletes go over and help the kids that i know at del rio and territorial that was neat to see um uh this reader her husband's parishioners came and helped out as they do every year and then of course you guys and everyone else so i want to thank everybody for helping out with that do um just i've always made it a point to go with my kids obviously when they get older they don't really care but this was really juke's first time because of last year not having it and i remember going with my younger kids and watching kids cry because their parents couldn't make it so i was like oh i'm going to be that parent that goes my kid could have cared less about it i told him next year i'm going to go with the kid that's crying because he didn't even talk to me i i just think it's so great that we do it and i saw grandparents there with their kid with their grandkids and i just think that's such a cool thing yeah we do so yeah it's one of the neatest things that we do for parent participation in the district and the food is great it is it really is good food so i think they got 60 turkeys and then roasted whole turkeys and carved them up so it was you know it wasn't the processed turkey that you might think it is yeah it was uh actual turkeys that they cooked so um they did a real good job and they always have have done a fantastic job so um yeah thank you for mentioning that that was really awesome john there was one disappointment that i had it was let me say i had a long talk with their sodaxo person after uh heritage i guess it was and i said well all this food can you donate this to the food bank and he said no the state law does not allow you to donate food that's already been out to food bank and they said well what do you do with it because you know it was fair enough yes was still there and he said it has to be disposed of and this you know like we kept talking i think other alternatives are the other alternatives it was just you know it is john says he was good food and uh but he said there's just nothing else we can do the law is the law that we have to try we have to throw this stuff away right and i i've been thinking about ever since i can't because that's not my field but you know there's got to be something that could be done with the food that that does not get serious and i can tell you that that some you know if he says it it's pretty accurate because they are really you know one of their things that they want to do is reduce food waste that's their that's you know that's money today sure that's so it's not it's not something that they take like me and if they could donate it i know that they would so um you know i'll talk to him about it and i mean i don't know i'm sure if that's what he says that that's what we have to do we must have talked 15-20 minutes and i learned a lot about the food industry and you know what you can do and what you can't do and all like that but you know he just said they same thing that you just said john that they have looked and looked and looked and they cannot come up as an alternative but to some place that they can put that food to good use uh calendar um there's a kind of a short calendar that's been included there's not a whole lot going on next month i do want to mention though that our district office and all of our school offices are going to be closed starting friday and they will not open again until january 3rd what happens is there's of the eight working days in that time there's four of them are holidays and then there's a lot of people that take the other four days off either vacation or whatever and so and then some of our staff are only 10 left and they don't work during those two weeks anyway so in order to accommodate to make sure that um we're not understaffed we just close the the offices there may be people working but the offices will not be open to the public so all 12-month employees either have to work or take leave and be honest most of them take either vacation or some copy asrs contributions we got asrs contribution information in the past last week um exciting news typically things go up this is the first time in a while that asrs contributions are going down by a quarter percent 0.25 when i started and and um i don't know you you were an asrs contributor when i started with seven percent i don't know what it was when you started or no actually i was in the city of phoenix phoenix never got it was it a little less when you started in asrs do you recall i'm thinking yeah but it's now 12 and a half um yeah we have to we the district based twelve and a half and the employee pays 12 and a half uh you're right city of phoenix and the state were always locked in together the same okay and you're all right i can remember now it was seven percent yeah and so uh it's exciting it's going down um also there's what's called the alternate contribution rate which is going down that's the rate that we pay for um to the to asrs when we hire retirees so anyone that's been retired we still have to pay into asrs the retiree does not and for a couple there's at least two people in the room that benefit that are going to benefit from the permanent benefit increase if you're currently receiving asrs retirement you'll get a slight bump in your retirement benefit starting july 1.
so that's something peer helpers did and then we have to advertise that with the boards throughout the school and then um this week we also had stew plants so students got to take home seeds and they can plant them in little styrofoam cups just watch them grow and then we also have a sand and a bottle activity with like different color sands and layers it's just a cute design um and then last thing we'll talk about student congress at um almost any meeting so i thought i'd show you guys a little bit of um an update as well as a spreadsheet we go through so this is actually the spreadsheet that we have so um we have a google form every student congress and it goes onto a spreadsheet then we bring it to another spreadsheet and kind of evaluate them so all the stuff you see in purple is things related to sodexo so we've decided that we're just going to send all of our petitions related to sodexo to mr osmond so that we can kind of correspond with him and get to work on those and then all the ones highlighted in light green were ones we talked about with dr gergen so it was me briana scheck my co-officer for our third hour team and then as well as our third hour team so we went through a lot of them had to do with um a lot of them had to do with adding intramural spike ball in baseball there was actually a call for a referendum of petitions so all petitions related to the student body the whole student body would vote on them since they didn't want to limit limit it to only student congress attendees um and then a lot of the other ones were adding like specific classes lots of language courses as well as kind of engineering and like computer science related since those are really popular majors coming up in college now so that's a lot of what our conversation was about and i think that really just contributes to the whole um the importance of student advocacy because a lot of what dr gurion said especially with like intramurals was students who are interested in these sports or extracurriculars could just go to mr wellington in student activities and kind of talk with him about it and then same thing with language and adding new courses obviously you guys are all involved with all of that but if there's like a student demand obviously administration should be willing to hear students out about that so that's a lot with student congress um before you go on what's spikeable spike ball okay my old like i don't know what that is a little bit maybe yeah what is so it's like it's this um game where you have like a stand and then there was a net in the middle um and you have this little tiny ball it's like a little bit bigger than a baseball but it's softer so you can't like lift it it's kind of like volleyball where you have to hit it off the net and it bounces and you usually play 2v2 um it was actually one of the activities we did in one of our virtual assemblies last year and it was super super popular all um i think nhsn yeah all right yeah it was also um we also had it was two of like the extra activities at um what's called spring fling last year yes for that very [Music] well without any other questions about spike ball we're good to go on to fmp okay so fmp sadly didn't have a graphic or a picture for today um but lots of important updates so first thing is recruitment season so all the applications are due december 17th um and then the second thing you see under recruitment season is mentor shadowing so i'm really impressed with fmp missed him in the whole board because they put out a google form for all prospective applicants specifically for sophomores since they didn't have an in-person advisory last year and it was all remote and as an fmp for this year and last year is completely different so i had a sophomore applicant come to my advisory today just to kind of shadow what we were doing we were kind of doing conferences today which brings me to my next point so it's kind of not the best day to shadow but um he did have such questions about um the application so i was able to answer those so i think was super super super helpful for um sophomores to come and see what fmp is fully about before they do make that commitment because it is a huge commitment and then second thing conferences and then semester so um me and my co-s and every other advisory out center google form a few weeks ago just to do individual conferences before the end of the semester so we were doing those for the past week so freshmen got to pick um whatever fmp they were comfortable speaking with so we just went over questions just any questions about final end of the semester um stuff like that basic stuff um leading into second semester and anything they struggled with just so that we can better support them um and then the next thing is something that's upcoming so we have freshman parent night so i remember doing this last year i was on a virtual panel just answering questions about co-curriculars um so um we will be doing campus tours and co-curricular information to all parents and freshmen who visit stevenson so i think it's super important because it is kind of like college where you do have to get acclimated to the large campus so definitely something super useful for fnps to look forward to nhs so nhs probably has the biggest update of the night so delivery day um from giveathon that's a photo um it's actually on the d125 website so gifts for more than 400 families which 57 of those gifts were um 57 357 bikes delivered to families 47 boxes of baby baby items and 80 boxes of diapers so obviously we were helping um support families for the holidays but then also just bare necessities so super super important work and then also kind of in conjunction with that collection day was also super helpful i went down during sixth period since i was a leader for my literature class so they were busy all day just kind of organizing and then you also had the um advisory donations of mac and cheese and also hygiene products so that's about it for delivery day first semester experience can i interrupt you for a second yeah what's up i just want to share with you i was at a um at a meeting over the weekend with a group that i belong to where we were talking about different types of charitable activities that we want to try and do and i was shocked at the short the demand and need for diapers that families have it's an incredible need and the fact that you're doing this and what you guys have accomplished with giveathon i just want to give you a shout out because i think this the students are just fantastic and what you're doing is wonderful in this area i think nhs did an amazing job i think everything just with families over the whole pandemic has been difficult brings into like child care child care services have been super difficult obviously teachers at stevenson have the amazing little pete's program which i think was shut down because one kid had covered which is really really sad um but obviously like lots of families are in need so they really did an amazing job with delivery day then the next thing we have is first semester experiences so nhs is probably the biggest club at stevenson huge membership so um all um members in order to maintain their membership have to write about three experiences they did on interview so this kind of like feeds into the discourse between hours and service experiences so they really want to make sure that everything that their members are doing has an impact on them and needs them to learn more about service so interviewing kind of reflecting is a super important part of being a member along with the floor the last thing is applications so rent applications are due january 16th so it's kind of a three-tiered application so after they do the written application there's an interview with the current award and then obviously they campaign with all the nhs members who vote okay last slide best line first thing we have finals week obviously all students have final experiences wednesday through friday i think one thing that i've emphasized really with my freshman is that they can leave early on wednesday since we have a fourth period advisory so i think all of them we're super super appreciative and excited about that um as long as they can coordinate rise and i think that's one thing stevenson has done that just to help accommodate students and stress second thing students have bad parking you know this has been going on for a while they officially got um name dropped and written about an opinion part of the statesman so i thought i didn't include them here so um i'm all for this there it was the original stevenson account and it's amassed over 1500 followers i think it's kind of fun for students i think it's the most anonymous account a lot of the other ones with like shs slumpers is kind of like i don't know i'm not sure about that one because people have like faces and they did like a dm for removal but i'm all for students in bed parking especially because i have road rage so i feel like the accountability piece is really there and you know i'm all for it um is it mr smith's car it's too clean um next thing we have the bandapalooza so freshman concert symphonic advanced symphonic and honors band held a two-day concert in the pac so one of the student council officers our secretary ian harmon is in honors band so we left monday nights really quickly of course our e-board was still there um but we left him on the ice really quickly just to go and watch that watch him and they were really really amazing we caught them at the beginning of the show since it was around 7 30 so they were just opening up but they're super super super impressive they have huge dedication i have no rhythm no anything i literally don't even have an arts credit at stevenson so definitely applaud them for doing so many concerts in the week is prominent patriot so nhs and peer helpers awards receive the honor for first semester so that's just a good shout out to all of them like i said nhs did an amazing job with delivery day and peer helpers is doing de-stress weeks so they're definitely doing important work um that's all i have on this slide but in my notes um you always ask about kind of the vibe or the feeling among all of the students stevenson so um i thought i'd just kind of include that with um the student highlights so i think with freshmen and sophomores i'm kind of lumping them together i actually saw my counselor today and i was like how are you all your freshmen because i know they were doing course election they're like oh they have no idea what they're doing along with the sophomores so i think that's kind of the i um whole purpose of fmps is to just kind of ease their anxiety and if there it is their first official finals week especially like in person two so i think um that's really important and then one thing that i think just comes from the whole finals experience is self-advocacy for students i think that's the best lesson i've learned at stevenson just being communicative with all your teachers and making sure that you know where you stand and putting in the work and making sure that you're advocating for yourself and making sure that you have the best ends of the semester possible so i definitely think that's a super important lesson for all students especially with associated with finals week and then juniors i think a lot of them are scrambling i think my junior i kind of got a reprieve with the online schooling since we weren't like in school as much and i kind of got to de-stress at home but i think this is the year that most students choose to challenge themselves with their coursework so i think with finals it's a little bit extra pressure with all of them and then seniors i think just everything like life is consuming them a little bit it's definitely consuming me a little bit i think this is where like the path kind of diverges for a lot of students lots of early college decisions i was trying to discover about this before i walked in a lot of early college decisions are coming out mid-december and that kind of coincides with finals week so lots of important things going on i think like the next time i'll see you i'll be a second semester senior which is just weird to say next time i'll see you i'll be like an illegal a legal adult so um not an illegal at all so just lots of things in life are happening um and i don't want like i feel like it's all passing us too quickly so that's kind of the whole um the feeling amongst the senior class any questions i have a question i just jumped on the stevenson bed parking um and there's one car that got three different days of bad parking did they get like an award or anything like that wasn't that your car i think just like it looks a lot like mr gobble's car by the way i got super scared because one day someone posted the same car that i have and then my friend dm me it's just like is this you i was like no i would never do that yeah so and the owner of the account ethan hill um so he posted the person that parked next to him and i parked next to him the next day a little bit late that day i do have to admit but i did like re-park and adjust him i will tell you uh assistant principal laca has really actually appreciated that instagram account because people are parking better so they don't end up on it so people are you know the security trucks have even been on there [Laughter] anyway secondly nick uh during the holidays my wife makes toffee so she made this for you so happy holidays see when you give gifts you got gifts back that's right so thank you so much everyone thank you so much you're welcome i'll see you all in january before we'll do this now okay uh so before i ask for a motion uh to open uh the public hearing for the bonds um there have been a number of factual inaccuracies that have been circulating in the community and we just want to take a couple minutes and identify those items um there's three that i would like to focus on the first one is the size of our fund balance uh a number of people been arguing that we should not issue bonds and they've been arguing that we should not issue bonds by telling community members that the size of our fund balances last year are significant and beyond what's necessary for the school the point that we want to make is that what's relevant here is not what our bond or fund balances were last year two years ago or four years ago the issue is what will our fund balances be at the end of this coming year after we pay the construction expenses and while we did have about 108 million dollars in our fund balances at the end of last year uh if we pay our construction costs as we've explained we plan on doing and then borrowing 17 million which is what we've intending to do uh then we're projected to have about a 49 million dollar balance in our front balances at the end of the current fiscal year that's significantly less than 100 million plus uh and it puts us at right around the bottom of the range of what we feel is a reasonable reserve for the school i do want to say in full disclosure we did recently change our accounting method which we had to do frankly in order to satisfy requirements imposed by the rating agencies our prior accounting method included advanced tax receipts that were received from the county because we were on what's called the cash method of accounting and they related to the next year so looking for example dr claudelle has put a uh a screen on the board or a site on the board with 108 million dollar balance that we had at the end of last year if you reduce the tax receipts that are reflected in that 108 million uh that are attributable to the fiscal year 2122 we really had a fund balance at the end of last year 58 million not over 100 million this year we projected we're going to have a fund balance um at the end of june of 32 million without issuing bonds and that's because now we're using the modified accrual method where we're taking and adjusting for that prepayment of the taxes immediately if we issue the bonds as anticipated that's the 49 million dollar balance that we had said yeah and this is consistent with the reports that we filed with the state and it is required not only by the accounting excuse me by the rating agencies we also discovered when we were looking at this we were one of only two schools in the area still using this method of accounting and uh so now we're basically doing what other schools do the second point that we want to make is people in the community are saying that we're misleading the community by saying that we're issuing working cash bonds to fund capital expenditures and working cash does not refer to capital expenditures but working cash bonds are called working cash bonds because the proceeds are deposited into the working cash fund which is a governmental accounting concept what the bonds are called has nothing to do with how the proceeds are used by law and i want to repeat this is strictly by law amounts in the working cash fund may be used for any corporate purpose including construction and other capital projects in fact the district is going to have to agree with the purchasers of these bonds if they're issued that we would only use a bond proceeds to pay for capital expenditures it will be a condition of the bonds again we have a slide we're just emphasizing the working cash bonds is strictly an accounting concept it's named that way because it's deposited in the working cash fund which is a governmental accounting concept and they can be used for any corporate purpose including construction other capital projects part of the miscommunication that's going on is people have said that we're the only school or one of the only schools around that's doing this it's interesting we spoke with our council there's a case that we cite on the on the side if you're interested i actually did read this 1001 ogden avenue partnership case and to the point that we're the only people doing this that case involved 16 school districts in dupage county who were doing the same thing that we're doing taxpayers filed making very similar claims that the school districts were scamming the public by issuing fraudulent notices that hid the true intent for the bond issues because they used working cash funds to pay for building purposes and the the district court lower court and the appellate court both throughout the complaints basically without even going to a jury just uh on a summary motion because it was just just wrong misinformation so we wanted to clarify that point the last point that we want to make is misrepresentations that are being made about the bonds and the tax cap illinois tax cap people in the community are saying that your tax rate is not capped for these bond repayments and that the taxes for the repayment of these bonds would be levied over and above the tax cap this is simply one the property tax extension limitation law people call p-tell generally limits tax increases to inflation and it does apply to debt service on the bonds that we want to issue and the reason is because they're not referendum approved debt in fact your tax increases for stevenson for debt service and other expenses for at least 10 years have been at less than the inflation rate and the point here that is truly ironic and that i want to emphasize is that if we had either asked for a building referendum to issue these bonds or the petition drive that's currently underway to try and prevent the sale of required referendum if in either case the community approved the bond sale the bonds would be outside of the tax cap and would be available to increase your tax rate the point here is that what we're doing keeps the tax rewards at and what's being asked by people circulating petitions is us to take a step that would allow for us to increase the tax rate which is terribly ironic the school board does not want to go to referendum because it does not want to increase the tax rate do we have a slide here showing what would happen if we went to referendum for construction bonds the payment would be uncapped and over and above the levy and tax cap for the petal limits if the working cash bonds are issued because we do go to referendum because of the petition drive the bond payment would be uncapped over and above the levy and tax cap if we do what we want to do which is issue the bonds pursuant to board approval the bond payment would be capped by the levying pcap and subject to the ptel limitations if you're interested we put the site here section 18-185 with the p-tell statute you can if you want to work through that that's fine we've worked through it we've worked through it with our council and this is simply a statement of what the law is which is inconsistent with what's being said the last point i want to make is that stevenson has held seven or eight public meetings to discuss this project and how to be financed the village of lincolnshire has similar notice requirements has also held seven or eight public meetings to discuss the project local press has published articles about the project people with questions have called the school for information we encourage that we welcome your calls if you have any questions or want to discuss anything about the project or the school we ask you to contact sean carney or someone else on the administrative team so that we can talk to you about your concerns so is there anything you would like to tell look if there's nothing you want to have we'll go to the national skill okay can i have a motion please to um go to an open so move set public hearing so we have a first and second and this is a voice vote all in favor uh all opposed okay motion carries and i guess i should read the motion it's to open the public hearing for purposes of receiving oral or written testimony in regards to the board's intent to sell working cash bonds in the amount of 17 million dollars from the remainder of these building edition phase two project do we have any testimony from the public or if the board has any questions or clarifying statements in the other comments i actually have a quick question steve i think you know unfortunately you know we have seen and heard a lot of misinformation moving around the community over the course of the past year and a half troy and i have been subject to you know quite a bit of it ourselves um the irony here and i think it's worth repeating again because it's so important we've received a number of phone calls over the course of the past couple days regarding your third point and the irony is that the petition drive that is currently circulating would actually have quite the opposite effect of what the intended purpose is so would you mind just summarizing this law again i think it's worth repeating okay so basically the point is that if we issue the bonds with board approval and without getting approval of the public in other words not going to referendum non-referendum debt is capped by the levying tax cap and subject to the petal limitations so that that can only increase annually at no more than the lesser of five percent or inflation if on the other hand we had decided originally instead of just going and approving the bonds but to go to referendum to get approval for the bonds the result of that is it would be referendum debt not non-referendum debt and that would be uncapped and would be over and above the levy and tax cap not subject to those limitations and if the people now who are seeking to require us to go to referendum to issue the debt are successful and we then go to referendum and that is approved then the bond payment would be uncapped again not subject to petal and will allow us to assess taxes uh at over and above the levying tax cap it truly is ironic it's just ironic i it's just hard to explain why this would be happening are there other questions or comments for steve okay um no other no other public comments so i'm going to ask for a motion to close the public hearing for the purposes of receiving oral written testimony in regards to the board's intent to sell working cash bonds in the amount of 17 million dollars to fund the remainder of the east building edition phase 2 project can i have that motion so moved second okay yeah gary was the second um and this is also voiceover in favor of closing the open jury public hearing all right well thank you um that brings us to uh the curriculum and instruction uh part of our meeting and uh on the agenda we did have uh originally planned for some ambassador awards uh we're gonna postpone those by one month uh so um we will present those in january so we'll see our ambassador award winner um in a month and that brings us to our team presentation tonight and i am so excited to have uh colleagues from my former social division and i'll let brad smith the director of social studies uh introduce himself uh and your team right yes um [Music] social studies director and i am very excited tonight to be able to help showcase our us government team or at least two-thirds of our u.s government team that's here tonight um and i'll get to who's here and who's not in a second but i'm i'm really excited to have this group of teachers here with us because of the work that u.s government has been doing which really where they've been doing the last five or six years really embodies the type of focus on self or individual student sel work that our division has been committed to across all the teams and i think they'll be able to showcase some of the work that they've done that has been i think quite quite positive and quite powerful in helping our students um but for me what's what's most exciting is the work that they're doing to help push forward our division helping lead our division into looking at more social aspects of sel and being a civics-based course the importance of that social dynamic is also important and their efforts at really leading us into using transformative sel and and looking at social awareness and and student belonging through those lenses so i think that's an exciting piece of the work that they're bringing to the division broadcast tonight i'm very excited to talk about um that with y'all sarah here sarah gutierrez is our 10-year veteran on the team uh longest serving member on the gov team i would argue her ten years started actually before that because as an alum of stevenson high school she was actually in my government class so um probably more than 10 years also pursuing her second master's degree hopefully pursuing her second lasting degree um i think there's stuff later that's coming up about that um in positive psychology so a great resource for us there great lizzy shankoff is with us she's current team leader and a fifth year ish since she's student taught here with us as well um teacher of government and also pursuing her second master's degree this one in instructional technology we're lucky to have both of them leading our students in civics government and then we also i mentioned we had two thirds of the team here i hope tom is out there watching us tom's not able to be here because he's worked he was working on having his first child he was expecting a new year's baby which is really exciting but ended up with a thanksgiving baby so congratulations to tom tom and amber are home everyone is well and they're eagerly eagerly awaiting um james to come home and join them as well so that is our team and let me let them lead us through the wonderful work they've been doing thank you so a little bit about our course it's a one semester course for seniors um it's one of two options for seniors to take ep is the other option it is a graduation requirement it's also a state of illinois requirement to take a civics course so it fulfills that requirement um and what we've been seeing over the last couple of years is an increase in the number of students who are choosing to take college prep so it's between 30 to 40 percent of the senior class taking it every year um and just a couple of semesters ago we also started to see a little bit of a change in our student population when the collaborative government class uh merged with the college prep class and so we're seeing an increase in special education students as a result and so in our course uh what we do cover is we have our three skills that are divided up all around civic principles so our first one of civic principles institutions and virtues is essentially the meat and potatoes of the civics course all of your content three branches of government so on and so forth civic reflection and deliberation is a skill where students are able to do a lot of self-reflection and hopefully build self-awareness which will give you some examples of that work uh in a little bit and then civic application is how are they actually actually acting right like how are they citizens within the classroom citizens uh once they leave the classroom and how are they positively impacting the world in which they live and so within these skills we do a really good job in our course uh in focusing on their personal identity and finding out who they are as a political being and we want to continue to build the community aspect of that um when we're kind of looking at these different pieces of data that we're going to show you that lizzie will speak to in a moment we notice that the sense of belonging in our classroom is is where we can see the most growth and building out of our curriculum and so that led us to that community identity piece so what we're looking at right now is actually the school-wide data on classroom belonging and so currently the school is sitting at 71 percent uh you'll notice it did take a little bit of a dip during the pandemic unsurprisingly but we are happy that we're back to the pre-pandemic levels um also important to note we are close to that 99th percentile nationally um so even though we'd love to see a higher number this is still a really nice thing to see across stevenson and so from this data in the svs we then broke it down to our data and we wanted to point out a couple of things here before focusing on classroom belonging um first and foremost we're really proud of that line right there that's all green dots where we're in that 80th to 99th percentile for all six of the tenants um that we're looking at for the svs survey we also saw some double-digit growth which was cool coming out of the pandemic going well this part of the pandemic coming from spring until now where we're seeing um students are engaged they're in our class we have space that we can make change in their lives because they're with us um and then we get to our classroom belonging which is our lowest number um by multiple digits but we also would like to point out or one percent higher than the school so we're excited about that too are students enjoying coming to our classes and getting us to a point that again we can push them in the work that we're asking them to do from a civics perspective so to dive a little bit deeper into the classroom belonging we wanted to break down into different categories so we looked at gender first by looking at the students who identify as female about 70 of them have a sense of belonging in our classes students who identify as male 74 so there is a little bit of a gap there that we can close but the one that we wanted to focus the most on is the racial data so you'll notice here that our white students do feel a stronger sense of belonging at 77 compared to our students of color and so with this we're aware of it in our classroom we're aware of it at a school level um it's something that the school has been working on to address and so we want to think about how do we bring our students of color their number of classroom their percentage of classroom belonging closer to our white students as we increase all of them and so through the lens of sel we wanted to look specifically at transformative sel and so transformative seo definition up there of focusing on a practice of inequitable settings and looking at those systems and settings um and bringing in justice oriented civic engagement to our classrooms and dr haney i believe presented a little bit to you guys in the past year on transformative sel but it's really this new realm that we're going into to make sel itself more applicable to our students and where they're at um so the castle wheel where everyone in here i think is most familiar this kind of gets us to the ways that we're working on our students as people outside of just on their academic setting and so by bringing in the seo we're familiar with along with transformative sel as a team and as a department we've really worked hard at kind of bringing in this equity component so we've worked with dr haney we've worked with molly for a few different sessions individually we're part of the erd cadres as well as from a department standpoint we've really been working within this work of equity for the past two or three years and so we feel that we're really moving into a place that we can start sharing our learnings in our classroom and start bringing this to our curriculum in a more purposeful manner for our kids so one way that we're already doing this is that we feel really strongly that we're helping students gain that sense of self-awareness and we'll talk about some different ways that we're doing that in just a moment but what we want to start bridging that towards is increasing students social awareness and also relationship skills and the belief is with that that will also build their classroom belonging so on our little framework here of where we are step by step we spent time in our student voice data and now we're getting to that commit and expand so we want to share with you a little bit just some of the ways that we're committed to the work that we're doing that we do really well as far as building that self-awareness and then bring you into some of our ideas for expansion and different theories of how we can can move forward so this is just a snapshot of some of the course activities that we have we're going to talk you through a couple of different elements of our course the first being identity wheels then something we call thinking questions tqs for shorts these are weekly topic prompts that students are able to engage with and then the political socialization essay which is a really key component of our government course so starting with the identity wheels i know it's a little bit difficult to read what these student samples say but to give you a sense of what's on here it asks students to independently consider different aspects of their identity so it could be race gender sexual orientation religion but then they also have an opportunity to discuss with peers the different identities that they feel most strongly about things that they think about a lot and things that they don't think about a lot um and with that discussion that open dialogue they start to see that there are many commonalities between themselves and their peers but also there are lots of differences and so the self-awareness that we're building here of who am i and how do i fit into this classroom community is very important at the beginning of our semester together as we continue to build that self-awareness as far as our tqs we give a variety of prompts throughout the semester but wanted to give you one of ours from earlier on uh in the year and so we ask students to engage a lot with the different principles that guide our governments and guide who we are as far as values of our country and the government system and so one of the questions that we ask is what image best represents freedom to you freedom being a foundational value of american government and so we give a whole bunch of pictures this is a sampling of some of them that we give and we ask the students to choose an image which one is best representative of freedom to you so i want to give you a couple of student examples up here and so on the left-handed side the student who chose the picture of dr king is really focusing through their own identity at understanding this picture what it means to them what it means to the country and how we value freedom we see a lot of great connections here too our student is using the lens of school that they've been through through other social studies courses of econ and u.s history to really pull together um what freedom means to them with this picture kind of being that lens and their self-identity and awareness being the lens that drives that belief on the right side we see a little different focus looking at security looking at our armed forces and the gratitude that the student has and how freedom is a driving force behind that security that they feel and where that freedom comes from and so again we see both 12th grade students both male students in our classes who have these different viewpoints that they are seeing the world through and therefore seeing themselves as a civic being through them so for our political socialization essay what we have students do is think about the different socialization factors that have led them to their beliefs so these are factors such as family peers school media geography and they spend a lot of time making connections to those socialization factors and why they believe what they believe and so they get to choose from different political issues these students have chosen on the left we have affirmative action on the right we have government assistance welfare and so these students were able to make connections between their beliefs about these two political issues and where their beliefs came from so they had to do some thinking and reflecting about how did i end up here how did i how do i believe what i believe and again through this process they're thinking a lot about their own self and they'd spend a lot of time reflecting individually so what we want to start doing is thinking about how do we bridge that to the community how do we take it just away from just being ourselves and bring it to the rest of the class which brings us to expand so expand is where we're looking at ways that we can modify our curriculum and build upon the curriculum that we do well to allow these opportunities for our students to gain social awareness gain relationship skills and hopefully gain a sense of belonging at a higher level than they have right now so when we're looking at just some of our different um theories and and focuses of how we're going to build this in the classroom we're going to continue on our professional development focus that we've had as a department and as individuals and continue working with molly and dr haney to bring these culturally sustaining ideas to our classroom right bringing in stories and viewpoints of all of our students so that we have more perspective that they're able to take and see themselves in the curriculum we also want to take that self-reflection that's building that self-awareness and then build it out through deliberative dialogue right putting our students in scenarios where they're having conversations they're pushing one another and ultimately themselves they are being pushed they're being pushed in the classroom and then that builds out to the community at large and to them after they leave stevenson either a semester or two semesters after having us when we're doing this we also know that this deliberative dialogue work is going to push them in their own self-awareness so we gain growth there as well and it's also going to lead us to that socially supported dissonance which we all know to be so important as political beings right understanding that everybody's not going to agree with you so how do i have positive conversations in a place that's very safe where students feel that you know we're there with them to help guide these conversations so when they go out into the world we can bridge political polarization a little bit down the line so to recap a little bit our current goals first and foremost to increase that sense of classroom belonging so make that number higher than 72 percent um most importantly working towards closing those equity gaps um especially with the the students of color that we have in our class we want to see a much smaller gap if any gap between our students of color and our white students and the steps that we're taking to get there we're building social awareness and relationship skills within our curriculum we're also curricularly implementing deliberative dialogue practices and including um various types of surveys so continuing the work with the student voice survey and also doing some teacher created surveys that we can give to our students uh at the end of the semester to check in and see how we're doing and what work we still need to do so with that last side left side yeah you did it because we're so close left side [Laughter] so two things let me can i go first sure first of all amazing uh absolutely amazing secondly before anybody else says it yes i very clearly was the anchor holding this group back when so kudos to brad and you guys uh i just want to get it out there before you jump in all right so you guys are amazing brad great job i apologize for everything now dave you can sorry have you um noticed that there's any difference in this when you do your surveys between their first semester students and your second semester students i only haven't done sex semester yet but from last year's whatever are you have you seen any kinds of differences so i've been teaching this the longest i guess so i'll take this one i last year was really hard with the data we didn't have very good results back on our student voice survey um just for full transparency from our students for this this course but in the past i think second semester there's just a lower participation rate um as far as the the numbers and the percentages we've had a lot of consistency um i think the students who do take our course tend to like it tend to enjoy the the classroom culture that we've created but just numbers i think that by the end of their senior year they're ready to go play spike balls so that's our biggest challenge thank you so that slide you had with the with the government aid and the welfare and the girl whose dad was uh yeah can you go back today that's it how does that play out and so what happens after what happened how do you facilitate that discussion so this piece has been all done independently in their writing but as we are trying to bring that to more of a discussion piece something that is really important not just in this class but any social studies class is establishing those classroom norms and procedures at the beginning of the semester the year whenever it is of how do we communicate with each other respectfully appropriately what does deliberative dialogue look like in the classroom and students come up with those norms it's usually something that they are deciding upon themselves as the class and it sets the stage for how the environment in the classroom is going to be for the rest of the year um and so obviously in the the time that we're living in there is a lot going on in the political world um and that's not going to change anytime soon so we're aware of it and our students are aware of it too they're they're aware that there are tensions that exist um and so they do have a sense of what is appropriate to how to engage with each other um and we're just there to make sure that it's a safe and respectful space and if at any point it doesn't become that we step in and say we need to we need to take a moment and take a step back and talk about what's happening right now so yours is a uh ears is a role of mediator sort of business facilitators yep do you think we need a teacher in that setting or any setting in that setting i think that if you start um from a place where the teacher does have a little bit more of a role and gradually remove that presence and turn it more into that facilitation role i think that's a good way to set up the students for success i think maybe we should send them to washington and maybe with the real government [Laughter] you have a lot of really good information on the site so i'm going to ask a question that i may have missed you're saying this and i apologize in advance because i was trying to actually read some more of what's on the side um are you getting a sense of why there is that difference whether it's with the students of color or the other groups as to what's causing that difference yet um as opposed to just recognizing that it's there's just is it too early the participation the the the sense of belonging and comfort participation yeah i think from a theoretical perspective we're gaining a great understanding of places this could be coming from and i think that that again is just attributed to our department and to these great cadres and dr haney has been wonderful in teaching us that those equitable differences over time i think the part that is too soon is that conversation with our students with stevenson students and what is that conversation that we need to be having and how do we help that get better here and i think that's the part that um this work is hopefully going to allow us to really see and do got you but you have to do the the first first before you can do this exactly right do we have that data for the whole school we do we break it down by race do we find that across the board those numbers are similar yes yeah um i'm just curious about the metrics you presented it obviously is by race and then it shows white versus other colors but there might be other metrics you can look at the participation rate in terms of maybe by their interest some students might be interested in stem they're just not interested in this type of very much debate communication based subjects or it could be um a metrics based on their language skills there might be students coming from like a um english is not their native language and they may not feel so comfortable to to participate so i just one suggestion rather than looking at simply by color of skin wrist there might be other metrics we can look at it and that would be a great thing for us to do when we when we generate a survey because the student voice survey doesn't ask those questions necessarily of what you know what topics do you enjoy learning or which ones um do you do you feel the strongest in so that would be something that we could certainly add to our own surveys to find out a little bit more a little bit more that background of why that example exists because obviously you're using that as a kind of criteria for your teaching efficiency and you want to see the gap is closing maybe it's not it's a false signal maybe it's not a right goal you're trying to close it could be a different goal that's why you might want to look at from a different angle yeah thank you i think that that i think we were talking the other day 61 languages spokane or 61 last year 59 this year languages yeah and we certainly know like through our classes that language is definitely a component of the way that our students are participating in our class and that would be i think great for us to look at and know and feel like we're doing a good job reaching out to those students who are listening to us speak about million thousand men in english about the government um to be able to connect with them yeah for sure thank you thank you so can you go dave was interested in this life that's the one i was particularly interested in um and you know having taught government myself this class for a long time i love teaching the course and i agree with amy like oh my gosh now more than ever what you all are doing is so important i think i was interested in you know are you finding it harder this year than maybe five years ago lizzie when you first started or you know 10 years ago sarah like are you finding that it's a much more challenging course to teach are our kids more vocal uh today than maybe they were five or ten years ago and then you know to me i quickly read these when you had it up there earlier but i think these the way that these two students wrote about that might signal the real strong differences and change that you're seeing these you can get two different images right yeah um yeah i so this is my fifth year teaching this course specifically and i've been doing econ all the way throughout so i do see a balance between those two um i guess the short answer is yes i think that students do get more vocal and more passionate i think it mirrors what we see in our country what we're marrying on social media um i think there's good to that people are talking right people are having political conversations right we're getting to see that in our classroom um i've certainly seen build out of these responses over time um from all my students instead of just being really short and like oh i got to get this done i think there is a lot more passion and excitement behind what they're writing politically um and that's really good and i think that that points to we have a great seed bed for doing work like we want to do because the kids are invested and i actually i taught middle school for um a few years before in between student teaching and coming back here i thought middle school for a few years that was that was an experience um right and west oak yeah so i actually i have a couple of kids in my class right now that i had as seventh graders that's really it's really nice it's cute they're taller now they're much taller and less smelly um but i i would say through and i've only been teaching um government for just a couple of years i've but i've i've taught um apus that my whole uh time at stevenson and i have seen the same things that there's there's more curiosity um amongst the students for what's going on outside of these walls um they're they're so much more sort of cued into what's happening um i have a student who shares different um news articles with me every other day um just like did you hear about this did you hear about this and i i can't imagine that happening at the same level um you know ten years ago five years ago five years ago so i i too liked this comparison and as i figured you would figure i would um but here too are you facilitating and not teaching why do you say not teaching to me they're teaching it's something it's what they're teaching they told me they were teaching they told me they were facilitated now they're teaching how how to have these conversations i'm asking is it about the conversation or the event these events are very impactful and they're very time sensitive depending on where you at where you are at in time sounding very much like a bible this is not a history class they come into this is the expectation that they know the events of history so now they've already taken us history they knew these events from the year before okay or should they should we will as historic moments occur in real time we definitely pause to discuss those um but we will not in the case of like this or like these slides we'll give them the pictures and then we want them to interpret the picture for what it is to them um and so really with our seniors that's what we're hoping that they're they're taking this stimulus that they've gotten in some other way and they're now figuring out what does that mean to me how does it connect into a civics curriculum um and really that extra step is now taking it to what we often are unable to get to right now which is okay what it means would you pick whatever did you pick why'd you pick it and giving them time to have those conversations together right um they're doing a lot of the here's what i think and i'm gonna type it and i'm gonna send it to my teacher so that my teacher can give me some feedback and have dialogue with me and now we want to open the opportunity so that they're talking to each other thank you thank you i made a joke and i i don't take this lightly though that i think that it's very important given the political world that these kids are coming up in to teach them how to have conversations where they don't agree and we don't just attack each other and get ugly and you know to have serious conversations and trying to solve problems and come together it's what's lacking in the world in the government today and so i do appreciate that we're giving our students that opportunity because we're never going to fix it if we don't fix it and teach children to do better so hopefully this generation will solve some of the problems that are being caused right now so thank you for that i think there's a really big challenge here that as you're going through all these things i'm i'm looking at this the idea of a sense of belonging and how do you differentiate that between ever i only have a good sense of belonging if i'm thinking like everyone else in the room and that to me that would seem for you guys to be a real challenge it's not we're not trying to get everybody on the same page so how do you instill a sense of belonging but have all these different identities and all these different opinions and that's okay you don't want to diminish the ability to think for yourself exactly and that to me seems to be a real challenge for that that you guys are taking up and i would argue that this assignment itself like the way that they've structured this not just saying describe freedom but giving them a group of images to build their analogy around i think that's exactly what kids need right they now i've got a space to look around and decide what it is to give them that place where it's not like us and them it's well i'm going to pick this image and i'm going to write about it i think that that's brilliant like the the way you structured that question is awesome seo so to wrap up two two things i think what you've heard us say is that the um fate of democracy rests on your shoulders so i think uh [Music] thank you thank you thank you so much i don't want to lay a guilt trip on you but i think in many ways our future does rely on it that's how important this is yeah thank you yeah and can i just throw one thing it was so awesome that they came into the space with having an understanding of what they needed what they wanted out of this course and what they said to me in so many words where we want to use sel as a lens to help students have different opinions and feel safe enough to dialogue with our argument without arguing right and as amy said that's something we hope adults could do right and so they knew what they needed to do and they came in with a really open mind about we need to develop social skills we need to help students understand that relationships don't have to be based on sameness right um and that we need each other to learn and so i think they came in just the right you know the right space the right attitude and i'm just grateful to be able to work with them this year so thank you thank you for working with us so it's great guys thank you a wonderful winter break thank you so much all right and that brings us to uh the next item which is the approval of board policy updates um and uh we shared this last month as a first reading just want to remind you that most of the items in here are wordsmithing a lot of catching up um with the press issues we had a little slow down during the pandemic uh carol and i blame it on the supply chain the only item that would be a of note would be the acceptable use guidelines uh doug did work with council on those to make sure that everything is up to date um and includes all the language that is recommended by council so we bring these to you tonight for your approval evolution second your first sentence all in favor all right um we have um under personnel you'll see the graduate program approvals the human resources report that will be included in consent unless there's any questions we don't need an executive session after the meeting as we had one prior to the meeting and that brings us to the business section uh and the first item sean is the award of the casework bid associated with the summer of 2022 uh renovations correct so in an effort to ensure that we don't have any material delays associated with some of the supply chain issues that the entire nation is facing we are bringing before the board today um a recommendation to award the bid for casework casework fancy word for built-in cabinetry um this is the majority of this work is associated with the science lab um renovations there are four labs left that we need to bring to the current national science standards for square footage and how to run a science lab or how to set up a science lab we did have three contractors bid and the winning bid did go to carroll seating um at a price of 248 245 dollars which was in line with our original estimate of 273 so tonight uh following discussion we are recommending that the board of education award did package 12a caseworker carol feeding at a cost not to exceed 248 thousand 245 dollars any other questions for sean about their country and would you please pull the board certainly moves i no hi shane hi frost hi weisberg all right all right well hi where's simple motion carries um we uh also discussed uh the acceptance and filing of our audit normally we get this to the board in november but our auditing firm eloy cam schulte jacobs just had a little bit of a delay john aceto um conducting our audit um you'll find that there were no significant findings and we had a clean audit opinion which simply means that there were no material misstatements by the uh by me i guess no deficiencies in our internal controls and compliance with requirements that could have an effect on major federal programs um so tonight we are uh recommending that the board of education accept and file the audited financial statement for the fiscal year ending june 30 2021.
how many times has this happened well it's i just i know that specifically sprinkler head bursts have happened three times since i've been here so seven years i know you had a bigger issue over here one time it happened in the office where we had to replace all the carpeting it did happen it happened in the office it happened right outside the cafeteria and then happened in this classroom before i got here it happened in middle school but i don't think that was a sprinkler i think it was something different they had something below though it was like a big one is the company that we had design it the one that manages it right now no no that architect is no longer by the same people that did the roofs it is yeah yeah i'll get a cost i'll get a cost for fixing those heads though and the the last item i have is is exhibit 11 a proposal for the uh tech insurance plan um i'm gonna flip over that real quick we have a uh as matt mccully can testify we have a lot of issues with uh students who break tech break the chromebooks and then we have to kind of argue with parents about whether it should be their responsibility to pay or not and ends up taking a lot of our time we've been talking about doing this for a couple years we haven't pulled the trigger and then matt i'll feel free to jump in here matt and share what you'd like to share on this sure so just as bob was saying you know it's one of the biggest things that our department deals with um as far as kind of time consumption and we want to be as fair as possible with everyone but also it's hard for us to be detectives on every single one and determine whether or not you know there was intention and all that so we've kind of marked it as any damage accidental or otherwise we're putting it on on families with the insurance plan the hope is that parents don't have to worry your families don't worry about any unexpected expenses we've laid out how that how that plan would would happen from first break second break and third break and even laid out um you know what constitutes an institute of a break where we're actually going to uh call that a claim um and then we've laid it out for if the families don't take the insurance plan this is what it costs the districts to pay with having the bags available to the students and the insurance plan available to the students we're not going to argue with families if you don't take advantage of having the bags you want to take advantage of the insurance plan here's what it costs so everything's out there in the open right now the proposal is for uh january to the end of the school year um and then you know we can continue to look further on that so it would be 10 bucks for the rest of the year if you want to join the plan and then that would be it and then we'll talk about how when we do the student fees for next year which probably march we'll talk about how to incorporate that next time for next year but for this year would be an optional we put it out there we'll put this document out there parents will give an easy way to sign up and uh once they pay the 10 bucks they're on the plan can we make sure that the documentation because i just rerun it now and it's not very clear that this is only optional right now it kind of looks like it's going to be optional every year going forward the way it's written um so that's that will be decided when we do the fees for next year whether it's optional or not next year right but reading this now it makes it seem like i sent this out to everybody that we're going to have an optional plan going forward forever it doesn't make it clear this is that's what we're doing right now okay yeah by all means make any edits that you will see fit with our proposal the only other question i had for you is was there any plans to just inspect the computer after they sign up because i could just see you know where we've got a couple weeks off coming up my son drops the computer down the stairs i go and sign up for the ten dollars and bring it into you right away like do we know that the computers are in working order before they've signed up for it yeah i think we're gonna have to trust communities honestly i don't know that we have the manpower to inspect if a thousand kids sign up for us to go around and inspect a thousand chromebooks it's not possible well if we get a thousand sign up that's great because then we have plenty of money to cover them up that's the whole yeah we can uh we can look and see how many we got sign up and then we can kind of play that and maybe just do a check on them as they go yeah the one thing that we would you know you can't sign up after you've turned it in and given the and i think we did try to make that clear that if we get the we get the ticket or we get the question like this is broken we're going to send it in to fix it oh and by the way i'm going to buy the insurance that's not gonna happen so that's why you have the sign up date would be specifically just as of right now december 14th through january 17th and then after that point number for the year yeah yep yeah the only exception would be new students so we want to give them an opportunity exactly i was going to suggest would be worth having like you know a two-week window from the day you sign up two weeks before it's effective so you can't just sign up and then tomorrow bring it in and say hey that just happens my motherboard's dead for some reason uh i mean we could do do anything like that you know i'm just the big thing for for me is i want to try to to ease the burden on on the families i know right now it's just that's the one thing that i mean we'll get one break and it'll be a screen which is very clearly you know something happened to the screen there's puncture marks on it and it'll be four hours of back and forth on the phone mr gold went up getting involved and now you know we we've spent the money that um we were going to spend on on fixing the chromebook on personnel having conversations with the parent um about the situation do you have a uh a large number uh repeat chromebook breaks by the same student so this year to date we've had two uh repeats um for those situations we've handled them individually this year's been much better with the chromebook bags that we purchased so we haven't had as many breaks so and we have a lot more back and forth too so last year for the most part for most of last year you know they were they're sitting in the bedroom sitting on a kitchen counter somewhere at home and not really moving around a lot and we had a lot of breaks this year we've had a significant drop the bags have really really added to that protection for the families repeat shouldn't be as much of an issue because it's only the first claim that's really fully covered here so that repeat offender who keeps breaking their hinges or paying after the first time yeah you know kind of that first one you know we can definitely chalk it up to age but after that um you know there's and it's at least a discounted fee too the second time so i think it's great all right so i guess i if you guys are good with it uh i've got an adjustment that i'm going to make that it's we'll highlight we'll make sure that it says it's optional for this year only and other than that we'll put this out probably in the next day or two what actually says this for the remainder of the school year but that's just further down it's in the second sentence just to maybe bold it okay or you can put through the last day january third through the last day yeah yeah i was just going to ask we we kind of open ended it with the last day or um the end of the school year you know since we are allowing them to keep it over the summer do do we want the plan to go till the first day of school um that was something that i don't think we thought about in the that's going to bring up inspections and stuff again so i think it's going to have to go through i mean go through the end of the summer unless you're going to inspect all the notepads but you get the 8th the graders graders would be different the eighth graders will turn in so that would go until they turn it in at the end of the day otherwise they keep their notebooks into the next year kindergarten through seventh is gonna keep them in the email are you also gonna specify that this will be part of the registration for i was going to hold that until we have that registration discussion yeah and talk about that that makes sense that's right it wouldn't necessarily be the remainder of the school year it would just be to the beginning of next year right if they're keeping them all summer can they understand that they can still turn around to get fixed um yeah i mean we will be here all summer so if they did bring it in to get it fixed but for those who did end up keeping it over the summer i mean they didn't bring it back until the first day of school and the first day of school it was oh i can't do my school work because it's broken so you would know because if they didn't come at the end of the school year then obviously it broke over break so i guess yeah that would i don't know what would we say um you'll probably still cover all right i think we should do summer covering it for the summer too the whole point was yeah you're paying so that you don't have to worry about yeah what little kitty does yeah all right okay we'll do that all right thank you so i just need a motion to prove that can i please have a motion to approve the self-insured plan for student chromebook repair coverage with the editions discussed motion second ash and jerry yes did anybody have any feedback on the newsletter the big hello newsletter and you can just i know really what i'm looking for is are you the the content like the um i put on the first page because i think money is important to taxpayers so i i want to provide something that's going to be readable and so i tried to make this as readable as possible so that's why you see pictures and um so it talks about the school bonds on the first page i just want to make sure there's no information on here that you don't want me to like put out there so the school bonds we have that our goal there is to get that bond levy to fall off on 24 or that 2024 levy you see on the there's some energy cost savings graph and i just put in there the strategic plan and the goals accomplishments over the last five years in a very summarized short way to do it so like i said i don't expect a lot of taxpayers going to read this thing completely but i was hoping that it said it draws their eye enough that they will read a little bit of it well i think the first one the text bond is going to draw a lot of readers what was that i'm sorry the first um section the taxpayer bond i think people would really be interested yeah in reading that and then what do you mean payments will be significantly reduced do you have like a how much they might be significantly reduced oh so just be more specific there yeah okay yeah you know how like we do uh if your home is 150 000 you know your potential savings could be yeah i can be specific there also is this going to be folded in something like this so it's going to be a uh 11 by 17 i think is what she said this is uh we have somebody else doing this 11 by 17 it'll fold over to um how did she say that it's going to be mailed to every residence i was just thinking you may want to have this oh because if it's on the inside they're going to see yeah i got you this technical information that's kind of just going to look like yeah so you may want to figure out how it's going to be folded and then put that school bond i'll see if we can make that happen yeah because the financial improvements is kind of uh i mean it's an important detail but i don't know if it'll drive people to open it up in the copa19 update right yeah yeah i haven't seen it in its actual 11 by 17 version and how it folds okay okay i'll see if she can do that and there's some other editing that's that i haven't done on this yet that's this minor editing but uh this is the general concept otherwise it looks good okay if you see anything like tonight or tomorrow that you want change just email me all right that's it cool uh the tax levy resolution so this didn't change from last month it's the same uh documents in there um if you want me to review any of that again i can't do that for you um but uh it's the exact same information last month didn't receive any uh questions from the public on that i'm open for any questions you want from me right or have for me right now and or clarifications one thing i will share is that i i know the levy says that it's a 4.79 increase but current taxpayers don't see that increase they'll they're going to see the tax capped increase which would probably be around two and a half so that 4.79 will go on all the new property that came just comes into the district this year so not all taxpayers would see that then i'd like to know we're last in percent funded adequacy right what was that our attic we are adequately funded is last yeah out of all the elementary school districts in lake county yeah and those are all the elementary districts yeah we're on the bottom of that list does anybody else have any questions okay please have a motion to prove the tax levy resolutions and certificate of tax levy for 2021.
um just was talking to melissa damewood in the hallway about some of the end of semester data for her kids um we've met with the seminar teams to talk about vertical alignment we've also meant to talk about exit and entry criteria to make sure that if a student is placed in this during the day it's a right intervention for them it's meeting the exact need and we're also talking about how we're using that hour and maybe graduating them out so they can get an elective and so it's something that we're going to review at the end of every semester there's lots of conversations in my inbox right now about students and placement and whether or not a seminar is continued is appropriate for them um we'd also like to offer it as a pass fail option for select students you know it's an intervention course that we are recommending and so we want families and students to have the option of whether or not they want that to be a pass fail or not we don't want that to be a barrier for them considering something that we think is appropriate for them um so again the data so far is really good advanced seminar kids juniors and seniors who need this skill set support are very different than freshman and sophomores and so it's allowed us a grade level age appropriate intervention for them throughout the pilot so i'm happy to answer any questions about any of the interventions i think they're great thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you dr ludwig questions for gina before we trade her out for mark [Laughter] thanks gina i always like to see these new courses because it it a lot of them you'd like to take yeah i know yes you know i'm saying i think we should go to school yeah i think about them thing no i don't try to yeah do it all over again because i'll tell you there was nothing like this available when we were in school definitely not for me no you could take advantage of painting no advanced stuff you know metal work putting into stone oh nose and stone okay yeah yeah all right before we get to mark uh return to in-person learning uh not no official updates yet this is uh each month we've been updating the board on a number of cases last month when we talked we talked about how for the beginning of the year the average numbers that we were seeing was under 20 close contacts per week less than five cases per week you can see just as society's numbers have increased over the last month so of ours still relatively reasonable in comparison to other schools in our area so it leads me to believe that the combination of the high vaccine vaccination rate amongst our student body as well as our students are really following the safety protocols you know with fidelity when i walk past classrooms i see masks on i see kids distance from one another lunchrooms obviously kids are eating so masks are off right but so far you know we seem to be keeping things well under control at school you can see the numbers of our staff spiked a little bit as well so we had two in august which was a shortened month obviously then six in september four in october and then we jumped up to 11 in november so we are a segment of society we kind of mirror what's happening outside but overall i think we've done a nice job of keeping our kids and our staff healthy and safe throughout the school year one other thing we had a meeting with idph on friday and dr ezekie as i shared with the board there was several topics discussed one of interest is potential exclusion and quarantine guideline changes coming up sometime in the future there was no date given or even promised that that would happen but it was nice to hear that there was a discussion around many of the topics that we as superintendents have been advocating for for months so at least we know that we're our concerns are being heard by the idph we'll just see if they result in any changes moving forward so if any of those things happen in the coming weeks or months i of course will update the board in public as those things occur and it will cause us to reevaluate all of our practices as those things happen so any questions do the uh do the positive tests um they do they continue to be mostly centered around extracurricular sort of things or these in school uh the positive tests not necessarily the close contacts that we track at school track to either lunch settings because then you're not maintaining distancing and masking right right or extracurricular settings okay so it's rare for us to have a close contact in a classroom setting happens now and then but it it's definitely rare in comparison to the other two the lunch setting or or extracurricular setting all right another questions all right tax levy mark all right what you're heading forward to the graph yeah so this is uh been to a board meeting in december you've seen this and i've used it for 20 years or more so uh hopefully with new numbers yeah yeah every six years i changed the numbers no this was a tough one but uh what we know is it's it's a balance of what we don't know and what we're hoping for and what we're really estimating um on the left far left side what is known as we do know of course last year's the 2020 calendar year assessed valuations as part of the the formula here and we do know that the 21 levy tax cap that today's levy approval that i'll be looking for is locked in at one point four percent that was the consumer price index for december of 2020 and i'm sorry 21 and is the limit that affects our levy and it's a it's the lowest it's been since i think they're saying the 80s late 80s so it's really shockingly no number the difference is since it's starting at such a low point getting back to normal and even above even is the more recent cap and i said that that is actually the 20 calendar 2020 2020 limit the 2021 is already peaked past five percent which is a tax cap of five percent it's always the lower of the cpi or five percent and this is the first time that uh we'll have seen next year celebi go out at five percent it'll be capped at five percent um so we we one four one point four it's pretty low print in particular if you consider we're going through some uh inflation right now and a dollar forty doesn't buy what you know it used to buy so it's going to be difficult but the saving grace here is some things that we do know we do know that the downers grove tiff the tax and current financing district has matured this year and any new growth so when whatever the the assessed value was when they started this 23 24 years ago anything that has grown over that period of time is now comes to us as new construction and we're able to extend our levy onto that property so it's a big increase so it's really helping us in a year we can use it with a 1.4 cpi limit so we we don't know exactly we did request information for the amount what amount of assessed valuation it's increased to in the village and i have two different numbers one from the county clerk and one from the the uh the township assessor and it's because they measured them at different dates so i mean okay and the higher one was the assessors it was more recent and so i'm using that and i'm adding 90 to it as a cap so so i know that we're going to get all of that that we it exists and then for the other thing we get is new construction dollars just which we get every year some new construction someone puts a second story on their house does something unique to their property increases the value it gets added to the tax rolls and then eventually years or later we get to start taxing that portion and it's it's new and that's really the only true way someone's assessed value or tax bill can increase if they add something positive to their property now it can go up because of inflation on that house or other things but that's really the key way and sometimes the the the rate will will jump our rate has been dropping for the last decade current rate this year is 1.68 you can see upper right hand corner i expect it to be a dollar sixty-three so it should drop a little bit um the thing that that there's an inverse relationship between that rate and and home values though some that three hundred thousand dollar house which we years ago decided was about an average for our community appreciates every year and so that appreciation and a drop in our value should measure itself out and so by by living at the level that we have out here 87 million 777 000 most of that is to try and capture the new construction in the tiff some of it is to capture new construction that the assessors always give me new construction values for the year but they haven't gone through the final phase which is a board of review and some other things sometimes they get adjusted down but it's the best number we can get at this point in time and so we have to make some kind of judgment and that's why the stuff in yellow is not i don't think that's going to happen but it protects us to those levels what i do expect is on the right hand side and if you look at the lower right hand corner with the total increases on the those properties 3.4 percent two percent um is attributable to new property that's what i'm guessing would be the average the average homeowner though will have 1.4 percent increase in their values and and the cost of them net to them on a three hundred thousand house three hundred thousand dollars is twenty three dollars a year so our our 100 you know 1.4 percent is really going to keep those those tax bills down this year because all the other money that we get out of this request is is from new construction that is new property being added and it's not the average house household so it's a really good year for the taxpayers and and thank goodness for the tip it's a good year for us so this has to be approved before the end of the calendar year before the end of the month so we're asking for it at this point in time and then in march we'll get a notice from the county with the actual new construction values and we can put together our actual tax rate and then they will use that for the tax bills that go out in june so i just i remind the board every year at this time that it's a system that's somewhat backwards in which mark and jury have to forecast what new construction will be worth and then based on that educated guess go out and recommend a levy to the board and if they guess wrong and we under levy we never capture that property value right then all right you have one opportunity to do this so when mark says we're levying what his best guess is plus 90 percent that's to ensure that all of that new construction that's we can't get the real dollar amount for yet is available to us when they give us the actual number in the future it's backwards from how it should be right so mark works really hard every year to try to bring in that correct number for us and it's a really it's a good process when you think about what i mean this is the first time i've at the beginning and the end of a tif you know they go 23 24 years i'm usually seeing them mature from 20 years ago or something and we've only had a couple there's ogden tip is still available but we haven't had access to the growth that's been in there we assigned an agreement or agreed to the tipping put in because we knew it was good for the downtown area and that eventually it would have this as i call my seeds these seeds grew and now they're maturing so that's that's what we have here it's done and it's it's can it should be a good thing for us hopefully the downtown area is appreciated by the community because they helped pay for that a little bit with the way that the tiff is designed well it comes at the right time who knew 23 years ago that our budget would be capped by 1.4 at a time the economy is growing six plus percent 6.8 right you know so it is showing up at the right time to help us keep up with inflationary pressures next year so this will be an action item and we we appreciate you approving it questions for mark all right thank you very much thank you thank you all right i'm gonna bring in a team here for uh discuss the cool school not cool the school climate survey yeah tony can you advance it my clicker is not clicking we're moving super slow well i'll go ahead and get started good evening everyone this year we're continuing with our practice of issuing climate surveys just like we did last year and the purpose of these surveys again is to collect feedback and to make sure that our students have a positive experience at district 99 and like last year we're again using the third party firm called panorama to help us with this and they help us with create the surveys and administer them to better understand our students this year unlike last year we issued the student survey during the school day so last year everyone was remote so kind of on their own parents of course were notified ahead of time and they could opt out their student participation was voluntary we also issued teacher staff and family surveys all of which were anonymous and voluntary as well so no slides for us yet okay all right that's okay and decisions about the content were made by administrator teams so for example ed and courtney went through the the panorama bank of questions and selected those questions to ask for families and we did the same for students and staff and teachers as well okay no slides that's okay our response rates of course were higher for students compared to last year since we were able to carve out time during the school year so they're about 3 100 or so students who responded our response rate for families was very strong too at 668 but not as high as last fall which over 2000 families responded as you'll recall we were talking about in-person and remote learning i don't know if you remember that people had some things to say which we read every comment um and the teacher and staff response rates were very similar that they were to last year also the and i'll show you the slides um all of the response rates are all of the responses are available on our website in full from the three last year and the most recent survey so you can go in and anybody can pull that data and see it so scott was going to provide an analysis of the students you want to say good evening so um i'll just go through the slide if it doesn't well there we go there we go so for the student survey though first i'd like to thank our building level teams administration so at north aaron ludwig kelly zerner and david king and then at south sarah corrington karen taylor and kristin borman they were all instrumental in helping to select the questions look at the themes and kind of how we wanted to use this for the future so so you can see on the on the one slide it talked about our themes what we're really excited about is the analysis breakdown where we can take student data and look at it from a district perspective from each school we can go by grade level or different groupings of students of like iep eo and then obviously responding to individual student needs so what i thought i would do is just kind of walk you through kind of a thought process of how we're going to be using this data so um the next volume um so one of the questions under our emotional regulation which would be under our social emotional learning theme uh was was uh when things go wrong for you how calm are you able uh to remain and you can see the results um so our goal as we're thinking about our programming is obviously looking at how do we are there things that we can do to respond to not calm at all and do that more immediate than future planning but our our goal is to really move all those up to obviously quite calm and extremely calm because that's kind of our thinking as we're looking at the data and then the next slide i'll kind of walk you through our breakdown so really from a district perspective you know this was the first implementation we'll obviously have another one come coming up in the spring um so as we do this year after year in all those categories we'll be able to look at longitudinal growth data at the building level in the immediate we'll be able to start looking at our our how can we use the data for our access intervention time and also um for professional learning opportunities so to give you an example about professional learning opportunities um you know we have a support staff professional development team and so we're gonna present the data to them to have them look at it um and i'm on that with uh with our director of hr jeff bergholz and so we work together with our support staff association um and really we'll look at and decide what are different things that might uh surface that we can offer professional development to improve our staff looking at it from a grade level perspective you know pbis right now for muslim way and positively north we look at data each month and we look at it from a 9th grade 10th grade 11th grade looking at behaviors looking at how do we program for lessons how do we program booster lessons so this will be one great area that we can have a lot of data to look at and then our seo collaborative groups at both schools will also be able to look at data um and then student groups like i mentioned earlier looking at students that are in special education in uh in our el programming you know kind of looking at it from that lens we can kind of dissect and and see what kind of supports we can offer and then also through c triple s and then on the individual level we're going to look you know we look at it how do we engage students you know from a counselor's perspective social work our dean or even teachers so we're excited about um you know the first round of data coming through obviously we'll be interested in seeing the second part of it and then using that for even more programming for the future so any questions on the student data before perfect keep going and we can answer questions later too so we also gave a teacher survey and a staff survey and while they were two separate surveys and both anonymous so it doesn't identify the teacher or the staff member when we went through the data we saw the same themes for both and these surveys like i believe jill had said were vetted the questions were vetted with building admin so for example the teacher survey i worked with our associate principals for curriculum and instruction ryan doherty at north and georgia at south and we combed through the questions to decide what questions we wanted to ask as i said the results were similar for both and the majority of our teachers and our staff members reported that they do feel a sense of belonging which is really important because that has been a huge district and school focus for us this year as has been relationships for several years now most said that there was a positive working environment they were obviously very positive about their experiences here at school they have trust and believe that their school leaders really have the best interest of the school and students in mind um so we were very pleased with these results especially being that the focus on belonging and the focus on relationships came came out loud and clear through their responses so for the family survey again anonymous so we again gleaned through the data and we saw that the majority of families also reported a very positive school climate they believe that certainly this year their students enjoy going to school that they are engaging in lessons in the classroom that are motivating that they're learning that there is an atmosphere of respect both in the classroom and in the school as a whole so very positive learning environment for their students they also believe that the benefits of athletics and activities really help to promote that positive learning environment and that positive climate in the schools and that they really help students to grow in terms of talking about climate they believe that we should add more opportunities for students more social opportunities for students throughout the year and then in terms of communication and our resources again we put a lot of resources in place especially this year and last year as well that that our teachers are very caring and have high expectations and that we are putting the resources in place to help our students to be successful in terms of the value of the survey i think we would all agree that the the biggest the largest value the most important is that i identify students in need of support and as scott said at the individual level at the school level at the district level so that is a key component of the survey yes however it does also establish some baseline data for us as we continue to administer the surveys it also gives us an opportunity in data an opportunity to look through the data and to use that data to better inform our professional development whether that's for teachers or for staff scott mentioned working with support staff on professional development and they will be looking at the data as well as we will be sharing that data with our building admin that focus on professional development for teachers obviously we will provide that data various groups and staff members as we look at future planning and as the board knows we are working on our strategic plan and this data is just a set of data to help inform and have additional input into that strategic plan so next steps sharing information sharing the data to hopefully inform programming and interventions and to see how we can use that data to better support our students we are planning to administer the survey again in the spring specifically in april and we also see that the survey data can complement our new schedule in terms of the programming that we put into our access periods and into resource so we'll identify needs for us that can better inform those two times when we can work with students on some of their needs and various interventions questions future surveys would you um will you be asking the same questions again so this really does serve as a good baseline to then measure progress as we go forward excellent and then in terms of the the takeaways we say the majority of families the majority of teachers and staff would you say those are strong majorities it depends on the area but it's definitely majority and stronger in some areas we again looked at the overarching themes and the overarching takeaways um but in some questions it's very very strong and in others it's not as strong but still a majority b-plus when i see majority i know that that 51 would constitute a majority and and this is is greater than the 51 um sort of idea um so this isn't this isn't close to a 50 50.
so you might see us here next year okay ninja hurley oh she's not here okay alicia jay suja grace lodi maggie myers viba nagalargi lucy nevins rayanch nigal jakar shevi no gojakar and michelle's son all right this is your state champion elementary school thank you for this opportunity so having been a mom that always wanted pictures can we do one for this group because we have all these parents that needed and need this picture oh absolutely all right i'm sorry nick one more please we'd love to have you all aaron's your will [Music] thank you [Music] oh you're mine take a picture [Laughter] awesome [Laughter] mr smith join them [Laughter] we did our parents [Laughter] congratulations [Laughter] it's going to come out congratulations to our parkside world champions i never had the chance to win they spell bull like that one to state gym but i'm i live next to somebody i noticed one of my neighbors he's in the group there so living next to the state's federal champion is pretty awesome i feel good about that so congratulations again thank you thank you very much for sharing with us all right now is an opportunity for presentations of best practice we'll hear from mrs katie day and mr patrick mccaffrey from schmidt elementary okay do you have the control up there is there make sure it works good evening i am katie day the principal at schmidt elementary and i am joined up here this evening by patrick mahaffey our assistant principal and mrs bless our title one instructional coach as well as kate edgar and udl facilitator i think this is her second board meeting presenting this month she's just that special so we are glad to be here this evening up on the screen is just a picture of our school and just a just kind of an overview of demographics at schmidt we are excited to be sharing our best practice this evening which is the effective use of multi-sensory instruction to build a strong foundation of early literacy with schmidt students so just a brief history to start off in 2019 an addition was made to our state legislature that with the hopes of identifying students who are at risk or at some risk in several areas of literacy and with the help of dr hack's office our district's response to this legislature included a very detailed multi-sensory instructional path to use as both a proactive best practice to reach all of our littlest readers and learners but then also a research-based intervention to support our students so multi-sensory learning involves the use of visual auditory and tactile strategies to enhance memory and to support early learning of language so really with our kindergarten first second graders but some of the strategies are really useful for students even in third or fourth grade so multi-sensory has always been done in all of our classrooms district-wide and pieces but this change in legislature put the process in place for every elementary school to use an all primary classrooms district wide so as the udl facilitator i greatly appreciate how multi-sensory instruction deepens our implementation of universal design for learning we've already known through our work in udl that students learn differently and they need multiple options in order for those learning connections to really happen we love how in multi-century instruction students are really engaged and are more involved in their learning because they're using all of their senses and you're going to get an opportunity to see that in action in just a little bit like i said it helps build multiple connections in different ways we know students don't learn in one way all the time and so it doesn't limit them to just being an auditory learner or a kinesthetic learner they get to learn in multiple ways throughout each school day and then finally like katie said it's a research based intervention and it's one that we do utilize when students are identified as needing some extra support but we also use it proactively for all students because we know providing those options is going to be really important i would like to introduce you to a couple of our students we like to put faces and names with some of this data and their families are watching at home so they're very excited this is wyatt wyatt just came into kindergarten this year similar to many other kindergarten students he didn't know any of his letters yet or any of his sounds and this quote actually comes from white's teacher so wyatt white's teacher reports that through his multi-sensory exploration and learning at school that he's just shown tremendous growth so far and it really helps lessen his frustration and it gives them the confidence to be successful in the classroom and this is eva and this quote is also from eva's teacher eva came into school this year saying that she was very good at singing but not so great at reading so her teacher charged her and said through auditory and kinesthetic learning and multi-sensory her teacher said you know we're going to change that and we have seen we've just wrapped up our middle of the year nwea assessment and she was in the 99th percentile for growth so not only were able to see her growth on paper but her confidence is also blooming in the classroom we will revisit with these students towards the end and just a little bit about our um journey through this and our preparation getting implementation in our k through second grade classrooms um it began with training for teachers like katie said most of our teachers have had multi-sensory they were using bits and pieces of it but the district really took took the lead with providing training for all teachers and different levels of training depending on what they needed we've also been able to visit other bcsc schools to do instructional rounds to see best practices from our other teachers in the district we've we've taken supply acquisition pretty seriously with the this multi-sensory approach we need to have different materials so teachers have utilized their supply money we've used title one dollars we've also had teachers write grants and just get creative with getting the materials needed our teachers have also done a great job adjusting the schedule to meet students needs so that we can work with all the students that need help and then even grade levels have collaborated even our third and fourth grade teachers are picking up some of these practices to continue with students who might need to continue with doing some of these practices a little bit longer than second grade these are the components that you will see in a multisensory lesson so usually we begin with a whole group visual tactile blending drill where the class will be together doing a very systematic approach daily to letters and sounds and blends and then we will also do phonological and phonemic awareness which is manipulating sounds rhyming syllables just auditory being able to do that listening and then speaking and then throughout the day different teachers do different approaches but some do stations or small groups with teachers or tas doing some more multi-sensory practice we have snap cards sand trays shaving cream all different approaches that you'll see teachers using to build in these different tactile approaches so like i said we wanted to give you the opportunity to see this in action so here is a clip was our second grade teacher laura adams starting to activate some background knowledge with a catchy music video a little shout out to the jonas brothers i can appreciate that so then she's moving into some practice again all the kids are at the carpet and you'll see in a little bit that they have little dry erase boards so they're also practicing some writing and this is what's called a spelling tic-tac-toe so they're working with that er and then um making different words and she's modeling what that looks like under the document camera that our controlled vowel makes her kids are getting a chance to say it and also write it on their boards and then after this whole group time she's going to break down kiddos based on what they need so here she has just a small group working on compound words multi-syllabic words breaking them down learning some strategies they can use when they're reading those together again involving highlighters printed paper small group then can work on different ways to practice we have an individual practicing here with stamps shaving cream is also been utilized and that is our teacher's assistant actually leading a station her name is twinette miller so a lot of just multi-sensory activities a lot of hands-on activities but that's not the only way that we practice so on the next slide you'll see different ways that we utilize technology and this is a really intentional use of the district resources we've been provided we recently adopted hmh for our english and language arts curriculum and it comes with this really great program that is super engaging called i read and it gives kiddos tailored individualized practice for the skills that they need to grow on and as you can see they all have headphones on because they are again practicing listening to sounds figuring out what sounds together make and the different blends and then helping them decode words as they're reading here's just another look at what you would see students may be independently working with letters sounds words and syllables in multiple ways again the teacher might be at a small group and then students would be working independently in a station or center format here is where teacher creativity really shines because as you know teachers love to make things fun and engaging for kids so this is an example of a kindergarten activity where the teacher created these turkey pencils with feathers turkey feathers and the students went around the building finding turkey cut outs with sight words on them and then the students practiced writing those sight words and saying those sight words so again just an example of this is happening all over the building where kids are engaged in the learning and it's fun and it's meaningful for them so to the results as i kind of hinted at that earlier with our two kiddos we have seen growth across the building we've just finished our middle of the year assessment and to see the growth that our kiddos have made especially the percentage of kids who are considered at risk has substantially reduced back to eva and wyatt eva's results are on the left from her nwa test if you can look at the 177 bullet that's the beginning of the year where she was in orange and now she grew all the way up to almost essentially green where she's on track to be at grade level just where we wanted to be by the end of the year wyatt has grown substantially as well if you recall he entered kindergarten not knowing his letters or sounds and not knowing how to properly use any kind of utensils and he is now forming all of his letters he knows nearly all of his sounds and he's using writing cutting tools correctly every day so our next steps with this instructional model dr hack always urges us to look at our data make steps as teachers and educators with the data right away so we're going to continue to use our title 1 intervention staff and our my coaches behind me to just do great great things for kids we want to make sure you know our goal is that postcovid even that we have fewer and fewer kids who are at risk get them reading and learning and spelling and decoding at a quicker pace and increased practice options and our effective util utilization of resources and that it concludes our presentation do we have any questions tonight thank you very much um and i appreciate learning how wyatt neva did are there particular questions colleagues have mr stenner sure thank you on one of the implementation slides it looked like the students the one with the headphones where they were really focusing we're using maybe a specialized piece of software yes yes that is ours does that come from how is that chosen it's our hmh platform that the district adopted um and it's a specific intervention program called within hmh called i read and so i i don't know if you can tell but sometimes they will use the headphones that you're just listening but this feature this program also has the ones with the microphones attached so that the the computer is listening to them speak and then the teachers can hear the recorded version which increases the opportunity for conferencing and for teachers to direct students obviously hip to hip listening is much better but when you have 20 22 students it's it's not always easy to do as frequently so so our k to two teachers and now uh even a few third grade students can use the program to help support their learning thank you i appreciate that that also made me think in terms of uh you introduced your next steps are there what did you call it dr roberts a moon shot are there are there moonshot goals for a program like this always right we want i would love for all of my students to be on or above reading level um i think it's it's challenging for sure um post covid but that's my moon shot i want all of my students on or above grade level in reading so i think we're hopeful that with research-based interventions you know such as multi-sensory instruction that that we can get there thank you awesome thank you there are other questions hi katie team um i have a question are there certain grade levels where you find this to be more effective than others you probably have to be creative at all levels i guess yeah it's it's definitely meant for the early literacy so kindergarten first and second um we have found especially post covid that our third grade students they really you know it's they had a normal year in kindergarten but that was about it um so we are finding that these strategies do help some of our students in third grader in third grade that are still struggling for for various reasons but but definitely geared towards primary and and to go along with this do you provide or have you thought of any suggestions for parents for at home activities that can also you know engage kids rather than just normal spelling words and things like that yes yes and so all of these programs are ixl that we use our hmh can all be accessed at home so we have sent chromebooks home for students it's not always possible with accessibility so i try to post strategies and activities on facebook our social media platform is is quite large with schmidt and our parents really want to help so we send the snap card flash cards those are a little different because they have emotion with it if i told you how often my daughter has sung some of the songs that my teachers have shared i'd be i could just do it all day so really really appreciate the support of our families we have wonderful families that do want to support our students at home great thank you dr bills she just asked the same question i asked so i don't need to ask katie can you help me with tools to get my kids to do their um their chores at home okay so that's an assignment that's another next step my facilitator would be happy to meet with you yes yes lots of no if i knew that answer nikki i could share with you i appreciate the time to present about schmidt thank you thank you thank you very much for your successes okay my all-time favorite dr roberts yes uh again one of these days we won't have to give this update but we are now love the picture here we did have santa and some elves delivering donations uh just uh recent just recently so appreciate the opportunity to pass that money out larry perkinson you might recognize santa there so with our cobot 19 plan of action update for 2021 2022 uh the map on the left has looked like that for a while that's from the cdc and how they measure um spread within each county so every county in indiana red the department of health is starting to look like that again a different measurement used that's why they look a little bit different but with the indiana department of health the most recent map looks like that one and bartholomew county is in red with a three there as is i'm not sure that's quite the majority of the state but but getting there if not yet so that's what it looks like um across the state locally here very specifically if we go to the data from our cover 19 task force this is data from today or at least was posted today reflects yesterday's numbers uh december the 12th so new positive case is 64 that's been increased hospitalizations is a 45 that's actually a decrease from the over 50 that it had in the middle of the week last week test turnaround time has stayed right around that 0.7 or less than a day so it doesn't take very long to get your results back but hospitalization is high a positive case is high we're certainly seeing that within the school corporation school buildings as well if we look at our first quarter we had 514 positive test cases since that time we've had 382 more so our pace was better and you can see the bark chart there to the bottom right and how we got around labor day weekend had a peak there at that point in time and then started decreasing to fall break the smallest bar graph there is october 9th to the 15th which is the week of fall break and then we came out after that and had pretty good numbers until we got into november you see that little spike we had from november 27th to december the 3rd and then we had still quite a few last week but on the heels of thanksgiving certainly a decent number of cases there again for the quarter 382 i think what's important is this next chart so as we get to this number first of all which notice that that's as we had had increases and it came back down on fall break this is the highest number in a week that we've had all semester and that was just the week of uh november 27th december third when we look at how we've been able to keep kids in school this is a reflection of the number of kids who were out either because they were positive or because they had symptoms or because we sent them home because they were identified closed contacts and coming out of fall break we made that adjustment based upon the direction of the indiana department of health that said if you have a mask environment and the classroom made on the school bus you can keep those identified close contacts in your school building so even as we've had the highest number of cases the entire semester this week we are not back quite the numbers we had of kids out here because we've been able to keep most of the close contacts in the building so it has if it just i think these two graphs that kelly thank you kelly and nick helped put together for us just so we can pay attention to the data and try to make some sound decisions as that positive cases have been going up but the number of kids although going up comparatively speaking are still remaining at levels below what we had before fall break when we were sending every close contact home and i think that's key as we look at making any decisions moving forward you know one of the questions we're going to be asked about is hey what about this mask thing right there's going to continue to be the dialogue and discussion and there will be school corporations making decisions either way as you read the news my from my standpoint i i'm not able to recommend to you anything with mass until we know that that doesn't affect the close the close contact slash quarantine situation as long as that is the really the minimum that we're able to do from the indiana department of health still tied to executive order from the governor which is in a mask environment keep your close contacts identify closed contacts in school it's difficult for me to recommend anything else at this point in time even if case numbers would go down we might go to orange we might go to yellow and hopefully that's going to start happening at some point it'd be interesting since we're now more inside more enclosed environments all those kinds of things we'll see but in that case if those protocols don't change um and we have identified closed contacts that we have to send home because we don't have a mask environment because we go mass optional that's problematic in terms of the number of kids again that'll be in the building it starts to impact us in other ways and so as as we've stated our goal is to try to stay in person in school we know that that's best for our kids and it's best for our parents it is a struggle when they have to be at home and gosh those parents who have to have a child at home who's a close contact for the second time third time more that is is really a struggle in a variety of ways so as we think about math i just offer to you as we continue to review that circumstance or situation that i'm not able to bring a recommendation to you yet and and don't feel like i can until we see that quarantine close contact protocol piece change which would come from the indian department of health i think would come from them seeing changes um both locally and at the state level in terms of numbers so that's where we are with the numbers at this point in time and at least my initial thoughts on the masterpiece i'm certainly happy to entertain any further dialogue because i know that's a topic remains out there right and you probably get the most questions on when it comes to covenanting thank you for that are there questions yes mr grimes yeah i'm not sure that what i have here is a question comment observation i'm not sure but um and probably what i have to say is is considerably premature at this point too you know considering local hospitalizations what you just had to say dr roberts about uh close contacts um you know the number of those kids being able to stay in school and the importance of the hat but i guess what i would like to say is i would like for us to have some dialogue you know fingers crossed that we do return to a sense of normal um at some point and so when when numbers do become more favorable perhaps the quarantine protocols uh change um from the governor's executive order at some point um you know i would like to see us discuss the possibility of setting some parameters of when you know we might consider lifting the mass mandate i know personally you know after 30 years in education i can say the last year and a half two years um it's been tough and and talking to teachers in bcsc my colleagues you know teaching friends from across the state it's been tough i mean first and foremost on the kids and it's you know there's a variety of factors there and i think you know stress tension anxiety i mean they're all at all time highs and i certainly don't think that's all due to mass but i think whatever we could do and this is far from a black and white situation but whatever we could do to create some kind of stability predictability you know be able to squelch rumors um you know we're you know have you heard about what's going to happen next uh the the more that that we could do um you know i think could you know i think we have a responsibility to ease you know do whatever we can do to ease some of that tension and anxiety and uneasiness that just it's kind of like a low-grade fever right now just it's always there thank you great points thank you very much this data though helped me a lot because i can imagine a lot of the stress and anxiety is when learners are not in classrooms and parents are having to adjust work lives and blah blah i can't imagine so so that balance i think is important for us to monitor and i appreciate your pointing that out dr roberts i think that's a good point doctor shedd i appreciate mr grimes remarks i think if we think about the stress that's within our school system and everybody's feeling stressed in one way or another for the last 20 months but if i think about our school system it's driven the most when people are gone right so if students are out of the building that adds stress to our staff members who are trying to make sure that the education can continue and besides within our school system certainly have stress to those parents who have their kids at home and then from staff member's standpoint if staff members have to miss two because cases are also increasing with our adults i didn't lay out the adult numbers but we are seeing the proportion um change from almost all students early in the quarter or school year and now it's not a balance it's still more students and staff but we're having more staff test positive and so as we have more adults out there there's a stress on the system in terms of substitute teachers and trying to cover those classes so absences continue to drive a lot of challenges for us and whatever we can do to manage that the best we can and and then going back to the graph that you pointed out here dr shed we're at least improving with where we were with numbers but still have ways to go to erase that and get to zero which is we're hoping it closer to zero never beat zero i guess be closer to zero at some point in time dr yes mr huffman i'd just like to also maybe think um thank our employers and the community because you know as as our kids are out of school because of a close contact or maybe having you know sinus infections but they ultimately come back as being covet positive or you know or not you know you just as a parent many times we try to you know be very proactive and keeping our kids at home when they got the sniffles and sneezing and you know but maybe that's the only thing they have and so and i know it's hard on our community as a whole with our employers because they need our people at work and you know and where do where do we draw the line at you know mom's taking five days off between six kids and dad needs to step up to the plate too but you know they're in positions that they maybe can't or their employer doesn't have policy in place where they allow it you know it's just tough you know really all the way around and you know i think a lot of our employers have kind of stepped up to the plate and you know are giving them options and stuff but you know as far as public safety because you know it's very near and dear to my heart it's tough you know when you're law enforcement ems your firefighter and they don't have a big pool and people you know depend on those individuals to show up to work so you know the same way with doctors and nurses and stuff you know there is i wish there was a way that we can have a room in that a room or a place where if our kids got close contact you know and everything and that they're going to have to stay home that we can take them somewhere and you know they can you know do a virtual where they're watching you know their classroom and and still keeping up with work and having a person there just to help them with homework or maybe you know do something but i know you know that's probably not a possibility but in a real world or you know an ideal world that would be something that would be a great thing but i just wanted to say thanks to a lot of our employers that have been very supportive of our parents and you know everybody because it is very difficult and it's hard when you have several kids and this is the tenth time in the last three months that your kids been you know either exposed or maybe they ended up with cove at this time so i just wanted to put that out there thank you thank you that's very important to add i appreciate it other comments for dr roberts all right thank you very much you're welcome so next we're on to um board commendations so i'll turn to colleagues dr shed yes the education hall of fame committee met a couple weeks ago and we have chose our educator of the year for 2022 and we're very excited but it will not be announced until they are notified themselves but or by dr roberts and we hope possibly maybe in february or so the first quarter of 2022 we'll be having a celebration of our in newest member so wonderful thank you and thank you for that work others mr grimes yeah i've got a few here um some which have already gotten some received some press and some that have not uh but i'll start with from cynthia gover at project manager at csa lincoln her and i had some correspondence and i'll just read some of what she has to say about the robuskies the the robotics team at lincoln said it's been a fun season very proud of our robuskies here at csa lincoln they competed in a virtual judging session for the state tournament saturday the 4th they went to the university of indianapolis just this past saturday for the state tournament entitled robot run and uh she said that uh they would know the results today and unfortunately i didn't hear from her so fingers crossed they did get results and it came back good today um but uh the the theme this year cargo connect they were asked to focus on ways to improve transportation and they did a little video on the idea of how to make school buses uh safer particularly in cases of emergency and put out a video which was which was very it was excellent so again uh congrats to the robuskies at lincoln a couple of congratulations to sarah frazier and cindy owens the cheer leading coaches at columbus north mrs frazier says it's first time that north has had a game day competitive cheerleading squad they qualified for the national high school cheerleading championship in orlando at disney world and they did that by placing second at a regional competition in centerville ohio and they mrs frazier went on to say that she hopes that they will compete in a few more events before heading down to orlando in the middle of february and they currently have a lot of fundraising efforts going on to for their 16-member squad to go down there and then likewise hannah moore from columbus east the cheer team there they have also hannah says we've been selected to compete at one of the nation's most prestigious cheerleading competitions the national high school cheerleading championship produced by universal cheerleaders association again they will travel to the wide world of sports complex in february and like north it was the first time a cheer team from east has competed at the regionals and she hannah says she's super proud of how they competed since they were up against teams who had been competing for years and then lastly just commendations to second graders teachers and students at south side who collected and wrapped presents for the angels of love program and i know there are several efforts going on at many of the schools to you know to help those in need this particularly you know during this time of year and so accommodations to them and also thanks to the many local businesses organizations that have partnered with bcsc and helped so many of our students thank you awesome thank you are there others okay thank you both very much school board member reports all right we do have a dnf meeting coming up so it's on wednesday so we'll hopefully have something to report on the district again facilities front at the next board meeting okay and i'll yeah i'll share one real quick so the school foundation just recently met um on december 7th uh the school foundation uh marched in the festival of lights parade right along the uh festive school bus and uh passed out scads of twizzlers um but uh yeah and also um you know that december 7th meeting was susie bruins last as the executive director so welcome to nicole cunningham and then i would also say thanks to mike jamerson serving as president of the school foundation board as he begins his transition off of that and then also the grateful and thankful campaign the cards that were sent out to bcsc employees from the school foundation i i hope was a success as well great awesome thank you i'll just share with my colleagues that i did participate in the discussion among school board presidents of region 9 and 10 last wednesday and it was interesting listening to different summaries of how school board meetings are going you can imagine and then we also got an update from our executive directors terry spradlin as to what are going to be legislative priorities for what we think will be a short session though they're doing a lot that typically is never in a short session so that was interesting to hear and as there are opportunities for us to speak and share our thoughts with our local legislators and representatives we'll be sure to pass those on but i think it's for a short session it will be an extremely busy session yay all right so we'll go to cabinet member reports mr phillips good evening uh thank you dr shedd this is something we put together as part of the public campaign for the referendum and just thought it would be a good idea each year to bring it back to you so the department of local government finance approved our 2022 tax rate and budget recently and we will continue to track how we are doing from a tax rate compared to we look at ourselves compared to the state average as well as to the 10 districts around us the 10 districts that are most similar to us in their overall total budget and the 10 districts that are most similar to us in assessed value so we think that those capture basically the the best ways to compare how bcsc is doing from a property tax rate standpoint and we're happy to say that our tax rate will tick down just a tad in this coming year and that we continue not only to to be responsible from a tax rate perspective but continue to invest in our facilities and our people many of the actions that you have approved in the last several months so just wanted to share that information and thought it would be helpful for you i appreciate that will you clarify location is that the ten that are geographically close to us correct okay we took the ten that are closest to us all right thank you wow bartholomew county is such a deal by way of reminder the the jump in that blue line that's us was the voters chose that's correct thank you for pointing that out yes that is the um and when we when we did propose the referendum and you and you all approved us moving forward we did make a commitment to keeping the tax rate right around that dollar one and keeping it consistent um you know of course excluding any um extreme events that were outside of our control so we're happy to report we're right there right right okay thank you any other questions about that okay so dr roberts i'll ask if you'd like to go through the items for our approval very good thank you dr shet i do have a list of items here for you minutes of the regular school board meeting from november 15th we just had one meeting in november that is that one supplemental contracts field trips and professional leaves as well as school fundraisers and mr grimes mentioned some school fundraisers in your packet or some fundraisers going to the national cheer competition claims in payroll we had claims for december 13th the total one about 1.4 million dollars then a pre-run this goes from november 16th through december the 10th that was approaching nine and a half million dollars for payroll we have two sets of payrolls for you about six totally about 6.5 million dollars from november the 19th which covers uh the previous two weeks of work days it was a normal payroll that included the new contract and retroactive pay for our teachers so there was some additional amounts in there for certified teachers covered under the collective bargaining agreement and then the most recent one in december the third covered the prior two weeks to that it was a normal payroll we have our neola policies emergency electronic meetings and please note at your places there are hard copies that i will refer to here in just a second just to make sure that you had the most hot off the press copies that if you do approve they will go straight into the neola data bank to then be added to our website whenever those are are done i'll come back to those in just a second oh actually probably good time to do that so um so the next few slides will hit that so in your packet if we just go in order uh with those jump to my ones so 0164.4 is revised by law that just talks about meeting of the board defined and so on that one in particular um see the piece that that you may not have had in your packet is the paragraph that starts the board's meetings normally shall be held at a location within the corporation boundaries so 0 164.4 in that paragraph the x was not clear as to what had been chosen there and it would be the superintendent and board president acting in concert so it wouldn't just be the board president it wouldn't just be the superintendent it is the superintendent and board president acting in concert to determine that it is necessary or appropriate to hold a regular special or emergency board meeting by means of remote or virtual participation so that was just being clarified on that one we then look at 164.5 which is member participation in meetings through electronic means of communication so find the one that is 164.5 i think uh mr stenner is the one that called this out last time options one and option two had been crossed out at least in your documents last time it had been on the on the website so i wanted to make sure you get those in front of you the options one option two cross dot accept we are actually going to say if you look at the sentence above where the option options are it says at least 50 of the board members must be physically present at a meeting okay so if we have members choosing to participate electronically we have to have at least 50 percent of you physically here so the next sentence is added just to clarify that because of our number of seven because boards can have different numbers of people it says this number aboard the number of board members who may participate in any given meeting through an electronic means of communication is limited to three board members so the most that could ever participate for us electronically would be three because that's less than the majority we would always be guaranteed then of at least the majority of you being physically present in in the meeting so that clarification is 164.5 164.6 did not have anything for me to add and is a new bylaw or new policy and then the last one which is 167.1 a revised one for voting by you um last paragraph all actions requiring a vote it wasn't clear what had been checked there it is all actions requiring a vote may be conducted by voice show of hands or roll call based upon the circumstances and how best to have you provide your answer so voice show of hands or roll call giving the option to the president who's presiding over the meeting as to how that would be accomplished with in person and then potentially virtual members so just clarifying those in case that was not clear as you read through the documents uh and we can come back to questions on that whenever we have a doctor whenever and if we can get a motion for approval in a second so moving past then those policy clarifications and again recommending them for approval tonight we also have permission to award bids for the hvac control system replacements at both east and north we also have the title 2 and title 4 grant applications mr edwards has placed in front of you the budget sheets for those and then we have an mou for the collective bargaining agreement so in your packet we included an update we simply did not get this corrected for the new contract is that for the referendum dollars given to teachers the five thousand ten thousand fifteen thousand based on years of experience last year's collective bargaining agreement said twenty five hundred five thousand seventy five hundred one half of those amounts because we couldn't start paying those amounts until january one half of the school year that's what it said for this year's contract two when we approved it it needs to say five ten fifteen we contacted the employment relations board to see how to best do that they said have you approved the memorandum of understanding with those changes that resolution is in front of you to approve tonight just to get that corrected for the collective bargaining agreement and those are the items that i have for you to hopefully approve for me thank you all right thank you so prior to any discussion or questions that you might have i do need a motion to approve items for a through i as they have been presented to us so moved thank you mr hofdwyer is there a second thank you mr bryant all right questions about what we just heard yes no mr stenner i'm curious about the collective bargaining agreement the move from a half a year to a full year will we have to move to a half a year again at the end of the contract good question i'm not sure that yeah so based upon the timing of the referendum and when we could get it voted and approved chen it will depend on on two factors one the voters approving the referendum to continue and so of course our commitment would be to making sure that this stays in place and getting it passed and making our case to the community and continuing to be transparent like we are with with referendum spending each quarter the second part would be whether or not there is enough cash left in the fund to continue for the remainder of that year okay so depend on those two factors and we would know that going into collective bargaining in that fall how much cash is in the fund at that time um but i would um anticipate that we would make sure there was enough cash to make sure we got through the calendar or the contract here the language um in the referendum is eight years is that correct that's correct yes those are calendar years of course and and we operate our teachers on a school year basis right the school year and the legislature and the state are all july 1 to june 30.
congratulations accommodation miss allen will take a picture take a picture of you up here okay how about we do this you can hold your i like to hold you hold the card with it and she'll take it and mom dad feel free to stand up and get your picture as well this is this is complete with a four-year scholarship spoiler choice sponsored by mrs congratulations good job [Applause] was an honor jet our agenda this evening but uh kind of exciting to see dr carroll i shouldn't take it out of classic for you mr hoffman but uh mr hoffman was presented with award from the isba and we wanted to recognize that this evening that is uh this award was presented to thomas hoffman for outstanding service to the indiana public school board members and school children during the coven years so mr hoffman i we all know how much you do and have done for the crown point community school corporation um and for the isba as well but um congratulations to you maybe you could you know give us a little share a little bit of uh what your involvement is with the well they basically i think the the outgoing board president presented these plaques to all of the directors there are there are 10 regions in the state of indiana that comprise the indiana school boards association plus your slate of officer so i we've got at least three officers so we've got 13 people on on the board of directors and you serve three-year terms and can be reappointed by the one of the school boards association committees make recommendation and then you're accepted back on the board by the board of directors but you know the last two years have been pretty difficult in public education i think it's been beneficial having been on that board to find out what goes on throughout the state see who's dealing with what kinds of problems see where we are positioned with some of the leading schools in the state and and things of that nature but you know we're very fortunate to school corporation because we are increasing and and [Music] student numbers versus decreasing so we've got funds available to do a lot of things that other school corporations unfortunately do not have if you're a declining school corporation many of those are in financial difficulty throughout the state so um but it's it's been fun to be part of this organization it's fun and our board members have attended the fall conference which is held every every year in either september or october down in indianapolis but it's it's an opportunity to get together with school board members from across the state and share ideas so thank you for acknowledging this and mr hoffman thank you for representing crown point as well [Applause] item three patrons comments patrons registered to comment on educational issues we've we have found it beneficial just go ahead and to read through the guidelines each meeting so that everyone understands what what is going on and what they will be asked to do to prove to present comment the board will hear patrons legal residents in center township at winfield top ship wishing to come comment on educational issues that the regular business meeting of the board of school trustees held in public patrons must sign the sheep provided in the back of the boardroom prior to start a meeting when their names are called to address the board they will move to the podium the front room please state their name spelling if necessary for record keeping addresses and the topic they will be addressing if patrons have prepared witness statements on a topic they may present at this time a limit a time limit of three minutes is allowed for each speaker we've asked mr angel to be our time keeper and you know generally he'll give you a either a hand raise or a warning of a minute 30 seconds and then the buzzer will go off at the expired time the portion of the meeting during which the participation the public is invited shall be limited to 20 minutes unless extended by a vote above the board speakers are to refrain from speaking on personnel issues and student issues i i want to stress this one because it has come up in past meetings that these are commons to be on educational issues uh not personnel um if something is said i believe the way we had it last time worked out okay we'll give you a warning at that second time we like we will cut you off uh immediately though if we're if we're not sticking to educational issues thank you so to begin this evening we have melissa pinita please come forward my first name is melissa last name is pineda p-i-n-e-d-a um address is 2601 west 135th um lane in crown point um can everybody hear me first and foremost okay my husband and i signed our middle child up for the new bulldog buddy preschool program as a general education student we chose the program due to having a wonderful experience with the exceptional learners program from 2019 to 2021 at the learning center with our oldest son who is on the spectrum the program at that point in time was something to be spoken for about and simply said truly amazing the program and its educators engage the children through interactive activities always involving academics at its core via structure and routine this concept made academics achievable for children with special needs and in general with this being said of course i chose this new program for our middle son i love the idea of inclusion and we're excited for him to begin his preschool journey expecting a very similar program early on i noted a difference in the program's curriculum when asked my son would simply say just play to describe his day just play how does a general education child let alone a child with special needs learn everything needed for kindergarten when a majority of their preschool and pre-k experiences simply just play and why were the parents never informed of this drastic difference in the program's curriculum or lack of i was told by the principal of the learning center that a child can choose to play and it's up to the instructors to engage with the child with questioning during this play i ask you though how does a child with special needs who has a language or speech impediment answered directions directed to them when a majority of the time they don't even have the capacity to do so how does a special needs student learn the routine that is expected of them in future kindergarten when their preschool provides them with such lack of however all children are supposed to be kindergarten ready and when they aren't allowed to formally or structurally address topics such as holding scissors letters shapes etc it's very difficult i believe any parent would expect structured learning of academic basics in preschool and pre-k at minimum we are setting our children up for increased behaviors and increased behavioral program programs at the kindergarten level especially those with special needs it's my deep hope that you please look over the preschool program involve those professionals such as special education instructors and those familiar with an iep and strongly address the current curriculum thank you so much thank you melissa lauren carney uh my name is lauren carney uh one two zero eight two dry crown point um i currently have a four-year-old son who attends the bulldog parties pre-school at eisenhower elementary my son entered the ecd program at the age of three being nonverbal and with a significant developmental delay during the past few years my something had to flourish inside and outside of the classroom walls we have every educator paraprofessional therapist and speech path to thank for his successes this year the program has drastically changed not for the better i had my reservations last spring when i heard about the transition of the bulldog buddies as an educator myself i know that this is no easy task to simply just launch a new program new programs take time with purposeful transitions small steps and training how was that done in fidelity in over one summer i began asking the questions why why in the world would this corporation rip apart a thriving program that was allowing their most vulnerable students including my son to achieve academic and social success why must why was structure and routine removed from the classrooms and replaced with 60 minutes at minimum of open play time why was the kindergarten readiness curriculum removed from the classroom my son required schedule and routine to function successfully throughout any day why are you allowing him to choose what he wants versus what his needs are why were special education teachers ripped away from their students on their caseload that they have been servicing why hasn't anyone in charge in the corporation asked is this what's best for our students i can guarantee if that question was asked the response would be no it seems as though whoever made the changes doesn't appear to know what best practice looks like let alone what um best prac what best practice and special needs students what they need and for all learners all around the message is being sent loud and clear to parents in the community that crown point community schools does not care or value their students with special needs if they did this program would not have been turned inside out and overhauled completely the program is forcing us to seek alternative community-based preschools for a preschool for our son in january imagine the setbacks that my son will now have to overcome with yet another transition to another program because this one is failing him this program was supposed to be an extension of the successful ecd program that he was a part of for the past two years my child has regressed significantly in his behaviors due to the lack of stability structure routine and academics in closing i just want to restate that every teacher paraprofessional speech pathologist and therapist has always had my son's best heart i simply can't say the same for the individuals that are responsible for this program i strongly hope that you look into it and i encourage you to observe a classroom read the scope and sequence of the adopted curriculum read a child's iep and then ask yourself would you send your own child through this program because i would assume you would not thank you for your time thank you lauren jessica abel uh jessica able 249 east greenwood avenue crown point same thing bulldog brothers preschool my son uh goes there five days a week this year this is his third year there he was in first steps through the state of indiana from nine months old to three years he was diagnosed with a speech delay he had not a single word he could not say mom dad nothing until he started at the learning center at three years old that 2019-2020 school year was incredible for my family to hear mama for the first time coming out of my child's mouth that's an experience you can never get back okay and he was learning abc's numbers colors writing a name and communicating in a structured play-based setting and even though he was thriving in this environment during all of this my husband and i knew that when he finished the school year last year he was not ready for kindergarten so we chose to hold him back this was before we heard about the bulldog buddies program we signed him up at a new preschool paid a tuition fee and everything we then bulldog buddies was a possibility for him and it was supposed to be an extension of what he got the last two years so we entered him into the bulldog buddies program and from my understanding again it was supposed to be extension and unfortunately it was not there is absolutely no structure no academic learning whatsoever just play time and this is why or why is this the only preschool of my knowledge in crown point that doesn't follow a readiness program that aligns with the kindergarten curriculum at crown point how are these kids going to be ready they're not for the entire two and a half hours these children are at school they are not told no once if they don't want to participate in an activity they aren't even allowed to be encouraged to go and follow their teacher or other students they are allowed to go and do as they please this program is failing our children will continue to fail each child that enters its door until something changes and unfortunately for kids like my child this was his last year to be ready for kindergarten i have made plans to move him to a new preschool for second semester and i hate to do that but he needs to be ready for kindergarten otherwise he is going to be farther behind than he already is thank you thank you jessica uh megan or megan uh jordan megan turner megan jordan 245 east 124th place crown point indiana i come here as a mother as well as a healthcare professional i'm a clinical pharmacist that rounds in the critical care unit i spent the last 21 months watching misunderstanding and misinformation take the lives or severely disable people in our community because of covet 19.
uh ending balance in operations 837 264 dollars and 94 cents total for all accounts if you go to the very last page that should be page five for all accounts is five million six forty five eight eighty thirty five and then next in your packet you're going to see the depository statement of bank balances for each bank you'll see the less the outstanding checks for all banks and then the november fund balance for all banks minus outstanding checks is 5 million six forty five eight eighty thirty five if you do that comparison with page five of your fund report you'll see that those balance to the penny and then finally in your finance packet um just update for the bond 2020 expenditures you've got your total expenditures forward from july 2021 through november 2021 was about 2 million 52 000 167 14 and then the total expenditures out of bond 2021 for december have been 784 231.37 those are all listed there for you so you can see what we paid in the month of december so total mon uh total um expenditures to date out of bond 2021 are two uh have been two million eight hundred thirty six thousand three hundred ninety eight dollars and fifty one cents and pending any questions i'd like to recommend for approval make a motion to accept the consent agenda as present second okay um emotion in the second call in favor all right all opposed motion passes thank you mrs romer you're welcome next item on the agenda is reports and first the superint or the assistant board like crunch so i just wanted to take about 30 minutes tonight to talk about literacy trends in america okay we're going to move that to the end of the day just kidding instead i'll give you a two minute overview of a doe initiative how about that okay um so the doe is presenting a new reading initiative and they're putting out more information in january but starting next school year 22 23 they are going to be providing us two components to this they call the literacy framework so one component is literacy instructional coaches so just like we got coveted relief money the state got covered relief money and they're using that to hire and train literacy coaches and then distribute them to districts in need we won't qualify i'm 99 sure we won't qualify as one of those schools to receive a literacy coach but there's a second group where they provide that and so you can kind of opt in if you take the opt-in suggestion or approach um then you probably will have to share a coach with a district but then they want to use that data they put the coach in your building for for your district for two years and they want to show that data that the model works so that something they can sustain and continue so it's just kind of like a pilot or a trial and then the second component is professional development around the science of reading so we will see what happens with those details in january when those come out greencastle we are already i think ahead of the curve with our primary schools right now we've been doing science of reading professional development for the last 12 months um in our k2 and that's so teachers already adjusting their reading and spelling instruction for instance instead of like the friday spelling tests where kids memorize words and so the research shows that those skills don't transfer so they don't actually use them in their writing they still spell incorrectly um so instead you teach spelling rules so for instance there's no um word in the english language that ends with the letter j so instead you teach them in the rule that that starts or ends with a dge and so then they identify and apply those like badge fudge trudge those kind of things so instead of being the regular spelling list that you memorize they memorize rules and apply them so it's just little things like that that are more science based and brain learning based where they can retain it so just making those kinds of adjustments um make big changes and reading comprehension and retention so those are kind of changes that we've made over the last year and now we're getting ready to extend that up and encompass tv with some different reading and writing strategies too so we're excited about that so that was quick cool that's good thank you that sounds great next on the agenda is the superintendent report yeah so the first thing is i just want to uh since this is our last meeting for winter break just wish everybody all of our patrons our students and our families a safe and relaxing holiday break and we'll work to close up the first semester here on friday and welcome everyone back in in january go along with that as you can see or as you've heard or as you've watched the many wonderful holiday concerts and things that have taken place so just thanking our students and our staff members that helped put on those performances i think we do a marvelous job here at greencastle building project has gone out to bid and plans and documents and specs are posted on eastern engineering and different websites according to the public notice and so we'll accept bids on that project until two o'clock on the 27th of january just a quick update based on special ed funding so just like with our student count day to where our funding can increase or decrease based on the two different count days our funding camp is affected by the december one special special education count and depending upon where students fall for their disability determines the different funding levels and so in looking at that we're looking at roughly a 200 000 increase in funding for special education um but on the on the negative side of that we're looking at a 50 000 decrease in cte funding and that's very similar as well the amount of students enrolled in some of those cte courses and if you understand our junior and senior classes are a little bit smaller than normal and so i think that really kind of attributes to kind of the dip in that but overall more funding headed our way which is a positive is a positive thing and then we received our 1782 notice or our budget order from the dlgf that was on friday i'm sorry i'm losing track of days here this week and just overall um highlights of it is uh they're all very positive is our assessed valuation and our taxing district increased by 29 million dollars from last year to this year and so anytime your assessed valuation goes up that can have a positive effect on your tax rate and it can cause your tax rate to to fall more on that in a minute they approved our budget as is for education fund for debt service fund for pension debt that cut our budget by thirty thousand dollars in operations fund but that budget also includes our entire cash balance so we're we're fine with that and approved our budget as is for rainy day overall our levies and debt service and operations both of those combined we're are up 148 thousand 222 dollars compared to the 21 budget but on the flip side of that our overall tax rate is down just over five cents so our 2022 tax rate is a dollar 31 11.
so it's a full 20 years old it's a black rubber roof uh in new england that roof would last about 20 years that's about the expected useful life so it's been a problem for a number of years for us we've had part of the roof overlaid with another piece of rubber in order to string it along but it's at the point where we do need to address it we would propose that this project would be an msba accelerated repair program project um that would provide us with about half the funding for the project if it were approved by msba so obviously a big project like this that would certainly be worthwhile going through that process it does lengthen the process you know that approval with msba they just um they just approved all of their grants for this upcoming cycle in october so we'd be looking at like next october before if this were presented at junetown meeting and approved next october before the msba would would uh you know get on board with us with the hopes that the following summer would be construction so it takes a while to get this done basically and we can't wait forever we probably could string it along for a year if we didn't get funding through msba and or if the town decided that they they couldn't fund the project so we'll have to address that we don't want to get to the point where we have buckets in the in the building telephone and intercom system upgrades um some of this relates to security as well mr galashaw has been has identified the need to replace servers with the intercom systems we also need to replace phones with ip phones so we hope to accomplish that the police department actually has access to our intercom system which is great it's just not a great intercom system right now we're working on troubleshooting some things but we so we need some improvements there for sure playground improvements at schools we have done some playground improvements although not major in terms of replacing large playground equipment that needs to start happening if you if the playground equipment is is nice it's all aging and we're having a hard time getting parts it's breaking down it gets a ton of use and we really need to start focusing on those playground units at the schools gradually and replacing them one by one so we hope to do that parking lot repaving this is really an ongoing thing we've been doing it um but we you know need more money to continue that process and furniture replacement we we do have some funding for furniture replacement it's probably not going to be enough when we hopefully go back to normal soon and you know we're having all tables and collaborative learning in classrooms and opportunities for kids to interact in a normal the old way we used to do things hopefully we're not going to have the furniture we need unfortunately so we need to invest in that a little bit so the total of all those is five million seven hundred and sixty thousand obviously the high school roof being the majority of that um and that's that's what we hope to tackle uh right away in year one so as i think you know these items um are here for your consideration after you have approved these items we'll then move to the town capital improvement planning committee the top of the finance committee the select board the junetown meeting and then some things probably likely won't be on the list for the junetown meeting they'll be available for reconsideration at the october town meeting and then whatever doesn't make the cut at that point we can you know revisit in next year's plan for sure so that's sort of the process and uh i'd be happy to answer any questions you might have or any feedback that you have on the list mr oliver thank you madam chair i have a lot of questions okay i have a lot of questions so let's start with the uh the big one the roof yes so how much are we spending on repairs right now do you have you could you ballpark it are we small repairs it's not a lot here and there yeah yeah small repairs but there will be a point where the small repair is not the answer sure one of the things one of the reasons that we overlaid a major portion of the roof is we identified that there were some um some faulty materials when uh in the initial roofing system that really were suspect that were cracking and this was oh i guess about six seven years ago now anyway was it still on the warranty at that time it was still under warranty we um we hired an engineer in the independent engineer to do some work on the roof some testing of the roof materials we identified some things that we weren't comfortable with they agreed to overlay a large section of the roof at the time which is great but basically that's like putting just putting a big rubber carpet on top of the roof and gluing it down um that it was only on a portion of the roof first of all and it's not a long-term solution to fixing the roof so what we would propose is a pvc roof similar to what we've done at the other school buildings has about a 30-year at least 30-year life expectancy and it's a million times better roof that's the white roof that's the white roof it reflects it reflects heat it's much more energy efficient um and it's just a far superior product this this is the cheapest roof you could you could find the lowest bill yeah um so i just one of the other questions i have a few more but um in your opinion you think that we would meet the criteria for mas uh mass school building authority funding i have one small worry about it so depending on the number of submissions that they get they have changed the criteria as to how many years old a roof has to be they've done it twice in the history of the accelerator repair program and msba has not been around forever so it's um a few years ago they made a decision that they would only fund roofs that are 25 years old or more now that was based on the fact that they had so many applications that they couldn't fund all the roofs so it remains to be seen how we would fit into that and whether or not they'd consider it i mean it is possible that it might not get done in the first year that we apply that doesn't mean it's not worth applying or you know gaining support from the town for um and it doesn't prevent you from reapplying sure obviously i just have concerns of if we don't receive the funding going you know asking the town for 4.4 million i wouldn't advise it at this point okay uh if we get to the point where we have buckets all over the building and we're damaging you know the building because we're you know at that point obviously then we have to make some hard decisions i think that msba will support us with a project we've had very successful projects with msba sure you have a good track all the roofs that we've done on you know the last 10 years you know all the other buildings are are taken care of through msba projects um so so i really feel like they will work with us and support them so if everything were to go as planned when if you were to get approval from town meeting in the fall um then mas uh mass school building authority when's the earliest that the project could be spit out in the if everything went as planned yeah it's um it's possible that it could be installed in in the summer of 23.
after that i started a security crisis management consulting company here in town and my the primary focus of my business is to build violence intervention and mitigation programs for schools and corporations um how i got involved with jeff was actually after the um the briefing that the school did post parkland um the parkland shooting to talk about safety and security and one of the things that when i when i work with organizations oftentimes the primary focus on dealing with an active outward violence and active shooter is to harden physical security features and the reality is they've 100 of the times in a school setting those speeches get bypassed and really when we talk about we we use the expression left of bang when you look at a timeline of events and the bang is the initiation of a violent act what we're trying to do with the programs that we're building is to get left of bang and get getting left in that timeline getting out in front of it i view an active shooter event the attack doesn't start with the first trigger pull it starts weeks before it's a process that an individual goes through anybody that engages in an act of violence whether it's directed inward or outward is engaging in the process of problem solving they're dealing with stressors they're coming to the conclusion that there's a cause for those stressors sometimes they attribute the cause to be either another individual a group of individuals or an organization and sometimes they place the cause of their stress on themselves and then we see kind of the blending of the two and so as we go through this what we're the truly holistic approach to safety and security of any organization shouldn't just be addressing the possibility of an act of outward violence it should address the health and wellness of the organization and honestly that's where as i built my programs for other organizations they tend to fit nicely into the hr program because it really is it's about addressing the wellness of the individual and preserving that individual and putting them on the right path and we do have a process currently for cheshire public schools that we use for identified concerning behaviors how to assess those behaviors how to determine what threat level they are and then have a mitigation and management plan which oftentimes simply includes coaching approaching the individual for you not using maladaptive coping mechanisms and where where the mental health first date fits in it really is the admit the missing piece that we've identified when it comes to this holistic approach we we have students that will exhibit concerning behaviors and right now we have students and faculty conditioned to report those behaviors if we're concerned that they're going to become outwardly violent meaning if it's going to harm us we'll report it but we also know human nature is currently we haven't educated the faculty staff and students as to how to identify somebody that might be at a risk of self-harm and they no longer pose a threat to us so we oftentimes it doesn't get reported and i think there's there's mul if that's multi-factorial much of it could be just not knowing what to do about it and so when we don't know what to do about it we do not we choose to do nothing and so this piece basically gives us another set of skills and the way the program will roll out ultimately within three years of the program roll out we would have three quarters of the high school trained in team mental health first aid youth helping youth and giving them the skills the tools that they need and the confidence like it lays out there the confidence to take action because now they've been trained to be able to take that action and like we said it's not to train them to be clinicians it's not the day for them to provide the treatment it's to redirect them get to get to a trusted adult and get them the help that they need because ultimately it comes down to the same thing where someone's dealing with stressors that we all are but we start to go through the process of what's what's the solution to these this stress and unfortunately some people get to the conclusion that it's either self-harm or or directing that violence towards somebody else and i think it may it'll make the safety and security of the school more robust um and ultimately it'll be even even more importantly it'll uh put kids on the right path and it'll it's going to preserve their mental health and mental well-being and that's ultimately the goal that's treating that environment you know obviously is tom emphasized the left of bang component here where we're in trying to provide a robust education response skill set around mental health and prevention i mean obviously as i've shared with the board before and you've heard numerous presentations on all the things that we've done to harden physical physical security you know in terms of man traps and cameras and things like that as well as alice response and things like that but you know obviously for quality of life and prevention is where we prefer to focus our energy so to provide a little bit of history about cheshire high school youth mental health firstly and a potential framework i'll ask dr gab to elaborate on that good evening everyone uh in 2018 january we had some training done with 14 staff in youth mental health first day which is a kind of a foreground for doing the teen mental health first aid where adults would be trained to then train students and so the teen mental health first day that we've been talking about today requires that 10 of the staff is trained we have about 211 staff members of high school so we need 21 to 22 to be trained to move forward and the training that would happen with students is delivering three 90-minute sessions to the entire sophomore class and so we would look at a framework where we would identify teachers school counselors etc who would be interest certainly pe teachers as well who deliver our health curriculum that those are some initial thoughts in that training so that they could then train all of our 10th graders and then annually that is the vision for the program that that would be done annually thank you so you know we right now we're still exploring this but felt you know there's superficially what we've explored so far tremendous value to ensuring that our students have these skills and in the same way we have all of our students educated in cpr this can equally save a life and provide tremendous support to our students some of the questions that we have as we move forward you know there's there's certainly a time commitment that's required to engage in this process uh four hours of training for youth mental health first aid and those that would actually teach students there's a three day training for that process so it's pretty time intensive to be able to make sure that our people have this sort of training financially there's a significant cost when you get to the number of people that we're looking to engage however you know i've recently had conversations with that area superintendents all who have expressed interest in participating and so in that case you know that the phrase a lot of the cost when we can have multiple districts participating and so we would definitely explore that route obviously grant funding is something we're looking at michelle has access to grants for that tom and i have discussed different federal grants for that and so i don't sit here today telling you this is something that we you know really need to move forward with i think it's something that has tremendous merit i think it you know at this point i would strongly advise we explore it further and i'd probably just share back with the board but i think we're far enough along that i wanted to make you aware that this is what we're we're doing and we'll have further conversations around this another thing that you know we're consider of in this process and michelle talked about qpr training and how that was more broadly available publicly i would really want to make mental health first aid training more broadly available publicly as well for people to take advantage of that families um in the broader community and probably partnering with sean for people like librarians and park and rec who interface with our youth to have these skills perhaps athletic organizations people outside the school system who interface with the youth should have these skills as well so that's kind of where we are at the moment and it's this is a a big topic to take in and a lot of you know folks that are working on us i don't want to leave rob anne out of the picture because she's been an important part of meeting with tom and myself and trying to examine this program and look at the benefits i know i don't want to speak for her but i know she sees tremendous value in it as well so i just want to open the floor to you if you have any questions or thoughts that you just wanted to share at first blush i have an easy here's question recommendation come for 10th graders and what's the right yeah so teen mental health first aid the program is designed for kids in 10 11 and 12 and as i think both tom and mary talked about we would like to initiate the program with 10th graders and do that perpetually so that they have that skill for the extended period of their high school experience okay can i follow on that um because i i have the same as um only the same question and um you do see in these violent episodes that oftentimes middle schoolers are involved and is there a middle school component to this is it does it merit taking a look at if you're going to put together a grant proposal or put together a program one that encompasses um say eighth graders uh because it's a rough time i mean that's probably the roughest time for students and yeah and it's a great question and something that we've considered the national council for mental health is the group that puts this all together the training for teens is relatively new two years old i've spoken like today i was on the phone with ashland um wisconsin who was talking about how tremendous it was for that kid they don't yet have a middle school module but they are working on that and so you know we'll certainly keep our our ear close to the ground for any sort of changes that exist there but right now the lowest they go down is 10th grade so 10th graders summer educators on the staff i believe right what about opening it up to uh to parents absolutely i mean i don't know rolling out all one shot's hard to do but yeah uh because oftentimes i think most parents probably don't know you know i had a look at what algae was being honest with you they did find you know recess learn courage etc but it also be good for parents too as adults also have you know things going on and may not know what to look for in their kids or ask questions so i agree with fade and if we're going to do the grant maybe a little more compassion so that when the potatoes are available yeah the other question is because you and i and mrs rosenberg is here too we were at conference last weekend mental health is probably the number one topic that came up and will be uh lobby for from kate on behalf of the legislature but uh his name from state parliament but he had talked about the fact there's a shortage of qualified mental health professionals to begin with number one number two there's not enough funding or any funding really coming down from state federal brands to offset something so how's this training being rolled out is there is it are these folks uh i assume they're qualified are they available because it seems there's versus shortage sure and i think you just hit on a really critical component tony and michelle talked about the lack of mental health providers i think in circumstances like we're experiencing right now it's really important to have all hands on deck and all people as educated as possible about signs and how to refer somebody who needs support um because right now we don't have access to as much therapeutic support as we would typically have if all of us are a little bit better educated about mental health needs including parents and people in the community as well to your point we're better at spotting who needs support and making sure that they get the intervention that's absolutely necessary for them so you know during this period shortage to have more eyes educated eyes aware of what's going on and be able to identify people who need support could be a critical you know support for that individual in our community all together but just in the in the different programming they have there's mental health first aid which is an adult program for other adults and more of a generic adult program then there's youth mental health first aid which is for adults to identify and support youth with mental health issues then there's teen mental health first aid which is for kids to educate them about signs and how to support you know find the right supports for your peers so that's kind of the different programming they have and we're hopeful that at some point that'll include uh down to the younger youth to seventh and eighth grade just not there yet yeah jeff i hope you don't mind me jumping in but you just i just want to say that um the mental health first aid program the one that is is focused on adults we in our community we've offered probably two of those trainings per year for community members parents and whatnot the tricky part about that training is you can only train 30 people at a time and max 30 people at a time and of course in the middle of pandemic it's all it's all been virtual which means that less people are really interested in participating but my hope would be that moving forward in partnership with the schools particularly particularly if we do launch a teen mental health first aid program um is that we can coordinate through the schools to get to parents to be able to offer more more of those trainings you know targeting 30 people at a time maybe making them school-based in some way or or some form so that we can we can get more people in our community trained um just to give you an example of of what work has worked really well um all town employees i think four years ago all town employees were trained in mental health first aid so every um every employee on the town side um participated in a summer i apologize um something terrible must be happening outside um we did it in a series of two three day training so split the town staff in half and everyone was trained and it was incredibly impactful and even people who were resistant to participating in the first place because there were people who didn't see this as a valuable professional development opportunity um following the training people were so incredibly moved and really found ways to apply the training both personally and professionally um so it was incredibly worthwhile and i see a lot of value to saturating our community with the with the adult mental health first aid as well thanks a lot michelle and to you know kind of build on that a little bit we offer these programs and recognize that when we brought michelle in to say we really want to talk about moving forward with team mental health first aid she was so excited and supported supportive of us to try and you know make this possible recognizing the benefits it provides today we had challenge day at cheshire high school and i was at the hockey game a little while ago and ran into a freshman and asked hey how are you doing you know how are things and he told me about challenge day today and he said i said what's your takeaway from challenge day what what did you and he stopped for a second and he said you know you don't always know what some people are carrying well you know some of the bad and it's pretty deep for a 15 year old boy who you know i've had a lot of other conversations with never like that you know never never conversation like that so you know the work that we do there is really important when we talk about social emotional support and i think this work can be deeply meaningful for our kids not just through cheshire high school but is a life skill of growth that they can take with them the same way we would consider cpr or the heimlich maneuver or other basic you know life skills and so we're excited to be here tonight to share this with you and we look forward to the opportunity to come back and hopefully have a plan to move forward can i ask a couple practical questions absolutely um what just what is what does the program cost it was like 45 grand to host a training for 20 uh it's a three-day training for the folks to be team mental health first aid educators which you know that's a big chunk of change obviously the training for the ten percent that's much much more reasonable it's like 150 175 that's something that we could easily do for fun people but the training to be a teen mental health health first aid educator that's where it's much more expensive but you know again between grant money between people um other communities who want to participate i think we're in a pretty good place though and so do you let's let's assume this gets up and running do you see this is taking place during the school year or is it going to be a summer training program do you think um i think logistically faith it's a fair question but there are just too many questions that are unanswered right now to be able to give you a thoughtful response i mean optimally we'd love to get people trained over the summer maybe potentially run this with sophomores in the middle of next year we're lucky but i really want um the community to experience it first uh and our obviously our folks need to be trained first so there's a timeline there for that and do you have you said you need 21 people roughly um you have any has anyone even expressed an interest and can you gauge where we are how quickly we'll fill those 21 positions uh yeah i could say instantly we will fill them yeah we had uh 20 i mean it's four years ago now that we ran this initially and had a bunch of people volunteer across the district that we're very interested in so i have no worries that we'll have that many staff that say they want to participate in this even even teachers yeah teachers i mean and i don't want to um limit this exclusively to teachers i mean you hear that that the town every employee i mean public works it's not just like law enforcement you might consider okay that makes sense everybody um for custodial staff we do we want to make it available to you know more than just certified staff so you can i have this conversation about my interaction with students one-on-one you know when you have a student breakdown and you know i feel very inadequately prepared to deal with those i mean we do have at quinnipiac university we do have um there's a care but as individuals you know we have much to learn all of us and you're an educated professional who is familiar with those resources if you're a 17 year old kid whose friend's breaking down that's a very hopeless place and a helpless place and so making sure that kids know those signs that this is more than a bad day how do i get this person help with what steps could you take to do this not that you're again you're not responsible as i said to carol today um just because you know cpr doesn't mean you follow me up the stairs you know but uh we're not responsible for this but you have the tools so that you don't feel maybe so helpless when your friend is sharing things that you know are of concern i think it's incredibly important and um i had a question about other communities are are we sort of out in front of this as much as and who are the other communities are there is there a good number i i only spoke to four who aren't doing this and would very much like to be a part of it so i mean in talking to michelle she said statewide there might be one district that's you know close to this right yeah um i don't i don't know uh specifically of a a district that's doing um teen mental health first aid but in sonia derby has started a screening program it's the only thing that i know of the color right now is um because teen mental health first aid is still relatively new but they screen all of their freshman students in adolescent expert to assess for risk for risk of substance abuse or mental health issues um every single incoming freshman um which i thought was phenomenal so um so that's sansonia derby which is is i think the thing that i found that sort of closest to something like this which would be kind of a blanket training for young people um but i i do also want to say that um if if you're aware of this that the qpr training was delivered to every single i believe every single school staff member um teacher lunch personnel you know i mean everybody was trained in qpr every single person and um and we had myself and several others were certified as trained facilitators and were able to go into the schools and train people so and and it was incredible the impact that that has had i think and so this type of blanket approach can be so incredibly impactful at reaching so many people um and i i don't think we should lose sight of the empowerment piece here where we're literally going to be giving young people the the sense that they can help their peers that they can serve their community that they can identify somebody who might need help and assistance um and and overall help people to be kinder and compassionate and more empathetic to each other which are you know qualities that we all want to see more of right especially um in across the board i think at this point so um i i think this is so incredibly important if that's not clear from how exciting i get when i talk about it but um and certainly the human services department is here to support this um you know i have access to some grant funds and i'm even researching some additional grant opportunities and my staff is here to support this as well so whatever we can do um we're here so thanks michelle quick question so michelle about this one obviously i i would say uh the mental health uh issue started before copenhagen we have something right exactly a lot of this a lot of things happening in and around us especially youth you and me here this evening um number one if you weren't trying to be proactive right and assessing needs but two i imagine we're also concerned about just the general state of mind of our adolescents and our in our town has there been an uptick in suicide preventions outreach from students is there something that's keeping you both up at night um about the state of mental health price of the cheshire or is it too early to try to measure if we're uh in the red zone being too many cases or how yeah i wouldn't call this a cheshire issue i mean it's definitely a global issue right now and the numbers that we track with respect to ideation or self-harm those numbers are on par with previous years generally speaking it's not that i don't know that this is um this isn't necessarily designed to exclusively address that um but i think it would help it and the the only number we want to see there this isn't like you know math or something where you're reading where you you understand that maybe not every student's gonna hit the top of the scale but we zero suicidal ideation and uh and self-harm is what we're shooting for absolutely you know again we're shooting for that in math and um in english but the stakes are a heck of a lot higher here and so so uh the uh they uh they gave a stat of you know one in two students one or two students uh four and a half percent i think in 2020 had some type of mental disorder so i guess as we probably don't know there might be some children out there struggling so i expect reports like this will reach out to those kids sooner or later so you might see more help but we're actually helping them get identified sooner uh empowering them to get help so uh i think this is very positive uh i i you know i'm not sure what a school district is doing because it seems like a lot of school districts uh boards are not blindsided by the mental health crisis but when i was trying to figure out how to staff up and where to start so cares to see how this this moves forward and gets reports back on for sure all right great jeff if i could just say one one more thing i think the early intervention piece is so important as well because we do want to get to kids before they reach a mental health crisis right and so this this will help that happen so i just wanted to highlight um what you just said thanks michelle i appreciate you asking if you could jump in but i know there's no saying no to you on the topic so just go ahead the floor is always yours so thank you for joining us sorry for disrupting your dog and your evening but i appreciate that thank you guys very much [Music] hey thanks you guys um next up with a series of informational items we're going to start um with a question um what are students reading in the elementary level and what skills are they learning [Music] so kevin and anne marie wintenberg and mary is a reading round specialist a really crypto instruction assessment specialist over at highland school and they're both here today to share information about what kids are reading at the elementary level so if you want to elaborate and let you know about what's being taught differently potentially between the schools i think it's a good place to bring that up with the kaizen is yeah i think that the letters that we got were from preschool okay from from preschool so i think that they were responding to things they had heard out in the community and were curious about our curriculum and if it's different in different schools um and so i think the things that anne marie and share today will really show that we have one curriculum and one curriculum for for all of our schools um also some things that i think were talked about at our elementary showcase relative to how we instruct for reading how that um how that ties into phonics how that ties into spelling how that ties into grammar so so a little bit tied into you know reading in general but i think this is more specific about the the content and the skills so beautiful yeah that helps tony oh just collaborate got it so first of all i appreciate uh emery uh coming tonight we often talk about our ram team and i don't know if recently we've had one of our rooms present here so um tonight we really just want to share uh based on some questions and for your information what are elementary students are actually reading what are they reading together as a whole class what are they reading individually and how that's shaped out and we often talk about the skills that they're learning or the standards that we're working towards so we'll actually walk through a little bit of a sample of what that looks like and give you a chance to look at that so i'm going to turn it over to ann marie first and she's going to talk a little bit about what our elementary students are reading and then i'll come in on the back end and talk a little bit more about the skills and statements and for that we've got some handouts so let me get those going in the right direction okay so if you think about what kids are reading in the elementary school it's kind of like three categories preps um the classroom libraries and radio levels so when it comes to the mentor text i'll start with kindergarten the kindergarten reading informational and literature standards all talk about the and support accounting and support these are our youngest resources getting started so they need that prompting and support the teachers are using high quality picture books many of them are caldecott winners or at least using notable authors excellent illustrations rich vocabulary and then the teachers use a picture book as a reader as a mentor text so they can model the teacher can model his or her thinking and how they're applying the standards and how they're understanding the story to help our youngest readers in grades one through six when it comes to the mentor text teachers are using the junior grade books as group mentor texts the junior grade books are a collection of the classics would be classic stories classic literature um classic authors these stories are known for winning healthcare medals newberry medals carnegie medals and among other awards the literature represents a wide variety of cultures experiences so that all our students see themselves represented in the literature in the characters or by the authors most importantly is complex literature and by complex literature we're talking about rich vocabulary um complex sentence stress a sentence syntax in other words they're not just simple sentences they're going to be longer sentences they have many clauses so with all of that being said the rich vocabulary the complex sentences the teachers are using our junior gradebook to for um to model again the standards to teach the standards using shared inquiry which basically just means having nice rich class discussions this enables all students to think deeply look into the mentor text as they read them and actually they're going to reread the entire piece of literature multiple times so that each time they're going into the into the reading they can go deeper and deeper into it the teachers are modeling and teaching the standards which kevin is going to talk about in a minute and the beauty really of the literature in these great books is that um the plot always has something unresolved so it really lends to an engaging discussion within the class i just brought one sample here um this is the second grade series so it groups the stories into in this case friendship responsibility and bravery and in your handout on the first page you will see two samples just just two random samples and again this is not the entire story it's just a page set from the first page is uh grade two miss maggie by cynthia ryland which is in the um book this one the friendship series and on the back page there's a sample of what it would look like from one of our fifth grade senior grade folks the invisible child so there were three main categories mentor text being one of them second one is our classroom library so our classroom library has a question libraries and just have a couple comments about the mentor text just going back to one of the investors email about the introducing these physically or digitally these students have physical copies of these books in this case they're often on paper because there's a lot of thinking work that we're asking students to do so they can do a lot of marking up and questioning rather than we have the books but they're almost they're often doing it on paper versions of it so they're doing a lot of the thinking work on that so just kind of comment on that piece since it uh these books is this great book style work they can look up more information [Music] have so um great books who defines the great books i mean are they classically red classed as great books or are they great books is like the name of the series but the stories or the literature selected um goes through a vetting process but it is rich literature um award-winning authors so it would be like you know they want to counter continental let me bury my little carnegie medal the american library association metal so it is award-winning works of literature do you have some titles that just uh like well yeah however like afternoon and linen by shirley jackson is in the sixth grade story you know shelly jackson well-known author mm-hmm there is essentially a story per month per grade level of books that we're doing so this is um as part of our curriculum when we get to the standards part of one of these stories full stories that students are engaging with on a monthly basis with standards so yeah and we do have those titles where i don't have a complete list of a first-year sixth grade free tonight that's why you're trying to pull up a couple samples just to give you an idea and it's nice variety with these folktales too everybody else in the shoemaker so that's the mentor tech department yeah [Music] so the second category would be the classroom libraries the classroom libraries have fiction and nonfiction books they're going to look different throughout the grade levels in kindergarten about half of the library's decodable books and by decodable books a lot of them are handprints or pioneer valleys of the two publishers and i know everybody's used to a chapter book so i actually brought a decodable book with me so the decodable books are level levels a b c d going up and they're very um very controlled for the language in the books so they in the beginning it's you know the ball is red and the next page the ball is great and then the pictures are in color it's going to help the students right but then as they go on in two little changes this is a level e so it's still pretty early but just to kind of give you an idea you know mom looked in the color by the way it's mom's shoes and mom looked in the closet are they in here she said no they are not in here so now watch when we turn the page look at the picture is going to help us mom looked under the chair so even if you couldn't decode the word chair you got the picture crew to help you are they down here said mom no they are not down here there's a lot of similarity they are not in here they are not down here so it's very subtle differences so those high frequency words are going to be over and over again to help the students so that's a decodable book and they obviously as the levels go up um the the nuances and the changes are less and less what grade level expected that's okay so this is a level e book so mainly we're going to see it in our kindergarten classes where the kids are reading an ebook okay so do age or a true abc so typically would be a kindergartner now do we have preschoolers that can handle this probably do we have first graders still working on an e yeah you do so the book is all the books and all the levels are tailored to exactly what a child needs regardless of their grade but you'll have these books in yes and we have them we have them in a way so in kindergarten i was saying like half of the library's decodable books right and half of the early chapter books now when you move into first grade it's not a third of the library's decodable books right and then two thirds are gonna be the early chapter books on this handout we included like little pictures so what does this look like so i know it's hard to see in the picture but you will see the bins so you see over here the bins are labeled c d e f and in the beginning of the year the bins start like a b c you start moving and then as the year progresses and so we don't need those a's and b's anymore and then you notice this one starts with a c d e towards the end of the year now the c's get put in the closet because we don't need those so much we need some more levels um it's also good because we want to keep the library fresh and new and inviting right we don't want to get too staggered as the library progresses from left to right you'll see that now we also have the early chapter books things like appleton nate with great young kim jansen arthur series all of those that we kind of all know and grades two through six their books now are more of the not if the second grade or third grade teacher leads to book absolutely we have those in the building we have extras depending on student need but generally two to six they're reading like the chapter books you and i know of chapter books right and i just went around and just took a few pictures you'll see in this handout the next page how it's either grouped a lot of them are grouped by author so again you get a student hooked into an author they really love a book by gary coulson well look guess what all the books in this thing are by gary polson to continue with their reading um sometimes they're grouped by just a topic in this picture up in here in the corner you'll see um fiction so somebody gets hooked into a book with fiction animals all of the books in this bin right here are fiction animals or a series the a to z um mystery series you'll see those right here and again um bernstein bears or some of the groups together in a series so that would be the um grades two to six libraries now from k to six we also have in um in the fiction section a lot of high quality picture books also because those are those are good and um and nice to read and of course don't forget that the nonfiction books are in there now the teacher these libraries how are they used teachers are using them to help students find those just right books that's a phrase a term we hear all the time um and i gotta tell you that is an art form or form within itself because you know we don't want to find a frustration a book but we're not everybody frustrated with their books but the difference between an independent level book and a instructional level book is there are such nuances that's what i think is the art form so when students are reading at their desks with their books in their hands they're reading at an independent level so it's a book that they're comfortable with that they feel success with that they feel like yes i can do it i'm enjoying it i'm loving this book when they come for a conference for a teacher now the teacher is trying to use also their instructional level book which is going to be just a tad level because that's where the teacher is coaching the student to that level so what does that mean though during those reading conferences the teachers are using the books to help the students increase their book levels apply the informational and the literature standards um that can go through what what what has to entail to happen for that could be anything from coding whether the student is learning to decode with short vowels or long vowels or looking for the root words or reflected endings to fluency which could be helping the students speed but not to speak to read really fast but to read porosities use the punctuation marks to help you with the comprehension or it could just be well we need to learn some more vocabulary words right so let's look at the word and what's the root especially with our fifth and sixth graders you know a lot of those greek and latin roots all right let's see what the word means what do we know how to apply it how to help us um the third category i started with would be just read alouds right so now when you think about a read aloud this is your listening comprehension so your listening comprehension teacher can now use a little higher of a level book because what you listen to is going to be a higher level than what you can actually have to lead right so a lot of these are um newberry metal winners but they're also we also look at books as just character traits and you know look at the character and what can we learn from that character thinking about the first week of school in first grade um wembley worried and it's a little character's name is wembley he's just so so worried at the beginning of school and obviously throughout the book that he's not worried about school he falls in love with school but then the students can apply you know lively's experience to their own another popular book wonder um in the central message in that book you know that right just being kind to everybody right being kind regardless of whatever that person goes through or looks through so those are just examples of read-alouds now in addition to those character traits you know most read-alouds are just helping build that level of reading teachers again can use that read aloud time to model the informational and literature standards model their own thinking out loud um and it's also another opportunity just to have that discussion and share the english discussions [Music] so so you've heard standards referenced a few times when you often hear us talk about statements so we thought tonight we'd walk you through a snapshot of some of the skills that students are working on while they're reading so if we take a look at this last page as a small title top sample reading progressions information text and literature i thought to use this as an example to just highlight a few different things that are are part of our standards so first of all we heard ann marie uh talk about that there are standards for both information texts and literature so we are trying to make sure our students reading guide includes both a large amount of literature as well as information text um so one uh i'll point you to well so that's that's one idea um and we'll come back to that in a minute a lot of the standards are kind of bundled in three key areas and you can see on the left hand column there's a set of standards of three standards that are really wrapped around key ideas and details the next set of three standards really around craft and structure and the last set of well not glasses but the last set of three standards in this case are really about integration of knowledge and ideas so uh there was a quote earlier tonight from from a public comment it takes years for deep reading to develop deep reading skills and we would agree with that wholeheartedly the skills on here are deep reading skills for students i would dare to say that their each standard in and of itself is is complex and it increases on complexity over the year our general progression is we zoom in on one of these standard sets on a monthly basis so we mentioned that generate books are introduced on kind of a monthly basis and we're using that time not to teach exclusively to that standard but instructionally kind of zoom in on that standard so in the beginning of the year on that first row that's actually the first standard if i'm a fourth grade student instructionally what we're going to be focusing on in the classroom is really referring to details and examples in the text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text so that's a skill that fourth graders are working on in the beginning of the year just to orient you to this a little bit that same skill you can see what the third grade version of that looks like and what the fifth grade version of that looks like and this is helpful in many friends it gives a progression of skills in this front so if i'm a teacher working with a student individually in the fourth grader i'm working with anne-marie and she has already shown me that she's pretty good at referring to details in the text to to support her thinking on those things i now know as a teacher i can push you to the next level of skill and that's not just referring back to the textual details but it's actually pulling quotes from the text because the fifth grade version of this says quote accurately and you can see how that progression of skills um from year over year will help students deepen their um their own reading on the chart or deep readers i'll also use that as a line just to note that in this case um you'll notice under key ideas and details there's an ri and an rl and the number one and the number one is just standard but the ri is reading for information and the rl is reading literature in this case the standard language for both of those is exactly the same so that's standard whether you're reading a piece of information text or you're reading literature is really the same skill the next two rows standard two you can see that sometimes there's mirrored skills for information text versus literature so if we're reading a piece of information text one of the ideas is we're going to determine the main idea of a text and explain how it's supported by key details you're going to be focusing on main idea if you're working with a non-fiction a non-textual piece of informational text if we're doing that same kind of skill in literature it's going to be determining the theme of the story and the events and details that help support that theme so there are mirrored standards for both information and literature as you go down in rows you can see our reading standard 6 is under the category the broad category of craft construction you can see we're starting to get into comparing and contrasting point of views from different stories and again i'm pointing out that if i'm working with an individual student conferencing on that and i'm a student that's struggling with a skill at a fourth grade level i know where to go previously to help them build that up so if i'm struggling to compare and contrast that point of view from different stories i'm going to go back to thinking about oh my point of view as a student might be different than the authors and using that as kind of a leverage point to move a student up in their thinking i've already had that under under my belt i'm going to really focus in on then how the narrator's or speaker's point of view influences how the events are described right so we're seeing that progression of skills over the course of years and by the time we get down to standard nine you're really seeing the integration of information across texts so in fourth grade i'm really and this this one happens to be an information version of the standard i'm integrating information from two texts so that i can write or speak about it knowledgeably and as a fifth grader i'm going to do that but not just from two texts from a wide variety of sources so um we share this with you because we've talked about standards a lot and we thought a small sampling of some of the skills that we're focusing on giving you the idea that we're working both on information text and literature at the same time that we're zooming in on kind of some of these skills on a monthly basis one thing i have yet to say is just because we might focus on standard two in october we are constantly coming back to those skills throughout the course of the year with our students emery mentioned reading conferences it is a critical part of our reading instruction that those conferences are a spot where a teacher is really helping pull out where a student is relative to all these skills and giving them coaching opportunities opportunities for students themselves to set goals to keep on growing as readers a few other things that i think are important to point out in this first of all is our belief set we believe that kids learn by reading so reading high quality literature in physical books you're seeing pictures of our classroom libraries of physical books they were copies of of our junior grade books often every single day so just like you're going to get better at soccer by playing soccer on the field every day we believe that about reading it is a foundation in fact when a student is not quite growing as a reader in the way that we want the very first thing we ask is are they reading every day for the kind of amount of time that's going to make a difference the next thing we're then asking is great what are they reading because emory talked about this independent level frustration love construction level combination that we're working on so we thought by giving a little bit of a snapshot of what we're reading and some of the skills that we're working on a little bit of a picture about uh um so i love i love the library i really do it's just a little snippet i know it's um it goes beyond just teaching about reading and reading comprehension it's sorting it's it's recognizing that books can be put in categories um but i i look at this and and i i appreciate honing in on skills and trying to develop individual skills um i think perhaps one of mr best was concerned i i don't want to speak to him and not probably here and i hope he does respond to me here all of us but um do we take a step back and look at the whole picture because i i mean i'm wondering how do you get to these answers on key ideas is it with prompts uh you know um asking the uh let's go to refer to details and examples in the text from explaining what the text says explicitly and withdrawing inference it's like does the teacher ask a targeted question to get the child back into the book so he or she can answer that question and doesn't that in a way um kind of encouraged the child to look for the trees not the whole forest you know i mean to see the beauty of the whole novel and the progression of the character over the course of the whole novel and again i'm just speaking from the literary literature point of view but um you know to see um how events of the book have developed that character as well i mean that's that's the beauty of reading a good rich text do you i don't know if that makes sense no it makes perfect sense yeah go for it sure so if the balance both right we do want the student to enjoy the entire piece of literature that whole book right but when you sit in your conference with that student think about that book that's going to be a few conferences over time so how does the teacher or how do you know how to get exposed to this my first thought as you were talking was it's a gradual release so when a standard whichever one it is that the teacher is currently instructing on first it's going to start with the body let me all right let's kind of do it together and then we kind of gradually release over time until the student does it independently so that's the teaching of a standard now when you sit in conference with a student we do want them to fall in love with the whole book and and see the development of the whole book and how a character develops or you know the little nuances and um anna green gables and her witty personality and her vocabulary that she brings in and one of the ways that we help students really get into the book and understand it is hey by the way did you notice these details hey what's the theme of this story or hey you know whatever standard they're working on at the time so it's a combination of books and is someone that's done the whole class sure so so some of the some of the whole class comes from a whole class dive into a junior grade book so right so some of this is done by that shared inquiry with students paired with teacher modeling of their thinking and then on their independent reading there and through conferencing they're applying that so i'm going to teach the whole class with the mentor text but when i sit with mike in conference and i sit with scott in conference they may be reading a little different levels so that i will coach the same standard like on his level scotland [Music] working with a partnership class but that that individual coaching is at the conferences on the street as well and kind of faith the the progression of these down the page because we're often starting with making sure students are understanding the text itself and then working their way to deeper levels context so that's literally how these are you know i plucked a couple of them for examples here but that's the vertical regression stages one through nine on this it's it's taking let's start with kind of what's in the text and then work to that deeper level if i were to give you a broad brushstroke of like how it's laid out um so that's and we're working the standard that we haven't mentioned you have cnn 10 which is working on increasingly complex texts over time so within a grade level you're already working on a range of complex types you've heard ann marie say boy when we're doing reloads including some of these junior great books that's that's work that's up here thinking more advice i'm also going to be working individually right where i am in an independent and instructional level so we've got a wide range within a grade level what we're instructing well with for students and then as the great all those move up um yeah the text and and it has to so um the uh but if you look at row two candies and details um as a fourth grader i'm going to determine the main idea of a text as a fifth grader i'm going to determine two aware more main ideas out of a text students have to be reading texts that have multiple main ideas which is only going to come if you're reading more complex texts so we have to have good good books in front of students and you can imagine the that's the information inside the literature side of that like really dealing with multiple themes of stories multiple characters developing becoming um emory noted one of the qualities of junior great books that i would also say of other books that we're reading is there's so open-endedness to some of what's going to you know some of the literature that students are reading so really helping them do the deep dive into that so we have to have the books yes and the library um keeping the libraries fresh this these are actually from part of documents that we provide for teachers on how to organize their library so this is some pictures a little bit bigger but the text on those guides for teachers this is a constant refresh um within the school year okay we want to make sure these libraries are are fresh but across the school year so you can imagine when teachers are changing grade levels or a teacher retires or or someone has been in the room for for 15 years accumulation of luxury we have to keep these organized and visible and fresh in a way that they're going to grab students and that is that's not as easy work as companies it's a constant part of of what we try to do and the other one of the other challenges with that is um we really want students have really good rates literature we also want students have good informational text the informational text is tough to have a good robust set in the class that's current and is that's that's a constant um is there an interest that looks changing sure sure and just the volume of really good texts that have all the qualities that we want at their level is just not as not as voluminous as on the literature side so those are that's a lot of the active work we're doing um because it's important that we have to have good books in front of kids and and yes the vast vast vast majority of what students are reading um our physical books on a daily basis well and i think that has been a concern not just mr district a lot of others because they're just that i know my reading has changed because of this thing sure um and when you introduce it at a very young age um it's the electronic tests it's um i i'm not so sure we know what we're creating so to speak but uh especially as the you know the brain itself is developing so um the fact that they have those books and and um there's they're still current which is lovely but um and one other thing i'm concerned about and this is just an observation when my son was in first grade um i the big thing was the five finger rule you you know you had to identify five words on page or something and he couldn't and he's in the library and his teacher humiliated him because he could get only great and he made him put the book back and i wasn't happy with the teacher if he wants to read more a piece you're gonna let him but um i just wanna we're can without taking a lot of time how does the teacher guide a student who's probably picked above his level but with without embarrassing him because my son doesn't like reading anymore at all and it's unfortunate and i would hate that to happen to any child so that balancing of finding that just right book on a whole i can't expect it speaks to that one experience but on a whole it happens during the reading conference it's one-on-one private conference between the teacher and the student and when i said it was an art form it really is because sometimes there is a student who is like so motivated to read a particular book that may be a little challenging but that's why you need that professional judgment because if that motivation is there you want to capitalize on it um and kind of go with it but it's a gentle conversation sure and then i'll say one other related thing is students are reading a lot every day so if i'm working with emory and she's in the book above um where we're really going to make construction gains on reading because it's it's a struggle it's a struggle at this moment in time um i'm going to keep her with that book uh uh especially if she's like a good chunk of the way through it because i know next week we're going to be in another book and i'm going to hit my instructional what we're trying to get out of destruction at that point for those very kind of reasons right now if that's happening too often too much but if anne-marie's motivated to read this book and she's in it and it's in in a lot of ways it's a struggle but she's moving agreement on that that agency around reading is something that's really important to to promote um and to encourage so yes that's that's very much on their minds and we're not staying in these books for six or seven months right we're we're getting kids kids through books so every teacher in that classroom and and i have that situation then um especially if there's a motivation you're just there great we're gonna have at it but i'm also gonna make sure that i'm doing that coaching conversation next time around the world well rest assured it wasn't here it was yeah and sometimes unintentionally but you also notice that that shift to how the books are organized not once we get out of those really early readers is an important part of a feature of our libraries for some of those reasons so question observation so uh we had our open forum back in october last uh we have some parents there curriculum and it was there was one uh parent who was wondering why uh i think her children are second grade why they had a chromebook and we don't give a quote books to early uh students in early grades the reason their childhood chromebook is the whole class was quarantined for coping so for those two weeks that i think went home but generally this is not an issue at very great levels there's plenty of textbooks besides that have you heard any concerns from other parents with kids in the school system that there's too much time on these computers especially in the uh obviously second grade up through the middle school level what's the feedback been beyond about use of chromebook yeah uh ebooks versus textbooks i don't have a lot of parent comments about chromebooks versus ebooks we have devices for all our kids as you'll hear when we move on to technology kindergarten up through but that was really more about this cold here and and having them available but our teachers are not um looking to to do more time on them yeah and by no means and again the 2021 school year was very unique because we were about learning hybrid synchronous learning so we did get chrome we didn't get the devices out as possible but that in no way is indication that we're on a path to replace textbooks with correct people just across the board that's just not happening so if i can add to that the students reading diet situationally may have had more digital over over the last year and a half especially because of that a point of emphasis with teachers in fact amber and i were talking today just about just about some individual situations so yes we our point of emphasis with teachers is making sure that wherever possibilities are reading a digital text or an e-book as opposed to not reading anything in the face of kind of the situations that we are dealing with we're going to have kids reading that and we have small pockets of kids quarantining and you know if parents can make it to the school we're making little packets not only with you know math materials and everything else they need but both take home with me but as a point of last resort yes if you have to you have to try to send help even to a quarantine kids send the books over but that's been a point of emphasis um for our teachers coming back and to make sure that that that reading guide comes back into the kind of on balance i like the portion of it well actually we use that a lot with you know that we want the reading to be a healthy diet yeah um going back to your point also the other extreme when students read books are too easy and too easy and too easy you know we talk about that healthy diet and sometimes this is a cupcake book so you want to have a healthy diet cupcake cook every once in a while it is fun you're not going to grow up unless you're getting to that stretch and you can maintain another bite does the annotating the text [Music] and the kids if they're really having trouble and they can't decode or use those skills independently they'll take their plastic overlay they take their whitening voice and they spot the you know spot the vowel is it long or short you sound it out and then they do their little so away from [Music] that is to say do all school districts i think going back in and finding the evidence and going back in and finding things in the text that support things is the way working through thinking about annotation but even just jotting their ideas or putting an explanation point what a question about this that's just helping students put their thinking on the paper as we're trying to help them develop that thinking you'll see a lot of times kids come in with their independent reading books on sticky notes all over it because maybe the goal that they were working on was tricky vocabulary words or maybe it was the main idea and so they will use that to mark it up other we got a still a lot to cover and i don't want to rush this and it's a great conversation but um so but i do want to ask and it may be a topic for later discussion how um you've only given us the sampling of the skills um and the standards but in terms of the actual structure so the grammar the spelling and all of that um how the teachers will use the books to then develop proper grammar proper spelling proper sentence structure if we could at some point revisit this um you know and at what point do we expect you don't expect a perfect paper out of a first grader but you certainly expect a higher standard out of a fifth grader um you know how i would love to come back and look at that and and see how we take what we use the the artist to shape the artist so sure that's a lot of bridge between our reading and writing we're reading everything right yes how we use the literature if we share um if we share out with other grade level bands in future meetings we can probably incorporate the ideas that it would apply to elementary too in in that conversation okay great thank you yeah sure yeah thank you you guys all said yes great thank you thank you for being here emery did a little juggling to [Music] all right um data privacy is another small topic perspective so i think you've met mike papa who is our technology director scott conway and tommy have i think the last time we had a meeting with all of you it was during token um and we were talking about devices and a number of other things so i'm really appreciative that all three of them here tonight to give you a real overview of both some of our history with data privacy and answer your questions related to tonight data privacy is a rather large topic um scott was going to start off by kind of explaining what the current state of law is what we do to comply with that law which we were way out ahead of it is it's a it's a very broad topic and the few materials that i've presented here for you really demonstrate a progression of best practices and what we employ here in cheshire public schools a little bit of history on this the connecticut data privacy law was initially supposed to be enacted in july of 2016.
[Music] item two conference on litigation government code section five four nine five six point nine subsection a current litigation seven cases one eight one three nine five two one nine zero seven one seven two two zero one one one one eight three two zero two nine five six two zero two three three six six two zero one three three nine six two one one one three oh three government code section five four nine five four point five subsection c five four nine five six point nine subsection d and two and e one anticipated litigation three cases 218 1907 2020 2105 2020 2107.
so it's a little bit over budget but those items one through seven um again uh i'd say just a little bit more than what uh i was hoping to do but jeremy can maybe even speak to the price of concrete because if i remember right it's going up ten dollars a cubic yard from january one um they're projecting the cement in the concrete is projected to up at least 10 yards there i know my rebar pricing last year if you're if you break that down in the even square foot price it is considerably more than last year rebar last year i believe was five and a quarter by fifty ish when i buy a semi load this year it was nine and a quarter and they told me my price was only good for one day and that was two weeks ago when we did this so it's the same exact same situation anything that is metal or um fuel driven put your water out there yes and our vendors are not they're not holding anything so i mean say you was awarded to us i would like to order my remarks tomorrow because i don't know what it's going to be good because i was just going to ask that because like ronnie just run up so if we were to award you the bid i mean if he was i don't want you to come back and say hey i need you if you want to warn me that [Music] as close as we can the high school parking lot this is where the current is right we're not yeah we are continuing yeah we are improving um there's areas that we're continuing as you can see in the high school area high school parking lot area there there are just new areas that we are adding actually it's not adding on it it's taking the old and replacing it yeah okay no it's not new it's not an additional it's removable of old bad concrete yeah yeah we talked about um there are some other random spots that really need some attention but it's like we've been going every year consecutive you know doing the front of stadium keep going it's like do you skip this piece and go ahead and do this one and i come back to this one in a few years or do you just keep yeah but that's one of the things if you don't just keep doing it every year you'll never go afford to do it all at once oh yeah yeah no way so yeah what are you looking at doing in front of the burlington middle school that's one of the middle schools so maine enters the sidewalk yeah it's from his ruts and i think everything else around there has already been replaced in previous years this is the last of the last of them improvements there so so why is good parking lot ten thousand dollars higher on your bid versus their bid are they lowballing us there or what's the difference bhs parking the bhs park number seven project seven right it's a little over ten thousand higher um my vendor that i'm using for the concrete was a hundred and twenty eight dollars a yard i do have another price from a different vendor that i would rather not use because they use fly ash full slag and other stuff as fillers and it's 95 a yard i am using the higher price vendor from straight c not only and i do have them documents if you'd like to see them so a tougher product for that 110 i would not use anything with fillers it really is it's just fillers to take heat up some weight in the concrete i mean they put cold slag fly ash all sorts of stuff in there we use a straight sea menstruation and i don't know if that's the case with the other vendor with precision if they're using a different product i i don't know for sure when you look at them again in terms of okay you have one project that's a different price but then you see maybe three others that are less from like from burlington and strategy and they're like seven thousand yeah it varies um but other questions or comments that you have to make a motion to prove the concrete amount of 159 372 from burn construction inc for projects one through seven a second so motion segment for proven concrete bid with you load our computers and i'll say if jeremy and sean you guys want to stay here you're welcome to say but if you need to get going we totally understand next item for contract approval is [Music] thank you guys there are some information on the bid recommendation and some summary of the whole landing system okay mr watkins took the lead on this because eight different vendors uh i i turned it over to him to ask for not only uh coaches but uh some more i would say whatever you tell me who else you've got to do uh mr watkins well i talked with i talked with the two vendors i thought had had the most record bowl talked to several different schools each had one with one landing system one of them they're both very good landing systems they both met all the big specs um talked with a couple of pole vault coaches that have had kids that are you know state level 14 and 15 foot old walters their recommendation was always if you want to go as deep as you can and then over from the vault box back as deep as you possibly can it's just safer so the one map has a little bit it's about eight inches further or longer i guess you recall it from the ball box back to the end of the mat a couple of the coaches are sold that's what they have on the ucs mat i talked to another school a.d at another school group they just bought a richie and they're very happy with it they both meet all the standards as far as federation and acacia standards the one thing that some of the coaches talk about in the ucs mat as opposed to richie is i guess you would call a more gradual taper around the vault box area and they they believe there's less rebound effect one the steeper it is and a lot of mats are square kids will hit on that edge that actually balances a little bit this has a gentle taper so they do get some of the slide so they think it's safer i i don't know what are the questions though that's the information i gained um both companies said they can deliver they want to have a longer warranty than the other so you're saying one says eight inches deeper yeah [Music] you have the one vulture who sometimes gets close to getting off the back just being survived is that the original replacement that's it was in capital outlay for either this year good no good question good question but it is uh the weather cover we you know duct tape and bailing wires we've been keeping that thing together and unfortunately we figured out your system to strap them down but you guys know kansas wins suddenly yeah previous times you just bolt them down sometimes they get free so and over time they do sit out the material underneath which is a vinyl it will get holes and everything so that that foam you are more of an expert on pole vaults than when you entered the wall landing systems yeah so which one at the end of the day we did the recommendation for the united cannabis and slain company which is ucs do they stay out year round no once when season's over they go back up and they're suspended and what you call those things those platforms underneath the stadium so they're off the ground yeah so they have a chance that there isn't anybody without a chance to drain out okay yeah so they go out about the second week of the season and then as soon as they're done there's some very large like scaffolding shelving in underneath the football stadium that helps protect our our mats for longevity and that scaffolding won't fit that yes okay yeah we can landing system in the amount of 22 490 from united canvas in sling and we moved yes where's your passes firing he's on to the personnel section of the agenda there's an item there for the executive session for some time if anybody wants to go back and talk okay okay it looks like for life promotion for an executive session we'll move on to the superintendent contract a commercial approved contractor craig marshall superintendent for the 2022-23 and 2022-24 schools motion second floor superintendent contract and we'll go to our computers motion passes 4-1 move on to item c for principal contracts moved to pre-play contract with stacey reid high school principal dave watkins high school assistant principal slash athletic director matthew spring middle school principal and darvo elementary school principal for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years second motion second for your principal contracts you vote on our computers again motion passes 4-1 move on to certified director contracts make a motion to approve a contract with lindsey graff special education director doug vander linden technology director and craig coleman assistant technology director for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 school years motion for certified director contracts motion passes 4-1 move on to the retirement personality i'll make a motion accepted time request of susan clarks with regret is off secretary effective january 1 2022.
so it was 30 more this year yeah so that's the main reason why but it's going to eventually once baby it should fluctuate out for stop numbers well and the town just keeps on building more and more problems right well they think that like i said i've been on a board since we started the program um i'm sad to see that it has to go on that day that it seems to be going in that direction but um can we as a board think about keeping the academies there you go [Music] when's the application process for next year right we're already in the middle of it it's either i start to accept these kids or i have to tell them that we're not part of the program so you have applications already i'm sitting on the desk waiting for either approved i think we let the kids come in one more year and then we said i mean if you've got children that have already applied yeah is it fair to cut their leg you know well i mean they're not here no but they're open to me for how many cities but we also have like eight to ten kids that live in town that need it if we need space like i get what you're saying yeah but the extra money could get us also what we need you know do something to get this you know finish what we need a lot yeah i mean i think the board has always kind of prided itself in keeping small class sizes as one of the objectives i know we talked about years ago and i would hate to see us not be able to provide that in high school as well simply because we're now starting to get a little more about it well real quick on average our freshman class makes up another like to go up 28 30.
and that is something that has been 10 15 years since the last permanent benefit increase so all of these things are a result of asrs their investments doing well and i've always say that asrs is one of the best funded pensions in the country not just arizona in the country and so um and that's why their rates so high they want to make sure that they can actually pay out what they say they're gonna pay out so um but um they're it's it's good to see things starting to go down when they've been going up for a long time so that's asrs um more good news we met last week with our kairos health insurance representative and our loss ratio is actually very good it's like in an 80 range so we're paying out 80 of what i'm sorry kairos is paying out 80 of what they're taking in from premiums for us which is good news um if it was higher or if it was over 100 they may have hit us with a large increase this is probably just going to be this means it's probably only going to be a um inflation increase that could be scary well yeah inflation's running five to six percent right now but you know we've seen 20 increases in the past and um and john correct me if i'm wrong asrs is our largest single po that we have uh the vendor that we pay them other than salaries it's the the the health insurance capital is our largest key purchase order over a million dollars it goes to kairos every year so a 20 increase is 200 so that is actually a um it's good to hear yes um the january government board meeting is on the 10th i will not be here um cindy's going to take over i have a family event in san diego that day so i will not be able to be here but we'll be here prior to the other week prior end of the semester this week marks the end of the semester for district schools starting tomorrow um china by high school is going to be on early release three-hour early release i understand that will allow them to do final exams over the next three days and on thursday which is our last day of the semester all schools k-12 are on an early release three hours and i don't think we have preschool on that day if i if i recall that they just canceled preschool because they can't do the afternoon and so they just cancel preschool together so um it's thursday k-12 we are out three hours early so um families need to be prepared for that and then i want um last week we honored our staff of the quarter at territorial we had our teacher was carly pruitt and our staff member was connie olson at del rio our teacher was beverly cassane and our staff member was christina sheriff heritage the teacher was nancy morgan our staff was cody aschenbrenner at the high school we had kathleen ryman as our teacher lucy swope as our staff member and in the room our district representative was nicole burdette [Music] who's been managing our special ed we'll say woes um the best to her of her ability but above and beyond what anyone could ask so anyone could ask so she was our district staff of the staff member of the month and then i want to thank again donna webb from jeds who was the sponsor of our staff of the quarter program each person recognized received a jed's gift certificate and some kind of booty so from dad's and the dead's goodies are out of this world so they were very lucky yeah so that's my report i don't know if anyone has any questions comments or concerns questions thank you very informative item 7c one is our financial reports for activity from october 31st yes president is complete and there's a number though property taxes if you look at that second sheet that roughly taxes with about 1.24 million and i did the report on december 2nd weren't added into the month of november so now they're there so you'll see a nice bump in property tax and state equalization in the december report that you could save belongs to november i just like to do them at the end of november these reports so it's a little shinier that the overall cash on page three there shows 2.7 million is closer to 4.3 so once you add that property tax just so you know there's a if they if they post it back on december 5th and i've already trained these reports out on december 3rd i could go back and get into your work right before the meetings but as long as you know sometimes those property tax months november and may i'll just say this there's more coming so what's the next report uh overall activity and remember uh look at cash funds uh we've got contracting really closely 616 000 in our cash funds and that's you have to remember we've mentioned this before that is budget balance because we included conferences as if it were actual expenses and lose cash flows and it's not always the case like if you look at food service 1.4 million during conference that's very likely that will be spent but there's other ones that we've been covered that haven't necessarily been spent yet we've just got deals in place 2.27 of the operating budget is available on our budget summary here and i'd say that's that's going to increase as our budget goes up from the 14 right now it's 15.5 million it goes up to 16.3 the incumbents the amount available will go up as a percentage that will be closer to three and a half percent so is that budget climbs that may turn down so last year's 14.4 million this year's 15.5 this year's revised with all these student accounts 16.3 so that's where we're at for operating and just as i move further back into cash balances all funds that's where i got the 2.7 million and it's closer right now at the end of the number 4.3 once the property and authorization so overall if you look at the percent expended here to date in our operating fund if you look at the days going by operating fund is adding expenses for the month to remember 5.5 million um as a percentage of 69's just under 30 and we're closer to 45 percent of the days gone in november so we liked a little drag there at 45 of the days were gone and 55 percent of the budget was spent we wouldn't like that we are at about 39 percent of the budget spent and 45 percent of these and then you know as much as going up so i think you have some sound financial position here hopefully the budget will remain and the legislature will do what they need to do in the spring and keep the 16 point treatment and i don't have anything else for you to addre [Music] um 123 908 you see expenses of 10 500.
can i give a motion so thank you um any questions for for sean um how you know this is going to come up later with the first reading from the first reading um is there anything that we have to do um in terms of you should ask about that at the first readings in terms of accepting the audit or in terms of the uh proposal that's out there yeah it gets the two together really i mean no so what will happen is with the change in our accounting um uh our the way we're um accounting so as as we move to a modified accrual basis um the new auditors should they be different we'll review this year's audit make some adjustments to restate them in line with the modified accrual basis um and then move forward with uh fiscal years 22's um audit on an accrual basis i'm not about to go business okay i'm sorry any other questions were shown about this the audit report for life did they have any suggestions for improvement uh no not on this one would you please call the board certainly okay uh thank you very much um and next one is um really something that is a matter of fact that we have to do um in 2018 the illinois legislature passed um some changes to the pension code that required uh trs which is our teacher's retirement system to develop an optional defined contribution plan as soon as practical uh well as soon as practical is january 1st of 2022 um they've decided to go with voya um the really the the i guess the the hiccup in this for us is that um this is an opt um out not an opt in for new employees so new employees will automatically be um enrolled in this program and we'll have to opt out um and the only reason i say that is an issue is because of our current collective bargaining unit uh our collective bargaining agreement and um the incentive that we have for our staff to save on their own but this will not cost the district anything other than just uh some time and energy on my part to manage uh and make sure that nobody goes over their contribution limits for the year because regardless of whether they're in trs plan or stevenson's plan there are federal limits that they have to follow so tonight we are recommending that the board of education approve the participation agreement for the supplemental savings plan with trs of illinois as presented can you have a motion from the left side i got two over there um okay any other questions for sean on this i have a question sure are those federal regular federal rules governing the top side or the bottom side top side okay so is this going to be pulled together pooled together so a an employee no this will not be part of our plan that we have with fidelity um equitable and uh lincoln investments well i mean it is uh stevenson's um all pulled together with everybody else it's going to be poor with other schools so they have a bigger pool rather than you running your own dc investment plan um so voyo will manage the entire plan for the entire state of illinois yes but remember contributions are not mandatory they're completely optional for the members sorry you misunderstood that okay uh would you pull the board please shang hi brass hi why is fruit hi hi well hi where's something hi who's i know hi carrie's seven or nine uh last thing i have uh for approval tonight there are the student fees for the 22-23 school year we are recommending no change when it comes to the student fees for the school year um they are currently at 350 per student we are recommending that they stay that um we are um though however recommending an increase in our drivers education fee for the summer school and this is only the behind the wheel portion we would like to increase it from 325 dollars to 50 dollars or excuse me 350.