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our average years of experience per teacher is for last year was 11.9 years and we had seven of our teachers were within their first three years of teaching so with that being said are there any questions on the auditor general's report on our on our spending i know it kind of went by kind of quickly a couple um on the on the food service cost per meal um we also average significantly less on meals per student yes than either the i mean we're almost half on a peer average that's something that we really need to look at um i'm not sure what happened with that with our record keeping with the students for last year because i know that we were keeping track of every student that came in because we were on the summer food program for the entire school year so our reimbursement rate for per student was much higher so i'm not sure why it's at 89 meals um one of the things i can attest our higher cost to is everything is is pre-made it's not it's not nothing is pre-made everything unless it's me running the kitchen with mr lincoln and we do everything we can to get pre-made so everything everything that our kitchen staff does is recipe and put together so it's not nut we're not serving kids reheated food that we're you know buying out and everything else so everything is fixed with on-site okay and um when you were just talking about the average teacher salaries the prop 301 money would not be included in the state energy so the gap is a little bit productive it's it's well it's hard to say what everybody else because not everybody has the same proper real one plan that's non-relevant right continental gives out as close to 100 of 301 money as possible where some districts may give out only 40 50 so to to actually make that compar i mean yes i am embellishing the numbers a little bit by saying that 7 000 plus 42 000 is a 49 dollar salary based on the forty nine thousand salaries for the state right because i don't know you know okay if they threw in an average 301 payout maybe that would that would adjust that a little bit more do you know what uh schools are in our peer average in our career groups i sent you that last year i don't think the group has changed if i can look into it i think that listed 11 or something there were quite a few there were or not the district page but the um the i think it's just the state page um where it has every single district listed on the back is that there are the appendixes and that will tell you who what peer group 10-2 is or whatever and the final comment is just i mean i was floored where i saw this 13.6 students for teaching i mean that's getting down to some of the things we chatted about being a goal i also clicked on students per teacher and that does not include non-certificate so which would tell me that according to this report our numbers would even be less than 13.6 on a first per teacher basis if we included the non-certificated teachers that are on staff so all of our teachers are considered certificated because even if they're in a program working towards their elementary certification they still are state approved to be teachers so they are still considered certificated teachers so they wouldn't be so what would be a what would be a non-certification long term a long term sub okay no we don't have any what's okay to me on this report is that they don't report like um peers in this teacher's salary section no you know they they reported everywhere else but in that spot so then we have to do our own homework in terms of looking at teachers selling districts you might have answered this but the teachers per student does that include the support services like title one or anything like that but they look at the number of special education teachers that we have and so with it then they just average all the kids and all regardless of service needed i also noticed that when we looked at our um when you look at students per administrative position they're pretty often the state average is 63 the peer average is 52 and we're at 44. 44 students per administrative position in a very small district and then you couple that with the square footage that we have per student and then you take it down and you look at the students per teacher and so it's really begs the question of we must not have full classrooms and we have lots of space one class so if we were looking at expansion it looks like we really don't need to look at that if we just take those three things and put them together we have you know 44 students per administrator so we have what would be deemed as a heavy administrative burden coupled with 207 000 or 207 square feet per student versus our peer average at 182 our state average at 171 and then we're showing students per teacher at 13.6 and yet when we had the conversation about my my statement that i think we ought to work toward having 14 students in a class it was like that that's impossible we could never do that and yet we are doing it i think that's that's off because there's fewer kids in the special education classes could that be skewing the average because we're including special education yes because if we took normal grade level classrooms right now then we would have we would need another teacher per grade level to lower the class size to 14.
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never got back up where it was in the early 2000s until the pandemic so you can see there that same story as north first semester which was almost all remote was actually turned out to be a little bit lower than second semester so first semester we had 112 students um accumulate 274 fs which put us back up at 16 percent and then we were at 17 the second semester but this fall we were down to 57 students with 91 f's and at 9 which is the lowest we've ever been except for that one year in 9 10. so um obviously there's room for improvement but it's pretty exciting to drop that number almost in half so so that's where we're at right now all right so questions for georgia or ryan all right thank you for all of your work and thank you for the work of everybody you lead all right hybrid block schedule as the board knows this is an action item later this evening uh we had a 90-minute discussion on this two weeks ago so i i was hoping not to replicate that the whole conversation with the board but i did want to knowing that you were going to hear about the strategic plan this evening i did want to take an opportunity to point out some crossovers and how important this new block schedule is to accomplishing the directions that are in the strategic plan one of the things you saw in that strategic plan tonight are some core themes that ran through it was ensuring that things happen not leaving it to chance right being intentional about what we do and that there's tier one supports that every student gets a same basic baseline set of skills the schedule that we're producing through that access period and through that resource period are where we create time to do those things my grandfather always used to tell me you show what is important to you by where you spend your time because the one thing in your life you can never get more of is time that's it so never call up grandpa and tell him you didn't have time to call him but one of the things the essential thing that we're doing in this schedule is creating space and time for all of these things that you heard about tonight to actually occur and not leave it to chance that they occur but program them in as gina discussed with you at our last meeting all of the different things that fit in there um so some key pieces that you heard tonight actively asking for information beyond college these are all things that are built into this access and resource period pathways internships meeting with employers businesses in the community the idea of a growth continuum that we're building in lessons and are being intentional about student accountability and resiliency and building in time for social emotional supports that there's post-secondary planning occurring during this time and that we can help our students see beyond graduation to post-secondary and life kind of opportunities that are going to be there and that students engage actively in that rather than being invited to come during that time we're building it in they're going to do this right we're not leaving it to chance that we talk about school life balance and how to manage their time and executive functioning and those kinds of things how to better live in harmony between your responsibilities and the things that are are driving your time that we are creating time for students to work together and to know one another and for adults to know what they're doing and want to do the idea of you're going to stack year after year with that same teacher in access that will get this opportunity to see you grow over time and to help shape that growth and really trying to build those opportunities so students know for the rest of their life that they're both going to be learning and they're both going to be working and it doesn't matter what order those things occur in but they're going to be doing those right that's the goal of making it through high school and going on in your life all right so uh we talked a lot last uh time about this um i do gene and i didn't bring any other greater presentation than that just we're here to answer any of your last minute questions that you have before we ask the question later on in the board meeting um i'll just open the floor up for are there any last minute things that gina and i can answer for you i just worry that there's too much down time it just having a senior next year she's already expressed you know that she's gonna aim for a sixth period lunch in an eighth period study hall and she can leave at 1 30 on wednesdays and thursdays yeah i don't know if that opportunity is going to present itself i understand but i mean that's that's her that's her vision of you know what this what this looks like i think it's a misconception that there's going to be a lot of downtime because we talked about it last time that monday tuesday friday are just like they are now except that really with you know like that's the 20 starting at 8 20 instead of eight o'clock is sort of you know like if you looked at it as right now they lose an hour and 20 minutes or whatever of instruction on mondays because they come in late um that offsets that offset correct but the so on the blockchain of the resource right remember on the block day that lunch period that falls in seventh and eighth period is a shorter lunch period the lunch what they did but the resources correct but that's where they get that so there's two shorter lunch periods in one longer resource period of which we're taking half of it right so it's a shorter lunch period then you get some of that time back in the resource period it it's close to how it averages out it's a restructuring of that time now and yes it's re-blocked in different ways but it's not necessarily an aggregate significant change it's a it's a structural change could i'm sorry let me interrupt could you just finish your thought because conversation i kind of like lost track of what you were trying to say well let's just say so also let's say the lunch is you're like in thirds and that so you might have the first sort of segment the second or the third so let's say you have the third and then you have resource sure like then you're done but you're not because you would have your lunch period then you would go to the instructional activity for the first half of resource then the second half of resource you would have time so there's gonna juniors and seniors are gonna be held to having to go to an instructional activity and not just leave well it'll be a mix it'll be a mix there'll be some days where they could just leave but there's going to be days where there's going to be required instructional activities as well and it's not every senior right seniors in good standing yeah with parental permission with transportation with all of those things which students can do right now every eighth period of the day right it's just restructured into how it falls over the the flow of the week but right now we have seniors that can leave eighth period and we've always had that right yeah and or come in after correct or come in late so it's just i guess it sort of falls maybe to the student that you certainly i you know i sort of feel like what if the elective is a study hall or is that for sure oh it could happen yeah so then you you i mean it happens now though but you look at it over the course of the week rather than a single day right so yes you'll have two days with longer blocks of time and those if a student doesn't have something scheduled into that time that's a longer chunk of time where that occurs but when you look at the other way now this is only happening four days a week rather than five days a week so it's a restructuring of similar times is it pretty you know is it 50 50 that they might have some i mean i guess it's like every student's schedule is unique yeah but i mean what if they have i mean you're planning like what if what if that opportunity is only once or twice a month or you know i mean is the objective to speak to keep them there or we're still working on resource in terms of the actual schedule um whether or not we'll have opportunities every single week probably not but we're not looking at something that's once a month okay right so um and we have a lot of different suggestions it's one of the same issues we're running into with access which is everything's important which it is and much of it needs to occur in the beginning of the school year so a lot of it's a little bit of balancing are you following a model that we could look at like you know this school does this go see what they're you know because i i know a lot of schools that do a formal block schedule you know like the a and the b and you can you know take a class in a semester a year class and a semester and that's not what we're talking about no but i have not had i have not heard of a lot of schools yes we've talked to other schools that have similar programming so for example the main schools island park deerfield evanston naperville has a similar access program so yeah we've talked to other schools in the area that have done similar type programming you know and it's not about the struct we understand how the structure is right now it's now to genus sorting out what do we put in there and what do we eliminate because the list of things as you heard tonight during strategic planning the list of things that we would love to do in that is much greater than a number of spaces that we have plus we hear from students as students talk about their time that they would like some time to catch up and to get help and you know sometimes it is to decompress you know and that uh that we offer opportunities for those things that students are at that we hear their voice and we provide some of those opportunities over the course of a semester as well that they can go make up a test during that amount of time rather than before school or after school right so it's a balancing of all of these competing demands to put it's not for a lack of things to put in this space it's narrowing down the field and making sure that the right things are scheduled in there over the course of the year so can i just build on your question for a moment so to jenny's point i know what i've read in the literature which is i've not done an exhaustive review of the literature but i've read multiple articles about this but from our neighboring schools what have been the biggest hurdles roadblocks negative um consequences of going to this kind of schedule do we have a sense from them yeah the biggest thing is making the change without having a plan where the students are going to go is what we've heard so part of the planning for access as we shared with you last time is that students will all have a landing spot where they start from and that is something that we've heard from the other schools that if you just leave it to chance and you just hope that kids are gonna go to the right places that you know they might just choose to go hang out in the commons instead right that were intentional and that was one of the words i used about making sure that uh students go get help or invited in to get help or learn how to advocate to go get the help that they need during that time and it's structured appropriately that if a student can't structure it we help them structure it right and that's really what we've heard you know is the the downside from other class other schools the other thing was just releasing students into it without any prep work leading up to it and in the plan that they're putting together like the first three or four access periods maybe even more than that for six are all built around navigating this new schedule and this new structure making sure that students are set up to be successful in the new schedule not leaving it to chance that they'll figure it out right that we teach them the expectations and how to pull the levers of it to help them be successful in the new schedule well don't you think that this is an opportunity for let's say a student is having problems in math for that teacher and that teacher knows the kids that are having problems and say you know either send them a note or ask them in class hey you know what i've got my access period at um thursday at eighth period well they're all free at the same time all right well all students and teachers are free at access right but you know maybe he maybe they have other students coming um on wednesday and say thursday why don't you come see me at you know this amount of time and we can go over it a little bit and help you and so it's an opportunity not for the kids always to ask for help but also for teachers to ask for them to come and see them and and work with them and i think that that's what's really a big advantage and and that doesn't mean you know just the kids that need help but all all of the kids can come and and talk to their teachers right so in the last teachers contract we really pushed hard for student support right so you see a combination of things here with office hours which you heard about tonight and us taking advantage of that and sending students to those office hours right part of that is access part of that is resource right they're all of these things it's putting the late starts back in the day to give students more time to start their day every day that's part of a tier one a support that goes to all students because we know that that makes a difference for high school kids right so this schedule is really built around getting students what they need in both just general tier one supports things that every student should get and then the specific supports that each individual student needs this is how we take district 99 from an environment that has conditions in which students can succeed to an environment in which we ensure that every student has been set up to succeed how do we take this next step in that strategic plan it's this type of a schedule that allows us to do that without that you're asking for district 99 to ramp up and go to the next level in education and not providing us the time or resources or structure to make those changes right and the schedule we're under is the same schedule that students in the 70s went to school schools changed a little bit since the 70s right so we need a schedule that allows us to catch up with the expectations of teaching and learning that have developed over the last 40 50 years right yeah i mean it's the it is we've updated our facilities we've updated our programming our curriculum our supports the last thing that we really need to update is our schedule to take advantage of all of these things that we've put in as a school district to support our kids and i think it's important for our students to learn how to do that you know some of them might be shy and and you know nervous about going to see their teacher but if their teachers communicate with them and talk to them about things they're much more open to come and and get the help that they need and i think that's really important and the final thing i will add is a reminder that we are starting with program evaluation in mind right that there will be a third party evaluator evaluating this for the next two years providing feedback to the administration the board and the public about are we being successful in this and if not then you should expect the administration to be responding to the gaps that we're finding in that but we're not going to it's not going to be like wait a year and then find out if it worked you're going to find out all along how we're doing and assuming the board approves it later tonight we have our kickoff meeting for that program evaluation on friday of this week so you know we'll you we will get underway with that immediately and i i kind of want to go off something jenny said something joanna said last time and that is the kids who fall through the cracks who's accountable to make sure that the children who the the students who struggle with this or the teachers who struggle with this are are getting what they need we're getting all of us but you helped by helped us with resources with adding ryan as uh directors that we've added you've added student success coordinators tonight that help with that interventionist the board has added social additional social work support and the all the counseling and support services additions over the last five years the board has built the team of resources to be here to make sure that students yes there will be students that fall through the crack but we catch them and we intervene rather than once again leaving it up to chance the things will happen you saw that's why i thought it was essential tonight for you to see that strategic response to failures that's not letting kids slip through the cracks right i think you know all the things that you're planning to put into place all these supports there will be kids who fall through the cracks it's inevitable and um i just i i it's i can see all the benefits of this a little bit the timing is bothering me and i know how you feel about you and now is the best time but the reality is the kids who are seniors right are going to be seniors have gone through some really stressful stuff they've been through covet and coming back and going back forth and i go is this the appropriate time to do it um i know yes the appropriate time to do it would have been four years ago before the pandemics showed up right but i do feel like those kids they you know we said the last time we shouldn't do it we shouldn't have had them bear the bronte covid we shouldn't have done it and i feel like we might be doing it on the backs of these seniors i here i i understand that it's a change first of all a student's schedule in high school you know changes every year it does right and if we would have had this schedule in place before the pandemic this year would have gone better right the the the things that ryan and georgia showed up to talk about that we had to fit these supports and you know take a structure of a schedule that's not built to necessarily be adaptive and support kids they talked about how they had to change kids schedules and summer school and they didn't even talk about virtual options that they did with kids and all of all of those things don't fit into the schedules we have it now where next year schedule is built for that it's built to take that on so when we talk about supporting kids we're still supporting kids the pandemic's still going on kids are still responding to it or still stressed or still coming back from it this is the schedule that helps us finish that comeback where the current schedule we have now doesn't create any more space to do things that much differently than what we do now i might offer too that the 75 of the students that go on to college those those seniors instead of going from what we're doing right now to all of a sudden getting thrown into college where every day every semester changes completely this is this is a a transition for them this is so instead of instead of going from a place where everything is just so regimented and structured to now they figure it all out this is a way for them to gain a little bit more the world of work has changed we all know as well and students uh workers when we talk with our employers in the community they talk about they need to know how to manage their time they need to know how to advocate for themselves they need to know how to work with others that like it's this whole list of skills that's not any different than what students that go to college need to be able to do for themselves either right so i i like joanna i am concerned about the the timing the second thing is the argument is in one breath for exam is to get them ready for the world but actually when we first talked about this we talked about it being to lessen some stress where it would be an opportunity for them to get kind of some almost to slow things down a little bit to give them a time to study to give them a time to take a breath but the opposite argument of that is that is not how the world looks right so you just get in there you you have to you know kind of make it happen so i guess my my i am concerned about the timing of this the the other thing is and i know i've seen some data but i just don't feel like i've seen and i know the administration makes the decisions but just the support of the teachers and what are the students as a whole feeling how are they feeling about something like this do we feel like we have majority buy-in from both perspectives the the staff administration the staff negotiated as part of their contract the last time so the the teachers agreed to it as part of their contract negotiations so the staff as a group has voted to support this change students it's mixed and part of it is mixed because they lived through a pandemic and a lot of students when i meet with them one-on-one think that this will feel like it did to some extent when they were in the pandemic and i can't change that until they live it right and i it's hard for students to understand it until they've lived through it but in talking to schools from other districts that have recently made this change it's positive in all kinds of ways like what you talked about in stress levels for students in anxiety levels and getting the support that they need and just because we lower stress doesn't mean you eliminate stress at school there's a healthy amount of stress within schools but you need to provide time and space for students to deal with that and to get support through it and right now we leave that way too much on the student shoulders to advocate for themselves and not creating time in the day to address those concerns so when you say in the contract help me walk through that they agreed to it is it one of those things where to be in the contract you have to agree to it or they had an option to agree or disagree to it they voted on a contract which included a change to a hybrid schedule okay i just want to be sure i understand when we say that language because i'm you know did i understand what that means okay because of the ch but it was because of the changes in time for professional development and some of the changes for it wasn't that they said they saw this and said oh yes i agreed to this it was because of tweaking of time correct it's a change in working conditions so it wasn't that they saw this and it was a done deal no it was down there with a whole bunch of stuff that they had to make a decision oh this happened to be in there okay on the on the concerns over the timing um so you would be less concerned if we waited a year yeah why is that kind of what i said about senior class the the upcoming senior class has been through two years of this covenant hybrid and all that and it's been stressful and we said at that meeting well we don't want to you know put it on the back of those kids this whole burden so why are we adding this traditional if you stay in the eighth period day you're putting it on the back of kids because you're not creating the time to give them what they need right this this schedule takes it off the back of kids and makes us more actively involved and supportive and giving kids what they need and don't think that going back to school next year is not a change right it's no masks it's the pandemic is changing the world is changing like next year will not be you know 2019 right next year will be 2022 2023 and it's gonna be a new year one way or another but it's it's going back to what we were more familiar with as a as a you know community at school no math no pandemic it's going back what we were familiar with those students lived it for two-thirds of a school year they've never they will never next year seniors every year will have been different for them they had they left school on march 13 2019 their freshman year again right and then they had last year which was a mess and then they had this year which is uncertainty with kovid for the whole year and masks and different activities and all of those kinds of things next year regardless of what we go back to will be a change from the last three years this is a change for the better change for the past is a change for the past it's a change next year regardless this is how we support our kids coming back next year not by going back to what we did in 2018 the world was very different in 2018 this is the schedule that we need to support kids in 2022.
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so but this is this is what's being measured across the state the ag didn't make this up just for us so it's students per teacher is the total students attending divided by the total certified teachers so word 13.6 so when i look at other districts and i see 25 and it makes it look like taking those three metrics and piecing them together really makes it look like we're in really good shape we have adequate space with a a good teacher-student ratio and where we're heavy is on administration am i not reading this report correctly no i mean the numbers they speak for themselves i mean you could i have no argument against anything that you've said i think we're probably heavy on administration which is probably common with smaller schools because you still need certain roles functions still have to be met whereas if you've got a medium school or small right for example we you know just hired miss schaefer to for our gifted and sped realm which was needed and then adding mr lane for transportation so it's and then i just went down to altar valley just to pick a school so that's kind of up in the marana area they've got 19.6 students their uh their payout with the 3-0 money 301 money is at 8 500.
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yeah because you've got mon you've got five days of monday tuesday friday so you've got no opportunity for the kids to really accept dirt maybe during their lunch hours or lunch hours well that's a fallacy but during their lunch to go get resource or to get assistance i mean that's not much time because they still have to eat and and we want them to eat because i think they're better students when they eat but this at least gives them the opportunities to get help of resources or you know maybe maybe work on their fafsa you know i just i just worry that it's not it's not something they need every week but this builds in a consistent flow when we talk about the stress and consistency i know people are like oh it changes now on wednesday and thursday they're different what you're looking at is a consistent flow from week to week we have less modified weeks because things like pbis lessons and all of those things that happen over the course of the week are now built in or the course you know week by week where you end up with all these different schedules you start to build in some consistency you know monday is monday tuesday is tuesday you know and you start to get into a flow of this as a student that there really is some huge benefits that come because of that when we look at lessons learned from the pandemic you know i look at this as a res as a response to that and we've we've definitely learned a lot about what students needs are and you know i think that this is one of the way that we that we address that and we're talking two days of the week right you're talking about modifying one class period right for each class right i i'd like to kind of hear from our students and see what they love them i'm glad it was fun it was right now can i just say that i struggled with the timing myself i was like so much so much but if it doesn't happen this year it's going to happen next year and those kids have had a different they'll have had a different year every year because they'll have had changes and then if we if we're really gonna if we if we don't in order to not really impact anybody who's lived through covet we would have to wait four years to institute now you'd probably have to wait 12.
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um they're their square footage is 216 which is where ours is and again another small school their district is at 49 students you know so if you just play in the comparison of looking at other schools that are similar you know and i think the one i looked at was an elementary school district as well yes altar valley elementary school district so i know we've talked about comparison among among different districts i think this is this is a great sandbox to plan but just just to put this out there we do have teachers that have zero students we have a math coach with zero students who's a certified teacher is that teacher getting counted as a certified teacher yes or are they getting counted as an administrator by teachers other schools have it too that's the key but do they have it to the extent that we do we have reading specialists we have a math specialist we have an ell specialist so there's three teachers there that observe the students and that's just three off the top of my head that's great i think it just keeps in mind that we've got capacity in this school for growth without any additional hiring right and without any additional temporary classrooms and things of that nature so um we won't be uh renting any mini mobiles no but we will not let's move on to the 2021 financial statements in usfri so a few weeks back we had a special board meeting to go over the the audit tonight's the night where you will do your acceptance of that audit but we do have a couple quotes on the line we have cynthia on the line if there were any questions that had come up since that last meeting a week and a half ago well first of all i moved to approve the audit right you know sir you have to move to accept the other accept yes um i had actually written an email to cynthia a couple weeks ago and i have not received a response um my question is in the material deficiency area because both the 20 audit and the 21 audit showed a material weakness and my question was is this the same transaction that affected the audit in both fiscal years in other words the um the improper cash or failure to do cash reconciliations on a monthly basis with the county and the the problem of reconciling differences via transfers in and out rather than actual changes to um or entries for both revenue and expenses is were those the same transactions because they occurred in they weren't discovered until jane the january audit of the 20 of the fiscal year 20 period and and so since they were in that audit and they didn't discover them until this fiscal year is it the same transaction or do we have two different ones good evening um who answer your questions the same process that we're knowing what's failing however it is different transactions that were noted thank you so if i can just add on to that the 2020 audit we couldn't prove that reconciliations were happening this on it we could prove that reconciliations are happening but to correct the deficiencies was is that not right cynthia all right fy20 um we missed the result reconciliation process and maybe um not being able to provide documentation that would prove that their reconciliations were happening um and then in fy21 there was a process to complete the reconciliations and strengths if you want to say the numbers however the way in which they were fixed was not the proper way again i guess the only other question i have i i don't mean to be the only one talking here yeah the only other question i have is on the uniform system of financial records compliance questionnaire there were approximately 30 areas that we received in no answer that something something wasn't done properly now some of those are definitely more serious than others there's no question about that but the accounting record portion of this thing received had six or seven sections of it and received no answer to every single one of those um which to me is is of a major concern um and yeah the only other comment that i would have is i remember the question that we had in the study session when when it was brought up is this a good audit what would you give us our grade and the auditors failed to answer that question they did not answer that question they said they would not answer that question yet in all the things we are reading i'm saying it's saying that we had a good audit so what's the explanation of that good evening morning members of my career when i'm beach um i guess it's a subjective question that i'm not sure we would answer for for any of our audit clients because it's hard to quantify and place a value in the quantity of finding the section that you're outlining the accounting records i think what you'll see is that there's a lot of overlap in that section and these these questions are drafted by the auditor general with a required response from us and i think what you'll see is a lot of those overlap and in fact some of those are the same findings that are reported in the report on internal control in the back of the financial statement so i think it would be it probably would be proper to count those individually when really they're all part of the same internal control issue that we've cited in in the financial statement so i guess that's why i would i would hesitate to say that you've got nodes to that entire section you've got notes of the way that they've written the question but maybe not you know six or seven individual findings like however many questions so maybe the auditor general needs to clean up their questionnaire a little bit thank you i do apologize i just email from um foundation i have on my um trash folder so um i will respond to that email thank you and i will say this you know like they said at the study session there are 430 total questions so take that into consideration when we're trying to figure out if this is a good or a bad audit like they said it is subjective so it's really up to you as a board member how you feel that audit actually went if it's a good honor right now greg i would like to commend you for your effort going through the audit and your work all through the year and all of this stuff so my opinion greatly thank you sir agreed okay mrs allen yes mrs paise yes mr mcgivern yes miss jollery yes and mr austin thank you mike thank you cynthia would be intentional thank you thank you you too have a good night thank you for waiting for the for us to get to the item no problem okay good night greg we're trying to wear you out tonight hey this is my knife to shine sir hey if you're fighting this 300 grand it's cool i am working on it so just for those new members and those who may not remember um when i first started i brought this magical creature called the school facilities board to your attention they are now no longer the school facilities board they are the sfob they're under um they fall under a different government agency and i can't remember which one was the administration yes so with that being said we are currently in the process we sent some more photos and things like that in today of having all of our buildings looked at to see how much moisture is actually seeping in through the paint into the block and getting into the classrooms so what they will do is um one of the things they do is called a rylum tube test and basically i don't know what the substance is it's like silly putty they put silly putty up against the wall then they take like a test tube that comes down and then 90 degrees into that silly putty and then they're just filled up with water and then they sit there and they wait for two minutes three minutes and see how much of that water is actually seeped into the building and that way they and then they do some calculation to figure out if we're steeping too much water if we're not steeping enough water but what we're looking at is called a weatherization project with the physical facilities board if it is found that we are seeping in moisture through our block walls they will repaint our buildings okay if you're trying to get an idea of what it's going to cost to paint our buildings you're probably looking between 250 and 300 thousand dollars to paint our buildings also that keeps mr lathan and mr bertrand from having to try and do it over the summer now remember working with the sfb is a process so it's not going to happen over the summer if this project does get approved um what we're waiting on now is approvals for the to actually have the assessment done if the assessment comes back that yes we need this has it's done now we have to go out and get bids from panners once we find a bid we have to submit that to the sfb the assessment the our liaison can approve the assessments but to actually approve the work to be done the actual painting of the building has to go before their board for their approvals they meet just like you guys do once a month so best case scenario we're probably looking at the fault if the sfb is going to pick up this project great so i just wanted to and i told you guys back then that as these projects come up i'd keep you free so so there you go that's what i've got for you so if i remember right originally we didn't think we could get them to paint because it was just more of a cosmetic paint crew and now we're seeing this moisture thing well what we're seeing is if it is what we're saying is if you look underneath our downspouts our stuffers you're seeing paint completely gone if you look if you walk the campus you'll see paint bubbling and peeling you'll even see some cracks within the buildings so this is the type of stuff that mr burfoon was tiny enough to go out and take pictures of i think i sent the sfv for like 75-80 pictures at least so and these are just examples of the buildings it's not [Music] so you know because this is an sfp project so they have certain they have certain standards that need to be maintained behind it yes absolutely great okay let's gets jump out at you just as we discuss the town hall april 5th i hope that board members will be able to be present to also help us get the sense of urgency out to our parents and our students on what goals we're trying to accomplish i do have on my calendar 5 and this one says 5 30.
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i think that's something you know i think the benefit this the ben the benefit i see in this is the longevity of it and so in my mind it's it is those kids that are in this for a year that are kind of going to be the pig you know let's see if it works again this is that same class you know i may or may not have a kid in that class but you're never going to get it we're going to go this way but i you know i feel that um i feel like you know it's inevitable that some kids are going to fall through cracks anyway and we're using all these words we're going to assure assure that these kids are going to get those self-advocacy skills and be taken care of themselves well i think we're ensuring that they get the opportunity the opportunity yes and we're going to be unable to remove a lot of the constraints that they have that are outside the school which are often even more affect these students performance i mean it's wonderful when kids have parents that are totally supportive and encourage them to get grades and are they don't have all those outside constraints but when you have a student like that this is going to be really difficult for them even more what do you do about the unmotivated i don't know but that's i mean that's why it's built this way this is why you have the same access teacher year after year this is why the programming is developed by grade level right so that the students are getting the appropriate material for the you know at least at the grade level they're at they're now with a teacher that has a small number of students that's keeping an eye out for them that's reminding them what the next day is that reminds them what access is the next time when they come back that's communicating and with them that way so that there's less of a chance for a student to fall through a crap right if you're in this small group of 10 to 15 students with an access teacher that's with you for four years and that access teacher is accountable as a student for not succeeding right they're with they're working with those students year after year that that's who's gonna see if a student that's another set of eyes not the only set of eyes but it's another set of eyes to catch if they're falling through the track cracks but we have all of these other supports going on as well like you saw that tonight with the response to failures there's just one example of all of the other pieces that are there you like i said the board has added c triple s support so the counselor doesn't have to look at as many students right now you're building the tier one interventions into the club so now you're not duplicating resources so hopefully there you know there's more in time there to monitor students you will go back to you've added all of the resources as a school district to make sure that this is successful now is the time to act and take that next step and i know it's change and change is hard and there's never a good time for change the good time for this change would have been four years ago before a pandemic showed up but none of us knew that was coming and all of our resources weren't here our facilities weren't really and our facilities couldn't support it at that time so you know as i've said before if our district could have made this change 20 years ago it would have there was plans back 20 years ago before i think mark's the only one at the table that was around at that time but there were committees looking to make this change two decades ago and the facilities and the sports weren't there to do it every everything you have done as a board for a decade to get to this point has led to here not making this change stop short of all of that work and is a disservice to our students that's how i feel about this i feel um too the easy thing to do would have been to not even explore this right if you're just going through the motion i mean who's going to criticize you for just doing what you've been doing everyone else is doing that right that's the way we've done it right but hank when previous board hired you now a couple of us were part of that you know we we wanted a superintendent who was going to not maintain status quo but look at how we do things and how can we do things better and how can we improve and this is exactly the kind of thing that i hoped for and expected from your leadership and you know quite frankly this is something that we you know with the master facility plan this was something that we this was we knew we were going to be able to do this with that and the discussions about this started quite a while ago so for anybody anybody suggesting that this is a last minute thing or you know we haven't been fully transparent they just haven't been following along certainly covid caused us to delay what we wanted to do right because the the schedule was this year was going to start this was that was the hope that was the plan yeah or long-range planning and we had to we had to pull off that in order to you know deal with the matter at hand and we at least had an experience that we could learn some things from to help inform this to make it even more hopefully successful you can't do something new without there being any risk at all right so we we accept that things may not be wonderful yeah i've heard a lot of literature and the abundance of it really does point to this that this is the way that we should go but i still am concerned about that for me it's the timing and i don't know if i'm gonna i'm always this last minute i'm thinking of my vote but but you know i i still can't you know help but not think about some children are this is not going to be the best thing for them but i do know that in the long run this is going to be better for more students that's what makes you a great school board member there's a lot of students right now that our current schedule isn't serving oh i know that right i think this will serve more of our students well than our current schedule this is a thoughtful board i mean i mean we're thinking about all the possibilities right oh yeah [Music] of accepting the fact that there are always students who are going to fall through the cracks what i'm hearing and it's not just hank that's working on us it's gina in hundreds and hundreds of other people are working on that you just represent that correct not not just but you know what i mean is that this acceptance that there are always going to be students that fall through the crack is is is i don't think is a good thing for us to embrace and i'm not accepting that yes and so this is an attempt that's my point is this is an attempt to identify students who heretofore would have fallen through the cracks and not let them fall through the cracks which is what we've been yeah saying for a very long time can we ask you of course i'm sorry is there anything you'd like to offer yeah absolutely open that can of worms i think you're concerned about the timing it's very fair and like you're basing off the senior class which as seniors this year definitely consider it but there's always going to be that next senior class that you don't want to mess with absolutely if you're pushing it back this year because of next year seniors well what about next year's juniors then it's gonna be messed up their senior year so i don't really think you can base it off of the class i know looking at it i was a little bit iffy at first you know my learning style i didn't know if it would best suit me but being a senior who's going to college next year you know visiting the colleges and hearing about their schedules this closely resembles that they don't have eight period days you have to learn how to manage your time and you have longer classes so i think the block days and having that mix is definitely the best of both worlds and you're getting your students ready for what comes next if they do choose to go to college and of course not like dr philly said one schedule isn't gonna work for everyone but again this is the best of both worlds so i definitely think it'll work and having that access period to do those like mustang way and positively north lessons instead of taking time away from your core classes i know personally math gets shortened and then you have all your other classes are shortened so just having that built-in time so you still have your same length of classes is definitely going to be beneficial for the students okay i think scarlet said it really well and i think that i think it's like with a lot of situations you're never going to make everybody happy right i think that's something that we need to understand and i think that as i've said on the board i've gotten to understand the schedule more fully than our actual students so i think that i i would look at this and i would be like i don't know what that means necessarily but i do and i think that i know you're not going to leave them up to their own defenses once it is in place like i know gina and dr thiele you were saying how those first few access like sections will be like talking them through and making sure they can understand and process how this new schedule will work and i think it's going to be beneficial i think it'll be less stress but i also do understand sherelle and joanna your guys's concern i was talking to a junior today and she comes up to me and she says i don't like the schedule i don't think i know anybody that likes it and these these are the reasons why and that was the like main reason she was like we've had so many schedule changes and next year we're going to start with a completely new one and it just doesn't seem fair and i don't have to think about that i'm leaving um but i did that did stop me in my tracks and i'm like i i get that like it's it's not fair to you guys but like scarlett said like there's always going to be something different there's always going to be change and it's not fair if we say that for the next senior class but then we're going to mess with the juniors and the sophomores i wasn't planning that i just thought that the seniors the upcoming seniors would have had just a whole four years of messed up schedule the rest of them you know okay you're getting some normalcy and i think you two would land on your feet no matter what kind of schedule it was but you know and so i i guess i felt that just i need to speak for those people who i think might not do anything it's definitely gonna fall a lot like on the students and what they choose to do with this extra time but i think with all like the extra support systems i know personally south councillors see triple s all our social workers they're all there to help if you need it so i think no student like students are obviously going to probably fall through the cracks but there's going to be someone there to help them get back on their feet and you know it's just going to be making the most of it and figuring out what's best for yourself as a student just learning how to advocate i'm taking your opinions and those are important lessons for life yes you know there's not going to be that person to just walk you through everything like you know next year when you go post-secondary you don't have your parents there every step of the way you don't have exactly i hope you don't personally my parents won't be going to college i think yeah i tried i don't know some people don't have that now anyway right and those that have i have are very fortunate yes but yeah it's yeah yeah so right now so the reality is there is that i mean there are students that aren't don't require that level of help every week and in the model like this could be done after social studies on thursday what do you mean by that i mean they could they'll work to do that they could have they have work to do every student has a full week's worth of work to do yeah there is work to be done in that time i guess well but that does reflect the world right the world is more about getting your stuff done not necessarily where and when you do it right in many workplaces like you take vacation when you want to take vacation just get your work done right part of this is it's changing expectations and flexibility in the world of work just as much as the world of school right it's about productivity and okay so if a student doesn't need that time there and they use that to do something else they still got to get their work done yeah maybe they would uh if they're in the robotics uh let's say club maybe they would want to work on their robot during that time so they don't have to take time maybe from their job after school in order to to work on that on that project or or they might we're just doing work or whatever yeah yeah but i'm just saying if they're caught up at some point they they might have another activity that would keep them occupied i mean you know we're we don't want them out running the streets i mean that's we don't that's right that's not the plan no that is not the plan pardon we do have to let him go at the end of the day darn but so i have two things to add and then i'm going to stop talking about this for tonight and uh one is some of the same things that we're hearing about seniors not wanting their last year messed up we heard about when we put the master facility plan in place right was wait a year to do the master facility plan because i don't want the hallways torn up for my senior year we heard some of those same things i don't want the school messed up for my my last year for my three years of school or you know there's never the perfect time to make any change as i've been working through this this year i heard a quote i believe it's from john maxwell who talks a lot about leadership and uh the quote is the future belongs to those who see it before it's obvious and this board has done a good job of that historically of making that change before it's obvious before everybody's doing it right you did it with technology you did it with facilities asking you to do it now with schedule if it was we would like everybody would be doing and just be okay that's what everybody's doing some some year down the road a school with this enough resources like we do and enough staff and the right facilities and all the right things combined this will be the obvious change for them what makes us leaders in the field is that we do it before it's obvious we do it when it's right for our kids and right for our community my time is now and waiting doesn't serve anybody better than what we're doing right now so this is an action item later on tonight i appreciate getting the board's direction whatever it is later on does anybody else have any the comments about it before we move in okay all right a few other items for this evening capital improvement projects i'll invite jim up good evening everyone it was really nice to hear those spaces from the mfp are being so utilized i i mean those numbers are unbelievable that is so so good to hear and speaking of the mfp and just these last beds we really did that at the right time i am so glad that we did that three years ago instead of going into it now while the numbers are just so much higher the market is so difficult right now so we made some good decisions uh on the mfp well we knew it right yeah we did it we're all geniuses yeah you know that was all you know par for the course for us yeah no i mean it's we got we got very fortunate i couldn't agree with we would have spent a lot more money it's crazy and we did so i'm very happy that we're completed uh so this is for capital uh for this summer uh we have uh three projects the physical education office at north social studies office these are renovations and the varsity softball field of dugouts that will be uh demolished and replaced we packaged all that wishes that was three minutes yes my friends just talked about it like the softball team needs to be excited there's actual holes there if you drive by there you can see them so it's it's really do um we packaged these together together to save some money uh so we had nine packages uh 21 uh bidders so we we've seen some movement with the bettors come in and some good competition but they came came in higher than we expected it with our budget so we are adding a 100 000 to our 1 million dollar budget so at 1.1 million for capital uh so we're compensating we want to get these projects done uh we reviewed the nine vendors and uh all the scope and the bid requirements were met so tonight we'll ask the board to approve uh that list of vendors for 359 808.41 i'll answer any questions if anyone has them request is it is it possible to see a pdf of the improvements the drawing work sure get those too thank you um okay i'm going to ask a terrible question go ahead is there any way to put any of this off that can wait until maybe some of the prices will go down well my gut's telling me that we're going to see this for a while that's okay we're going to have to write it out you know talking with white and talking with other school districts i'm part of dupage county with all the billing grounds people actually we sell less than what they're seeing so and we all believe that this is going to continue for another year unfortunately and mr davenport could probably attest to that as well he's probably hearing the same thing i'm hearing um we can always push projects we can always save the money but as we push projects the five-year list then becomes gets bigger and bigger and then there's more money in in future years that we might not have so we like trying to keep on schedule that's why we get that five-year plan going so we can get these done each year um but certainly if the board decides us for us to push the project off i'm just asking because i figured that it's a lot like anything else that goes up and then comes back down and then goes back up you know right now the forecast is not saying that i'm not seeing that like furniture and yeah yeah furniture's terrible the timeline and the expense of furniture it's it's truly unbelievable i've never seen anything like in my career it's it's so high yeah five-month lead times on windows um it's it's insane and and even if even if uh uh theoretically prices would come down a little bit inflation's just gonna keep pushing it up yeah i so yeah you know as supply chain things straighten out some i'm just i'm just asking because i know i wouldn't want to tell those girls over at south that those dugouts yeah there could be a mutiny on the bounty no i'll let that to somebody else okay that's not scarlet she lives pretty close to you i could send her over yeah yeah that's okay i think there's a lot of people who know where i live it's frightening so i just had to ask absolutely fair question very fair all right uh this is up as an action item later on this evening thank you jim thank you thank you uh food service agreement renewal yes i think this is jury has got this one this is this is cool good evening yeah yeah well i think you all remember that last year we entered into a one-year agreement with chartwells to pilot a food service program that provides larger portions a better offering of menu items and it operates outside the usda meal programs so we don't have to deal with all their restrictions and so within the first few weeks of school we were able to tell that this was a very successful program because if you went to the cafeterias you would see the long lines of students so that was one problem we had to solve but the students and staff have been very happy we have the new coffee stations at both buildings that are they're really a hot item there's lines that's out there all the time the students can go there from the commons and pick up snacks during their study hall and that so it's been really really successful so chartwells has submitted a three-year proposal to the district and this proposal includes a couple of items here i just want to go over so it includes a six point five percent return on revenue schedule for all three years and then in years two and three that return would be six point seven five percent for all sales that exceed two million two million dollars there's also an inflation clause in there to protect both chartwells and the district in the event that inflation rises above 2.5 percent the two parties would kind of share the cost of that burden and then the other item i that i'd like to point out is that there's a mutual agreement upon the number of free and reduced price meals that chartwells will provide on a daily basis at no cost to the district and the number that's in this agreement is higher than the daily average number of meals that they've been providing this year so it's a safe number so we we recommend that the board approve this three-year proposal i think it's by doing so chartwells will invest more in our kitchens um add to the program and i just think it'll be a comprehensive food service program for students i'm just really glad that our students are happy with it and that they're they're purchasing more more food and we're not throwing away garbage cans full of apples and oranges what did you see the change yeah it was reported in there yeah i mean wow right it's huge i mean double i can tell you i've put more money on that card there's nothing i hate more than making lunches so again i'm happy to pay for it thank you thank you we appreciate it job well done then yeah yeah i mean if you look at what they vote with you know just doubling that that's what i was saying same year yeah yeah um and this has been a goal for years how do we get how do we get the students to start participating more because it's just been a steady decline ever since we've been on the board leave the national program you could do things a lot more creatively with food which chartwells has shown yeah right i'm glad we did and our students are healthier because of it even though well because they're actually eating eating and that's what i mean i mean and they can think better when they're when they're not hungry you know and that's not eating potato chips you said it's there's a 2.5 percent expectation for rising costs is that what you is that when you're reporting it goes above 2.5 percent there's i don't know if you've in the the agreement that was attached there there's an example that says if revenues returned to the client are one hundred thousand dollars but the cpi for the most recent december to december period was 4.5 okay then the re revenues returned to the client would be reduced by 2 000 so it's not a significant amount of money whatsoever but at least there's a little safeguard in there got it that helps them cover the cost of food yeah i was concerned i didn't want to see them cut back on staffing so what can we do in partnership so it's just kind of sharing the cost well job well done thank you yeah yeah fabulous all right jury had the exciting one with food mark drew the short straw with copiers and printers everybody had this one circled on the agenda let's go we have we had a five year lease with uh kanika minolta and um we replaced a large number of machines with that in the back end four or five years ago now we're having to start to replace some of the machines and we've also increased a usage that one of the one of the biggest things that east campus has been wanting to do is get more access for students right now a student has to download from their their chromebook into a computer and into the library or they don't have one in the comments yet and it takes time then you have to wait then you can print it what they're going to do is get what they call a smart queue or a basement base it's called base something search student facing software so um they'll be able to upload it just like we do if we have it and then they can just go and it'll be floating around and then go to one of those two printers once in a four digit pin and it'll print they don't have to load it and go through that extra exercise and that'll give more students access to the printers that you know in a quicker format so we're real excited about that and right now the plan is to have one in commons and one in the library and what we do is we for this one we like to try and keep the cost in alignment with the year rather than paying for five years worth and paying nothing before four years because the dollars for this are incorporated into the per capita cost for individual buildings in this case the bigger the cost is about um uh i mean 70 percent of it is for a large heavy-duty printer at the south campus and so we'll we'd like we like to keep it by building in five by a year so we do it in a lease which you know it's relatively low um we've used wintrust before they have bought our bonds in the past right we have a good relationship with them we asked them to give us a quote because they have a capital division which actually works with the retirement of the machines and we can get different services at that level if we want um and it's a few you know a few thousand less to do it with wind trust so we think it's the right thing to do so we're asking for approval of the lease um with them in the amount of uh 220 316 that'll be the action side of the meeting told you riveting special education i thought it was great well done [Music] special education transportation you've seen from all that we use a lot of different carriers or several careers we have one with sunrise company llc that serves about 100 kids and we are in a communal agreement with sas and we share costs with them and it's it facilitates them being able to take the kids from their home school to one location so it's good to get you know these are usually pretty far away maybe 20 15 20 miles away where special needs kids are getting special services and tuition programs and so it's better if we can you know combine the kids and all in one ride out to everything having five five different vehicles go out there thirteen percent increase is just kind of the number that's been buzzing around all transportation this year when i drive past the bus to the bus web that they have in westmont for students they have it on the the board always always hiring 5 000 bonuses you know so it's it's going to be expensive for for transportation the good thing about it is typically this has been reimbursed at a fairly high rate by the state especially transportation so even though we're going to be paying more hopefully they'll have dollars to offset it for us so that'll be an action item to extend the agreement with sunrise with our special ed program all right questions for mark one year extension again yeah because we did put a penalty sign into this so that if it's if they don't serve aside up at 100 don't we knock a percent off right away for that month billing so we we did it for a long time there was three of us that were working with them on behalf of saseb and that was the big thing we wanted to have a penalty if they don't perform so this is a big you know okay down to 10 thank you sure riveting again yeah well done it's up for action later on this evening all right fire requests we've received them we filled them you can see them on our website by clicking on fulfilled foyer requests okay we'll move on then to the public hearing section of our agenda for the honorable dismissal of teachers this this next agenda item is a public hearing on the proposed reduction in force of teachers this hearing is held in line with section 24-12 of the illinois school code which provides for the hearing when the greater of teachers to be reduced excuse me hearing when the number of teachers to be reduced due to economic necessity is greater than five or 150 percent of the average number of teachers honorably dismissed in the preceding three years whichever is more while the reductions contemplated later in this evening's agenda are not based on economic necessity we are holding the hearing with the intent of giving both the teaching staff and the public notice of layoffs and the opportunity to express their views to be clear the reduction in forces contemplated later in this evening's agenda will not impact educational programming and are not based on economic necessity rather these reductions are based on course selections for the upcoming school year do we have any discussion no this would be an opportunity if anybody in the public wish to address the reductions directly had the opportunity to as well the reductions i think you read it i was just making sure it's based on just the courses no longer being available the course the courses that students have selected so we're again the reduction goes along with the lack of course being needed or wanted by the students it's not a specific course it's like students put all their requests and then it takes out it tells us how many sections we need how many you know how many english ones we need to run in english dues and when all of that kind of folds together our enrollment is down slightly so the number of classes is down slightly and then these reductions are to reflect the fact that we we don't have as many courses to run in aggregate as we had last year but if we have an increase say a lot of students register over the summer and now we fill those these are the first people we usually call back correct and many of these are part-time staff that is coming back at a lesser amount or we're going to hope hopefully we'll come back at a lesser amount and stay with us in hopes that that does happen and it does sometimes over the summer okay okay anybody else anybody wish to address hearing may have a motion to close the hearing second mike and terry no it wasn't me oh i'm sorry chris chris my apologies christopher espinoza hi derek aye joanna vazquez drexler hi mike davenport aye fuller aye jenny heggstrom aye nancy kupko aye the public hearing is closed thank you next we'll move on to the consent agenda before we do is there any item that anybody wishes to to take out just talk more about before we do i would just like to thank joanna once again for being volunteering to be our assassin representative it's an important important role on the board so we need a motion for the board of education to approve the consent agenda as presented which includes the personnel report 2022 2023 full-time renewals 2022 2023 non-10-year part-time renewals transition of position classified appointment classified the personnel report retirements classified resignation certified resignations classified the financial pages the assassin board of control governor governing board appointment the 2022-2023 proposed amended calendar the 2023-2024 proposed calendar and illinois high school association ihsa membership so moved second terry joanna jerry pavisic aye joanna vazquez drexler aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza aye shirelle fuller hi jenny hagstrom aye and nancy kupka aye the consent agenda curies next we'll move to the recommendation excuse me the recommendations for action the first is a motion for the board of education to adopt the resolution authorizing notice of honorable dismissal of non-tenured teachers other than final year probationary teachers and the president and secretary be authorized to say to sign same so moved second mike and joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye mr respinoza aye cheryl fuller aye jenny hagstrom aye terry pavich aye and nancy kupka aye the motion carries next is the motion for the board of education to adopt the resolution authorizing notice of non-renewal to non-tenured teachers other than final year probationary teachers and that the president and secretary be authorized to sign same so moved second mike and chris thank you very much mike davenport hi mr espinoza aye shirelle fuller aye jenny heggstrom aye terry pavich aye joanna vazquez drexler hi and nancy kovka aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the hybrid block bell schedule beginning the two beginning the 2022-2023 school year so moved mike and terry do i get an opportunity to make it yeah okay the one thing i wanted to point out and i don't know if this is a amendment because it's already there this is for 20 22 and 23 school year so next year we would approve this the next school year again this will go into effect for the next school year and that's what we would have going forward nope i get that for that so maybe i should say 23 24.
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so and your report says in the cafeteria this says that it's in the gym right so is it five o'clock in the gym or by 30 because the school district calendar says live but this is like i have 5 30 to 6 30 in the day 5 30 to 6 30. and the reason why i was thinking originally cafeteria is that it's easier to hear and keep people contained i don't want to lose people that are sitting up in the gym that are not paying attention and have it you know i really think that it needs to be a smaller environment where we can we're just not sure how many people yeah when when you said tonight parents who have students with d's and f's so i think we kind of limited our audience which might in fact um diminish even our ability to get good ideas well we are going to send we're going to do personal invites to all parents those students that have also been invited for saturday school and tutorials who have not been coming um but that's why i said it's open to others because other parents might have good ideas and help us reach out to other parents but i don't anticipate that we would have the cafeteria overflowing with families we'll decide where we want it to be once we get to our conferences with parents getting signatures of parents and giving them notices on more of a feel or rsvp who will come we'll determine what we have [Music] and monica the executive session on the 11th will start at 4 30.
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is that the way to say it because it's saying out here it's beginning the 20 22 23 right here let me say what i'm trying in perpetuity until we change it that's correct so what i want to say and i know i'm going to probably goof this up for in a minute i want it to be looked at again based on the metrics that we talked about in that next school year to be sure that we feel like this was the right move for the school so i don't know how i meant that because i'm going to goof that up mike and terry would have to retract their emotion i i don't want it amended i think that the board has the authority to come back if we wanted to next we're going to be we're going to be getting the reports back right front where we have an independent group looking at what's going on we're going to be analyzing if at any point along the line so you as a board member wanted to make a motion to to take an action to make a change we always have that that authority to do that here's the good news not that i think that this will be a train wreck right i obviously believe i hope not very successful i'm somewhat staking my career i don't like the mention of no no i mean i'm i'm literally staking like this goes down i'm standing right there by you however let's say let's say the worst possible thing happened or the world changes in some way and we decide between now and september like whoa we need to pump the brakes sure the schedule's built on any period day right it would take something tragic right but we have scheduled and built around an eight period day i'm not even recommending that we should do this i'm just saying there is there's always there's an escape hatching this isn't like you're going to the block schedule like like a 4x4 block or whatever you're you're going to two days a week you're modifying what that schedule is we it's not a drastic change in the whole scheme of things so shirelle you know if it should look just terrible or the world should change drastically in some way there is an escape clause i wouldn't pull that cord unless we were plummeting to earth but um i mean that just shows you how much of a drastic change this is and is not at the same time right okay so but we've had but we've had an update every meeting every meeting this whole year we've talked about continue i think was it we will continue to have an update and then not only will we have updates as we if and when we launch this but we do have as you said an independent third party who's doing evaluation so we'll have periodic and update from them so i think to you would it address your concern to just say this we'll keep this on the agenda for the foreseeable future going forward every month as we have been doing that okay yeah i like that as well oh absolutely that means i mean we did it with the master facility plan we did it with the pandemic like constantly updating the board on a major change is kind of my job so uh we will keep that up and we want success right yeah i mean that's why we're doing this i mean if we're not getting it then you're going to know it right away because you're going to hear it we've had success so that's the point we want to continue to be successful we are not in an unsuccessful model now so that's the point i understood yeah all right okay so does that address your yeah if we can keep it um um monthly status checks are you make a good point dr feeling like we did for the master facility plan yeah this will be a standing agenda item get used to it like returned in person and master facility plan and you know any other major change we make we report on it regularly to the board and that will that trend will continue any other comments before we call the vote julie mike davenport hi trey pavisic aye joanna vazquez drexler aye christopher espinoza no shirelle fuller hi jenny heggstrom aye nancy koepka aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve contracts for summer capital projects to the vendors presented in the aggregate amount of three hundred fifty nine thousand eight hundred eight dollars and forty one cents so moved i'll second chris and mike thank you christopher espinoza aye mike davenport aye jerome fuller hi jenny hagstrom aye jerry the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to approve the three-year food service agreement with chartwells so moved second terry and mike this one's personal it is terry favis aye mike davenport aye christopher espinoza aye shirelle fuller aye jenny hagstrom aye joanna vazquez drexler hi i'm nancy kupko aye the motion carries next we need a motion for the board of education to authorize the district administration to execute all documents required to secure a lease with wind trust capital for the 2022-23 school year multi-function printers and copiers enthusiastically i move i do this second second enthusiastically mike and then joanna thank you mike davenport aye joanna vazquez drexler aye christopher espinoza aye cheryl fuller hi jenny heggstrom aye aye papasich aye and nancy kupka aye the motion carries and finally we need a motion for the board of education to approve the amendment to special education student transportation services and transportation contract with sunrise southwest llc for the 2022-23 fiscal year and authorized the administration to execute all necessary documents to continue this contract so joanna and terry i think so yeah aye the motion curies okay we'll now move on to the second reception of visitors public comment this is the second reception of visitors which is intended for audience members to address the board on any topic pertaining to community high school district 99 comments will be limited to three minutes to provide all visitors an equal opportunity to address the board individuals needing more time should submit their thoughts and writing to the board secretary mrs nadak visitors addressing the board need to submit a comment slip to the board secretary will be invited to the microphone prior to addressing the board audience members should state their full name the proceedings are being tape recorded for the purpose of producing accurate meeting minutes and are being live streamed i reserve the right to modify these protocols if circumstances warrant and audience observation of these protocols is appreciated all right we have two slips uh one is for eileen briner but i think she might have had to leave yeah okay and then the second one is for kevin custer i believe he's here there we go mr custer kevin custer my son is a senior at downers grove north in my last email to you hank and nancy you stated that you're not teaching crt however your response revealed your true objectives and i quote from your email district 99 remains committed to embedding social and emotional learning equitable includes inclusive practices and restorative practices into all learning environments i find the use of the word embedding in the email in the slides tonight very illuminating i looked up in the webster's dictionary embedding means to implant an idea or feeling within something or someone so it becomes ingrained or essential characteristic of that person these words reveal you're trying to indoctrinate my son and these students you want them to see people as oppressed and oppressors based on skin color race and gender based upon the video of intersectionality that all students were required to watch you're creating two classes oppressed and oppressors true equality is achieved by maximizing the ability of people to become self-sufficient not by dividing based upon race sex or gender this board should focus on people's ability to become self-sufficient not by dividing by race sex or gender resilience and excellence are common standards that challenge people from all backgrounds to achieve their greatest potential on the scale of desirable ends resilience excellence beats equity and restorative practices every time throughout history this board can no longer use linguistic shell games to hide your desires to indoctrinate these students history just isn't about people doing bad things most of the time the story is about people doing things they think are good but are rooted in division and destructive concepts leaders who abuse power through deceit linguistic manipulation and dissenting uh voices are always on the wrong side of history thank you mr custer okay we'll move on to communications and announcements uh lend jenny anything done okay you're on i'm on i'll try to keep it short so um we had a meeting on friday march 18th um a week earlier because of spring break we had a guest speaker representative tara costa she's on the house elementary and secondary appropriations committee um she's sort of just she's not doesn't represent a little sliver yeah a little sliver okay yeah so uh she sort of just gave kind of an overview um you know as the esther funds in the last couple of years have pretty much put most districts especially in dupage county in a pretty good place she's continuing to look at how to deal with arpa funds i had to look that up but she's also you know constantly looking at revenue streams for the long term she'd like to see some of the ebf evidence-based funding move to an above the line item which allows school districts for better long-term planning and less fluctuation of money from year to year overall she reiterated that in general we're in a pretty good economic place and then we sort of shifted she said there's been no talk of a property tax freeze um there has been some continued discussion as to the evidence-based funding and i think they're at a point of a five-year review she said the reviews look too you know one thing they did mention is trying to keep chicago public schools as a tier one school district and she said if that's the case you know she'd like to make sure they're held to the same standards as the other districts then we sort of shifted to our meeting agenda a lot of the bills that we would have interest in have kind of been held until the summer there is a continued review of the cte bill which is the career in technical education they adopted some opt-out language they pushed back the effective date it was noted during the meeting has indicated full support of the cte bill there are some e-learning accommodations that will expire at the end of this term but they are likely to be reviewed and revisited to allow for remote learning plans one issue that they touched on surrounding this potential legislation is that districts would be required to provide full payment to support staff anytime a remote or e-learning day is used and then we sort of we're running out of time after the speaker so short after that next month in april we'll begin to look at the budgets for next year thank you joanna no report the report uh 99 foundation we didn't meet chris anything on isb uh well uh in light with uh just the amount of teachers that are dropping off uh there have been a couple of bills have been introduced into committee that have attempted to allow for substitute teachers they instead of teaching up to 90 days in a school year it's 120 or we is the proposed change and then there's another that's i think substitute teachers are only currently allowed to sub for five days consecutively that would change to from five to fifteen again just trying to curb some of that um covered loss but yeah thanks chris and a reminder that the iasb division meeting will be at north high on april 6th uh the now north high team is going to do a little tour for other school board members to come walk and see the the projects at north um i would i think julie still got a couple of calls out i won't put you on the spot but if you haven't told julie you're coming yet please tonight let her know so we can get you registered for it um it's a you know you've been to these before but it's nice to to be the host no because they've been virtual yeah well this will be your first ones hopefully um but it you know it's a great opportunity to hear some speakers get some professional development as board members and to show off our new digs yes aren't the students i i rsvp'd i believe but what time is it we'll have uh yeah i think the tour is five three two or five actually chartwells is who we're partnering with to cater the event for us so nice to reward them with some business from dupage iasb um who pays for the event we don't you know there's no cost for us we just uh we we just host thanks man and it's really a great opportunity to network with other uh boards and and that and so um i encourage everybody to go and especially because it's it's in our backyard it's in our yard not even our backyard there you go it's a new yard and i will recognize that julie has done an incredible amount of work on this uh so is the north high team especially ken and michelle and all of them thank you thank you thank you upcoming board meetings we will have our next meeting on april 11th a workshop meeting at 6 30 here and then on april 18th we will have our regular business meeting at 6 30 again here then we'll just ask for a motion to adjourn so move second chris and cherelle all those in favor all those opposed we are adjourned really no opposition
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yes that was my existing sorry i had to put down five and i would encourage you guys if you can come to attract me it's in all the schools and that we like four or five schools all together and there's there's a lot of people out there um in six schools yeah mr lathan just like shooting the starting gun i think somebody's got to do it we had a starter bail on me oh really but i think you know i mean that was really well organized especially just coming off spring break and that's but they are you know you have to say the whole time but it's kind of kind of cool even if you don't have a kid out there so with that um i believe we have some vouchers weeks wow if you're gonna lose that's good yeah cool and then we have a future agenda item just kind of a new agenda item if you will is there anything that anybody might like to have considered to be a future agenda that will move to i do have a question what was the resolution with the parent that was here last month about the um i think his name was mister thank you or something yes so mrs met with them and met with the counselor as well with with them as well and um i spoke with mrs agu and they are going to be coming in to work with the counselor to kind of start to work with her on documenting the books and stuff that she uses no she's going to be doing that she's going to do it she's already any guns that we have on her arms they were willing to come and help do that so after the conversation so the resolution that occurred as we had a meeting with the family with the parents and um it does need to be very transparent as to what our curriculum is to our students as every parent family member taxpayer as many spoke tonight does have a right in that in knowing what we're teaching to our students and the curriculum and the books and the literature so for our school counselor she's going to be working on creating a page that's going to go on the website that will state what books in literature is utilized when she teaches and then which ones are just on an as needed basis with parental consent permission if she's meeting with the parents and the children because i know we had discussed that too in the summer so that will be made public on our school website and then um the parents were you know very responsive to that as well and very open to helping with because there's a lot of books and a lot of things that we need to put and make it very transparent to our families that they know but it might take some time to just get it all cataloged in and then um also we're going to be instituting our our weekly news bulletins not weekly news but like our monthly but in there it'll also have what our school counselor is going to be teaching as well and then just for the record it's not a zen den and there's nothing zen that's being taught religiously in that class that room was initially utilized then meaning like the peace quiet room because students were allowed to go there two years ago was when it was opened if they didn't want to go outside to recess but they wanted to go play games or draw or do things um quietly and her office used to be in a different building but then when we had our stacy schaefer bertram join in our counselor moved into that room so it was already referred to as that so we clarified that as well so just are there any other questions so it was the counselor that was doing the teaching and not the teaching so the counselor does she has a curriculum online and we also went over the curriculum and the standards she has to teach per ade in the state so there's curriculum one of the questions that was asked that we discussed in the meeting is we don't have a board approved per se curriculum for our school counselor and that's something that i think we could really talk about and discuss so right now she has to plan lessons just like our teachers do and based off of the standards from our counseling state standards in the state and through the arizona department of education so we went over that too with the parents so the children in kindergarten are being pulled out of the kindergarten class twice twice a month for 30 minutes to go with a counselor yes it's like a special that's what it is and she has to do that it's part of it's part of a counseling so some schools might have them or they just push into the classroom but they still have to teach lessons so it's social emotional learning done with our kindergarten classroom twice a month for 30 minutes and this is required by the state that she has to teach certain types of standards so it's not all just social emotional it's also study habits um so is she a teacher well she's a school counselor so she's a board approved school counselor certified school counselor certified school yes and she has to do those lessons as a school counselor there are lessons that she has to teach now what the curriculum is she doesn't have a curriculum so if that's something that we need to discuss purchasing for her but there are standards that need to be taught by all school counselors in the state of arizona and she has to create lessons just like teachers have to create lessons so in in k through 8 she has to go in and teach his classes and that's mandated by the arizona department and then there's the council yes we can send you the links you can also see all of the guidelines and everything she has to follow so the teachers um will usually sign up and request so not all teachers will take their students theirs but that's also a discrepancy because it's due to scheduling and what so let's say it's self-esteem or um if it's the friendship unit during um you know love of reading so then it depending on what the theme is or what the topic is or what if the teacher's noticing kids are struggling making friends in the classroom then she'll seek out the counselor and schedule the time to take the kids there so then the children are not it is not mandated by the arizona department of education that the children receive one hour of education from a counselor no so it usually is the standards and every school is different based on time available and i know a lot of schools counselors struggle with getting the time to go in and meet with the students because the master schedules are difficult and you know we're trying to balance all content all subjects so some of them do a rotation so maybe they'll start the first quarter or first nine weeks doing kinder first because that's usually where the kids are having trouble acclimating and then maybe third through fourth might do small growth small group pull out based on teachers but this isn't an educational requirement so this is something that a school counselor has to do yes yes but it's not an educational requirement because not all children are getting it because it's at the teacher's discretion to schedule the counselor to come in and some teachers don't schedule the counselors to come in right right so that it's not a requirement it's a requirement if you have a school counselor that they're teaching these standards she has to stick to the standards they're not stuff that she's just coming up with right but not all kids are getting it right right so how can it be a standard no it does not change what she's teaching so i understand that what she teaches but what i'm saying is it's not required for all children so it's not a standard in ade to require this learning from a school counselor it's not mandated by bud state but we have to show to the state we have to report the number of classrooms the number of one-on-ones the number of small groups that the counselor has done because if we have the school counselor they're expecting that these are the standards and this is how you're gonna meet the needs of the kids so it's just different at every school based on what the counselor decides and what the administration decides to schedule and allow in the school so it's not everybody equal at the same time so there's probably some kindergartners who have received less service from the counselor based on lack of need or attention to that specific and can parents opt out of this because it's not a requirement of the state sure that was discussed and that's what we talked about in the news that are putting like the curriculum corner on the counselor will be focused on this bullying for the month so that if a parent says they don't want their child to to receive any information based on anti-bullying then we would exempt the student from that 30-minute lesson okay with that we will move to item 16 um discussion ms will just start with you and move this way i think i just got mine i think so okay i'm fine i'm good with that we'll take a short recess it's not a couple hundred of these things [Music] if i may we just got in the board's results we tied 285 31 points
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all right thank you everybody for being here today we're live now call this meeting to order and we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance would everybody stand and brian crane would you lead the pledge for us thank you allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible that you diana yeah okay we're good we're good disappeared for a moment that's all right just by way of information we'd like to excuse uh chuck waldo he was a little bit of an accident in tucson he's okay but he couldn't get here and uh diana butler uh is home not feeling well she's participating with us by way of telephone and we'd like to excuse lauren webb who has family situation today he won't be able to meet with us tonight so we'll begin with uh mr brad pico if you don't mind take the the microphone and talk to us about federal programs you're involved with that we are involved with i should say so in regards to federal programs which is a wonderful opportunity to seek federal grants to provide for school types of improvement for student advancement of course you remember that no child left behind in the bush administration was to push schooling forward and equalize so it's an equalization grant and uh primarily what we're doing in federal programs is we are equalization of education so if paradise valley for example receives a certain ppa per child we should be able to receive the same type of funding up here in northern arizona in a rural school district in order to even the gap of education for kids i'm grateful for my opportunity to serve in this district because leadership and dr wright and brenda have given me the leeway the trust and the ability to seek those types of funding programs that provide for our staff and students and it's a wonderful opportunity there's lots of fun things going on right now and federal programming of course with the esser grant on the table which is worth 5.2 million dollars to our district that was a fun one to put together and i appreciate everybody in district who who helped and pitched in for that so just a wonderful opportunity to equalize the playing field for our students in education and moving forward thank you mr pico you also should remain standing because you're a recipient of the br star award for this month very excited about that it may be the only time i get a picture with dr wright where we're not adversarial [Laughter] thank you brad appreciate that appreciate your service in the district our next item on the agenda would be a curriculum presentation by mr ryan grace good evening y'all um i just wanted to go ahead and start with a recap of last meeting so last meeting we went over the entire process that we went through in order to take our selection down to mcgraw-hill we we set up a district-wide committee we went out for between four and five different curriculums for each subject that we were looking at we had to first identify what a curriculum is identify our need of trying to align our grade bands making sure that we're providing that foundational education that's going to be every student gets this education and yes we can supplement off of that for for differentiation to go higher and lower as we need but ensuring that we have the foundation set so that the next grade level knows these students are coming to me these kids are capable of doing these things and we wanted to make sure that that the curriculum is reflective of the fact that we have high expectations for our kids and we want that baseline to be mirroring that high expectation so for this meeting here it was really just to go through the financial side of mcgraw-hill curriculum adoption um and for the most part i rounded all of our numbers up to be able to give us that ability to to be flexible and and since this presentation was made we have actually brought that initial quote down [Music] and i'll address that as we go through as well but just to be able to we want to make sure that we're able to purchase slightly more and give ourselves a stock for if a student needs to purchase a new book because one was ruined water damage backpack loss something like that that we have some books on hand that we can we can have students purchase from us that would bring that cost back to us but being able to have them and not wait so a student is not without while they're in the classroom so let me go ahead maybe maybe use this okay there we go all right so i went ahead and started with the high school adoption um the high school is going to be probably one of our biggest adoptions here i broke it down we're looking at three different subjects for this curriculum the math the english language arts and then the science for math we're looking at about 560 students will be impacted by this with that ppa or that per pupil allocation of around 138 and 75 cents presentation per student that's a six year number so it's 138 dollars but that's not per year that's per six years which brings it down to um just slightly over 23 dollars per year gets that student a consumable textbook these are two volumes of interactive textbooks digital access to their curriculum online for if if we were to need that since we are one to one it utilizes the technology that we already have in students hands and it also gives every student at the high school that's in that's impacted by this a subscription to alex which is a math remediation program we already pay for so we'll be able to take that subscription and remove it in order because it comes with with this purchase um and we're able to get far more with our money for alex and that remediation program going through this purchase then buying it as a standalone product so for the math side of the curriculum it comes out to just around eighty thousand dollars um moving on to english language arts it's about 380 students we did discuss potentially and this was one of the reasons why we why i rounded those numbers up to give that a little bit of cushion is we did discuss potentially moving that up another grade level to include another grade level in that purchase to be able to impact more students it comes down to a 140 dollars per student for six years which is 23.33 per year um or roughly fifty one thousand dollars fifty two thousand dollars for english and then for science it's back to those same grade levels as math so it's 500 roughly 560 students and these numbers can be and will be adjusted as we forecast our next grade level and we get students that are are enrolled and pre-registered and stuff like that and it can came out to be about 67 000 with the high school curriculum total being roughly 200 000 um for a six-year purchase of this curriculum any any questions on that one before i move on just clarification the high school will be receiving workbooks also that the kids keep and the books that they receive are there books that they will keep we receive new books every year right yes sir and they're workbooks that they can actually write in and keep themselves they don't have to turn them in at the end of the year yes sir these are consumable books yeah that student and they are in full color as well so that suit will be issued that book and it becomes theirs at the end of the year um i have a question just sorry to interrupt that each each year the the book will be updated won't it it won't be this reprinting of the same book it'll be if they update their book then we get the next year we get the updated version of their book yes sir okay yes sir so if we buy it this year they don't update for next year it's not a different volume then we would get essentially a reprint um but if they were to update it then yes we would get the updated version the following year when they offer it all right thanks yes sir also for clarification this is our general studies not our honors classes correct yes and so um that's the reason why we don't have physics and some of the other ones yes also and they're going to be using our traditional textbooks that we're currently using correct yes ma'am and and that is something that we can mcgraw hill does offer those and i have looked at their physics book i actually have one sitting in my office and if it were to be something that we do want to to push for then yes we could we could still go through mcgraw hill go through the same vendor it's the same online programming the same training everything like that that we would be able to use um for for this one the the need that we looked at was for the alignment of a general-led student correct yes and so for our dual enrollment kids that's when we re defer to mpc when they have their calculus pre-calculus physics and those type of crashes correct okay um so for for the next slide here it's sixth through eighth grade adoption um and i put it that way specifically because almost everything that you would see written on this including the quotes that we get say junior high or middle school being that sixth grade is is at my campus i went ahead and differentiated that is six through eight not just seventh and eighth um because of that uniqueness here for us so once again these are a six-year subscription they include online access that consumable book which is reshipped annually and here in just a minute we'll look at the shipping handling process fees the number itself is large but it is a one-time payment meaning that next year there is no money going out for this they're re-shipped annually to us without an additional cost incurred so for sixth through eighth grade in math we're looking at about 430 students that would be every student is impacted sixth through eighth grade um including our students that are in eighth grade that are taking algebra one um and that we also included the accelerated course in middle school as well so they do offer an accelerated course that takes seventh grade and eighth grade math and combines them into one year's course so that a student that is moving from sixth grade to seventh grade but is on track for algebra one in eighth grade does not miss any of that vital content and they go to or go to algebra one in eighth grade fully prepared for it they've seen everything that is that that has been deemed absolutely necessary within those two years within one year so that does uh does include that and the math comes out to about fifty five thousand dollars for for sixth through eighth grade english the reason that english the total number of students served is lower it's about 130 people lower is that we already have this program it was already purchased for sixth grade when we adopted mcgraw-hill open court for k-5 so since 6th grade was at the k-5 campus we went ahead and got them several years ago before i got here that studysync mcgraw-hill product as well so k-6 already has a curriculum in from mcgraw-hill in english which brings that number down lower for us here on this purchase and then for science you're back up to the 430 students once again that's just a ballpark number of what we have now rounded up to the next 10 so that i could get quotes put out and you can see that the the ppa goes down since 101.97 which comes out to 17 per student per year um and that would be inclusive of a teacher's edition as well because all of our teachers editions were included for free as part of the purchase so middle school came out to be where six through eight came out to be about 141 thousand dollars any questions on six through eight nope carry on all right so for the k5 adoption we were only looking at math and science because we do still have and i believe it's five years left on our k5 english already so we still we do have multiple years left on that one so we're only looking at math and science to be able to align these and you get a little bit more at the k5 level than you do at the at the upper levels because we're building a base so for math we're looking about seven for both of them we're learning about 750 students are impacted um and for science it's it's less than a hundred dollars for a six year purchase and it is right around 100 for math for a six year purchase um these come with so math comes with consumable books they're in full color k through five i mean even our kindergartners they will get a consumable book that they can write in that is tailored to them that is in full color as well so they come with that online access should we need it or for our teachers to use it it brings with it an assessment software a couple other pieces that consumable book our lowest grades i believe we put it in through second grade get math manipulative so hands-on math kits come with this we get leveled reader library libraries for our lower grades that are content related so that students can read things on their level within their content to expose them to content more and then we also get each class would get interactive read alouds that teachers can read with their students that expose them to content at their level and that's gonna be for our lowest grades where we're trying to teach those slightly abstract concepts to very young minds so for the k5 curriculum we came out to be about 155 thousand dollars just for clarification this math curriculum is not our everyday math curriculum correct okay just how to make sure people knew that this this math curriculum is is fully aligned to our state standards and it brings with it the rigor that we need um for our students because when we look at state assessment problems when we look at at a college level testing things like that we need students to be able to work a multi-step problem that is lengthy with words that they can go through and pull out the information that they need and from a very low for a very young age this math curriculum does that gets the kids to think critically about their math and their numeracy and things like that perfect thank you all right so on our summary of cost the total curriculum cost comes out to be about 495 000 um it is slightly lower than that like i said i rounded those up our processing fees i did not round that number up because i wanted that number to be there for you to see so for the processing fees which includes shipping handling and tax it comes out to just shy of 91 000 once again that is a six year one-time fee so we pay at one time and they will ship to us regardless of paper costs regardless of fuel costs or anything like that we don't pay again on shipping processing and handling it is a one-time one-time fee and then our free materials i wanted i did want to include that so we are not paying for a single teacher's edition or teacher online access and the professional development both implementation and the refresher every year is included for the the life of our purchase on this one um and i've already talked to our reps a couple different times and they are chomping at the bit to get that on the schedule so that we can get if we go with their product that we can get the product in the teacher's hands as quickly as possible and we can get the training done before school starts with a follow-up training shortly after school starts so the teachers that have been using it can then ask the questions that they run into and don't have have a long lag between those trainings yeah for alex we used to pay for that separately correct and that's bundled into this payment and what do you remember how much that was um i believe we currently pay roughly 29 700 for alex per year so that's an annual thing and going with mcgraw-hill and i'm going to give a ballpark number because i don't know it off top of my head but if you go here on hill i believe it's about 18 000 okay for six years okay so we do save quite a bit off of just alex right quite a bit actually from that and then we are looking at a couple other things and then some of the other more difficult costs that we would be looking at as well would be we're not running as many copies we're not using as much paper because students will have a color book in front of them which is something that i've i've talked to a lot of teachers they're very excited about because they know that every kid's going to have a copy of it right from there and this also does not include we opted out of social studies correct yes yes um and so i did want to just go ahead and just making known since i put this together dr wright has spoken to our reps about bringing down our possible purchase cost and [Music] not to get down to the penny but as of right now he has been able to talk them into reducing our overall purchase cost by thirty one thousand two hundred fifty three dollars and sixty four cents awesome um off of the processing shipping and hand can you tell us kind of what um they include in their processing fee what is that what's that so when i see the processing fee it's just it's just the line item of a processing fee so that's going to be them [Music] their reps working with us okay if that's under there that makes sense yes ma'am okay yes sir if i may also add some of these products they are buying from a third party and it's a pass-through cost and so that's it's a non-negotiable fee because that was the first place i went and that was the part i didn't have any room in so we went to the next thing which was shipping and that's where we gained most of our shipping and handling is where they had room um the other costs were were hard costs that are passed through costs they probably if they were smart put shipping and handling very high probably did correct and and they did so they put the shipping and handling um on this as 000.
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i called to order this workshop for bullhead city elementary school board on tuesday march 22nd 2022 at 6 00 p.m uh roll call corey burgess here amanda amen here charlene diaz here anna boyd here melinda sabrasky here all present item 1.3 town hall planning dr stewart mr president and board members melinda and i met the day after the last board meeting and she brought lots of really good ideas we kind of sketched out some plans and so we put out questionnaires to employees and to the community as requested the board requested at the last meeting we had as of this morning i think it was 75 community responses and 41 employee responses i pulled together the from those responses uh the questions and you can see there are several pages of questions and then organize them in a way that i thought would be um that you all could kind of think about which thing you want to be the expert on and then we also sent along a copy of the or the link to the actual questionnaire so you could see the other comments and then we printed those out for you because when i sent that to you yesterday or sent the link we had not set those cells up to wrap so you could only see part of the you could only see part of the part of the responses unless you actually clicked on the box and not everybody including me not everybody is really good with xl kinds of things so tried to send those to you so um i also sent you a draft of a draft agenda for that town hall to kind of keep it organized so it's pretty much open for you all to discuss ask questions i did go back and rearrange the questions in six categories and that seemed to fit so i wanted to suggest to you that you think about those as the categories for who becomes the expert on what and then i took dibs and volunteered on the first one all right for those of you that might be unaware uh the topics that these are broke down into is first off background which dr stewart had just addressed that she'd like to take great idea because she has all that background information so that works out really well after that the next ones go questions on tenants leasing properties and project funding and then there's a a general category of other because there were lots of other questions that kind of spanned a very wide wide spectrum now i do want to thank the community that did members of the community that did reach out and and respond to our questionnaire because that did give us a direction to start here but i do like the idea of these these topics and it works out really well because with counting dr stewart there are six of us here we can each take one uh kind of break down those questions that we have see where it fits into a sub-topic that we take and become the area expert on that topic if you had one he really jumped out on you uh great if not i was just thinking let's just go down the line and make it easy unless anybody had anything specific they wanted does anybody have a specific topic that they want no charlie oh she just all right okay anyone else have one that they prefer i'll take the leasing oh you guys are making this too easy do you want property and project or other one okay and then mr president one of the things that can happen is i can meet with any of you individually and we can work out you know or you can say oh i need more information on something and and i'll help you round that up yeah and uh between now and the town hall as we look at those questionnaires and i'm sure you guys have probably spoke with other people if they have questions now you kind of know who would be the one they can reach out to they can direct the questions to dr stewart she can forward on to us if there's anything additional going on there but we had a pretty pretty good way to go so this will give us a good direction to head with that so we all have the best answers we can come up with with the information given knowing that some of our answers are still forthcoming i mean there's very few that we have answers to right now like funding would be one that we could kind of have some information on but you know we're working through the rest so absolutely it would be a good idea to contact a lot of these school districts that have already i've started yeah the reason you only had that i only sent you a few handouts is because i'm having trouble getting responses from some of these other places so i'm going to reach out beyond arizona and and lance has found some articles about some uh districts in other states that have similar programs and so we'll just keep reaching out and trying to get more information from them great yeah all right any other questions on that okay uh dr stewart has background ms diaz has uh tenants the same and has leasing uh i have property and project ms boyd has funding and mr browski has the others all right and then mr president if you would uh not that we have to set it right now but did the the draft agenda look appropriate for everybody for uh did you contact jennifer i haven't yet because i thought i wanted to wait until the board had a chance to say if that's kind of what they wanted to do and then i would give her a call tomorrow and by the way i i put citibank and my understanding is it's sit bank my ear sorry about that so melinda suggested her she works across the river right across the river and she lives in mohave valley so she's she's she's neutral relative to our district and um and she has some background in doing this kind of thing so uh you know being a being the moderator so you know i thought it was a really good uh recommendation excellent carolyn i want to thank you for for for pushing this forward for me um and the rest of the board too i think that this is this is going to be an eye-opener for everybody that we can be transparent that we can answer some questions that and people who show up or come online are going to get some information from us absolutely awesome thank you very much thank you very much okay moving on um we have future business right that's where we have that to sit is that on tonight's agenda the future dates and things okay you could do it then time with future meetings yeah so we'll set it on uh 5'5 all right okay 1.4 insurance for 22-23 school year dr stewart okay um we had a meeting last week of the insurance advisory committee and that committee is made up of the members of the certified meet and confer committee the classified meet and conf confer committee the two board members who volunteered uh two community people one of whom is here tonight we have bill hart who has in the past sold insurance and knows oh about 10 000 times more than i know about insurance and so he's been a really good a really good resource for us we had representatives here from kairos from asbate from emeritus with whom we have currently have our vision insurance but they also we learned have a dental insurance program as well the person was not here from vision direct but he sent us the information that's reid nelson he sent us information that they would not be increasing their rates and then we have on again off-again kinds of communications with unum who handles our life insurance and short-term disability um we're kind of negotiating with them on what they can do for us so um really a good actually to a little over two hour session lots of good questions from everybody and so we just met bill and melinda and charlene and i met just before this meeting to kind of summarize um i don't know if you want me to tell you now kind of what i'm going to recommend to you in the meeting or if you want to ask questions or how you want to handle that i think we can wait okay all righty i really thought your discussion for the town hall would take a little longer than this but that's okay i guess we could go over and somebody had some questions about the insurance we got time nope not right now all right we can we can hold on that um okay with that we need a motion to adjourn our workshop when we move we adjourn the workshop i'll second that motion charlie and diaz i want to see you [Laughter] all in favor aye corey burgess i'm in eamon aye charlene diaz hi anna boyd i'm melissa we have adjourned happening you got a few minutes you have 20 minutes [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] do [Music] so [Music] hmm [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do [Music] i called to order this special meeting on bullhood city elementary school board on tuesday march 22 2022 at 6 30 p.m uh roll call corey burgess here amanda amanda ayman here my mic wasn't on charlene is here anna boyd here melinda here oh present please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for office citizens president please sign in at the back uh adoption of the agenda we need a motion to adopt the agenda i'll make a motion to adjust adopt the agenda and avoid only the espresso scale second all in favor aye corey burgess i'm anna amen aye charlene diaz aye anna boyd i'm melinda sobreski and someday i'm going to go out of order that's right we will hold it against you all right item 3.1 insurance for the school year 22-23 dr stewart mr president and board members i would like to recommend insurance for medical insurance and pharmacy insurance only at this time approval for tonight we had as i told you we had a meeting of folks who asked questions and shared information last week currently we're we are with kairos and we did also hear a presentation from asbate but we did not have number figures from asbate at this time we heard from the other vendors as well we don't have quite such a timeline on the decisions for vision dental life insurance and short-term disability so i'd like to recommend that the board approve kairos for one more year for one year contract for medical and pharmacy insurance i will put a footnote to that right now we have a policy that says that our meet and confer committees do not start until january i will be bringing to you at our next regular meeting at your next regular meeting recommended change to that policy that we start our meet and confer meetings in september and so those committees because those committees talk about salaries and benefits that they start doing the homework on insurance in september to bring a recommendation for insurance for the following year to the board in february so that this gives us another year to gather those good data and good information to bring to the board a year from now so as i said i recommend a year contract with kairos questions all right do we have a motion i'll move that we approve cairo's for insurance for both medical and pharmacy pharmacy for an additional year and um that's it all right i'll second that motion and a boy all in favor aye corey burgess aye amanda aymond i'm charlene diaz hi anna boyd i'm melinda sabrasky so moved item 3.2 convenient to executive session to ars discussion or consideration of employment assignment appointment promotion to motion dismissal salary discipline a resignation of a public officer appointee or employee of a public body except that with the exception of a salary discussion of an officer appointee or employee may demand that the discussion or consideration occur in public i move that we enter into executive session i'll second that amanda amen all in favor aye corey burgess hi amanda amen bless you hi anna boyd i'm melinda so moved we are in executive session [Music] do [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] motion to close executive session i'll make a motion that we close the executive session charlene i'll second that motion and avoid all in favor aye corey burgess i'm amanda ehman hi charlene diaz hi anna boyd i'm melinda item 5.1 reconvene into open session i move we uh reconvene our open meeting wait a second i'll second that all in favor aye corey burgess i'm amanda ehman uh charlene diaz hi anna boyd hi melinda sabroski item 5.2 there is no action for resulting from executive sessions so we will be moving on to 5.3 future topics do we have any future topics that we need to discuss all right if you do have any recommendations for future topics please let kim know or myself and we will get those added to the to the agenda uh upcoming events any upcoming events that we need to make the board aware of just the quantus kids expo i know is a big one that's coming up this weekend yep yeah and i would also note that lance is representing us at two events on visitor thursday and house in the spring because it had to be pushed back in the winter that would be in the morning and we'll push tax credits as well as just do other troubleshooting and then after that is over we are going to be and just to push on the tax credits they can still get those tax credits in two and four hundred dollars single and 400 for married up until april 15th and that can go on their 2021 taxes so and since i've been doing them and we push tax credits we'll normally have a half dozen or a dozen people take them but on average we will normally get at least one out of it and just one in and of itself is worthwhile absolutely but there are so many people who don't know about it and so it's nice to be able to take the time and even the folks who live out of town the snowbirds who are coming through even if they can't use it as a cash credit if they've got a connection to the school we'll use it as some unfortunate contribution absolutely and then relative to tax credits i would also let you know that jenny becker who sits out at the front counter is our safe coordinator but is also our tax credit person and she's been out talking with groups she's been contacting tax preparers and all kinds of folks like that started that before winter break and so she's been selling our tax credit things too good all right 5.5 date and time for future meetings our regular meeting would be the second thursday and i would i would ask you to consider putting the town hall in the third week after testing is done that way employees and parents and folks might be more likely to to participate what other business do we have to take care of in april um do we have any budget items or not at this not at this moment we don't probably some a couple of policies because as i mentioned earlier i'd like to bring a couple of policies for you to change we have supplemental pay things not um it's a general one what what we're going to pay per hour for people to work say after school programs and those kinds of things so that's a that's a pretty short item because if we can do it do you have do you have anything kind of pre-loaded on the kim tri kim tries to pre-load the next month's things on board docs so that you know we try not to miss deadlines on things i don't remember the reason i was asking is the possibility of doing one thing okay that's why i'm asking we should do that okay all right let's let's discuss when we're gonna do the town hall meeting first um if we're going to set that up for we good for third week of april april 22nd that's a friday that's a friday is on the 14th right yes the 21st it would be on the 21st correct i mean unless we did our meeting earlier then you know well that we run into conflicts for scheduling for tutoring in college so that kind of comes becomes a problem so are we good just setting up the 14th and the 21st do those dates work so 14th for a regular meeting like we always do yeah and then the 21st for the town hall yeah all right what time will town hall start i think 6 p.m is good because then people who are wanting to get here after work can can make it does that work for everybody else and you want 5 30 for the meeting or uh yeah and half an hour workshop yep all right awesome now we need to do is uh 6.1 motion to adjourn one motion to adjourn amanda amen because that's your favorite one in favor aye corey burgess i'm andy ayman hi charlene diaz hi anna boyd we are adjourned thank you for coming [Music] you
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okay hereby call this meeting to order roll call please got a live group tonight brown is here mrs galbraith here dr hall here mr sawalis here mrs walters here vice president group here president albrecht here please rise and join me for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all and ms roop would you please recite our mission statement our mission is to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future thank you okay next up is public comment do you want me to read these first or one let's have our guests okay i'll go first would you like to introduce me yes uh we've got with us this evening mr mayne and ms ali from csk we invited them here this evening because they have some very special news to update the board and the community on and we wanted to make sure that people could mark their calendars so i'm going to turn that over to uh mr mayne and miss ali hello my name is uh brian mayne uh this is miss maya ali i'm the principal of cardiff king magnet school and this is our relatively new assistant principal at credit king magnet school miss ali came to me in the late summer early fall with with an idea and this idea has now grown into something much more grand the initial idea was to find a way to help educate our students more about our school's namesake and i think i think it was timely because there was one point in the beginning of the school year uh where one of our younger students came up and uh asked one of our staff members uh very cheerfully are you are you coretta scott king miss bruns was not coretta scott king uh and so i think that that you know was a was a very cute example of the need to really educate our students over time miss ellie has has been able to recruit a team of about over 20 volunteer staff members as well as some members of central office and even the some members of the university park village and this idea as i said has grown over time the month of april i don't want to give too much away but the month of april is going to be designated to coretta scott king and to find ways to educate our students and really celebrate her this will include a variety of class classroom lessons it's going to include some artistic creation some musical renditions we are going to cap it off with a virtual school assembly that will definitely include our students and hopefully some some some dignitaries which again will will save that for a surprise and on top of that we've also decided to create a coretta scott king award at our school and so this award is going to be an annual award that is given to every fifth grades or not every the fifth grade student who emulates the the life's work of of coretta scott king that student will end up with a some type of a trophy or a plaque and also we're going to hang a plaque on our wall and each year the recipient's name will be engraved on that plaque to hang as long as credit scott king stands and that is that that's that's our celebration and we're really looking forward to it uh it is a still a work in progress and uh i would encourage all of you to uh to attend and if you can't attend to watch watch live on online did you give the date on that yes uh the the the date of the uh the assembly will be april 27th but we will be celebrating all month long if you'd like to stop by this is fantastic i will provide the board members with more specifics uh because certainly you will be invited to come for uh some of the events there if you can make it nice yes definitely april 27th is going to be the big one that'll be the grand finale well you can come on by anytime come tomorrow so very very commendable very convenient uh commendable both to you uh brian ms ailey and the staff it just says volume to you guys just knocking it out the park this is so impactful and thank you superintendent who was in the fyi i believe for your update and i saw that i didn't expect it but good job looking forward to it well thank you very much any other board members thank you thank you okay we did have two public comments submitted via email the first one is from chicago heights construction company um says good evening ladies and gentlemen chicago heights construction company would like to thank the board for the opportunity to present this written comment to all its members and those in attendance tonight from the public who live in the creekmoni school district 201u chicago heights also sincerely appreciates the opportunity to prepare and submit its bid for the construction projects at coretta scott king magnet school and balmoral elementary school that will be discussed under business items 8 b4 b5 b6 and b7 of tonight's agenda we reviewed the proposed determination summarized on tonight's agenda that the board finds the chicago heights that finds that chicago heights does not meet meet the bitter responsibility criteria as specified by healy vendor patton in being architects in section 1.02 item d of the application we believe this recommendation is being made by virtue of the past 2016 crete middle school project which chicago heights completed nearly four years ago the recommendation is unfortunate given the issues over the project were amicably resolved and all parties agreed there would be no liability determinations as shown by the agreement attached to your board packet despite this chicago heights is extremely pleased he was able to present the board and district with bid proposals for the current projects that contain the absolute lowest bids of all competitors by a very large margin while simultaneously offering services of the highest quality in the industry in a time of increasing costs and supply chain difficulties chicago heights remains proud it can provide the public of this district with one the most competitive rates and lowest bid proposals by far to save taxpayers money two services that exceed and are unrivaled in the industry three over 110 years worth of knowledge and experience in the construction industry across multiple generations again thank you for the opportunity to present you with our proposals we appreciate your consideration of this statement we wish you success on these current construction projects and look forward to future opportunities to help your district grow daniel and timothy bergen president and vice president of chicago heights construction company and the next is from jamie healey's email but it's signed anyway it it reads us um follows the 201u education foundation is pleased to announce the return of our spring fundraiser the foundation is hosting our spring fling event at the monidi heritage center at the creamery in monee saturday may 14 from four to seven pm our purpose is to raise funds and provide education educators with resources to enhance the educational experience this event will provide us an opportunity to begin fund allocation for the 2022-23 school year through ticket sales and our growing uh silent auction which includes an overnight room in downtown chicago sightseeing flights charcuterie class for two and other high-end items the foundation board would like to formally invite the 201u board of education and all district employees to attend the event at a discounted rate additional information can be found at the eventbrite link in this email and or our facebook event page and i think all board members receive the email so so that's it for public comment next up we have a need to go into closed session can i have a motion to uh let me make sure i have the removed can't move that's it okay um can i have a motion to go into closed session for the purpose of student disciplinary cases someone oh no take that oh let me first excuse me so can i have a motion to go into closed session for student disciplinary cases and for the employment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees specific employees specific individuals who serve as contractors etc so i'm not going to read the whole thing okay roll call mr brown is an eye mrs galbraith aye dr hall aye mr smallish aye mrs walters aye vice president rupert aye president albrecht aye okay we are enclosed 6 42.
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morning i'm bryson and i'm kylie with your morning announcements for march 23rd upcoming school events march 30 is the immunization clinic eight o'clock for juniors april 4th is the academic ceremony at 6 30 p.m april 15th is good friday we have no school not a carmen with the weather today is cloudy with a high of 63 and a low of 45 with rain expected in the evening tomorrow is cloudy with a high of 50 and a low of 39 and friday is cloudy with a high of 48 and a low of 37. now back to the announcements attention senior academic and technical honor recipients please return your rsvp into the main office today there will be an ffa meeting this wednesday march 23rd in mrs fry's room at 11 o'clock we will be voting on officers so please try to attend now to carmen with the lunch today for lunch we are having crispy chicken bites carrots and a cheese filled breadstick now back to the announcements please follow greensburg safety on instagram to stay up to date in your community the cincinnati reds ticket vouchers are here students with a 3.75 gpa or higher during any quarter of the first semester 2021-2022 qualified if you're not sure you qualify check for your name on the list posted by the front office now to sebastian with the sports there is no sport news today back to the desk mrs soldier will start delivering these vouchers to classrooms after spring break or stop by the guidance office now the vouchers will tell you how to order your two free tickets all ticket orders are subject to availability so make sure you to order your tickets asap freshman t-shirt orders are now available orders will be taken until wednesday april 6th order forms are in the main office with mrs tacovi mrs peters or the health room see mrs mintz or one of your class officers for more information have a great day and be sure to follow us on twitter snapchat instagram at
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[Music] oh good evening everyone i'd like to call the march 22nd meeting of the dartmouth school committee to order um please rise for the pledge of allegiance we have a flag over here i pledge allegiance to the fly of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all dr gifford can you do a roll call for us please sure kathleen amarill chris oliver here john nunes yep dr jenkins here mary wait here i'll just note that miss amarelle couldn't be with us this evening because she's ill so she's watching uh via live stream so she will hear all of the comments that are made this evening before we get started on the one item on our agenda which is public comment on the matter of the dartmouth logo i'd like to talk a little bit about our format for the evening we're going to start with two opening statements we have one statement from each side we have i see mr pereira mr ventura here who are going to start with opening statements in favor of keeping the dartmouth logo and then dr hall is here and he will start with an opening statement in favor in opposition to keeping the logo um they may have fellow speakers here i'm not sure i don't see everyone in the audience it's hard to see from up here i will just ask them to introduce anyone else who's speaking with them each side will have 10 to 15 minutes to sort of make their opening arguments and make the argument for each side for the public that is watching us and then we will move on to public comment from the audience we ask that each person who would like to make a comment please state their name and their town of residence we will alternate sides on the microphone back and forth so we'll go back and forth so you can line up on either microphone which are up here between the back and the front of the auditorium you'll see on our left here we have a timer set up we are generally speaking asking people to keep their comments to about two to three minutes so that everyone in the audience has the ability to share their thoughts this evening the timer will roll down at two o'clock to two minutes that is not a hard stop that's just a sign for you if you're up here to to get about wrapping up your thoughts at about three minutes we'll say something um to sort of remind you because our goal is to hear from as many people as possible this evening um we've set aside until 8 30 this evening to hear public comments um at 8 30 i will entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting and we will be finished for the evening the only other rule that i ask for this evening is that we be respectful to each other everyone is here because they love the town of dartmouth and they're here because they believe in this town we all have differing opinions on this in fact this committee is divided on this issue it's fair to say but we all respect one another and our right to have those opinions and i asked the audience members to show the same respect to their fellow community members when they're making their comments with that i will invite mr pereira and mr ventura up to the microphone i don't know if mr carney's here sorry if he is here he's welcome to come up as well sorry i didn't see you there i would ask you to come up to the microphone it's hard to see into the back it's very dark back there so um they're going to start and they're going to have about like i said 10 to 15 minutes to make some opening statements so i see mr pereira first please take it away thank you uh good evening everyone chris pereira dartmouth a former school committee member today i stand proudly with the dartmouth wampanoags all natives and the overwhelming majority of dartmouth residents who support the dartmouth indians logo including teachers administrators coaches current students and alumni to those seeking to cancel the dartmouth indians while we disagree strongly we respect your opinion even as we are steadfast confident and unwavering in ours the respectful beautiful unifying dartmouth indians logo and iteration of which was authored by clyde andrews federally recognized wampanoag tribe member and dartmouth high school hall of famer is a unifying symbol playing homage to native americans key facts about the logo include that it is just that a logo a symbol not a mascot there is no pat patriot wally the green monster or arnie the courtier the name indians is the federal term used by the u.s government as it relates to american indian tribes and members it is also the universal term used by native tribes themselves across the nation hence the federal bureau of indian affairs additionally every dartmouth wampanoag has signed a letter that was shared with the school committee and the now twice dissolved subcommittee in the letter they emphatically state their support for the logo no tribe has come out against the dartmouth indians logo in fact the only tribes to formally go on record support the logo and interestingly in last june the dartmouth high school spectrum school newspaper conducted a survey of students teachers and residents and found that 77 percent support the logo and only 13 are against it with the remainder being undecided at the end of the day this is about dartmouth and it's up to the dartmouth wampanoags dartmouth residents and school committee not outsiders most of the opponents speaking in opposition to the logo are not from dartmouth didn't go to dartmouth schools or they have ties to academia especially umass dartmouth curiously desperately a few have turned this into a personal political issue sadly deflecting time resources and effort away from children and tribes that is the most important fact of all because you see as the school committee and their creation of the subcommittee has focused on this topic for three years our children have suffered time is finite there's only so many hours in a day time spent on trying to cancel a logo that people love and honor is time not spent on children and education the last two years have been trying for students parents and teachers during covet depression anxiety stress suicide attempts are all up while test scores are either flat or declining teenage girl suicides are up 50 percent unbelievably the school committee chair continued to push the cancellation of the logo even during the height of coven in the summer of 2020 chairwoman jenkins publicly tweeted they're mad that i pointed out our mascot is racist it's a lot easier to laugh out loud when racists are mad at you what a disgusting false and evil attack on the people of this town at a recent school committee meeting a parent talked about how their child had to be seen at a crisis center a friend of mine's daughters has been suicidal because of covert he confided in me i'm losing my daughter and yet for three years we've had time to talk about a logo that people love but not one subcommittee was created to look at these real problems and not one public forum on these real problems there must be a reckoning there must be an accountability for what has happened thankfully there are significant tools at the disposal of dartmouth residents if the will of the people is ignored they include peaceful protests recalls of school committee members and contested elections for the next several cycles but wouldn't it be nice to build up rather than tear down in a race understand educate and honor rather than cancel let us unite around a symbol that has united generations of dartmouth students athletes teachers alumni and dartmouth residents we respectfully and emphatically urge the school committee to do the right thing follow the will of the people and the dartmouth wampanoags it is long past time to reaffirm the dartmouth indians enhance educational curriculum focus on the important priorities for our students and parents and move on with our lives the love of the dartmouth indians will triumph over hate love wins madam chair love wins thank you all god bless [Applause] to start i'd like to briefly just summarize a few points and reiterate i'm sorry mr carney can you introduce yourself to those who might not know you thank you uh my name is sean carney i'm a proud member of the aquino wampanoag tribe um and i'm here today today to speak in favor of keeping the dartmouth indian logo as i said i would like to just reiterate a few points that i've made both in public forums and other mediums when we look at the dartmouth indian as compared to similar movements we've seen throughout our country similar to washington or cleveland we are able to draw very distinct lines between what was authored in those cities and what's authored in dartmouth in washington you had a derogatory name on its face in cleveland you had a very caricatured portrayal of a of a plains indian but in dartmouth here we aren't using an offensive name now as uh chris had correctly pointed out pointed out native american peoples will diverge on this subject however the word indian is codified in our constitution it's codified in the united states code it has agencies and federally recognized tribes utilizing that verbiage in that nomenclature so onto space i think we'd be hard-pressed to say the word indian is offensive secondly the logo here is tastefully done we don't have a caricatured depiction we have a historically accurate representation of what eastern woodlands indians looked like prior to settle satellite settling by colonizers the other things we'd like to address here is that the indian here is used very respectfully you don't see it at the 50-yard line where it can get stepped on nor do you see it at half court you'll see it in the rafters you'll see it in display cases and you'll see it on the football helmets every single place you see it has a place of reverence it's not overused it's not plastered around town it is used only to honor and revere the sporting event the musical event or whatever extracurricular is happening at the time furthermore when you're at the dartmouth sporting events you don't see someone dressed up as a as an american indian doing flips on the field or twirls in the basketball court you don't hear war cries we've heard these horror stories of things and people using these logos and doing things that are quite offensive to american and american indigenous people but none of those things are happening here in dartmouth this is a uniquely dartmouth issue we don't have a broken system here we don't have a broken logo and i can't see a reason to fix it there's nothing to be fixed and i'll agree with some things that people have said the logo on itself is not a solution to educating our children on what indigenous culture was but i'd say if you're looking to change something look towards the curriculum make some deliberate changes that will focus on indigenous people that were here prior to the rest of us i would also say that it would be a great idea to look at forming deliberate partnerships with our neighboring tribes the tribes in aquina mashpee etc that can aid this curriculum and help bring a better look and a better eye on to what we're teaching our students and make sure that we're teaching our students exactly what that logo represents and why it is to be honored and respected lastly i would say that we've heard only one testimony or anecdote about the logo being treated disrespectfully out of i don't know how many people that have come up and speak from the public via facebook etc and other mediums i would say though that we have plenty of stories as you'll probably hear today of how that logo was used respectfully of how it brought honor of how it brought strength i think you could tell from any dartmouth high school athlete or any student here when you put on your jersey or when you put on your helmet or when you're wearing that indian you need to be held to a higher standard and you will treat others with respect you will lose with dignity and you will win with grace thank you for your time [Applause] jacob ventura dartmouth precinct six and i apologize for any overlap between the prior two speakers um former finance committee member here in town former town meeting member dartmouth high school class of 2005 and member of the wampanoag tribe of gay ed aquina and it's good to be back in this room uh when i graduated in 2005 i was the drum major of the marching band led the band on that very stage wore the patch uh the indian patch on our chest and was very proud of that first we need to correct the record about what has been said by some in town and reported in the media to date not a single tribal government as formally stated they are in favor of erasing the dartmouth indian not a single one in fact chiefs of the picassot and chappaquiddick tribes submitted written opposition to erasing the dartmouth indian symbol additionally every single wampanoag aquina member and resident in dartmouth is unanimous in our support for maintaining the name and symbol we're absolutely unanimous the mashbee chairman even voiced the willingness to work with the school department on education initiatives if the town decides to keep the logo the common takeaway from my conversations with all of these tribes was that indian country has far bigger issues to be dealing with than this murdered and missing women land trust gaming recognition status sovereignty rights education housing health care the infrastructure transportation senior citizens employment food access environmental and property rights just to name a few the issue here in dartmouth created by non-tribal members has been distracting to indian country and it's negatively diverting our time attention and resources away from the much larger issues that our people currently face i first became involved in this issue on october 28 2019 that's now spanning four calendar years nearly three years ago i wrote a letter to this school committee uh with the exception of miss waite who was not elected at the time and i urged the school committee to review the 2014 u.s patented trademark office decision pertaining to the washington redskins and sean uh mentioned this previously in that case the trademark office adopted precedent from the u s court of appeals for the district of columbia and applied what is known as the disparaging factor test when reviewing trademarks now while dartmouth's indian symbol isn't trademarked we can still use that disparaging factor test as some guidance the test is as follows whether the word the what whether the word marker image in question was of a disparaging nature at the time it was established not whether it would appear to be disparaging today in other words was the word marker image disparaging at the time it was established after years of compiled data cultural references census records treaties compacts tribal and non-tribal polling and interviews in literature various forms of media at the time the court determined that the word mark was of a disparaging nature when it was introduced in 1932.
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all right thank you for that uh all right um we are at 1.01 uh at this point i'm going to go ahead and proceed to item 2.01 with public comment if a speaker wishes to address the committee on an item on the agenda time will be provided for public comment before or during consideration of the item public comments shall be limited to a minutes per uh person is there any public comment at this point was it yeah hello board president at this time i see no request for public comment all right thank you all right we'll go ahead and proceed to item uh three review and approval orders of the agenda is there any uh members of the committee that are wishing to uh move or make some changes to the agenda all right i see no desire for many of the committee members for that so we'll go ahead and proceed to item 4.01 the development of an action plan and so for the purposes of just to begin the discussion i went ahead and threw in a very very brief short framework and i'm going to go ahead and share right here on the screen and it's nothing much other than three three slides on a powerpoint presentation so don't stress about it too much there's no homework to do here um and so uh the charge of the committee for recall for those who weren't at the meeting was uh to create a nearly focused task force that allows us to explore the concept of teaching or workforce housing some of the genesis or the the idea behind this was to address the teacher crisis that we're having nationwide uh and even us also with respect to special education bilingual educators or even in the worst we're we're more more of a crisis in order to attract um teachers even it's more difficult for those particular types of teachers and so um the idea was to start looking at some of our assets uh that we may be able to use to uh support or to deal with those those with that crisis by providing uh options of affordable housing uh as a way of enticing uh people to come and teach at our district uh it's based off of conversations as well that some of us have had at least i know i've had with other school districts uh in various settings in various places and where they've informed us that they have actual teacher housing and that um the words of one particular governing board member was the only problem we have with that housing is that we don't have enough of it and that is the problem that we have that we have more more people that want it not enough supply um and so uh from the conversation we had at the board level those of you who were there at the meeting would recall that it was uh nearly focused and the idea was to in large part carry out research conduct research as a committee publicly so we can go ahead and bring back possible recommendations to the body as a whole so we are not to go out there and start attempting to identify projects and stuff of that sort uh more than anything it's for us to go out there look for whether or not this is even feasible and then bring that information back to the board so that we can proceed and see how the board wants to uh proceed with this um so i opened it up is there any comments or questions from members of the board from of the committee or did you recall something different i just want to make sure that we're all on the same page uh justin can you mute yourself or yeah a quick question thank you um if i remember correctly we were wasn't it for not just teacher workforce but district yeah that it was expanded and so that's why the term went from teacher uh housing to teacher and workforce housing oh teacher and workforce yeah okay because i don't need an and in there all right sorry about that yeah all right thank you go ahead and address that yeah there was a desire by the board to explore the possibilities of of more housing in general however there was also comments about um not wanting to open it up so much where it winds up that somehow alum rock is going to solve all the housing crisis or other problems of the city uh so those were kind of the things that were kind of dealing with as uh as a board when we were moving this forward but more information is good uh further questions or comments i think that was a great clarification there all right so uh in terms of the time frame a lot of some of the some of the board members raised concerns about having a never-ending committee that was going to go on perpetually and i said rest assured that i'm not interested in doing that myself i'm sure that the committee members or the task force members are not interested in doing that as well and so um i threw out a couple of options obviously not went to that the task force itself would ultimately decide what we want to go with um but we may go with the slower pace of six months to bring in speakers and individuals that have more information such as mr scott who's going to speak tonight as our one of our first uh presenters who will give us more information on what the possibilities are or we may take a little bit more aggressive approach uh in terms of the the schedule and go with more meetings uh per month uh but a short timeline and so that's just something that i'm throwing out to get a sense from the task force as to what the appetite is for uh moving forward with this uh with a work plan you have any preferences from anybody on the task force right off the bat uh or remember uh i like the one meeting per month so it's not as brushed and it allows for any homework or you know conversations to have before the next meeting um you know i kind of figured that most would be more comfortable with that i just thought i'd put the other one because of the concerns that were raised by one particular board member who felt that the committee might go on for a really long time uh all right justin i i agree with trustee herrera laura that i'm concerned that two meetings a month between now and june that we might have a difficult time coming up with dates that would work for everyone all right i understood so i'm i'm getting the feeling that this is kind of the consensus of the committee is there anybody who's dead set on going for option two for some reason i'm not white to it so i'm seeing a lot of shaking heads so unless there's somebody speaks up and says hey i'm really interested in wrapping this up by june then looking like the task force is looking at option one with uh a maximum of one meeting per month um to go ahead and start bringing in that that information that the board is looking for um all right and so obviously the the superintendent's office is going to go allow us to um coordinate those that one meeting so that we can ensure that um everybody you know if possible every single member of the committee can participate um all right so um as we move along and we start identifying potential presenters such as school districts that already have moved forward with projects or that they for years already had teacher housing programs already in place then um the they'll we'll start identifying them and then bringing them over so they can present and uh we'll obviously agendize that properly for that meeting um the intention is not to overwhelm everybody with massive amounts of information all at once we'll take it slow since we do have the six months and then do our due diligence by bringing in um those individuals that will give us the information that we need in order to make a recommendation to the board does that sound about right or um how is it that we all want to proceed all right i'm getting some some shaking heads so all right so at this point on the edge we have our timeline and so glad that we got that out of the way uh we understand uh the focus or the narrowly focused role of this task force dr bauer did you have a question i would like to just since everybody is here in the task force to think and hopefully before the meeting adjourns to think about a good day during the month um it will be faster for us to be able to schedule those so between now and the end of the the meeting is that okay to do that uh president quintero yeah if everybody can take a peek at your calendars while we're moving through uh you know when you get a chance let us know uh ideally for me are thursdays or non board days because i've already kind of set those aside so you know if you have a similar date that works for you you can let dr bauer knowledge be good all right uh so uh unless there's further discussion on uh the ore plan then let's go ahead and move on to item 4.02 is there any further discussion i'm having to scroll through speakers because on the small screen here so if you do have please raise your hand all right i've seen you raise hands um is there any public comment on item 4.01 hey uh mr president uh at this time i see no requests for comment okay all right um we go all right see no public comment let me go ahead and move on to item 4.02 it says uh information about workforce housing is being provided by dale scott um dr bauer do you want to go ahead and introduce your speaker thank you more president um at this point we i would like to introduce mr dale scott he has been chosen by our district to be our financial advisor when it comes to the bonds program and when we went through the interview process we found out that he has some experience with other districts in this particular topic so when the board brought this approved gave us direction to form this task force we asked mr scott to see if he would start introducing the concept of what he has worked with with the other districts in terms of how can this be attainable for alum rock so without further ado i'm just gonna turn it over to mr scott dale the floor is yours so that you can share with us what you have been able to accomplish i believe this is with jefferson union nearby right we have now worked with a number of uh of districts around the state and maybe that's a good place to start okay and so what i'm going to show you tonight is really i would call it the state of the art right now in terms of how these projects are being put together in the state of california we have worked with jefferson high school district that's over in san mateo county in the bailey city area that teacher staff housing i call it teacher staff housing i know one member said is it just it's not just for teachers and that's correct these are generally put together as both for teachers and staff members so i will constantly be referring to it as teacher staff projects that project is actually going to have a ribbon cutting in about two months they're opening i believe it's about 135 units in daly city and i'll show you a little bit of that we're working on a project in soledad uh california we're working on a project in pasadena we have voter approval for a project in chula vista down in san diego county we're working to put an item on in front of the voters and i'll describe how this all works in a moment in santa cruz and we have another projects around the state so what i'm going to show you this evening and describe you and i welcome questions as much dialogue as we can have is how these financings can be put together you have a unique i believe well maybe not as unique but you have a very rare situation in your district where you have the ability to actually pull this together um none of these projects are quick let me just say that but you can move it along much faster than many districts and i'll show you how i think it can be done and i'll show you what the timing looks like in your various alternatives and some are very quick and some and not so quick so we'll see where you end up um let me just try to show the screen here everybody good okay um so teacher staff housing i do want to print out just one thing the superintendent and the board president i believe know this already you can see down in the bottom corner there's a best in business award from inc magazine we actually received that as a national award received that because of our work in teacher staff housing in the state of california so that is the best for the best businesses in the state of the united states for last year let's talk about teacher staff housing in general as i said there are a couple different projects i'm going to show you a few schematics this happens to be the jefferson high school district schematic this was a schematic that was actually developed in you can see that it is you know gorgeous in terms of its schematics i'm going to bring this down for just a second because i have a picture i want to show you that is just a couple months old i have to make sure i can find it but what that what that looks like as of a couple months ago there you have it there i am in front of it um that is you're going to be opening you know that was about um it was about three or four months ago that picture was taken and now it's about ready to open it's a gorgeous this is a really really gorgeous project three stories i don't have time to show you all the insights but it is it is a nice project in daily city a different example of the project would be the one that's being worked on in soledad a lot of times people think of teach when especially employees hear the words teacher staff housing they unfortunately think of like dormitories or uh housing that's not so great here's this here's a rendering of the project that is being considered in downtown soledad and this will be um roughly 20 to 25 units as a two-story building so these are the kind of projects that can be built they are really they are really exceptionally handsome when they're put together correctly the problem with these projects is financing and i hope you don't mind i'm gonna i'm gonna go in and out of this screen because i find looking at pictures of little pictures of people on the side of the computer so difficult so when i don't need the screen i'm gonna i'm gonna stop the sharing so i can see her and see if there are any questions i was in a meeting with jefferson high school a couple years ago they wanted to build teacher staff housing they were having us look at similar to this committee they were asking us to look at how could they put this together financially we began to run the numbers on this in a conventional form you know you go out and get a loan you use the rents to pay off the loan and the operation of maintenance and i could not make it work and i went back to them and i said these numbers simply do not work on what you're trying to do and the cost of housing and the fact that you have to have a higher wage wage amounts paid for a public sector project um and then i said to them you know school districts sometimes i think have a have a tendency to want to solve the problems on their own they always want to kind of take on the problems but in reality this is really a a community problem not just a school district problem the community actually suffers by not having teachers and staff members live in the community in which they're working so why don't we go to the community and ask them if they would be willing to pass a bond to help finance teacher staff housing in this area and the um superintendent looked at me and he said can you do that and i said i don't know i don't know if you can do that but we'll find out and it turned out uh yes you could and but the jefferson high school district's project that was now supported by a general obligation bond was the first in the country and it had never been done before and that's been done in a number of places of course but let's go back and look at this and see what the issue is with the numbers as we put these together if we think about a conventional financing and what i've done here in the upper right hand corner is made a few assumptions and these are examples of probably somewhat like yours um how many units i assumed in this example 50 units the market rents we obtained off of a website for the san san jose area we assumed that the rents would be that were charged would be 65 of these market rates there would be certain amount of cost increases there would be a certain amount of operation and maintenance that had to be paid and we assumed a current cost of 550 000 per unit and that's pretty accurate in the projects we're working on now if you look to the left side of the page you can see in this gray orange and red these are the rents that are coming in or the revenues that are needed i should say so in this example we're assuming that this is being paid for by a loan not by not by a general obligation bond but by the district going out and um and and securing financing for this in the form of what's called a cop a certificate of participation so this is what happens to this stream of rents if we try to start modeling it out the gray is the portion of the rent that would go to the operation and the maintenance of the of the units you'd have to have uh you know people fixing it cleaning it etc etc the amount above it as you can see this bracket that is the amount that's required to pay back the loan that would finance that in this case 27 and a half million dollars of of projects the problem is that the rent if we use these assumptions i've given you current market rents 65 percent of rent being charged the rent only covers about two-thirds of that loan and the remainder in this example not what i'm suggesting the remainder in this example would have to be paid out of the district's general fund which is not a very good situation to be in if however we change this and we go to the voters and we obtain approval from the voters to finance this project everything changes i'll show you on the next slide all of the assumptions are the same in terms of the rent and the cost and the operation and maintenance but now a certain amount of this rent goes to the operation and maintenance as i described before but there is no loan because the project is being paid for by the general obligation bonds that are being uh approved by the voters so that green here is actually additional income and that additional income goes into the district's general fund it can be used to build additional housing it can be used for other educational purposes that would be up to the board but once it gets up and running i've stopped it here at 30 years for no reason then i ran out of paper this goes into perpetuity this this project continues on and on and on because it's owned by the district and it is rented to its employees by the district any questions on the financing part of this because this is kind of the essence of the i should say the gas in the machine to get that kind of financing is i believe the only way you can get these projects off the ground in this current environment and i've seen projects uh proposed throughout the state i mean there are some where you have large very very wealthy corporations that are claim they're going to assist we'll see if that works um but in terms of just your general school district trying to get this off the ground without support from your from your voters i don't see a method that they can be financed where the operations and the maintenance and the debt can be paid out of the rent at a low market rate any questions on this before i kind of go off to the next slides so we're looking at a target of what twenty seven and a half million dollars in order to be able to in this example yes under this model and if we were to pull it from another source that you know there's there's already a bond that's been put out by the county for example they still have i'm sorry already a bonus been put out by the county of santa clara about a billion dollars of measuring money and uh there's still about 300 million out there uh four projects if we were to pull it in from there we'd we'd still be able to plop in these or plug in these projections and be able to make it work well i'm unfamiliar with that bond it would depend on whether you would be asked to repay that bond or not if you if you're trying to repay that bond out of the rents that are being brought in then you are in this model uh if you are not going to have to pay off the bond and the bond is going to be given to you then you're in this model i'm unfamiliar with that bond but i have a suspicion that it's that model and maybe uh there'll be uh speakers that we'll bring in for the next uh for the next meeting to see if it's feasible to hold on some of that money we just saw that they you know bought out a couple of uh places uh in santa clara as well as morgan hill so possible very possible it's easier if they are uh already constructed and that may be what those places are because already constructed you don't have quite the difficulties of the labor costs so let's talk about your bond preparation if you were to go down this road um here's the problem with the bond preparation i'm going to take this down again so i can explain it to you if you're going if the district were to do a general obligation bond under california state law you can only do put that bond on the ballot in a general election and the general election is basically defined as a statewide election so what that means for you and i and i had to bite my tongue when i heard about well how long shall we have these meetings for you know that kind of depends on how fast you want to go the next opportunity for a bond to be put on the ballot in california or for a school district is november of 2022 and i'll explain how that all that process works in a minute if the district is not on the 20 november 2022 ballot the next realistic opportunity is not until november of 2024 so that means you're basically then three years away essentially from getting any funding for that and so you've you're in if you're if you want to go down this road which i think is one of the few available roads you're in a bit of a quandary because you either have the board has to either decide we're going to move forward on this uh funding idea for the 2022 ballot or we're going to wait but it's going to be a long wait for the 2024 ballot because you can't really get it going until you have some money available to start paying the people and i'll show you how that works experience people start putting it together so unfortunately it's not an elastic opportunity where you say oh well if we miss november 22 then we can do it in april of 2023 no it's november 2022 essentially november of 2024 of the two options let's see how that would work so if you were going down the road of november 2022 there would be two things that we would want to do very quickly the first would be a voter survey a survey of all the voters in the district a random survey of the voters in the district and then at the same time a staff survey and they have two different functions the voter survey is obvious that's to determine is this something that there is support for because you don't want to go and do all that work and cost if there's not going to be support at the polls the staff survey is to determine what's the amount of demand for this now i'm going to bet that in your district there's a very large demand but it would be good to quantify that and have a sense and that is done through a survey of all staff members and they are very inexpensive to do and very quick to do that can be done literally within a couple weeks the information you get back on that is really golden it gives you a real sense of how many people are interested what's the size of the units they're interested what kind of renter that you're willing to pay etc at the same time you would want to have and we don't do this but we'd be happy to introduce you to some people that do you would want to have a very preliminary feasibility study on a couple of the different sites that are under consideration this is not a full-blown feasibility study this is more yes this site would work yes you would be able to put this many units on it or this site would not work because it has this that and the other in terms of some sort of roadblocks and then that information would come back to the board in this example would be may and that would allow the board then to to make a decision as to whether they wanted to go forward with that 2022 ballot and i'll describe how that process works in a second any questions about that i'm going to turn to a financing method and just for as we go on here but i want to make sure that i want to take questions as they come up i guess what i'm saying no okay um as i said you have a you have a fairly unique opportunity here um because the district actually already has a general obligation bond that has been approved by the voters this is the district's previous experience with putting items in front of the voters and if you look all the way over on the right hand side you can see the amount of bonds that are authorized but unissued that means they've been passed by the voters they're still available but they have not been the bonds have not been sold there was a measure in 2016 for approximately 140 million that is the that is the bond that's going to be used very shortly to start doing improvements in the facilities but there was also a bond that was passed in november of 2012.
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and that shipping and handling they were able to bring down um and the processing fees things like their manipulatives i'm sure that they're bought through a third party and there it's a pass-through cost as well as workstations that we are getting as part of this as well for our lower grades um because one of the things about math is that if you teach it hands-on to your little kids then then they tend to grasp it and carry it further and so that was something that that we wanted to make sure that we did get included in this okay thanks thank you thank you sir mr ryan mr grace this item will bring up again uh first item of business to vote on but thank you for the presentation right now are there any questions further no thank you for all the hard work yeah going into this the way you put it here but yeah that's a lot of work absolutely my pleasure thank you you make it sound simple right margaret yeah thank you much okay the next item on the agenda is the presentation of arizona merit scores we'll start with the high school and since mr webb can't be here we've asked mr crane to do that then after mr crane's through we'll ask mrs hoffmeyer to present that and then mr grace again all right good evening um i'd like to just preface this with uh the state keeps presenting us with a moving target when it comes to our state evaluations every year uh two years ago we had the az merit and then they changed it to the azm2 and this year we actually are taking the act test so we're just going to look at the comparisons between the test we took two years ago which one is it two junior highs it is okay the i'd like you to first look at the the bars on the right far right of that slide and you can see that statewide the student success rate dropped significantly in the state in 2019 34 of the students statewide passed the test and then in 2021 only 27 of the kids did did well on the test if you and so then look at ours our ela scores actually improved at the high school from 2019 to 21 by 8 our math scores dropped a little bit from 32 to 24.
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and this will be about half an hour okay we are back in open session um next up is board updates um carrie i know you have one i just wanted to make sure we shared this with the public as just reminding the other board members that we have agreed upon having our the mec hearing that we talked about for the closing of mec we will have a presentation we we've agreed upon april 12th which is our committee of the whole time and that meeting would start at six o'clock april 19th which would also start at six o'clock and then this is the outlier is a friday the 22nd and that would be at 2 o'clock and you know i wanted to make sure that i have a quorum there that day so make sure that you share your availability that day so anyway just want to make sure the community was aware of those dates ahead of time okay any other board updates i have a question for board updates i believe it was november or december last year when we had mr izzo on zoom and requested him to write a letter again to university park and it is now march and i have not seen anything so i'm wondering where we stand with that well i can address that thank you in fact i was going in my fyi q and a's today so um i did speak with mr izzo today about yesterday one of the days about that he acknowledged that he is going to be going back and finishing those letters and he's going to have those to me to do a quick read on those today or sometime this week and we'll be moving forward with that so appreciate your reminder on that any other board updates okay um next up is the consent agenda approval um dr coghlanis could you please read the consent agenda as is it's in the agenda yes underneath superintendent we have number one approved regular meeting minutes february 15 2022 item two approved special meeting minutes of february 19th 2022 item three approved special meeting minutes of march 8 2022 item 4 approved special meeting closed session minutes of march 8 2022 item 5 approved committee of the whole meeting minutes of march 8 2022 item 6 approved committee of the whole first closed session minutes of march 8 2022 item seven approved committee of the whole second closed session minutes of march 8 2022 item 8 approved 2223 board of education meeting dates item 9 approved deletion retirement of board policy 7 colon 193 electric electronic signaling and cellular communication devices um which one were we pulling out number six no we're pulling out number three anyway um so we do want to pull one item out so can i get a motion to pull the minutes of special meeting let me start over can i get a motion to pull the minutes of the special meeting of march 8 2022 to vote on separately moved second roll call please brown is an eye dr hall aye mr salonish hi mrs walters hi this is galbraith aye vice president ruth aye president albert hi um okay now can i have a motion to prove the consent agenda moved second who's second standing okay uh well i i have a couple of questions actually um the the retirement of board policy seven colon 193 is that just because it's duplicative now with the that is correct okay and then i was looking at the meetings the board meeting dates for the 2022-23 school year um december 20th so does christmas break fall after that i guess that's not on christmas break yes okay and ken does that date give you enough time i know that's usually when we have to deliver the levy to will county it does uh the letters do the last tuesday of the month uh of december so that gives us plenty of time so okay if approved on that night i would turn it in on the 21st okay okay i'm just thinking about that so okay um we already had a motion mr brown when you're ready for roll call brown is an eye mr swallows hi mrs galbert aye dr hall aye mrs walker moved second any questions or comments okay roll call please brown is and i mr salangish aye mrs walters aye mrs galbraith aye dr hall aye mrs vice president ruth aye president albert aye motion carries on the next item under business approval of a resolution providing for abatement of the 2021 uh levy adjustment since this is a resolution secretary brown will you please read the resolution prior to getting the motion resolution providing for abatement of 2021 levy adjustment whereas section 18-233 of the illinois property tax code illinois compiled statute 200 200-18-233 provides that beginning with the tax year 2021 a prior year levy adjustment amount levy adjustment will be added to the property tax rate calculation for each eligible taxing district based on on the amount certified by the co the county treasurer as the total refunds paid from the taxing district tax collection over the past 12 months and whereas the amount so certified for this district in 2021 was 307 and 88 dollars and whereas the board of education has determined that abatement of the full amount of the taxes for the levy adjustment for the tax year 2021 will be in the best interest of its citizens in order to provide relief to the taxpayers of the district now and therefore be be resolved by the board of education crete money community unit district number 201u will county illinois as follow section one this board of education hereby finds that all the the recitals contained in the preambles to this resolution are full true and correct and does not incorporate the same herein by reference section two the clerk of will county is hereby ordered to abate 100 percent of the real estate taxes which will otherwise be extended as the levy adjustment for crete money community unit school district 201u for the tax year 2021 2022 tax extension 307 thousand five hundred and seventy two thousand dollars and 88 cents section three the president and secretary of the board of education are hereby authorized and directed to execute this resolution and cause a certified copy of the same to be filed with the county clerk section four this resolution shall be in full force and effect upon its adoption adopted this 22nd day of march 2022 okay can i have a motion to approve the resolution providing for abatement of 2021 levy adjustment moved same roll call please uh brown is and i dr hall aye mrs galbraith aye mr smallish hi mrs walters aye vice president rupert aye president albrecht hi motion carries next step under business is can i have a motion to award a contract with bci burke company llc to replace the courtyard of the early learning center with an ada compliant playground in the amount of four hundred and forty eight thousand eight hundred and sixty seven dollars and ninety one cents moved second any questions for ken oh ken i did ask the question i believe at our last community as committee as a whole meeting regarding what's this the most efficient way to use those funds for this project did we have any projects that you felt was more high on a priority list than this one i i don't feel i think this is a good use of those funds okay as it they're able to utilize for all the students in the district so i think this is the best use of those funds and that was consensus with your team yes it is okay thank you you bet any other questions roll call please mrs walters aye browns and i dr hall aye mr swanless hi mrs galbraith hi vice president root aye president albrecht aye motion carries uh next up can i get a motion to accept and approve the base bid of six million seven hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for a total contract amount of six thousand or six million seven hundred twenty five thousand dollars for rl sohal general contractor of plainfield illinois for the 2022 renovation work at crete elementary school moved second any questions or comments ken real quick yes uh was this around our budget or a little this is uh who you know i don't know off top of my head i it was either i don't know the direct answer it's either a little bit less or a little bit more i think it was a little bit less up there the one thing i will mention though that their original bid was actually six million seven hundred eighty-five thousand dollars because they were the low bid i was able to go with them and i said can you squeeze the number a little bit so they came down an additional sixty thousand dollars so in essence the bid which you are voting on tonight is for six million seven hundred and twenty five thousand dollars in the district conditions ultimately there's three contracts there i think at the end of the day are we pretty much at our budget on all three pretty much we're pretty much we're actually a little bit under our budget on all three of them okay yes okay roll call brown is and i mrs galbraith aye dr hall aye mr smallish hi mrs walters hi vice president group aye president albrecht hi ken would you like me to get a motion first and then you uh yes please if you would okay uh number four uh can i have a motion to make a determination of the of the lowest bidder chicago heights construction company on project number 7-221-55 the 2022 renovation work on coretta scott king magnet school as not responsible for bid award well yes second okay you've got so bored if you you allow me i'm i'm going to read a statement to kind of summarize this so the public and you know where we are in this on march 15 2022 bids were received and read aloud for the 2022 renovation work at coretta scott king magnet school bids were received from two contractors chicago heights construction company and r.l solhold general contractor the low base bid was submitted by chicago heights construction company with a base bid amount of four million six hundred and ninety five thousand dollars the second low base bid was submitted by rl solehold general contractor with a base bid amount of five million seven hundred and seventy five thousand dollars a review of the bitter responsibility criteria is performed by healey bender patent being architects to determine if chicago heights construction met all of the requirements to be recommended for awarding of the contract for the project the following is a summary of criteria number four submitted within the proposal from chicago heights construction criteria four states successful completion of a previous project for the owner is not a requirement however if the bidder has performed work for the district within the last 10 years from this project's bid date the bidder is required to provide the following information which will be considered in evaluating successful completion one substantial completion of work within the prescribed number of calendar days beyond the contracted date for substantial completion or a mutually agreed upon later date not due to the material fault of the bidder on the project titled addition and remodeling at crete monee middle school the contract schedule was from 10 2015 to 8 2016 which was 304 days based on the schedule above chicago heights construction company had 10 days from 8 from august 2016 to complete this to complete substantial completion however it took until september of 2016 which was 31 days it is the conclusion of healy bender pan and being that chicago heights construction does not meet this criteria number two final completion of the work within 60 days of the date of substantial completion on the addition and remodeling at crete muni middle school chicago heights construction had 60 days from substantial completion to final completion of the project and it took two years and two months it is the conclusion of healey bender pattern being that chicago heights construction does not meet this criteria number three completion of the work at the original contract amount or a mutually agreed upon amount not due to the material fault of the bidder on the addition and remodeling project at crete mooney middle school the contract price was 14 120 000 the final price was hundred and 14 six thousand six hundred and one dollars and an explanation of this discrepancy was not disclosed in their documents it is the conclusion of underpandent being that chicago heights construction does not meet this criteria number four completion of the work without litigation mediation or arbitration by bidder owner any subcontractor or others except we're not due to the material fault the bidder on the project addition and remodeling at crete muni middle school based on the information provided by chicago heights construction there was mediation between the school and general contractor and chicago high school construction disclosed the following information and i quote there was mediation between the school districts and chicago heights contract construction attorneys to close the project out which extended the final completion date this was an extremely difficult project for all parties involved due to unforeseen circumstances conditions that drastically hindered the project schedule and sequencing of work i.e varied storage tank end quote it is the conclusion of healing vendor pattern being that chicago heights construction does not meet this criteria in addition to the information provided by heavy bender pad and being architects on october 16 2018 the board of education approved the settlement agreement between chicago heights construction company and the school district within that settlement agreement it states the following the school district issued a written notice of termination to chicago heights construction dated february 23 2018.
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in boston before they moved to washington in my view the dartmouth indian would fail to meet this disparaging factor test first the term indian has been codified by the u.s constitution as you've previously heard and it is the federally recognized term used for american indians and recognizing tribal sovereignty rights well prior to dartmouth adopting the indian as its symbol the term indian is also the universally accepted term of federally recognized drives in their sovereign government-to-government relationship with the united states when dartmouth adopted the indians sometime in the 60s the term indian in no way would have risen to any level that of as a matter of fact indian was the second least offensive term in indian country when they were polling during this very case out of hundreds of references the only uh term that was least offensive to indian was native american furthermore even applying the standard and present day the term indian is still federally recognized the bureau of indian affairs the national museum of the american indian at the smithsonian the national congress of american indians just to name a few finally an iteration of the dartmouth symbol was specifically designed by a fellow tribal member mr clyde andrews as a way to honor his people in our shared history i implore individuals on this uh school committee to do your due diligence before making any decisions and research that disparaging factor test i do believe it's informative i believe any reasonable person who reads this test that the court set out would come to the same conclusion that i did that the dartmouth indians would not remotely meet that disparaging fact of death as described finally in my october 2019 letter i encourage the school committee to explore entering into a formal partnership with the wampanoag aquina so we would formulate enhanced educational and cultural opportunities for our students and town residents i wrote that we should embrace a partnership similar to florida state university and the seminole tribe where university officials and tribal leaders have collaborated on a number of initiatives while tribe the tribe allows the university to maintain its native imagery and name is in that spirit of compromise and collaboration that i'm hopeful that we'll be able to work to bring some consensus on this school committee uh following the april 5th referendum and let me close by describing the tremendous opportunity i believe we have as a town and tribal nations with this situation we have the ability to provide a great model for not only our region and state but for the entire nation on how sovereign tribal nations and municipalities can work together to preserve our history and our imagery i believe there are several national implications based on what we do here in dartmouth in the coming weeks we have an opportunity to establish a new national model for tribes and municipalities to decide what is best for their individual circumstances versus a national one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter all-out ban of all indian references let us as a community resist the urge to cancel everything we might personally disagree with let us also resist the urge to let non-tribal people tell tribal people what is and isn't defensive to us let us instead work at building consensus and embrace our shared history the good the bad and the ugly move forward to strengthen the bonds between our town and our rich tribal cultures in history this could be a learning moment for the entire nation and i'll close with that with what i envisioned here in dartmouth as a compromise back in 2019 and what i continue to maintain uh three years later four points number one a formal partnership with the tribe that aims to educate our current students and visiting students about the special relationship the town of dartmouth has with the indian symbol we must educate people that we don't have a mascot but a proud symbol designed by one of our own number two a review of the consequences and penalties related to the student handbook code of conduct and athletic policies pertaining to anti-bullying and stereotype measures as it relates to the indian name and symbol i think that's something we can all agree on in this room this can be used as a learning moment to teach those who aren't familiar with our relationship with the symbol what our respect what respect and honor is all about that means no tomahawk chops whooping chanting or other racial slurs tolerated by our students faculty parents or any visiting students or schools whether in dartmouth or out of town scholastic events number three reviewing opportunities to enhance our curriculum as it relates to local indigenous history taught in our schools this could include annual assemblies with visiting tribes educating our students and the public about tribal culture languages food music and art as well as our shared history could also include the placement of permanent plaques at every dartmouth school including at the dartmouth memorial stadium that would showcase the special relationship that our town has with its tribal partners this partnership could include a formal ceremony mr ventura may i ask you to please wrap it up we're at 18 minutes now thank you this partnership could include a formal ceremony at a football and basketball halftime show that includes tribal representatives and school administration and finally number four it means maintaining our beautiful dartmouth indian name and symbol a symbol that is not only respected in dartmouth but across the state and nation we must do everything in our power to show the world that the dartmouth indian is more than just a symbol it's an icon as miss edith andrews our tribal elder uh previously stated a few weeks ago it can serve to educate people from dartmouth and people outside of dartmouth what it means to be a dartmouth indian what it means to have dartmouth pride and what it means to the town of dartmouth that honors its uh history and its indian symbol we have a remarkable opportunity to build that consensus and i'm hopeful that the school committee will finally reaffirm the dartmouth indian following the april 5th referendum thank you thank you now i will ask dr lisa hall dartmouth resident president of the naacp of new bedford to to invite introduce himself and invite anyone else who will be sharing his time thank you dr jenkins again i'm dr lisa hall priebus darwin president current employee of umass dartmouth i will make my opening remarks brief as there are several allies here who will be speaking after me good evening it is always important to first acknowledge and proclaim that we stand here on native and indigenous land as i said earlier i am dr lisa i am president of the national association for the advancement of colored people commonly referred to as the naacp in short the mission of the naacp is to eliminate racism hatred bigotry discrimination wherever it is present i have lived in dartmouth since 2015.
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of that bond there remains 71.5 million dollars that has not been issued now you might ask yourself why why is there 71 million dollars that hasn't been issued under california state law for a general obligation bond when it's passed by voters it has comes with it what's called a tax rate limit meaning as the bonds get sold and the taxes is levied against property within the district that tax rate cannot go over in the case of an elementary district thirty dollars per hundred thousand dollars of assessed valuation and for that previous bond um you are at that tax rate limit meaning the bonds you have sold now uh the district has sold now are up against that tax rate of 30 and so while you have 71.5 million dollars of authorized but unissued bonds they're not available to the district at this time because of that tax rate so what do you do the district's kind of done this in the past we developed a project a program about 10 years ago for districts that hit this problem called geo bonds reauthorization and what we do is we go back to the voters you can see in the step one where there's the 71 million dollars on unavailable bonds that's in orange we go back to the voters and we ask them to reauthorize those a certain amount of those bonds now in this example i've said 27.5 million that's the gray it could be the entire amount it doesn't have to be limited it's really up to the board what they decide if the voters approve that measure then we decertify a like amount of the old bonds and the new bonds that are passed are inserted so it doesn't increase in this example that's 70 plus million dollars but there's another thing we can do this is why i'm bringing it back to housing those previous bonds passed in 2008 had something attached to it called a project list meaning these are the projects that these monies that the voters passed can be used for can be spent on none of those projects on that 2008 bond say teacher staff housing so even if you could use those monies now you could access those moneys now you couldn't spend them on teacher staff housing because the project wasn't approved by the voters so if we go back reauthorize those bonds we would at the same time insert the teacher staff housing as one of the projects that could be funded and we would have anywhere from 27 to on upwards of available funds to begin that project immediately and that would be enter this model on the november 22 ballot and then you would be able to begin the process at the beginning of instead of waiting for the beginning of 2025.
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you guys have any questions on any of that no i would say if i might miss prison the high school can can you review a little bit of what we're doing for summer school to help remediate make up the learning loss yes sir so i'll actually move to the we actually have that right here so the summer school remediation in all core subjects will take place from may 23rd to june 30th we've got three teachers coming in and we'll pay them for the end for their for their work and they're getting paid really well uh to come in and and remediate in all the core subjects and so we'll have a math teacher we'll have an english teacher and then and then we've got teachers that can address both science and social studies as well we have seen because of covid we've seen our failure rates [Music] increased dramatically over the last year and a half and i think everybody knows that the online teaching was extremely difficult during that time we had a lot another one we had a lot of we had techno technological issues we tried to provide kids with hot spots we did as much as we could i feel to get kids engaged but we had a lot of absences we had kids who just didn't show up online on their zoom meetings with their teachers even when they did show up oftentimes kids would just have their computer on enter the zoom meeting but that then not engage in activities so it was also very difficult i must say for the teachers to adjust but i would like to commend them on what they did in moving into the and the district also by providing the canvas program which enabled teachers to upload all of their assignments and enable kids to access those from home and so those were some of the issues that we faced and so we are definitely addressing a lot of these things through that summer school program giving kids an opportunity i believe that the state's going to pay for that again the summer school program and so we will you know get as many kids as we can to come and engage and try to earn back some of their credits any other questions no sir okay and like i said when i began we're comparing data from two different tests the first one in 2019 was the azmerit and then in 21 it was the azm2 and like i said this year we're actually moving into the act testing for juniors and then the freshmen will take the act inspire test and then juniors are taking a princess science test we're actually starting that next week next week is the science testing and then in april it's in about three weeks we start with the reading writing math act tests and then we the last test we take at the end of april is the freshman act inspired test this is just a real quick question these numbers are they a pass rate or a score rate sorry those are proficient those are the students i believe that scored proficient in that subject okay how long did it take the state to get us the numbers back so in 2019 i they got them they usually get them back to us just after the school year ends and i believe they did the same thing in 21 so we get them at the very beginning that's a lot quicker than other years probably so and and one of the one of the reasons i think was that they the writing test is a little bit different now whereas they had to in the past with the other arizona merits they had to have at least two people grade each written essay and i think that changed a little bit so i think their grading styles changed a little bit all right so how we're addressing those gaps i already talked about the summer school and what we're going to be doing and then mr grace just talked about the mcgrill mcgraw-hill adoption and the alex program we actually started the alex program at the high school last year and the math teachers really like it um the they they think that that is engaging students and that students are becoming more proficient in the state standards through the aleks program and then we're starting another program at the high school called avid and that's being run by mrs jessie reek and that's district wide and what avid is seeking to do is to pull middle of the road kids in and engage them more in their academics and point them more towards college and so we're trying to target those kids we've got targeted school improvement strategies which we'll come back to in a minute and i'll let mr brad piko talk about that one and then we hired an additional counselor to try to address the mental health needs of students and there has been a significant increase in the number of students who need just somebody to talk to they need help parents need the direction to the services that are available in our community and then there's been an increased focus on curriculum alignment within departments and i think that's one of the reasons why we see the increase in scores in the english exam so let brad quickly talk a little bit about uh the average strategy the avid strategy is basically a research-based program and it's not ade ade is getting tighter and tighter in regard to what programs we could use district-wide statewide to be in compliance one of those one of those prerequisites is that they're research-based now so when we started to look at school improvement we began to look at the average group which was research based which ade approved made it a lot easier to write the grant but not only did it make it a lot easier to write the grant the program is solid jessie reek has done a phenomenal job researching avid bringing that to the table so that we could we could utilize that so in the tsi program which is a grant that we do utilize here in the district it funds about 35 000 a year so as we start talking about paying all these extra costs and teachers at summer school please understand that these are all federal programs that are supplying this money and through the support of dr wright brenda and others other leadership we're able to move that forward so the esser grant requires uh 20 of that grant to be utilized to make up student learning loss so in the case of our district that's about 1.2 million dollars so in the grant we were able to write things like summer school remediation avid is a tsi program that funds itself within what we're trying to do and it basically targets three subgroups of children within the school district they target the population the native american population as well as the el population and so we get together with our rep katie clenser from the state of arizona and we have zoom meetings and i have to drag the pencils into those and it's really nice because it puts us on track to do our cnas our fishbone activities and everything that we're doing towards school improvement it's robust it's meaningful it's dignified and it gets us ahead of the it gets us ahead of the race and so avid is a program that we're using that the faculty seem to like it offers a professional development it offers professional development that targets those three subgroups and the high school the junior high are the two targeted assistant campuses that were that are using avid right now as a side note we've taken in the elementary school faculty in regard to avid and that training is not being funded by tsi and funding that program out of another federal grant because we think it's robust we think it's meaningful and we like to see the parallel learning amongst our faculty from grade level the grade level any questions hey brad do you guys have any other questions i had one question came up oh thank you i had one question come up and with the new testing for this year where will the baseline come since it's new testing for us this year will there be a baseline from other school districts or will next year be the baseline for the following year i believe next year will be the baseline okay all right thank you if if i might add mr president the act was selected i think it's a wise choice ironically some of our top students just take the arizona merit and they don't care they're filling in the bubbles they know it's not it doesn't mean anything to them they don't need to graduate they're already accepted to college it didn't matter to them but if you're given to them as juniors and it's an act they see how it applies and it's free and they know i need to do as well as i can on this and it also helps us to align our instruction we know what's being taught on that and it helps us prepare our students better for that and we think we're going to get greater buy-in by the students because it will apply to them that's one of the things about arizona merit has no teeth other than it has a you know pejorative label that you throw on the school there's kids can get a zero on it still graduate doesn't matter so act i think was a great choice that was driven by the faculty and administration i agree with it i think that's great didn't sound like something the state would come up with on their own do we still have our act prep class as a skinny yes cool all right any other question that's all the questions i have anybody else have another question or comment all right thank you soft meyer good evening technical difficulties give me one second sorry hold your hold your mouth like this there it goes stick the tongue out well thank you um i want to go ahead and show you some of our comparisons this is showing you our 2000 um oh gosh okay sorry same colors there they are nope let me go back okay that's elementary okay yep there it is all right thank you this is going to show you that uh the azmerit of 2019 and the azm2 um basically uh i mean this is a very similar test um different name but both assessments through the state you can see that in each area we we actually had so from 2016 through 2019 our uh our numbers were pretty level they stayed right around where they are 2019 with a couple areas that were a little bit you know one or two points increased but in 2021 you can see quite a difference in both ela and math at the 7th and 8th grade level i did not include our science we take 8th grade science as well because we did not have uh 2019 we had a 51 passing rate 2021 was a pilot test we didn't get any results for that one our 2016 through 2019 scores were very similar right around the high 40s to 50 percent in science what we noticed very similarly to the high school the factors that led to our decrease in achievement were significantly student absences we had so many student absences whether it was while we were online or in person due to covid due to family difficulties and hardships so that was definitely our number one factor in our decrease technology issues were mainly not necessarily we had so many technology efforts at the district side but things that were happening as far as low internet at home not being able kids not being able to communicate or to to log in from home and not as a result of anything on the district side of it more you know again family difficulties or technology issues with internet services at home our online instruction as well we found just was not it is not it just didn't help in-person instruction definitely is we are finding junior high level the kids need to be in school learning in a classroom it was difficult to get them just as mr crane was saying difficult to get the students engaged even if they you know some of them get in zoom some would be engaged many of them would not um it was difficult to get them to turn on their screens so that we could interact with them so that was a difficult piece as well and then we also noticed just some of the curriculum it which is great that we're addressing this with mcgraw-hill just submits consistent curriculum from k-12 so most significantly though i mean between student absences and then the mental health needs as mr crane mentioned as well students are coming to school either while they were online while we were learning or you know last year they they were coming to school with some really heavy needs that we needed to help them address and so the test was not their top priority um you know just getting through each day was a big priority for them and that became our priority how do we help these kids get through a day successfully and feel valued and loved can i ask a question in regards to this because i i'm having a hard time understanding like how we compare to the state do you have the state standard numbers that we do so with the state we had let me go back um so our state comparison we were actually very similar into the state in 2019 2016 to 2019 we were similar um typically one or two points below or right on level with the state um 2021 the state dropped as well we still fell probably um i would say on average about five points below where the state was as well do you know if there's any research in regards to school districts that went to like an online program versus in person during our covered time i'm not sure if there is a published version of that but i i will look into it and actually i'll i'll get back to you on that because that would be really good information for us to have as well so in order to address the gaps we have our teachers and i will just tell you that you know during all of the covid closures and then when the kids were back in hybrid and then when they came back fully our teachers have just adjusted and helped these kids try to transition from one way to another and they've done an incredible job we are we are focused more on our we're doing a lot more data analysis of our kids our teachers talk regularly in their plc groups and actually on a daily basis about how the students are doing and what can we do we have some flexible schedules for students so if they need a little more help in math or english we can give them a little bit more help in that area if we need to change their schedule so that they're getting that that help then we can do that as well we also have some literacy-based remediation efforts going on particularly in our title 1 reading classes our title 1 reading and special education classes which helps our lower readers and that's read naturally which helps our kids become the ones who are struggling with fluency and then of course with comprehension read naturally is a program that really helps them focus on getting that fluency and comprehension up we also are working on testing strategies so we have our enrichment wheel at the end of our school day our fifth hour and this particular four and a half week block is our ready set test and during this particular time we have scheduled events for the students today it was an awesome day it was school-wide math bingo where the kids got on zoom with uh from the classroom a teacher got into zoom with two different teachers and we had kids winning bingo school-wide it was incredible uh and they had kids had a great time we're trying to just get them a little bit more excited about if you know kids don't love testing time so um we're just getting them prepped for it showing them a lot of different testing strategies and i'll jump to avid because this avid program also helps with that the avid program that we've we've implemented at the junior high as as far as getting those kids their middle middle of the road college and trying to get them interested in college we also have used avid to try to make a lot of school-wide consistency changes um having some different practices in the classroom that are more consistent we're just getting started with it and we've started to go through some strategies our last training was on having kids writing more focused note-taking and getting more writing in the classroom and so we're starting to work on getting some of those strategies into each of the classroom so the kids are seeing things consistently in every class we also have frequent visits with our students regarding their mental wellness miss montoya she visits with kids on a daily basis but she has also she's also implementing the safe spaces training for every 7th grade student every 8th grade student in fact our 8th grade is going through that training this thursday with her and that gives kids some strategies on emotional resilience and how to cope with some of the feelings that they're having but also who to go to if you're struggling with different events at home different events at school and gives them some outlets as well as some paths to success um as and then our focus on our vertical alignment we're excited about the mcgraw hill i'm excited to see what after the first couple of years what kind of changes are we going to be seeing from kindergarten through eighth grade um just to see some of the consistent practices that we'll see throughout the that adopted curriculum [Music] and then our summer school remediation program is going to be running from may 23rd through june 16th we've already sent our invitations out to several students who we feel would be benefiting from that but it's open to any student who is either needing a safe place to come in the summer or needing that special remediation we do have four teachers for our summer school as well as two aides the teachers are going to have one teacher for math um one for english a social studies science combined and then our special education teacher as well who's going to be teaching each of the subjects i do feel once again i just want to say i i feel like the junior high staff the teachers are doing an incredible job working with the kids they this is the staff that understands junior high kids understands the emotions that they can go through gives them some grace um as they're going through some of these things and then is all they're all also pushing them towards success and helping them realize what their potential is do you have any questions for me i do thank you appreciate it i i have one real fast one so do we do year-long english and math we do okay and then social studies social studies and science sciences is on that rotation there are semester long classes [Applause] thank you thank you appreciate your information mr grace i'm back again okay so uh we're facing some of the same issues our 19 data was over a test called the azine merit this is the azm2 this year we will be taking the aasa instead and like mr crane said a belief that this year will be a baseline to compare against because we haven't taken this test before our science test in the past has been in grades four and six i believe last year it was in fifth grade it has become an interval test the science test now so last year was a field test meaning that we did not get any results back our students did take the test we did get to see what that practice test looked like but we got zero results back from it being an interval test now that test is going to be given in fifth grade eighth grade and i believe 11th grade is where that science test will be and so we should this will be our first year of of getting results back on the azci test so i compared we have grades three four five and six take their tests um i was looking at the math and the english so i have actually two slides here this is going to be the math for the elementary school in 2019 we were slightly below the state we were fairly close to what the state average was we fell sharply in a couple great bands in math and i wasn't here for the online part of the year last year my first day was a week before we brought students back in person however i can tell you that elementary school teachers don't get into teaching to be on a computer they are people people and so we ask them to jump through hoops to teach kids online and the vast majority of them far exceeded probably their own expectations on that and so while we we did drop in our data i think that a lot of that was due to that online for our younger kids i know that my own daughter is currently in kindergarten if we were to go online and she were to be online somebody's going to have to sit with her or she's not going to do it i mean she's five years old the fact that she can log into a computer just blows my mind that she's able to do that and we kind of see that same mentality up to about fourth grade we had students that were logging on to to their zooms they were there they were not engaged regardless of what we did on on our side students were not engaged those that are naturally capable were still naturally capable those that had parents that sat with them and worked with them they still did well for a lot of our students we were just lucky that they logged on and we were able to see that they were okay in a lot of instances so yes in our grade levels for 2021 we did drop it is a different test and it did get more difficult the problems are more in-depth they were some of them were multi-step problems some of them were multi-problems within a paragraph as you got into fifth and sixth grade you would read a passage for a math test and then there would be three or four questions that you have to go through as well as graphs that have to be manipulated by a student on a computer in order to find the data that they needed to then do the math involved um and so we were our third grade was still fairly close they were actually right around the state average in fourth grade we saw dip but there is a big transition in fourth from third grade to fourth grade math that is one of the biggest transitions that kids see in math as well as sixth grade math starts to bring in more abstract concepts and it's just a a more difficult math we also face some student apathy when you hit sixth grade having been a sixth grade teacher towards the end of the year there is quite a bit of student apathy which is something that we are working diligently this year being in person to address address that any questions on the map before i go to the english so basically the same thing can we get like what the state standards are to or this yes absolutely and and we did see a drop across the state um in a couple grade bands we were very close to that drop still in a couple we were we were far below and those are areas that we are working as targeted areas on our campus this year to bring those up as well as moving into next year developing our plan of not just this year it's not what do we do we had a bad year we now how do we bring up one year how do we move forward how do we continue to raise those expectations um as we go i should have asked this before the other principles too but have you had a chance to look at the state results comparing the metropolitan areas where they have easy act most kids have easy acidic acid accessible wi-fi compared to the rural conditions so i looked at them according to who i knew were in person for the majority versus who would be online in person schools from my view of the data tended to do slightly better they all saw a drop the entire state saw a drop i did not look at it from that point of view but i definitely can and report back to you on that one i do know there are places in the valley that have poor wi-fi too yes they just don't live in areas where they have it or they can't afford it i've talked to a couple of teachers that i know down there that taught elementary and they said it was a big bust even for the kids they expected to be able to carry on they didn't do well at all and that was probably third grade and while this shows our assessment data we had connectivity issues and we had online issues all the way down through kindergarten and then bringing students back when students were out they'd still go online then you have a teacher that is at all great bands at my level were teaching to an online student while also teaching to you know 15 or 18 students in the classroom and some of those students they require constant attention of are you you know please pay attention make sure you're paying attention having them answered while they're online having them be on the board so they can interact with their class that sort of thing and then we also see at our age level when you talk about eld students you see a language barrier we have a couple students that they don't speak english at home so having their parents sit next to you even though you're teaching them their parent doesn't speak english so they can't really help them to the level that we'd like so yes while we're looking at data we did see those across the great bands at the elementary school that's interesting though that everybody went down so for i don't think that actually so i'll go ahead and start talking about the english um for english we have we have two different kinds of of english happening or of reading happening at the elementary school we have students that are learning to read we have students that are reading to learn and that's a break in one grade level so up to third grade we are learning to read and from fourth grade on we are reading to learn and those that are still learning to read in fourth grade are doing both um simultaneously so we had very good scores across according in relation to the state in 2019 we did see a dip in that a lot of that from what we can tell of analyzing the rebound the coveted rebound for when students came back the growth was exponential because they were actually with us in their exposure level to words to books to sentences to that structure was high it was exponential growth it just didn't grow back the year that we needed that we had lost and so we did drop our numbers were better mostly because this test was not more better than math mostly because this test was not as as changed as the math test it wasn't as in depth it's a reading test and the previous test was also a reading test and so that kind of kind of stayed the same for us we do have a program that we use um called lexia reading that we use k5 and then they have a sixth grade version called power up that we use as a remediation that tailors the remediation to the student last year if we could get students on it at home we could get parents to support it and be behind and get their kids on it that we had them do it as soon as we brought them back it was one of our main focus areas um within our day and so once again the state dropped in this area we dropped in this area and we were we were below the state um and and that is something that we are we are actively addressing um we see it in all of our grade levels we run a data wall k5 in our building where you can see where students are at level it's color coded so we know what where our students are at we're seeing growth by having students at school we're seeing growth through solid instruction in the classroom one of the areas we we have a reading consultant that comes in one of the areas that we're focusing on is tier two instruction this year to try to bring that up and for those that don't know what tier two is tier one is going to be your general ed instruction tier two is that remediation within the classroom so what are we doing within the classroom for students that still aren't getting the content after we deliver it the first time and so we're working um we have an additional staff member in kyla butler being on campus that works with teachers on their instruction and we are working to implement that tier two instruction to complement our tier three because we also have a title reading program as well so we would like to see a bigger increase in reaping this year the test the aasa is going to be very similar they had already purchased the to my understanding they had already purchased the questions from azmerit so that it should be similar to the azmerit that we've taken in the past for the aasa in third grade this year we are also getting a listening portion which is new and we don't have a lot of information on anything other than how to give that test but it's 15 minute reading fluency test where students are going to listen to part and read part which i'm assuming we probably won't get a whole lot of data back on as well because it'll be a field test we also took a new writing test this year i think the junior high took the writing test also so we took a benchmark or a field test writing test that they're going to be implementing next year separate of the reading with the writing portion that we already take now and like i said we don't know a massive amount about that test other than the fact that we took it this year as a benchmark and as a field test and we'll give more information as we move forward factors leading to that decrease online instruction with with little kids is difficult student absences we were subject to the same thing we had a lot of students that were absent um for a long time last year we have some large families we have multi-generational families when one person got sick that student stopped coming to school for a while whether it was them or not um and in some cases it was their parent or their grandparent that monitored them online and when their grandparent or parent was sick and unable to do that they weren't online and then engagement we had engagement issues same as as the junior and i had same as the high school had of students that would log on and were not engaged we did have students have their screens on we had them mute themselves so that you could teach without you know their dog barking in the background but getting all of that and getting small children to manage technology at home is uh was a challenge in its own and i think our teachers did a phenomenal job working on that and then the reduced accessibility to tier two and tier three instruction last year with pulling small groups is is not possible online um we did do some tier three um title last year online those students had to log into a different zoom work with our title teachers but once again these are our students that are lower that need that additional help and we're asking them to take multiple additional steps to get there whereas now we go pick them up from the classroom we walk them down to the room and we give them that instruction much easier so and then student age and supervision issues were absolutely a factor for us so addressing those gaps in remediation so we spend quite a bit of time looking at data monitoring viewing our remediation efforts myself my dean of students and ms butler who works with our teachers in curriculum instruction we spend time with an instructional focus every three weeks where we go in and do walkthroughs in classrooms and give feedback directly to teachers within the day so that they know you know what we're seeing as an additional set of eyes and then just being an increase on data awareness knowing where our students are knowing our current reality of where kids are and going from there we have frequent visits with our plc groups our plc groups meet as a grade level each week they talk about their students they talk about what they're doing in class and and we spend time working with them so that they know uh they have our support and whatever we can do we heard that our students need more exposure in kindergarten to text and so mr robinson our dean of students now reads books to them every day at lunch to the entire grade level at one time he reads books to students so they get more exposure in that unstructured time throughout their day we have professional development that targets areas that we need we do have avid at the elementary school it's mostly based around student advocacy being an advocate for themselves if they don't understand something knowing that they should raise their hand that they can raise their hand it also focuses on organization and note-taking strategies so students are more organized and able to keep up with their stuff keep their mind a little bit more focused and they're not you know searching for everything that they own we have our vertical alignment focus which which we'll be pushing into for next year we already have our mcgraw-hill for english and so that has been an area that we have focused on this year is making sure that it's being implemented with fidelity so that we know the baseline and when our students move to the next grade level we know what that student is going to be capable of doing then we have three different summer schools that happen at the elementary school so we have our eld summer school which goes through one of our title grants if i'm not mistaken i think it's title three that miss hearst puts together is for our eld students we have two teachers one we'll do uh first through third the other one we'll do four through six and each of them will have an aid as well to try to give as much small group instruction as we can we have esy for our special ed program that has a certified special needs teacher as well as a special education aide that work with our special needs students and then we have our regular summer school program which is first through sixth and we have a teacher and an aide at each level and we hope to get between 25 and 30 students and focus on those concepts that extend from year to year within math and english so try to bring those up students that need that help to make sure they're successful the next year as they move on and then i've reached out to [Music] the high school about potentially having some of our our honors students our nhs students if they have a need for service hours or something like that to come down and help us with summer school so that we can get even more one-on-one instruction if we can questions thank you yes sir appreciate that a lot of stuff to be digested there and i appreciate the high school the junior high and the elementary school and in taking the time to assess and make plans so that we can bridge that gap that we lost so badly during the covet those those months that year that was just erased so i appreciate the effort and the work that you've done there next item on the agenda is uh the consent agenda board in looking over the consent agenda is there any particular item that you would like to have removed so that we can discuss separately and vote on independently 2.10 do we have anyone here for the out of state or anybody to talk about maybe the principal we do we are our outstanding chess team and coaches here on town because we'd like to hear about that it's kind of bad just to say okay they can go that's 210.
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