001Our turn screen worse. Hey you. You're so cute. Change. Okay. Wait. Hey, you everybody good to go? Let him do his video. Okay. Ready. Calling to order the committee of the whole meeting for Diamond Lake School District 76. Roll call, please. Miss Angorola here. Miss Bis here. Mr. Becker here. Miss Hail here. Mr. Hman here. Mr. Candella. Miss Sullivan here. Please rise for the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance 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. We now open the floor for public comments on agenda items. Do we have any public comments this evening? Okay, there being no public comments, we will move on to what I think everyone is waiting for, which are
002our presentations. All right. Thank you. We have one presentation this evening and it is on the spotlight for West Oak intermediate school and I am honored to introduce our intermediate school student council and then following them will be our instructional coaches. So you're going to get a a lively and interactive and a very formative presentation tonight. We're going to start out with the West Oak Intermediate School Student Council first and our sponsors are Mrs. Bradsky and Mrs. Burman who are going to do an introduction of what the student council is and then we're going to hand it over to our students who are going to introduce themselves and a little bit about what they do and the purpose and role of student council a month. Um and this is all fourth and fifth graders. um
003we work on building up our community in the school and in the towns around us. So, we are excited. They've worked really hard on a slideshow for you tonight. Um and we are excited to show you our presentation. Hello, my name is Charlies and I will be reading the introduction today. Hello and thank you for having the West Oak Intermediate School Student Council here tonight. Tonight we will be sharing about what the student council does and what the student council is. We hope you all enjoy our presentation. Hi, my name is Devin. What is student council? A club where students are provided their opportunity to become leaders in the school and community. My name is Eric and my side is on Halloween candy. A student council and students at West Oak School collected Halloween candy.
004We collected over 70 pounds of candy. Then students student council gave it to food pantries, shelters, and more. I'm Isaiah and this is holiday cards. I'm Zoe and around Christmas and Hanukkah time, we made holiday cards for nursing homes. Hi, my name is Louisa. We successfully delivered the cards to make million people happy during the holidays. My name is Adeline and today I will be talking about Valentine's Day. To spread Valentine's cheer, we put hearts with words of encouragement and compliments on every locker in the school. We saw all the students faces brighten up the next day when all the students saw their lockers and it brought student council so much joy. Hi, my name is Sophia and I'm in fourth grade. I'm a member of student council and we are giving blankets to the
005orphans of the storm. We made blankets to give to the animals so the animals aren't cold and have a comfortable place to rest. We had so much fun making these blankets. We're so happy to help these shelters. Hi, my name is Richard and I'm a member of student council. I'm in fourth grade. Um, at Student Store, we sell items that kids use and they need. Student council members get to help decide what items will be sold. It's very important to have a store because we need the money for new items for West Oak Intermediate School. We also can use the money towards assemblies and other things as well. We sell school supplies, magnets, and sometimes some fun toys and gadgets. Hi, I'm Salman and I'm going to talk to you about Feed My Starving Children.
006Next week, student council is going on a field trip to feed my starving children. We are going to pack boxes of food for kids that don't have any. This food will go to different countries around the world. Did you know that every 4 seconds someone dies of hunger? This will be a great experience for us to be able to help other people that need our help. Hello, my name is Itel and responsibilities. Student council members are elected by our classmates. We are responsible for making sure that everybody has their student store orders. We are also responsible for reporting to classes about what is happening at our school. We help the school do special activities like spirit weeks. Student council is in charge of being good role models to our peers. We help our community and
007we represent our school. Uh my name is Ashley and I'm part of the student council. Thank you for having us share about student council. We hope you enjoyed our presentation and remember to sparkle on. I have a question. What is your favorite thing to sell at the student store? raise your hand and I'll turn and you can turn your mic on. Um, it's not exactly specific, but I like So, like when we saw toys, um, one of the thing, one of the items I like to sell at the student store are fidgets. And one of the items that I like to fill at the student store are gel pens. Anyone else? Any other questions? Oh, Mrs. Bis, it's it's not really a question, but I just want to thank you. All of us want to
008thank you for coming because what you're doing now and being such wonderful leaders in this school will help the school and help you guys and help communities as you get older. And we are just so proud of you and all the things that you do. And I just wanted to say thank you and thank you for this wonderful presentation and keep sparkling on. Thank you so much, Dr. Sharma Lewis. So, I am excited to be here tonight to talk about the work that the instructional coaches have also been doing at West Oak Intermediate School. This year we have had academic coaches for math and for English language arts and then also the new position of the social emotional learning coach with Mr. Carr. All three of our coaches are here tonight to tell you a
009little bit more about their role and how they've impacted West Oak with their practice and then they are going to turn it over to some of our student council members who are going to teach you the new things they have learned. coaches. Good evening. I'm Vicki Riley. I'm the K5 instructional math coach. So, we had a great opportunity to uh host some modeling and observation cycles for our teachers. And one of the things that we had an opportunity to do is with our fourth grade dual language classes. We went in and we had a chance to set up some guided math stations. So, guided math is important beyond the primary years and it is incredibly important when it comes to the intermediate grades. So, some of the things that are beneficial when we're talking about
010uh guided math in an intermediate grade is we're talking about this is a great time for targeted instruction. We're able to hone in exactly on the specific needs that we have for our students. We can also build in a lot of our differentiation during this time either to enrich our students or to retach. We also have the option here to have a lot of hands-on manipulatives kinesthetic learning that can help to deepen understanding throughout the entire math process. It also is extremely engaging because we have the opportunity during a guided station to move around the room, get hands-on, and you'll get a chance to maybe try some stuff out in a little bit. But we also have the chance to develop mathematical reasoning. So, this gives us a chance to verbalize our thinking for math,
011talk to each other, justify our answers, and it gets us into a much deeper level of our understanding. Teachers have the opportunity during a guided math model to assess on the fly. giving us instant feedback on how our students are doing and where we need to go next. And it helps us to build independence in our math because we set up routines and structures and we allow our students to take off from there. And I have the clicker and I didn't turn it. I apologize. All right, that was part So for the fourth grade math, we had an opportunity to go into the classroom and set and set this up. We I had a chance to work with the classroom teacher, set up some new routines and structures, create a nice organizational framework in which
012students can rotate around the room and participate in different activities. I modeled the launch of each of these stations as well as objectives and the behavioral expectations that were to be demonstrated during these stations. So, the nice thing here is guided math allows us to really gamify our math practice. Uh typically during a class period you may have between two to four stations. So the students will visit. In this particular classroom we got a little fun and funky with the name. So students had an opportunity and Richard is in this he lives this uh they have an opportunity to visit the game grotto the fact fluency fiesta the success maker summit where we're using our products from envision so that they can uh utilize that through our technology. And then our math ma math mastermind
013time. Tongue twister. Um, which allows students to focus on their vocabulary instruction. Hi, I'm Will Carr and I'm the new coach this year. Um, something that I've done with the PBIS team this year is create the Wolfpack ways. And I'm sure at some of the school districts that you might have been around or that you work at, you have some type of behavioral expectations in your school. And this year we did a great job of creating consistent and clar uh clarify and to hold accountability of our students using these behavioral expectations. Um what we have this for are all the areas within our school. So the hallways, the bathroom out at lunch and recess and uh in the classroom. So Miss Louisa is going to let you guys know what our behavior expectations are in
014the hallways. I need to turn this one off. Okay. The Wolfpack hallways. Wolfpack ways. W for walk on the right side. O for organize materials and lockers. L for level or voices. F for follow your line. P for personal space. A for appropriate language. C for care about others learning. And K keep your hands to yourself. Awesome. Thank you. And something else like Miss Riley talked about going we had the chance to go into classrooms to model for our teachers and something that I helped model with Dr. Burgerer is morning meetings. And our morning meetings are the first thing our students do when they come in for the first 30 minutes of the day. And what this does is it provides that classroom community and builds that positive culture and positive relationships with each other.
015Um and it the biggest thing that I find beneficial for is that it provides student voice. It teaches them how to be confident in themselves and just have those positive relationships with one another. So Devon is going to explain what her classroom does during morning meeting. Every morning we have a morning meeting. We start off with a greeting like good morning and then say their name. Then we do a share like what's your favorite color and why. And then we do a game or an activity like four corners. Sorry, my tech guy left. You too, Mr. Hansen. Hi, my name is Sharon Tweed and I am the K5 literacy coach. Thank you. See, we support each other in everything. I had the opportunity to model in several classrooms some word study lessons as well as
016how to incorporate those then into our literacy stations. Some of my specific goals for these lessons included increasing student engagement, specifically through providing opportunities for student discussion and self-discovery of concepts. Also making sure to model how we use data-driven decisions to target specific skills students need as well as getting that informative data throughout our lessons so that we can address things and provide feedback right then in real time to our students. And lastly, just overall strengthen our implementation of effective word study practices. An example of a format that we use when we are teaching word study to address all of these goals is from our word study curriculum where we start with a mini lesson where students participate with us to discover a concept. Students then have the opportunity to apply that concept. In most
017cases, that is through small group work. Specifically, we try to get open-ended activities. So, students have to apply critical thinking skills and also be able to articulate their ideas to each other. During that time, it provides the teacher an opportunity to walk around to observe what students are understanding or maybe not understanding and either intervene right then and there or take some notes so that they can address those needs later. At the end of each lesson, we like to share out where students can share what they learned or share about their experience because sometimes things happen. Like even today, Solomon and I were doing this activity and he made me think of it in a totally different way. So it's always interesting then to share that out to the whole group as well as it
018gives the teacher an opportunity to address anything whole group that they might not have understood and students can also provide input on how they want to infuse that into their literacy stations. So in a second you're going to participate in something and the students after doing this activity wanted to make their own for their peers to try out. So they even took it to the next level. So for right now we want to invite the board to have some fun with us with these activities. So some students from the intermediate school are going to join you. They know how to do the activity. It should be just a quick like two three minute thing. But please feel free to engage with them, discuss with them, disagree if you need to by articulating your ideas and
019they'll do the same to you. Trust me. So, as we wrap up our presentation with West Stoke Intermediate School today, I first want to thank our coaches, Miss Tweed, Miss Riley, Mr. Carr. They have done absolutely incredible work all year long in all three buildings along with um Jamaima, who is our other instructional coach. Um, but they have had such an incredible impact on student learning and being able to do it in different ways and being able to explain what they've learned. So, I have I hope you had a wonderful experience with our kids being able to show you how these new strategies have really impacted their learning. So, I would love to give a round of applause to our instructional coaches for their great work. Thank you. And I would like to thank all
020of our student council members. You did amazing job. how you put the whole PowerPoint together yourselves. Those were your words, your ideas, your pictures. So, we really appreciated how you worked well together to put it all together and you came and I asked them all if they were nervous and they said no. And I said, "Well, guess what? I do this twice a month, so you can come back anytime." So, nice job. And I also want to thank Mrs. Brodsky and Mrs. Berman for leading and helping and supporting the student council. Without your leadership and support, they wouldn't be as amazing as they are. And I know I'm attending the Feed My Starving Children field trip with you guys and I just asked Mrs. Bradsky and Mrs. Berman if we could have pizza for lunch
021after. So, are you guys okay with that after your field trip? Okay. All right. So, the surprise is you're going to have a pizza party on Tuesday because you've earned it. So, family, friends, thank you so much for coming. Um, this ends our presentation for this evening and everybody did an amazing job. Thank you again, coaches, Dr. Burgerer and Mr. Mrs. Bradsky, Mrs. government and student council. Thank you and have a great night. Okay, we will move on to our business agenda. We have two items up for action this evening and the rest of the items are up for review. The first item on the business agenda is the omnivous vote agenda and that item is up for review. The next item on the business agenda is the P is personnel. Sorry, I started before
022I found my motions. Um, okay. Um, so be it resolved, the Diamond Lake 76 Board of Education accepts and approves the personnel items as depicted on the agenda. We have three new hires, one resignation, and one leave of absence. May I have a motion to approve, please? Mr. Canella, Miss Sullivan, yes. Miss Angorola, yes. Miss Bis, yes. Mr. Becker, Miss Hale, yes. Mr. Yes. Great. That motion is approved. The next item on the agenda is also up for action, but first um Mr. Rogers is going to speak as to the summer 2025 projects. Thank you. Okay. So, you guys originally had a presentation for uh doing two projects this summer. It was the Diamond Lake sidewalk and the masonry work at Westo campus. So, recollected the bottom of the document had some other future projects
023for consideration. we were able to get quotes for two of those projects and so I'm was adding those to the memo uh for consideration for tonight. So the two projects, one of which was the sewer pipe replacement at Diamond Lake, that's the one we've been working on for quite some time. And you know, the original quote we received was right around 4 to 500,000. We're able to get that down to about 34,000. So they were able to get a lot of creative uh ways to reroute the the sewer piping in a safe manner. So, the problem's gotten a lot better from what from tweaks that Mr. Tibido's done, but this would hopefully solidify the problem for good and I think a relatively low cost. Uh, the next one is, again, I'm so thankful that we
024have uh people like Chris that are on staff that can help vet these proposals out and go solicit some creative options. Uh, the last time we looked at an air handler replacement, it was around $150,000 a unit. There's a lot of design and engineering costs that are baked into that. He's able to work directly with vendors and get a below our bidding threshold to do a like forlike replacement. Actually, not a like for like replacement unit. This one actually, it's a little bit more of an upscale, more efficient unit, but the price is $29,000. Um, so we were able to save a lot of money having his in-house expertise. So, those are two of the projects we want to bring forward and we anticipate to get some additional proposals for some more uh mixed air
025units that hopefully we can do this summer as well. So, if we get those uh proposals in time, I'll bring those to the second meeting, April. Okay, great. Does anyone have any questions? Nice job really getting those costs down so much. It'll be great to get them done, too. That's fantastic. Yeah. Okay. Um, so that item now is up for action. Be it resolved. The Diamond Lake 76 Board of Education accepts and approves the 2025 summer project proposals as presented. May I have a motion to approve, please? Mr. Becker, Mr. Hman, yes. Miss Angola, yes. Miss Bis, yes. Male, yes. Mr. Pandella, yes. That motion is approved. Um, the rest of our items on the agenda are for review. Mr. Rogers, do you want to speak as to the custodial services contract? Yes, thank you.
026So, this is a little bit of a deviation from um how our last custodial contract was entered in. So, originally we had a joint bid with district 75 and 120 to do a contract with GSF. We awarded the contract to them. They've been really a wonderful partner. Uh provided some exceptional service for us and they came to us with a proposal to do a a CPI increase of 2.9%. District 75 and 120 wanted to uh go out to bid as really the directive from their board. And since they've gone out to bid, their costs have gone up rather than entering into this renewal. So I I decided we want to split away from that is at least our proposal for tonight because we could enter in yearby-year renewals with GSF at CPI increases and we're
027still able to pay a competitive wage. we're with a vendor that we really know and that's sometimes the downfall of going into a bid environment where now they're entered into two different vendors that neither one of them know and their costs have gone up uh pretty substantially. So just wanted to point out that this uh is not essentially a joint contract but with custodial services there was really no uh efficiencies by maintaining a joint contract. We didn't share any services. The only efficiency was maybe using some personnel if we had any absences, but uh so far staffing levels that been at 100% for the last uh at least a year and a half or so. So uh we've had good partners in place. That's great. And really at 2.9% increase seems very reasonable. This environment
028has been pretty extremely responsive to all. Fantastic. Do you want to talk to us about the food services contract? Y uh food service that is a a joint agreement that we have with district 75 to use their kitchen. This is just an extension. Uh we have to we entered into a 5-year agreement uh for Isby's guidelines. There's a 5-year contract that we have to prove yearbyear. Uh the CPIU uh is a little different calculation. So it's either the the lesser 3% or CPIU food away from home it's called which was 3.6%. So the lower numbers three that's the renewal that would be for all of our meals. So as a reminder we're still anticipating being part of the C program which is really transformed the way we operate our food program. Uh we've been able
029to maintain uh really a net zero cost for us. I think the program exceeded uh you we had about $450,000 of costs and then revenue last year. Uh the ex the expenditures exceeded our revenues by I think it was $15. So we're really breaking even on this program and I anticipated us having to eat some losses by providing free breakfast and lunch. So we've been able to maintain um some good continuity of services. So this proposal is just to continue that with uh Arbor for another year. So, they've actually been bought out by Witson's just in case you see some promotional stuff that uh gets put out, but still same management, same people that work for us. Does anyone have any questions? Great. And then do you want to talk about the meal price increase?
030That is the one that we required to do, though we are not charging it to students right now. So, in the event that we do have to revert from the C program, there's a price calculator that ISBY utilizes for what the minimum we can charge students and still be part of the NSLP uh reimbursement program. So, a 10-cent increase would be proposed for the upcoming year. Great. Thank you. Did anyone have any questions about that? And just one quick one, any specifically any information about potential discontinuing funding for this. Uh we've been diligently paying attention to that. The uh the National School Lunch Program, I've not heard any chatter about any discontinuation of it. The only program I have heard a little bit of uh guidance about is the title grant program. So for us,
031that's the title one, two, three, and four. And um there hasn't been direct guidance that have gone to schools, but some of the uh literature that's came out uh was the district had to uh essentially pledge that it wasn't going to be used uh wasn't going to be using those funds for uh some specific DEI initiatives that was identified. So, I there was definitely going to be some more information that came about, but I just heard from the some of the grant coordinators that just be aware that you may have to delineate your money in different avenues uh to continue the program. So, I'm not at fear of any programs going away and that would also include our um uh state our regular and special ed transportation grant is our other big federal one. So,
032so far I've I've heard positive news. Yeah. That's good. Good question. Okay. Um, that wraps up our business agenda for the evening. Moving on to board discussion. Do we have any items for board discussion? My only item would be to remind everybody that needs to file a statement of economic interest to go ahead and do that um because it's due in the beginning of May. Okay. Moving on to Freedom of Information requests. We have a very large number. Does anyone know why? You know what? All of Lake County um had received this. We were kind of communicating back and forth that they weren't sure if these were AI generated or if this was an actual person, but then a few of uh the superintendent had reached out to law firms and that we had to
033be responsive to them. So, Mr. Rogers and his staff have put that together. They stopped at 10 and they were like literally coming one or two a day like for a week straight. So, we don't know why. They ran out of years. Yes. So, there's no more years. So, maybe next year we'll have one more. It was just very random. But I did like do I did look at it and I see it on a lot of boards agendas across the country. Yeah, we were just communicating late counter. It is. Mhm. Yes. I don't know if it's verified or if there was someone behind the AIA doing it, but it was verified by one of the districts. Yeah, everybody responded to it and it wasn't unduly burdensome. That was the other thing that we were
034looking to use as an excuse. I feel like 10 might be Yeah, that's 30 years, right? Because they each were like a three year three random years. It was unduly a pain. But uh the the good news is all they were asking for there's an annual report called annual statement of affairs that lists vendor payments. Um so after putting together a lot of information for the first one and putting in the format there that they requested, we just were able to send them the annual statement of fairs that they asked and essentially the information is there. It's up to them to go and find it. So it's the passive aggressive way of saying here's the information but we're not going to put in the specific formats that they looked for. So it was pretty easy
035to respond to all of them. Okay. Well, that's good at least. And they did number them for us, so we knew which order they were coming in. So, that was nice. Okay. Notices and communications. We have uh some seedall information. There hasn't been another seedall meeting since we last met, right? And then district 76 highlights. We have the March moment of the month. It's very nice. No. Um, public comments and petitions on non-aggenda items. You ladies have any comments? It's nice to see all of you. Uh, does anyone have any others? Okay. Then we will adjourn to executive session for the appointment, employment, compensation, discipline, performance, or dismissal of specific employees of the district for legal counsel for the district, including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee or against legal counsel for
036the district to determine its validity and for student disciplinary cases. May I have a motion to adjourn to executive session? Mr. Miss Sullivan, Miss Angola, Miss Bis, yes. Hale, yes. Mr. Hman, yes. Mr. Thanks everybody. Thank you everybody. Able to