D200 Board of Education Regular Meeting - Dec 17, 2020 [2]

001virtual board meeting of the oak park and river forest high school board of education on december 17 2020 it is currently 5 32 pm um gail could you please call the roll yes um dr moore no um mr barron here mr eisley oh he's not i'm sorry mr martiri here miss harris here and mrs dixon spivey here so regarding our virtual location the state of illinois continues to operate under disaster declaration related to the covet 19 worldwide pandemic the health department continues to advise the community to practice social distancing or face masks and avoid unnecessary contact with others based on the current public health concerns i serious ivy is head of the public body i do not believe it is either practical or prudent to hold an in-person meeting in the board of education december

00217th i further believe that it is either practical and prudent for the public to be present at the public body's regular meeting location we will continue to hold a remote meeting with updated practices to comply with public act 101-640 that was signed by governor pritzker on june 12th okay our first item this evening is closed session so i moved to enter closed session for the purpose of discussing the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees the district for legal counsel for the district and independent contractors and specific volunteers including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee or against legal counsel for the district to determine its validity collective negotiation matters between the district and its employees or their representatives deliberations concerning salary schedules for one or more classes of employees

003as well as a self-evaluation practices and procedures or professional ethics when meeting with a representative of a statewide association in which the district is a member litigation when an action against affecting on behalf of the district has been filed and is pending before a quarter administrative tribunal or when the district finds that action is probably probably imminent in which case the basis for the findings will be recorded and entered into the closed meeting minutes is there a second second uh gail could you please do a roll call yes um mr barron yes mr martiri yep miss harris yes matt and mr spivey yes um so we will now uh go to our closed session link and reunite there for any members of the public who are watching we will be coming back for open session

004our levy hearing public comment or normal items of business at 7 30. uh so okay hey megan it's jackie mcgowey they won't be back until 7 30 for the open session you're muted if the thing's at 5 30 which i thought was early but i'm like i'll just turn it on and yeah they they open the meeting and then go right into closed session so they won't be back for open session until 7 30. okay great thanks for letting me know yeah no problem what if i just sat here for two hours and stared at you i have much better things to do all right wait what did you tell me i've already forgotten 7 or 7 30. 7 30. okay thanks jackie sure no problem bye okay yes you [Music] so i think we're

005still waiting still for a couple of board members um it's so hard to tell sometimes on zoom um i'm here can you hear me yes yes thank you just checking my mic i always have mic issues yeah we're still missing some i'm in jackie's here yeah let's give it another couple minutes we're still missing a one now it looks like oh you know what gail i think she had said that she wasn't going to be able to make part of the meeting that is correct yes okay next we will just i forgot that okay um let me get to where i need to be so um we are here for the tax levy hearing it is now 7 34 p.m i call this public hearing to order on thursday um december 2020 for the oak

006park river forest high school 2020 text levy notice that this public hearing appeared in the december 9 2020 edition of the wednesday journal newspaper at this time i asked for any written or oral comments to be received and there this is now the opportunity for public comment on the tax levy yes and we do have one if you give me one moment and this is from michael gibbs to the district 200 board thank you for your service to the community yes you have been elected to serve the interests of the voters of oak park and river forest but the primary reason is what is that the best interest of the students of oak park river forests present and future as president of the husky booster club for 10 years in river forest village trustee for

007eight years i grew to appreciate the different responsibilities of the various elected bodies and who they are elected to resent represent you need to ask yourself one question before every decision you make is this decision in the best interest of district 200 i firmly believe the decision is to not take the allowable levy is not in the best interest of district 200 where will the funds come from to renovate the facilities certainly not reductions in revenue it is it is an accepted reality that the athletic facilities are the worst in the conference excluding the football stadium the delay in the renovation project should be an embarrassment to all of you your solution is to reduce the income to address the infrastructure shortcomings and of course athletics in the bull's-eye for cost reductions shame on you

008i have been an ihsa official for 36 years the opr facilities are comparable to chicago public school again shame on you go visit other schools in the conference tell me how proud you are of 200 north scoville avenue after those visits a high school has a great deal to contribute or reduce the value of our homes if the high school is in poor shape it reflects negatively on the home values i encourage you to reconsider the levy reduction those things that are best is the school model not a description of other schools in the area is this the dis is this the best decision is this decision in the best interest of distribution no and that's all i have sarah sorry was i a mute i guess forgive me yeah forgive me i'm just talking

009away okay so uh given that there is no other additional comment concerning the levy uh it is now 7 37 pm and so i'm going to close this public hearing kayla is there anything any other formality that needs to be done with regard to this for tonight okay yeah right we are now on to oh something nice um employee recognition or employee recognition of the month so um as we feels like so long ago but as we hopefully remember when we used to meet uh live and in person we had started honoring various members of our husky community so we are going to start doing that again um i think the events in the past few months have had us all so um scattered that uh we we lost sight of this for a little

010bit but but it is back so as you know last year the district launched our employee recognition program where each month we recognized a teacher of the month an employee of the month and a volunteer of the month unfortunately due the pandemic the program was put on hold but we realized that during these difficult times many of our employees have gone above and beyond and that they truly deserve recognition i'm happy to announce that we resumed the program in december so we are going to publicly recognize our winners for two of those categories tonight teacher of the month and then employee of the month um and gail i don't know do am i supposed to have a certificate because i don't no it's going to be just flashed on the screen oh i don't have

011to do anything with it okay um so first i would like to congratulate megan cahill she was selected as the teacher of the month she was nominated by six different people which i i hear may be a record um and here are just some of the things mentioned in those nominations um and like let's not lose sight that being a teacher while remote is i i can't even imagine how difficult this must be so uh megan is fearless when it comes to advocating for his students out of the box thinking comes naturally to her and she has a productive workaround for the tedious and the difficult that's that's a great skill she is willing to go the extra mile and then some to make sure that students who don't have a voice find one due

012to the pandemic our seniors and their families were at a severe disadvantage in making final decisions about where to attend college with the help of chris johnson megan cahill spearheaded a community-wide initiative called college connection which reached out to thousands of oprf alums and community community members which allowed students and families to connect with an expert mentor and support to help make these big life-changing college decisions um so here is the there's a should be a certificate on the screen i unfortunately can't see both at the same time yep there it is um so i wish that megan were here there would be a photograph it would be a little bit more celebratory um we could see her we could give her a hug um but congratulations megan we are so proud to have you

013as one of our faculty um so is she here and able to make us a statement or wishes to make a statement i don't think he's here okay all right well um we are super super grateful for her service and then we have our second employee of the month um and i'm so glad we brought this back all right our second employee of the month um is tim hasso and here is what people who submitted the nominations had to say about tim this fall tim has been running our on-site connectivity lab for students who have had difficulty with consistent internet access at home and has gone above and beyond serving as a mentor tutor and unofficial case manager for students in the program because tim quickly built meaningful relationships with students in the program he's

014been able to continue the outreach encouragement and academic support with these students even during this adaptive pause he has been an incredible advocate for our students and has managed to motivate students who have been really disengaged during remote learning i can't say enough positive words about tim's worth that work ethic and drive to help our students succeed so thank you we are so grateful for your service to our kids um really boots on the ground yeah and there's his certificate so i don't know if he is here this evening and has any words that he would like to share i don't see i don't think i see him on here so we will make sure that both tim and megan get those certificates uh mailed to their home i'm assuming uh so that they can

015feel the love uh when that arrives in their mailbox so thank you to both of them all right um now we have public comments um so gail if you want to begin yes sorry can i jump in really quick i apologize i just saw megan cahill in the room and i don't know if she wants to say something but i i would be remiss if we didn't give her the opportunity to release yeah please oh hi sorry i switched over to the youtube one because i didn't want to disrupt the levy but thank you very much i i appreciate it um and hope everyone has a wonderful um holiday thanks and thank you for your work during this really horrible difficult time it's a it's a great place to work i feel very lucky thanks

016again thank you megan i'll mute myself thank you sarah you're a mute sorry um public comment gail yes um this is from suzanne morrison dr pruitt adams doesn't leave until i believe july it seems appropriate for this board to choose her replacement there is nothing wrong with getting a head start such as searching such as securing a search firm and providing a first draft of the criteria for a new superintendent however selecting a new superintendent when the makeup of the board will change in april is a bit of an overreach it seems unnecessary and hence it makes people suspicious of the current board's motives if this board is 100 percent intent on making that decision for the subsequent board and perhaps create a task force or ad hoc committee mem made up exclusively of district

017200 board candidates to provide input into the candidate process of course not all of them are going to be elected but a better group of engaged people you could not find anyone interested in potentially joining the board and putting in most unthinked time as a board member is someone who cares deeply about the opr fhs and our community it may help squelch some of the community trust issues that dog d200 many in the community perceive that d200 board seems content to proving major plans and initiatives that are presented to them and the community that are rather light on the details of how things will be administrated once the rubber meets the road there are all sorts of obvious details that no surprise were thought through that end up creating all manners of problems personally i

018recall the changes a few years ago to the attendance policy that left seniors that left a few seniors hours before graduation unable to walk the stage until myself and many other wrote letters questioning how such poor communication and execution by the school could be allowed to cause such arbitrary pain and hurt my child was not one of those students but i wrote anyway because the fault seemed to lie with the attendance policy they clearly hadn't considered all the issues when it was adopted when an administration and its board treat every practical pro question as an attack then things that inevitably end up being poorly planned and executed questions especially the ones you cannot answer the ones that make a good deal good idea great the staff needing to find answers to those questions is what

019makes an initiative roll out more smoothly it is tough for the board and the staff to feel attacked but feelings aren't the important thing educationing etiquette educating our kids to the best of our collective ability is those uncomfortable questions aren't personal most often they are practical despite the constructive criticism please know your unpaid time and dedication to the community is appreciated the next one is from mark trinca dear board members thanks again for your time and energy in dealing with multiple dynamic issues surrounding the education enlightenment and health of our high school-aged children one of the issues of surrounding the education enlightenment and health of our school-aged children i got repeated that one of the issues that arose during the spring summer of 2020 was the use of the tennis courts for staging of construction

020related activity related to phase one of the imagine oak park project this staging took away courts from the girls tennis team thereby reducing the number of women that could play the sport the messaging surrounding the use of these courts was disingenuous as the courts were largely used for private passenger parking vehicle parking for contractors i'm am interested in your analysis of the girls tennis program and what could have been done to make it a more successful venture i'm also interested in the modifications that you are considering in trying to make the boys tennis season a robust experience for all thank you the next one is from mr clay hoolan oprf board i want to voice my concern about the rise of mental health issues since the coronavirus arrived depression and anxiety in america have become

021rampant federal surveys show that 40 percent of americans are now gradually grappling with at least one mental health or drug related problem but young adults have been hit hardest than any other age group was 75 struggling even more alarming when the centers for disease control and prevention recently recently asked young adults if they had thought about killing themselves in the past 30 days one in four said they had keeping young adults out of the school is compounding this problem and i fear that the remote learning solution to our problem is worse than a virus that has a 99.97 survival rate among the same age group oprf high school students high school has always been known as a trailblazer a progressive institution one that cares about its students and the welfare of the community we should

022be striving for not only the hybrid opening but opening up completely to all students the teachers i spoke with all privately in quotes want to come back and teach in person they care what happens to the next generation they are teaching i'm not sure if the unions feel the same way let's do something right for our children like other school districts across from the country let's not play politics political football with our children's mental health the next one is from lisa reed dear d200 board members something needs to change our huskies are suffering more students are receiving fs than ever before facebook is loaded with stories of huskies with 3.5 plus gbas in the pre-koba times who are getting decent ass for the first time ever why they are not turning in work why they

023are not engaged why they are isolated and depressed clinically diagnosed now for many we the parents of oprf students are told to show grace where is the grace for our huskies where is the grace in reaching out to students who are receiving atypical grades and or not turning in work to understand why and to see how they can partner together where is the grace in reaching out to parents to see how we can partner together whereas the grace on the part of the administration to reduce their stress huskies by making final optional as a grade boost or making finals optional as a grade boost or allowing students to go past fail as many universities are doing please on behalf of hundreds if not thousands of parents please show grace to our huskies cancel finals go

024to pass fail if requested help the teachers figure out how to engage the huskies it is time for a new approach it is time to show with actions that we are all together the next comment is from terry keeler kelleher two oprf district 200 school board members i'm writing to urge you in the district 200 board of education to allow oak park resident dima alley an opportunity to address the board of education at its upcoming board meeting she deserves an opportunity to respond to the way she the muslim community students of color and supporters supporters of an inclusive community and racial equity were harmed by the statement by the public statement of a school board member matt barron at a recent school board meeting it's only fair that miss ali be provided equal time to

025directly and personally respond mr barron used the school board meeting as a platform to defensively double down on his prior racially inflammatory and harmful statements which have been widely condemned and removed from the local newspaper she requested this opportunity to speak to the board that has been denied and only offered the option of submitting written comments that would be read aloud by the clerk of the board the public heard mr barron in his official capacity representing d200 reinforced racism in his own voice the public deserves to hear equal time from this alley in her own voice and she was told that there is not the technology to support this direct public comment this response lacks credibility given the array of virtual meeting functionalities currently commonly and securely available if the school board is committed to

026addressing a racial harm that it is implicit in there is likely an easy technological solution and sufficient reason to change your protocol to repair this harm i also understand that she was offered to participate in a peace circle a woman of color who was harmed by the words and actions of a school school board member should not be expected to have to expend further emotional labor on top of all the emotional stresses threats she has already had to bear by by participating in a peace circle i'm a supporter of peace circles but those most harmed should be the ones to determine what kind of repair is needed miss ali has requested an opportunity to speak directly to the board in public i a completely fair and appropriate request plus the primary issue here is not

027about unity between individuals it's about fairness inclusion and equity in our high school and community when there's racial equity unity is more possible please allow the public to hear mr miss ali's own voice so that can community healing can begin it's the fair and right thing to do thank you the next one is from flo schumacher good evening board members as a parent of a special education student i would like to remind the board once again of its commitment to prioritize the needs of the district's most vulnerable students when responding to the coven 19 candidate the harvard model and the models followed by almost all other districts placed a priority in returning special education students to in-person learning earlier and more frequently than students without special needs the hybrid plan the board approved does not

028follow this model special education students are given no more in-person instructional time than regular education students that is one day in four in addition special education parents were just advised the learning labs which provided much needed in daily in-person attendance to some of our students will be discontinued once hybrid learning resumes this means a number of special education students will actually receive less in-person time during hybrid learning than they were receiving last semester i urge the board to make good on its commitment to looking out for our most vulnerable students to that end i urge the board and the special education administrators to return our special education students to school as soon as possible as soon and as frequently as possible the next one is from patty flannery dear board of education thank you for

029the opportunity to contribute important data from the university of chicago's the five essential school independent survey results on the high school this data is used as a leading indicator of school performance now and predictive of future of the future throughout the state this administration and communication team have a track record of cherry picking or repositioning data that paints them in a favorable light while important information from internal and external surveys that address issues are excluded from board presentations and public viewing in a year that the traditional illinois scorecard was incomplete due to covet the five essential survey report which was completed before the shutdown should have been shared in the state of the district presentation and embraced by the administration board parents teachers and students as an opportunity for growth and transparency i have recapped

030or i've included a recap uh below with 2020 versus 2017 with lowest rankings one of a hundred to highest rankings 100 of a hundred as you can see parent-teacher students rated oprf high school leadership 18 out of the 100 and the survey reveals a growing lack of competence trust in the administration those issues should have been brought to the attention of the board and the community years ago so she puts down 20 20 versus 2017 hundreds 100 highest rankings instructional leadership at 14. it's a 46 decline program coherence at 15 is a 25 decline effective leaders which is 18 is a 14 decline teacher people trust is 19 that's a 46 percent inc increase student-wide student school-wide future is at 40. it's a 35 percent decline student trust student teacher trust is at 52 a

03127 decline student academic press is at 57 16 decline ambitious instruction 58 a nine percent decline school commitment 47 a 23 decline parent-teacher trust 79 and 8 decline involve families 81 2 increase the administration and communications team should be held accountable for sharing all data with stakeholders additionally they imagine one project update does not include budgeting cost information the community should be informed without making a foia request on where the finances of this project stand if possible please add budgeted actual costs to the presentation as soon as possible or let me know if it's necessary to make a foia request in closing there are many teachers i admire and respected oprf apparently many of them share the same anger and frustration with the administration and leadership of their school moving forward the five essential surveys

032should be included with the state of the district to the board of education and community thank you mr johnson could you sure thank you from ross news dear board of education you have shared your passion statement for the tennis program in the past and so i thought i would update you on the success and challenges of the girls tennis program this past fall the power of sports and clubs for our children should never be minimized my understanding is the varsity team finished the season without a major covet incident the huskies had 16 players they all stayed healthy practices were spirited and they completed the conference schedule in fifth place the jv teams did almost as well completing the season with only one two-week quarantine even with the health restrictions it was frustrating for the program

033to have to let go roughly half the players who came to tryouts because of space limitations the program was not going to have competition for all of them but it would have been beneficial to offer them a practice schedule and an opportunity to get on the court exercise and be with classmates traditionally tennis has been a no or low-cut sport that was not the case this fall as you recall many in the community had advocated proud of kovit for allowing more tennis courts to be kept playable as opposed to turning the courts into a construction parking lot and hosting a single trailer limited street parking was a major factor cited by the administration for converting the courts thus when we heard that our students would be fully remote the entire semester the tennis program community

034was excited to discuss the possibility of allowing a few more courts to come online for the girls fall tennis season that never happened in fact during the process of inquiring fences both literally and figuratively were put up which reduced the number of courts by half and resulted in cuts and less student participation this happened while the entire west field was wide open not a single fall oprf ihsa sport needed the fields it was a lost opportunity to have an honest discussion and it affected many student athletes negatively you should take this opportunity to reach out to players and ask them how they feel about their facilities and how they feel the school supports the tennis program our school community has another chance to make this right for the spring we know uh we now know

035that only quarter of the students will be on campus at a time and half of those will be freshmen and sophomores who don't drive thus parking seems less of a concern will you at least consider opening up a few more courts for the spring tennis season to allow more kids to participate in an oprf team sport in the middle of a pandemic i look forward to any response and a conversation to try to help kids stay active and connect with the school when the weather breaks go husties from judith alexander jeered board members this is a message of appreciation for your decision to take a flat 2020 tax levy despite dire warnings from the administration as you know the pandemic has created a financial burden for many in the community a flat tax will help

036these taxpayers remain here taking a flat levy now also will increase the likelihood of a favorable referendum vote even if it means you'll have to go to referendum a little sooner i also suggest that you work to shift the culture at oprf to one of greater financial responsibility ask faculty and staff to suggest ways to save money give quarterly awards for the best ideas look for someone with a track record of holding down spending without sacrificing academic achievement when choosing our next superintendent the more the community sees the high school exercising financial discipline the more it will trust and support the high school thank you for the opportunity to make these comments from lori jerry dear 200 school board i would respectfully like to urge the boe and the administration to identify and focus on

037the real customer at oprf it is not the teachers it is not the parents it is not the administrators it is the students i cannot feel i cannot help but feel like we do not truly have a student-centric mindset at oprf this pandemic has required businesses to rethink and reinvent themselves to meet the needs of their customers and stay afloat if you own a local restaurant and you don't figure out carryout you lose your business if you own a small retail store and don't figure out how to engage your best customers when it's easier for them to buy from amazon you lose your livelihood if your customer says this is a waste of time and it makes no sense during a pandemic advisory you listen and adjust or they leave is it possible to have

038the same entrepreneurial mindset in our schools is it possible to seek the council of students and listen to them rather than parents and unions when decisions are made is it possible to have the difficult conversations that would improve the education of all students without posturing and worry about political fallout examples of this include the eight months it took to get to a hybrid plan that turned out to be far more innovative far from innovative excuse me the lack of any opportunity for freshmen to meet their teachers in person the detracting of the curriculum how do low and high performing students feel about that the lack of quantitative measurement for online teaching when i tell friends and family that my junior has not been in the classroom since march they are astounded so many schools have

039figured out how to have some level of in-person engagement private schools our incentive are incented to figure it out and they will lose revenue we are now in the dark and dreary months of winter with cases spiking and i cannot help but feel we miss our chances this fall i appreciate the work people are doing especially the volunteers in the boe but hope with the new superintendent we can reorient ourselves to focus on the true customers at oprf our students from david detmer and jean bacon we have a real love for opr high school community and have been saddened by the recent chain of events that have us under underperforming our peers in many metrics we understand covet has been difficult on all but also believe our response to covet has been to wait out

040the virus until a vaccine becomes available versus looking for creative ways to get our students involved in some way on top of all this disappointment now we are dealing with a threat from our administration of cutbacks in numerous student academic and extracurricular programs we the entire opr community need to find more ways to bring our students and staff together now more than ever we need to get going the extra mile to do whatever we can to get our students and staff engaged both during and after the pandemic we can set a new course with exciting and hopeful leadership in the coming days and months please consider all we can do to help our students reach their highest potential thank you all for your time and service to your community since uh sorry for monica sheehan

041good evening i appreciate the opportunity to make a public comment tonight it addresses agenda item 11.01 i strongly support a flat levy it is just and responsive action as our community continues to deal with the economic consequences of a pandemic two weeks ago more than three hours of public comments were submitted in response to the administration's effort to change the board's decision regarding a flat levy the vast majority of comments supported the school's aquatic teams and urged d200 to continue to provide pool resources for them their comments served as excuse me their comments served as a reminder of the inequity of the imagine plan it calls for a huge pool and a 600 seat and auditorium in project 2. while a standard size indoor track for the school's largest and one of its most diverse

042teams track and field isn't addressed until the fifth and final project of the 219 million dollar plan as a reminder opr removed the team's outdoor track in 2003 to expand the stadium ever since the spring track team has had to hold practices and home meets offside in less than desirable circumstances given that imagine project one is already over budget and 39 of its classrooms remain on hold despite the more than 90 million sitting on the school's cash reserve it's reasonable to think the track and project 5 will never be built as such i request that the board undertake a comprehensive review of the imagine plan and prioritize its elements accordingly it's not enough that an element is included in the plan it matters when and if it will become a reality while d200 faces the

043scarcity of land and financial resources there is a pragmatic solution to the pool indoor track and other facility needs the school can collaborate with a park district and build a covered competition-sized pool at ridge and commons at a total shared cost of 14 million remove the old pool from the building making space for a standard size indoor track expanding the team's cramped field house and creating new space for other sports clubs and the performing arts the time is long overdue for the school to update its update its antiquated self-imposed and burdensome swimming requirement there is in fact no practical reason to demolish the structurally sound uh south end of the building as outlined in the imagine plane the time is now for this board to responsibly and equitably address the school's facility needs balancing them

044with taxpayers ability to pay thank you from marcy grant dear 200 board members i appreciate your service and commitment to the community as i hope you can see racism and bigotry uh excuse me sorry about that uh i hope you can see racism and bigotry and opr fhs will not just dissipate if you will if you will it will away or or sweep it under the rug now you have hate crimes inflicted upon students remote learning as well as a bigoted board member who refuses to accept responsibility for his ill-conceived actions racism and bigotry at the school level whether the perpetrator is a board member or supposedly behind a screen halfway around the world must be met face to face hate crimes must be approached with absolute clarity and straightforwardness that is transparent to the

045student body parents staff admin and the community at large oprfhs has failed at taking these measures and still exhibits a desire to minimize and manage incidents apparently one of your deflection tactics is to feign technological incapability and protocol issues as a ploy to deny dima ali a mere three minutes to defend herself and address the board the same privilege that was granted to her perpetrator as soon as he could seize the mic despite the excellent i.t department the high school boasts if it is still that difficult to ascertain i myself and several members of the community are willing to instruct the board through the easy steps of inviting a community member to your zoo meeting via link placing them in a waiting room and calling upon them when you are ready because this is so

046simple to do it would be prudent to allow the resumption of live public comments instead of staff butchering our words when they read our letters aloud the longer you deflect injustices like demas and try to pretend you are technologically incapable of honoring a request that was given to her perpetrator without questions question weeks ago the more dir enraged and distrustful you make the community with your favoritism of the oppressor your willingness to hold them accountable and your sw your unwillingness excuse me to hold them accountable and your sweepingly opaque and indirect tactics to wish this injustice away racism and bigotry and injustice at oprf must be approached with this with unwavering clarity and straightforwardness marginalized students have an incredible amount of knowledge and methodology and best practices for addressing the and fighting injustice that the

047adult staff should take a cue from i'm hopeful you will switch your prime concern about injustice in and related to oprf from damage control to serving and healing marginalized students and their community from colleen hillen hello i have three questions i asked a question at december 3rd 2020 board meeting and it was directed to the website for answers specifically the update on freshman curriculum restructuring area my question is is there a freshman class ninth grade that has detracted curriculum with any level of measured success the opr website has a lot of research most of it dated before 2013. i could not find data on measured success for schools that have implemented detracting well a better way to put it i could not find information that is obvious and easy to understand i'm not an expert

048on education so the information is somewhat of a puzzle there are mentions of a few schools that had rollouts back in the early 2000s but as i dug deeper i couldn't find any data that followed this school's success over a period of time evanston had a similar program back in 2010 and it spanned over four years but i can't find any recent gail if you're you're editing i can't follow when you do that but i can't find any recent information on continued success if you have it please post so in pursuit of more information i will ask a more specific question please provide a recent school or schools in the state of illinois who have a detract freshman curriculum and data to support its continued success if there are no schools in illinois that have

049recently tracked their curriculum then what schools and data are you using as a benchmark my second question in the state of the district document under the logic model of transformative teaching and learning page in the professional practices area it's state that school teams will collaborate to make data-driven decisions to improve student learning can you be specific on what this data is my third question i want to clarify what was stated in the november 2020 freshman curriculum and instruction update is oprf rewriting the entire freshman science curriculum what is the process to ensure it will meet ngss standards and who signs off on this who is the lead author of this new information how will this process be communicated to parents i think an easy to understand timeline would be helpful so that parents can follow

050the progress of this new detracting curriculum i realize there is a lot going on at oprf but i also know that detracting keeps moving forward and specific information as it relates to the process is not available thank you um i hope i should pause here for a second have somebody else step in i think we're very close i'm going to keep rolling out i can come in okay yeah i'm sorry i was unmuted all good thank you yes so from you uh asa i would say asara syed dear president spivey and the school board dear school board members i am writing about your fair rejection of dima ali's request to make a live public comment at tonight's school board meeting in response to board member matt barron's public statement at your last meeting on december

051third board safaivi introduced mr barron by saying that board member baron has asked for a moment to speak i would note that the views of any individual board member do not necessarily reflect the views of the district or the board president spivey specifically introduced him as board member not as private citizen yet she gave him a public platform to re-express and double down on his private islamic phobic attacks that he had already expressed in the wednesday journal he did not address his role on the board in re-explaining his belief using it as another opportunity to take shots at dima and the progressive members of our community since then baron claims to have understood his mistake better and has begrudgingly apologized in a private message to dima which the wednesday journal published dima then made a

052reasonable request one that is mandated by law to be allowed to respond and to address the public any taxpayer has a right to publicly comment in the school board arena even during the pandemic yet spivey said to demon in email we do not have the capability to support live public comment at this time telling her that the only option was to email a comment to be read aloud however the illinois attorney general mandate for the pandemic clearly states that the public convenes of via electronic means it should provide multiple alternative means for the public to comment such as telephone or video conference capabilities in addition to the submission of emailed or written comments not only is the board breaking man state mandates they are cycling a marginalized woman who has been so wrong in her

053public forum by one of their own board members what message is the board sending to the all the muslim and other marginalized students at oprf high school with this refusal to comply to the law and what and with what's right and fair only provided providing jimmy the option of emailing a letter like the one i've sent is that fair and equitable as opr strives to be dema's words will not have the infection or tone intended her muslim immigrant female voice is still cycled and replaced by that of a non-muslim non-iraqi person who will not pause that the parts demon would have paused at will not emphasize the words demon would have emphasized heck the word is islamophobia might even be mispronounced like it was by the reader during the last board meeting at this point

054the oprf board has already made the wrong decision twice i expect better for my community and especially it's sorry elected leaders and i look forward to hearing from president spivey and the board how they plan to publicly rectify this situation immediately i also urge the community to remember the community to remember to vote in april 2021 which is when matt baron is up for re-election this is certainly not the kind of letter who would be making this is certainly not the kind of leader who should be making these decisions for our children's future miss bivvy is not up to for re-election until 2013 so i hope she takes this opportunity to redeem herself and the reputation of the school board oprf and the community of oak park sincerely from steve lefkow thank you to the

055members of district 200 board for the opportunity to make a comment my name is steve lefkow and i live in river forest covett has created many questions under the umbrella of when of when when will construction end when will students return to in-person meetings learning my comments are directed at the question of how how will every student be challenged to grow in a rebuilt oprf school system we're increasingly becoming one school district oak park district 97 river forest district 90 and opr district 200 and it's especially evident in the coordinated changes in curriculum and instruction it was about three years ago when the river forest district 90 board present described a fundamental change in instructional philosophy the initiative was multifaceted and spurred by a common goal among sister districts 1997 200 of reducing the racial

056predictability of achievement the goal included a strategy involving a changing curriculum and instruction for every subject taught in every grade implementation was quiet and expedient and soon the board described being years ahead of our sisters district 6 what follows is a performance update for district 90 since the changes in before school shuttered in march 2020 due to covet one river forest adopted a less rigorous math curriculum it's one of the us department west's uh us department of education what's works group affirms should reduce achievement among all students by nine to eleven percent it's already working math achievement has fallen even before covert the district eliminated different differentiated instruction and now the growth of children on either end of the achievement curve is delayed the district adopted an improvement unproven reading and literacy program from lucy

057culkins that defies what research says is is best like a foundation in awareness of early readers phonic awareness of early readers students choose their own books now an achievement in english language arts students chose their own books now and achievement in english language arts has fallen even before copic immediately after implementation the illinois five essential survey showed river forest teachers blasting the administration rating instructional leadership in the bottom eight of the eight percent of all illinois schools the trend is teacher voice persists today in the short time exemplary schools were downgraded to commendable there is no longer an exemplary school in river forest since the new philosophy river forest school ratings on popular home finding sites like realtor.com schooldigger.com and gradeschools.org have declined creating a community issue and not just a curriculum issue it's astonishing

058how quickly a lower academic ceiling has translated to lower student achievement lowering academic standards helps know someone and it is an inconsistent step for well-funded schools instead changes should consider directing more attention more contact time and more resources to students needing it most this is where a money should be spent in april 2019 oprf assistant superintendent greg johnson described tracking as rebuilding a school system at opr fhs it sounded eerily familiar to the vision cast and river force with this evidence and given close coordination among districts it's up to the administration to convince the community how changes to curriculum instruction will make opr better district 90 may have won the race to implementation but i would urge this board to accept the advantages of second place take your time be patient with parents concerned the

059detracting risks lowering academic standards consider alternatives and implement changing incrementally well beyond the internet okay i don't know how much longer this is not much but i can stop this is from renee rototerry i want to express my gratitude the board of education for their time service and commitment to the community as evidenced by the three and a half hours of commons last at the last meeting our community is very invested in providing the best best education for our children as well as rich and diverse extracurricular and social opportunities the husky model of those things that are best asked all staff students and teachers to strive for high ideals in all pursuits it pains me that many initiatives underway run counter to this model and serve to undercut the dynamic and vibrant fabric of our

060community it was deeply disappointing to hear that our administration's take on budget cuts was exclusively focused on student student-centric programming in a year in which so much has already been taken away from this administration needs to do the hard work of finding cost-saving measures that aren't on the backs of students we certify i'm sorry we justify the high taxes that we pay with expectation of a high quality education must do better our school community should not set goals based on meeting minimum standard minimal stand state benchmarks we should aspire to hire goals and provide appropriate supports so our children can succeed you should look unifyingly ways that helps each child strive for those things that are vast over the next several months we have an opportunity to chart a new course with leadership i think

061that is imperative that the board listen to the community as they share their vision for those things that are best and the future for opr fhs high school thank you for your time the next one is from christa lambie or crystal lamb dear board i am writing to express my concern with the results of the university of chicago 5 essentials survey oprf falls in the highest category involve families achieving the quote most designation with a score of 81 100. in the category of effective leaders oprf scored in the lowest category entitled least achieving achieving a score of 18 out of a hundred that data making that data making up that category includes instructional leadership teacher principal trust and program coherence among others the definition of instructional leadership category is the school leadership team sets high

062standards for teaching and student learning the instructional leadership category is shockingly low at 14 over 100. has the board queried the teachers why they do not believe the school leadership team sets high standards for teaching student learning going forward as the board endeavors to hire a new superintendent the board should examine the five essential scores of any new superintendent in canada assuming said candidate comes from illinois before hiring further the board should fully engage the teachers in choosing the new superintendent specifically teachers should be given the opportunity to vet candidates and query each other on instructional leadership-related issues i remain concerned that the timeline to hire a new superintendent is too short particularly in light of kobatons and board changeover while the process needs to begin and i remain thankful it has begun there should

063not be an artificial deadline in hiring further to that end the new board should have the opportunity to have a voice in the decision their input and they're important more importantly the teachers input should be the driving force in hiring a new superintendent thank you and we're done all right thank you thank you to our readers that i know it's tiring um so we are on to introductory reports before we um go to our student council liaison uh maeve mcanders i would like to make one statement from the board um so tonight's the first time that the board has had an opportunity to meet together since the events of the last several weeks have unfolded um both you know concerning mr barron's comments and the ensuing continued struggles um so we are in the process

064of working on a statement from the board we're not ready to um give that tonight because we want time to craft it and be intentional and careful in our wording so our plan is to have a special board meeting which will be on december 22nd at 5 30 pm to address the issues that came up tonight and many public comments um and with that uh maeve you want to begin hi everybody um i'm nate mcandrews and i'm the student council board representative i'm excited to be here tonight and tell all of you what student council has been working on this week students have been participating in our winter spirit week student council wanted to create a fun sphere week for students and staff to participate in before finals we hope this week has helped everyone

065relax and show some school spirit before the first semester endings um this monday was pajama day tuesday was winter gear day wednesday was white out day today was ugly sweater day and tomorrow is fancy clothes day although we have not seen as much participation this week as we did during our home cozy spirit week we still see a bunch of students and staff sending pictures each day showing off their school spirit additionally student council is in the process of planning some fun activities for the second semester that we will that will get students involved we would like to host a virtual cooking night where we would have a chef teach students how to make a meal or pastry over a live zoom call we are currently looking for possible chefs that are willing to participate

066and hope that students are interested in this idea also student council is still working on our virtual trivia night for second semester and we really hope that people will want to participate in that too recently we've noticed that some students are still a little confused about how hybrid learning will work exactly so we would really appreciate just like a little extra explanation of what the second semester will look like just to help students understand what school look like when we return from winter break just you know help them as much as uh we can so thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to speak on behalf of student council thank you maven that's a really excellent point about doing additional education so that students that we can alleviate some anxiety if possible before

067they come back into what will be a very different school and thank you for your work with with spirit week i think that it's never been more needed so that was really nice to hear and if you need people to be the tasters of that great chef work i'm sure you'll find here okay you ready for me to call on the next day okay uh miss camerton could you give us the four-year request please yes we have three foia requests and they were resolved thank you uh so my for my superintendent uh announcements tonight i want to begin tonight by congratulating the husky booster club on celebrating its 50th anniversary this year unlike a lot of booster clubs which support just athletics our husky boosters support all four of the four a's at oprf academics

068arts activities and athletics the club is celebrating this milestone with a donation of forty thousand dollars to project one the funds will be used to create a new wall of excellence in the student center as well as a video wall in the welcome center thank you to the boosters for your tremendous support of opif high school and congratulations on your golden anniversary also i want to remind everyone that tomorrow night is the winter of prisms concert it is free this year you can go on our web page and register for the to attend and it starts at 7 pm i also need to make an announcement about the equity audit based upon hearing the board's clear response to the proposed equity audit on december 3rd 2020 it has been decided to pull the equity audit

069action item from the regular board agenda packet for tonight this equity audit was recommended with the purpose of evaluating the systemic impact of current policies programs practices and equity initiatives in d200 and objectively and objectively evaluating our learning system during the pandemic we certainly would have current relevant data to inform future decisions on how to best align our systems and increase the impact of our leading for our equity efforts the driving force behind the proposed audit process was to be data informed in the selection of a long-term equity partner for d200 by the end of the 2020-2021 school year having the appropriate long-term equity partner is critical to systematic systematizing district efforts as they pretend to pertain to equity leadership development student voice cultural responsiveness and professional development the district equity leadership team or delt

070conducted a process of inquiry around the need to do an equity audit acknowledging who we are as an institution in our equity journey was important to discuss the dealt understood the need to choose an audit firm that would meet to d200 where we are relative to the current state of our racial equity journey although an rfp was not required we felt it was necessary to take a systemic approach to identifying an honor firm to best fit our needs as an organization going forward we will continue the racial equity work the plan is for the administration to evaluate our current systems for efficacy and make the necessary adjustments relative to our equity needs use of racial equity policy 7 colon 12 specifically the equity analysis tool will continue to play a critical role in this evaluation

071process additionally the use of past and current data collection will aid in the realignment of our overall educational system design that will drive the advancement of racial equity in d200 that concludes the superintendent's announcement thank you um so next we have up approval of the following consent items which is 9.01 oh so yeah so i moved to approve the following consent items um the first being 9.01 personnel recommendations including new hires transfer and retirement 9.02 confirmation of culture climate and behavior committee member 9.03 board of education meeting dates for 2021 calendar year 9.04 open and closed minutes of november 18 19th and december 4th 2020 in a declaration that the closed session audio tapes of march 2019 shall be destroyed 9.05 presentation of monthly financials report presentation of monthly treasures or excuse me 9.06 presentation

072monthly treasurer's report 9.07 approval of the check disbursements and financial resolutions 9.08 approval of purchase of the telecom innovations telcom innovations group remote phone solution 9.09 approval of purchase of technology for hybrid classrooms 9.10 uh ff and e contract is there a second if if we want something pulled yeah oreo yes or is there anything any one months pulled okay 9.01 because we haven't completed our um enclosed session review so any other items all right so i i amend my prior motion um to include all of the previously mentioned items except for 9.01 which is the personnel recommendations including new hires transfers and retirement uh because we will need to go back in the closed session and then come back out later to vote on that so that is just being postponed um until later

073in the meeting is there a second second um all right and that was a second to the amendment of the motion um so gail can we just do a roll call at this point you should really have a that was that approved the amendment now we should go back and hear the motion okay so um so is there a motion to prove the following consent items nine point zero two nine point zero three nine point two four nine point zero five nine point zero six nine point zero seven nine point zero eight nine point zero nine and nine point ten is there a second was that mr kovsky that secondary yes thank you okay uh gail could you please call the roll yes mr martiri yes miss harris yes mr kopsky yes dr moore yes

074mr barron mr barron mr eisley yes mr spivey yes and mr baron okay i'm seeing you i didn't hear you okay all right um and now we have discussion items yes the first item item 10.01 is the state of the district address i'm waiting for it to come up on the screen thank you um tonight as we have done in the past two years we come forward with a comprehensive state of the district report that we'll address would you go to the next screen please that shows that everything we do is centered around the students that we serve meeting them where they are and moving them forward regardless of their race ethnicity and social economic status our mission on the next slide is to that oak pork rind forest high school will provide a dynamic

075supportive learning environment that cultivates knowledge skills and character and strives for equity and excellence for all of our students next slide so tonight we will cover our accomplishments we will go to our data dashboards we will have a specific pull-out focus on transforming an air a part of this presentation will include the illinois state report card the five essentials the 29th 2019 strategic plan accomplishments the 2019 strategic plan focus areas the educational transformative ad the learning laws as well as identifying the superintendent goals and recommendations as we move forward the next slide please as you can see here are some of our top accomplishments that took place this year by oprf students and staff for the last school year recognitions and awards range from local all the way to national what's more these achievements span

076a variety of areas including leadership environmentalism social emotional learning science the arts and athletics what these accomplishments show us is that we are a public school that truly does provide a comprehensive well-rounded education for our students next slide instead so this year can you make that a little bit bigger greg is that possible actually i can't it's in presentation mode as it is right there okay as you know last year we launched several dashboards that are posted on our website these dashboards provide a wealth of information and data to the current state of the district the first dashboard to your left is the illinois state report card you can go on there and see the current illinois state report card and those which the state issues in the fall of each year by clicking on

077the illinois state report card dashboard you will have access to our 2019-2020 data the center one is our strategic dashboard which also has a replication of that data the five essentials report as well as our focus on a strategic plan and then the last dashboard to the right is our interactive dashboard that we will speak a little bit more to later would you go to the next slide please so as you know when kobe hit in 2019 20 2019 is all the blur now we initially when we did our report for the 2018 2019 school year we shared with the board that we as a district were at a commendable lev designation with the state i want to highlight this uh as long as with the percept with the successes of our annual illinois state

078report card as i said in 2018 the state began giving each school an overall rating based upon eight different measures that we will cover in just a moment this rating is called the school's summative designation the designation is a measure of progress in academic performance and in student success this slide shows the four designations that are given by the state because of colby 19 the state did not change any district's summative designations from what it was the previous year and so for the 2019-2020 school year last year we maintained our summative designation of being commendable next slide please no go back i'm sorry greg please no problem give me one second for the 2018 2019 school year the index score that the district had was 81.21 to be an exemplary school district we needed to

079earn 85.45 points and so our goal is to score that a little bit more less than four points away from earning this prestigious designation as you will see in the coming slides we'll show where we need to focus on some of our chronic racially predictable disparities and this is exactly what we will focus on our strategic plan the next slide as a school our summative designation is based upon 10 indicators listed here the pie chart shows the weight of each indicator when calculating the overall designation so as you can see 75 of our designation comes from the academic indicators english is 7.5 percent math proficiency is 7.5 percent of the indicators science 5 graduation rate is 50 of the way for academic indicators and the english learner progress proficiency is five percent the other 25

080for the designation comes from the school quality or student success indicators chronic absenteeism is worth ten percent climate survey which is the five essentials is worth six point six seven percent ninth graders on track to graduate eight point three three percent we are still waiting for isb to add in the college and career readiness which we hear is coming and the fine arts i do want to continue to talk about our uh illinois state report card due to the covet pandemic it led to the cancellation of the spring testing so there's no data for several indicators as you will see here and that's on the chart when you look at the data dashboard while the summative designation was not updated the report card does have new data so i'm going to share with that data

081with you our graduation rate has gone up four percent it is now 95 uh our chronic absentee while we went in the wrong direction it is now 19 which means we went up four percent in our chronic absenteeism we are still looking at the data to see if this is directly correlated to uh covet the five essentials climate survey our designation stayed the same as it was for last year i'm sorry greg could you flip this this slide i'm just talking thank you my bad which is our moderately organized for improvement and later on i'm going to give you some more information on uh the five essential survey our ninth graders on track went up one percent so we are now at 91.8 well again i said there was no uh assessment data given for

082last year so we don't have that but i do want to break down our graduation rate uh for the 2019 graduating class 85 percent of our black students graduated on the four-year cohort for the 2020 school year 89 of our black students graduated in their four-year cohort so that went up four percent from the 2018-19 school year are 84 86 percent of our hispanic students graduated within four years for the nights for the night 2019-2020 school year 91 of our hispanic students graduated with their four-year cohort so we went up five percent there in the 2018-2019 school year 96 percent of our asian students graduated on in a four five four-year cohort we went down one percent with 95 percent of our asian students graduating with their five-year cohort uh 20 92 percent of our

083students who identified as two or more races in 2019 2019-20 the 2018-2019 school year graduated with their four-year cohort in the 2019-2020 school year 97 percent of our students who identified two or more races graduated with their four-year cohort so they went up by five percent also in our early college which is a new indicator early college course dual credit we went from 29 percent of our students uh taking dual credit early college courses to 36.7 percent of our students taking uh early college dual credit courses our post-secondary data which we did report to you last year from the college board we do not have at this point in time it has not been shared with us again you can go into our data dashboard and see the data that i have presented to you

084tonight from the illinois state report card greg do you want to go to the next slide please oh whoops excuse me so i want to talk now about the five essentials the five essential school report for the state of illinois was derived 20 years ago in research for improving schools the raw data from these reports are based upon a comprehensive core of more than 80 student and 150 student quest teacher questions compiled into 22 measures for school climate practice and formed into five essentials and so what uh what this the data tells us is following natural experiments they found that the survey measures reliably predict school success on a variety of outcomes in both high school and elementary students including itbs improvement isat value added explore to act gains explore to plan games plan to

085act gains attendance rates college enrollment high school graduation freshman grades student mobility and grades in college prepared for preparatory classes and so as you can see for oak park we have uh four years of data as it relates and as we said once again we are identified as moderately organized for improvement and so under involved families our even our family rate went from 2017 being at 79 percent to 2021 to 2020 being 80 for ambitious instruction we went down from 2017 at 60 percent to 2019 at 58 and we stayed flat at 58 from our supportive environment we went from 2017 at 63 percent down to 50 in 2019 and down another percent for 2020. and our collaborative teachers we went from 45 meets it was what's called uh average we went from 45 percent

086down to up down to 39 in 2019 and then up in 2020 we went back up to for effective leaders we went from 2017 to 21 thinking that we were effective down to to 2019 down to 17 percent and then up one percent for 2020. so what does that tell us that tell us that we need to see our parents more as our partners that we need to look at our resources on how we are supporting student education that we need to really look at our environment to ensure that our students feel safe we need to provide our teachers with high quality our students with high quality teachers and we need to make sure that our staff is satisfied with their work we also need to focus on developing essential 21st century skills socially emotional

087learning through increased teacher training and emphasis on classroom instruction we need to enhance the supports and improve visibility to support highlighted student subgroups for our highlighted student subgroups we need to focus on training for both staff and students related to the appropriate rules and enforcements of behavior we need to ensure that our teaching staff is well trained for effective student engagement we need to develop protocols to build leadership capacity that is engaging and working with our teachers and we also need to evaluate our current professional development offerings to improve the work that needs to take place as we move forward the other we really uh where we did the greatest loss was in implementation across all five areas of the five essential climate survey next slide please we need to go to this slide for

088the strategic plan thank you and this is all a part of navigating our dashboard this is the home page this is the home page for the strategic plan and when you look at it the second tab is the indicators on this tab you see a snapshot of our district that is similar to that on the district uh excuse me the illinois state report card if you look at the graduation rate it's there our student mobility rate is now at six percent uh our school finance we spend twenty four per student our evidence-based funding shows us at 117 percent and our chronic absenteeism as i indicated earlier is 19 and our teacher retention is at 92 if you go down to student environment when you're navigating our dashboard if you also you don't have to do

089it now grid because we just went through it if you click on the climate survey it will take you directly to the five essentials report it shows our total school days it shows all the information about our school system that you will find on the illinois state report card greg you want to scroll down so they can see the entire screen and that's our student achievement data and as i said earlier we didn't have any assessments thank you if you go to the strategies now if you click on the strategies tab that takes you to the um strategic plan so what i'm going to cover first is those things that we've accomplished in the strategic plan for the 1920 school year goal number one is our goal for equity under equity we have four strategies

090would you click on those please those four strategies were the development of the framework for the racial equity policy that was done 100 percent i do want to say that the numbers at the top the 70 the total numbers at each indicator are approximate numbers uh the system does not average out the numbers but this is where we believe we are with the context of accomplishing each of those goals uh the second strategy that we worked on under the racial equity policy was the development and publishment of the imp the implementation of board policy 7 colon 12 and that was the racial equity metrics those metrics are not completed but are in the process and so they're 90 complete also with we wanted to prioritize the order of the policy sections and resources to consider

091this is so small i'm sorry if i'm squinting so we have 90 percent there for prioritizing those and then 20 complete thank you 20 complete on the assessment for school culture and environment and that goes back to the surveys the climate and culture surveys that we're going to do so overall for racial equity for the 2019-2020 school year we are 70 complete with the four strategies that were being addressed now while we're going to show you some items for focus for the 2019-20 for the 20-20-21 school year please note that that does not mean that we will stop the work that we're already that we still have to continue to do from the 19 2019-2020 school year our second one is priority two transformative ad where overall we are sixty percent complete and we had

092seven strategies there the first one was to implement a comprehensive database system that will monitor and support our students academically we will share that with you you're going to see some dialogue about that tonight and it really talks about our social and emotional impact when you look at transformative ed it is comprised of three different sections holistic community education transformative teaching and learning and so um supportive learning environment the second one which was 75 complete is is on creating an individualized post high school plans for students greg is going to talk a little bit about that when he talks about the portrait of a graduate uh we also are 50 percent uh complete decreasing the disparities between overall school demographics and that students receiving at least one discipline referral and students receiving five or more

093tardies these are some of the things that are also addressed in the behavior education plan that was presented to the board earlier this year so for some of these these are the baseline data data i also want to say for those of you who are listening that the strategic plan is not a one-year plan it is a five-year plan every year we pick a focus that we're working on what i'm reporting on now are those things that were accomplished last year and then after that i will share with you those things that we are focused on this year so also under transformative ad we're working to increase the percentage of students that feel that they are welcome in our building across all demographic groups and this is a goal that comes from our ccb culture

094climate and behavior committee uh also increase overall participation and extracurricular activities while ensuring that the representation of our that reflective of our student demographics is looked at this too is a goal from ccbr culture climate and behavior committee uh also we worked on decreasing the opportunity and that report was made to the board earlier this fall to decrease so the second one was to decrease the opportunity gap for our black african-american and hispanic students as measured by the percentage of students who earned honors during freshman year you're going to hear more about that when mr uh johnson speaks and then the last one under transformative ad was to decrease the opportunity black gaps for our black and african american and hispanic students as measured by the percentage of students who are honest throughout their high

095school experience this is a five-year goal you will learn today where we are with that and how we're moving forward would you go to transformative leadership transformative leadership for the 2019-2020 school year focused on three strategies they were improving quality and accountability of employee evaluations by implementing an electronic evaluation system we implemented that electronic evaluation system last year the reason is 90 complete is because once covet hit uh isb changed the way that we would evaluate people for that ensuing year and so we're this year we believe we will have that completed also we wanted to complete the representation of our minority teachers every board meeting when we do a personnel report there is a portion of that report that speaks to the demographics of our hires right now we are 55 within reach of

096that uh goal the other one was to increase the overall representation of our minority employees we are 65 percent there so the overall goal for transformative leadership which is priority three is to hold our leaders to a high expectation of responsibility for policies and practices and to create opportunities to support effective teaching learning and leadership priority four is our last priority and we're a hundred percent there that's the operations facilities and finance glad greg could you click on that one thank you there were three strategies that were focused on all which are 100 complete the first one was to update the five-year financial projection and annual updates given to the boy each december the second one was to complete the design for imagine project one facilities project one uh tonight you're going to get an

097update on that and then in january we will bring forth the cost for those items also we will present to the board a preliminary balanced budget for fiscal year 2021 so we've accomplished those goals 100 so let's see what our focus is for this year for 2021 school year you do see where we've started some work so for the racial equity policy we have identified streets three strategies for this year to substantially implement our racial equity procedures uh for policy 7 colon 12 by july of 2021 substantially because i want we want to say that there are 12 different sections to the racial equity procedures and our goal is to have all of them fully implemented and up and running to the best of our ability by july of 2021. the second one is to

098identify a long-term equity partnership that strategically guides d200 to a systemic racial equity transformation by may of and then to develop a framework aligned with the illinois state funding model that allocates funds based upon student need the next one transformative ad transformative ad has grown from seven because we wanted to specifically identify this year some sections for our special education diverse learners and so the first one is to put in place systemic pieces to become a data driven organization we're trying to demonstrate some of that tonight or maybe not so eloquently by utilizing our different dashboards by the fall of 2021 integrate our post-secondary career clusters and pathways in the student decision making throughout our high school you're going to hear some more about that too later when mr johnson does his presentation by the

099end of the 2021 school year creators submit an online proposal for the special education department's strategic planning process to begin in the fall of 2021 we also want to develop a two-year outline for job-embedded coaching and professional development training specific to the respective roles the special education division staff who teach and support the needs of our diverse learners we want to implement systemic pieces to become a trauma-informed school we started that process by identifying an individual who will begin to do that work we also want to by the fall of 2021 fully designed a multi-tier system of support for social emotional and behavioral needs mtss and scb you'll hear a little bit about that later about fall of 2021 complete curriculum plans to detract freshmen english history science and world languages throughout this school year

100and then into the next school year we're going to implement a comprehensive and differentiated professional development to support the needs of our teachers and the learning of all of our students and the last but not least by the fall of 2021 conduct a review assessment of and gpa practices at oprf to include best practices in equitable grading evaluation of our academic performance in-text api calculation process would you go to priority three please for priority three we have the three strategies that we will continue to work on and that is increasing our new teachers of color increase the overall percentage of our diverse new hires and increase employee engagement and job satisfaction with specific emphasis on our employees of color and then the last focus area for operations facilities and finance we will refine the 2022

101budget process identify benchmarks for district expenditures that align and do not that align or either do not align to the evidence-based funding model and that is one of the goals that the board has established for the superintendent to be identified by january 31st for a presentation in the february board meeting the second one is to determine a resource excuse me the third one is to determine a resource based on the evidence-based funding model that will benchmark and provide directions to determine strategic outcomes that will assist us in building our balanced budget this is to be determined by i believe march for implementation by june and it too is entitled to is tied to the superintendent's goals the next one is to evaluate our current public facing finance dashboard we want to find a way to

102include our finance dashboard into our current uh data dashboard and then by august of 2021 complete the summer construction as part of the long-term facilities plan complete by august 21 project one south cafeteria and the src to 70 percent that meaning that the only thing that would need to be done would be the uh punch list and then by december 2021 substantially complete the south carolina and the src and hopefully have a ribbon cutting that's our focus for this year and at the conclusion of the presentation members of the executive cabinet will answer any questions that you have pertinent to their part of the presentation i'm now going to turn it over to greg who's going to detail more deeply into the focus on the long-term focus on the transformational education piece which is also

103tied to goal the first superintendent goal from the board and that is the long-term outcomes to achieve exemplary spat status on the illinois state report court greg thanks dr pruitt adams um in the interest of um trying to move for this as efficiently as we can while still getting the important information out i'm going to go as quickly as i can so uh if um if i go too quick and there are questions you want to ask please feel free to to slow me down um as a quick reminder before i dive into this the transformative education part of this of the strategic plan is actually broke up into three subcategories um and so what we're focusing on right right here is specifically the teaching and learning strand in previous board presentations we've talked about

104these five goals that you see on the screen uh as as as the ones that we care about most for our long-term outcomes so these metrics here they aren't new and they provide a nice transition from what we previously heard if we're going to realize a level of success that by all means we should expect at oprf these are the areas that will mark our improvement gains in these five areas are needed of course like doctor put adams just said to realize exemplary status please keep in mind that this isn't that these areas here they aren't criterion referenced uh in the state uh designations uh we aren't trying to hit some externally imposed benchmark with these marks instead we're looking to gain in a comparative metric to other districts in the state but regardless we

105are looking to see steady gains in all of these areas year and year out and so the question is what does gaining in these metrics look like for oprf uh before i go into um the specific way we've we've configured the transformative ed uh logic model uh i want to draw attention to two board goals uh that the board set uh for dr pruitt adams um the first bullet is uh it references a need to identify and see improvements uh in in those progress metrics that will improve our status on the report card the second goal that you see on this page here highlights the importance of race and ethnicity in doing exactly that both are important ethically of course but relative to the state report card they complement one another by doing one we

106almost certainly make gains towards the other so how are we planning to meet these goals in previous conversations with the board we've discussed the need for two things both intricately related number one a logic model that illustrates how we aim to bring about our goals within the organization and two the metrics to chart how we're getting there what our progress is along the way in a previous board presentation related to the trauma-informed specialist position you saw a bit of a preview of what that logic model looks like and how metrics are integrated into it something that we've used to reconfigure elements of our strategic plan so in the next few slides we'll take a deeper dive into the transformative teaching and learning part of that plan that helped to illustrate this shift so here is

107the first half of what that strategic plan uh logic model looks like okay in order to illustrate how to read these next two slides i'm going to be clicking back and forth a little bit so for now if you could just pay attention to the headings in gray and just the color coding in general on this slide paying attention to the flow from left to right so first you see our school improvement strategies listed on the far left and the blue and that's they're listed in the blue column that lists them out in green you see how we are in the process of realizing those strategies both in terms of professional practices and the products of those practices in the school so that in other words the things we are engaging in and then what

108we'll produce throughout that engagement again this is all focused on adult behaviors in the in the organization what we're doing as adults as educators in the building to produce these changes i'm going to click over the next slide briefly here illustrate that on this slide you can see us making the transition from the adult behaviors in the organization to our students the first column illustrates those experiences that we want our students to have and on the right side you see metrics that we've set to help measure our progress uh with those with student experiences in the school these metrics that you see here are designed to help produce those long-term outcomes that you saw uh three slides ago okay so i'm gonna go back to the previous slide for a second and dive in briefly

109to uh just some of the highlights on here um so there's no need to go through this in great detail um but i i do want to point uh or you know point by point but i do want to point out three things relative to strategies and how we've set this up number one our curriculum work remains a focus as you all know number two developing and implementing quality professional development also remains a focus we are in the midst of that uh and that will continue to be an ongoing focus for us for the foreseeable future of course we are able now to also begin a focus on assessment and gpa practices opr this last area that you see in the bottom left corner there number three was named in previous versions of our strategic

110plan but we have now gotten the point that we are able to move on it and as the capacity outputs illustrate on the far right column we will we will be bringing an analysis of our academic performance index to the board early next semester we have also begun to educate ourselves on equitable grading practices something that we have a committee working on right now led by dr fiorenza and it is uh is really just in the discovery phase at this point so down the road we look to give an update to the board on that as well so let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into the information on this slide as well um i want to draw your attention to the content on this slide in just two quick ways um well

111maybe not too quick but in two ways as you may recall um we did a thought exchange with the community first regarding a profile of a graduate and from that exchange we saw four main themes developed you see those referenced in the second area in the top left quarter here of the of the presentation um for several reasons this past semester was not the best time to get a wide slice of our community together to discuss a variety of ways to develop a full profile to graduate but we do have some very quality raw materials and some strong themes from that thought exchange there are four topic areas that are noted here critical thinking problem solving effective communication and cultural consciousness that were developed throughout that process um a few points i want to make

112about these metrics too on the right in the right hand column first you'll see that they generally do two things some are directly linked to the summative designation metrics that you saw a few slides ago the graduation rates and the other things that are on there others are linked to them through um are linked to them through kind of a process steps along the way i.e you see a reference you see references to growth targets and enrollment and honors classes along the way uh those aren't specifically related into in the summit in the summative designation but they are of course uh linked to those uh to those outcomes also you'll see that parallel to the board goals that you saw a few slides ago they're categorized into two different in in in two different ways

113uh first addressing the needs of all students again targets that we believe will place us in the top 10 percent of the state and number two raising the success rates of our black and brown students i want to make one final point here you do not see us here unlike we have done in the past in some ways referencing closing the achievement gap as a metric that's for a few different reasons first when our team was first considering this work we quickly came to realize that defining student outcome goals by gaps is reductive and it feeds a deficit mindset instead what you see are targets for growth also secondly a gap itself might help to describe a data set and it does so fairly well but because gaps can be closed in a few different

114ways one of which is by lowering achievement for some students the goal could lead to misinterpretations that we don't have high expectations for all of our students and of course we do want to see growth across the board for all of our students another reason we've arranged the metrics as we have here okay um as far as the logic model and the metrics that we set up that is the last slide on that information but before we conclude everything we want to share today um we we do realize that this is a a very bizarre and trying year for all of us and we need to share a little bit more information to fully give you an idea of what the state of the district is um and so we want to answer answer the

115question to some extent about the state to which uh the ways in which covet excuse me has has affected uh our school environment and so i want to draw your attention to um kind of the purpose for what we're going to share here other than that we want to convey what's going on from a learning perspective and from a systems perspective in the school this remains a very complicated situation and that there is no way that what we're going to share here accounts for all the possible variables for each student's experience at oprf throughout last spring and into this fall but this is information but this information excuse me also helps us to understand where we sit and what has become a very widespread national conversation likely you've all seen the articles out there about

116the effects of the pandemic on student achievement they've been varied but the bulk focus on learning loss and f rates increasing particularly in secondary schools as an administration team we've been looking to understand the extent to which this trends exist at oprf and so we've taken a look at the data that you see here we've analyzed a consistent standardized data point our star reading and math assessment data and you've seen listed out in the three sub bullets there how we've broken that out and begun to understand that and i'll talk a little bit more that in the next next few slides but we've also taken a look at our grade analysis of course and those um those rates that um suggest that our students are in a problematic area specifically d's and f's so let's

117jump right to it the next slide here takes a look at our benchmark data a benchmark comparison for freshman students only all right we asked ourselves this question how different were our kids skills at the start of this year from freshmen in previous school years so we analyzed what our incoming freshmen looked like last year and compared them to this year we want to be clear that over 90 of our freshmen took this test in both years so we have a large a large participation rate when comparing current freshman reading proficiency band distribution to that of last year's freshmen there is no significant difference noted overall one could state that there is a slight increase of students performing at the advanced and proficient level and decrease in students performing in the strategic and intensive levels

118when you are taking a look at the reading proficiency in the top left corner but that's a marginal shift and in order to draw any widespread conclusions from that we'd have to see the data spread out over time or break it down to analyzing an individual cohort now you take a look at our math scores in the bottom right and when comparing current freshman math proficiency band band distribution to that of last year's freshman there does appear to be a slight increase in advance and proficient levels and a slight decline in the strategic and intensive strategic levels similar to what we saw in reading um but again in order to draw any conclusions of that we'd have to see it over time and drill down to see what's really going on with an individual cohort

119over time the overall takeaway kids skills were pretty consistent with what we've seen in past years okay one measure of learning loss again one measure of learning loss but it does point us in one direction so let's take a look now instead of taking a look at two different classes of students over let's take a look at how one class performed that has been within our organization the whole time what about our own students in other words kids who didn't come here from somewhere else but were with us and took the same test last year this is an analysis of how students did on the um on the star test on the star reading assessment um last winter comparison to their performance as sophomores this past fall so freshmen from last winter sophomores this fall

120how do we see them doing um first all freshmen in the winter were administered to star reading and subsequently sophomores in fall 20 of course were given this test and we this is a true cohort so we have removed from the data set those students who only took one test or the other and so um we had 699 students um uh have scores recorded for both test windows and 646 percent were counted as valid scores meaning that you did not see a uh for those 646 some sort of dramatic swing in the data that would suggest there's something going on besides measuring learning it's really important with this data to uh identify your outliers in the data suggesting that there's something completely different than how they approach that assessment that tells us about something perhaps

121very important but not about their level of learning and the specific content area that's being assessed and so again 92 percent of our students though fell into that category of um being valid for this data the grade level cohort data was examined and disaggregated of some group subgroups as you see referenced here by race iep status and lep status due to the low number of students with an lep designation this group level could not be analyzed but three quick conclusions from this number one no groups fell into the decline category this is important this data is broken down um into four different ranges of growth um and it's color coded as you can see in the bottom um by by kind of the type of gain that we see or it would be red if

122we saw a decline you see that all of the groups identified here fall within the bandwidth suggest you know that in the maintained bandwidth also true that no groups made impressive gains and skill level from the previous year that would put them into a a gain bandwidth overall the conclusion is that rates of proficiency remain consistent during the cobit 19 learning disruption when you compare last winter's data to this falls data with the exact same kids but i want to be clear about this again this does not conclude that no student suffered learning loss it tells us that overall academic proficiencies remain stable from last winter to this fall but that's not all the data we need to understand to figure out what's going on in this in this fall semester for our students so

123um so this far in other words we don't see huge shifts in student learning but what about student achievement what does grade data tell us so first what you're going to see in the next few slides is specific to quarter one data it's important that we look at quarter one data because prior to the end of a semester when grades become final um except for a few students who need to make things up for various uh specific reasons outside of that semester um quarter one is really our most valid data set right it's it's when a quarter has ended and great effort has been made to make that a very clear data point that that isn't going to shift after that point um so as a school we examined our grade rate distributions um and

124we have broken this down internally by division by course within course uh and and at the teacher level of course we analyze the data by controlling for several factors such as gender race ethnicity free reduced lunch status and and special education status and ell um and so here is what you see from the first quarter what you see are that 76 percent of our grades from the quarter one mark uh were a's or b's i want to be clear to what's being counted on this this doesn't mean that 76 of our students have a's and b's it means something slightly different it means that 76 of the grades that were earned this past quarter were a's or b's uh and 12 were d's and f's as designated by the uh orange and red colors in

125the bottom on the bottom here okay so 12 percent of our students uh i see i just made a mistake 12 percent of the grades from this past quarter were d's or f's so let's drill down into that a little bit more thoroughly this compares our d and f rate over the past three years and what you see is at least the suggestion that our dnf rate is a fairly stable figure when you compare 18 19 to the 1920 school year of course pre-pre pandemic as far as quarter one grades are concerned but when you go into 2021 over here on the right-hand side that's where you begin to see our increase i want to note before we go a little bit further with this that our student population at oprf has not gone under

126some sort of dramatic swing up or down right we're always right around 34 or we have been right around 3 400 students over the past three years so overall student population has not affected the numbers you see here um what we see represented here is about 900 um we see an increase of over 900 grades of drf for this past school year when we've broken this down internally and take a look at f's we see that f s alone have almost doubled at oprf over the past four quarter one so let's break this down a little bit more thoroughly when you look at the students who are getting apps specifically the overall percentage of the student body went from 13 to 14 percent uh from 1819 in the first two years to 19 and quarter

127one you see that in the first row across here that is a five percent increase uh from last year to this year when we control for race we see that a larger portion of black students have historically gotten apps and this year although percentages went up across the board the biggest jump was experienced by black students plus ten percent as you see in the third row most groups have about a four to six percent jump in apps over this past school year our black students have an increase like i said of 10. when we have examined this data further by including free and reduced lunch status and students with ieps this data becomes increasingly disproportionate this tells us what we already know in some ways the pandemic has had a greater effect negative a greater

128negative impact on people of color specifically black and brown people and people who are struggling financially so what are we doing with this data as a school first we want to be back working with our students we need to be back working with our students in person but for the present moment there is no magic pill that we can pass out to fix this problem but we are pressing our school from a systemic and individual level to shift these outcomes before this semester runs out we have analyzed and shared this data at the department level for trends and engaged in individual and team conversations we are encouraging and modeling empathy curricular flexibility including with assessments how they're great and how they're managed in the classes both on what is being given and how we are

129grading them like i just said excuse me tcts our teacher collaboration teams have focused on discussing how to reach out to struggling students and support them on specific topics um but perhaps more importantly or at least as importantly believing of course that a lack of engagement is the most important reason that we see this data existing as it is at the pss team level we have weekly monitoring of this data including attendance and our full mtss support system is in place to help us understand what's going on consistently and respond to it with our full system we can talk more about that if we have questions about what that mtss support system looks like additionally we have increased outreach to families via phone calls home conducting more home visits than we've ever done in the

130past inviting kids in to online tutoring opening up our in building resources uh space for kids who are really struggling to engage and who are willing to come in uh even during these past few weeks we believe uh and based on more than mere hope based off of more this amount of this monitoring that these numbers will improve by the end of this semester but they do underscore the challenge we have and the fundamental need to get our students in school where they can be more engaged and we can support them more when that is possible for us um so with that said that that that gives us that uh that basic overview um there is one more slide i know that i believe uh dr crude adams you want to speak to correct yes

131would you click on the link please yes i just want to share with the board and the public uh if you would click greg on the data dashboard uh this one over here correct last year the board asked us to uh create a public facing data dashboard and so i just want to remind our audience that you can go to our website as i said earlier if you click on the first dashboard that will take you straight to the illinois state report card the second dashboard would take you to the ecra dashboard which is reflective again the illinois state report card is also reflective of the five essentials and where we are with the strategic plan and then the last dashboard is our dashboard that is has our data and it allows uh you to

132go in and desegregate data based on the graduation rate our students are students on track our attendance discipline student achievement student performance student participation college and career and our climate data and you can disaggregate that based upon gender race and ethnicity special education free and reduced lunch and economic economically disadvantaged and our students who have 504 plans greg if you just click on one so they can see what it looks like you might want to go to the uh either one it doesn't matter just click on one so when you see our data you will see our most up-to-date data while a lot of our data is similar to that of the illinois state report card you will find some of our data has been updated for the 2019-2020 school year when you go to

133the assessment data you will see an assessment for 2021 and that's because we as a district chose to do the s.a.t in october but just wanted to remind everyone that this data dashboard does exist and you have the opportunity to go in and generate reports based upon those areas that i indicated gender race and ethnicity special education social economic status and section 504s thank you greg you can come out of that and so now we are open for any questions that that the board may have and members of the executive cabinet are also prepared to answer questions should you have them relative to their areas of the strategic plan thank you that was a very thorough presentation um board members questions all right question i'm sorry yeah i'll put my yeah okay thank you um

134thank you it was uh a lot to take in so i'm not sure all my questions will be asked this evening um so i reserve the right to ask more later absolutely but i did um you know uh in terms of the uh the slide that had to do with uh the grading for first quarter um and yes the the one that's broken down by uh by race yeah um with students with one or more f's and this has been an area um that has always been concerning for our district for our uh uh black and brown students and black students in particular you know we can't seem to get below a third of our black students having one or more f's so i uh heard greg your comments about um outreach and offering more

135assistance and support and things like that what i'm wondering about is how this data can be um i guess analyzed in terms of the work that's being done on gpa and how we're looking at grading in particular because i you know with our racial equity policy and how we're looking at curriculum and instruction is there i'm you know the research tends to suggest that um how people are graded can can be impacted by race so uh i just you know i look at these numbers and i want to know how we can dig down to to reduce those pretty glaring uh disparities yeah thank you uh that's really the issue isn't it um to be honest i think that um perhaps like a lot of schools but uh regardless certainly here uh we have i

136think fallen into and you heard it in my comments to some extent uh we fall into this trap of thinking that we can um we can uh tier two right our way out of this or we can support our way out of this out of this issue when um we're in a pandemic and and i really appreciate your question because you're really cutting to the chase you're not asking a pandemic question you're asking the overall question and that really is a tier one issue it is not a is not a tier two issue and so in order to understand what's really going on uh we aren't studying uh as part of our learning in the organization right now grading practices overall we are specifically studying equitable grading practices and i'm not going to be able

137to do justice to that uh that that work and how that's unfolding the way that dr ferenza might if she were here and she was talking about in greater detail she would love to wax on about that for for quite a while um but that is um for right now that's how i can answer your question we are approaching it as a adult learning issue and a tier one issue not as something that is focused on um on on that we're going to intervene our way out of okay i appreciate that thanks uh because it does i just i always want to be careful that that we are looking at the cold picture and uh in terms of assets how we're making sure that we're not you know putting because those those numbers reflect i

138think more than than what we uh understood in the past i would love if perhaps at some point we had maybe in our instruction committee uh some more in-depth information about what that would look like from uh dr fiorinza we can make that happen yep i think there was another question so yeah first of all thank you to both of you for the presentation um the i think the logic model and goals and you know the data it's kind of taking shape and has taken shape where we really are targeting very specific things in our measuring so i that that's music to my ears um the question i have is you know on the five essentials and the the one on leadership so that one's been an area that we've seen i think effective leaders

139so again this is one that if you even pre-date 27 this one's been consistently a a low number and what do we know what do we think what's the perspective on this because it's a a rather alarming number you know we at one point took a look on initially it was like it was always focused on the principle and then we took a stance that it's not just a principle when you're one high school district it's it's all of us and um you know we've surveyed we've asked we need to be i think i think what we hear from people is we're turning the time and things are changing but we have to also i don't know if it's being more visible at this point but i think as we move forward with all the

140work that we're doing with professional learning for our staff with our plans for what we're doing with regards to the curriculum rewriting restructuring what we're doing with regards to the um the logic model will get us to that because one of the things we're doing that for years had not been done is we have we're putting teacher voice at the table as we're beginning to do this work and so it's not just individuals doing the work in silos it's all of us working collectively thank you can i ask a question that's related to this i'm curious so tom mentioned that there was you know that number has historically been low prior to this the 2017 time but i'm seeing that drop in that number in the last two years and i'm curious if that number

141call if that date that timeline of drop would has when did we start talking about the curriculum change yes um when did we start talking about that uh we started talking about it um we started talking about doing curriculum evaluation in the spring of 2018 although it had been part of the strategic plan prior but real conversation about it um uh was throughout the uh the 1819 school year that's when the curriculum evaluation with the freshman teams began yeah i i um for me that because this is a um because this is a survey done by families and community i really i that correlation for me seems like a very strong and real correlation and especially based on all of the feedback that we had gotten back about the curriculum change and all of that

142all that we heard of concern and you know all of those pieces to me that that i feel like there's definitely correlation and i just wanted to make sure i was correct in my thinking about the timeline for those two things so seeing that decrease and then seeing that you know because of people's opinions so thank you yeah and i i want to i just just one thing to that overall too which your question kind of begins to hint at right um this as uh i think tom spoke to as dr pruitt adam spoke to this data that you see this kind of uh this data that's in the lower quartile of the uh of the survey um you know it's it's been going on for years and i think that it is something that

143um while i mean well not wow i mean we own as leaders we have to we have to as an organization but we have to understand what it's speaking to and i think um it's really important to understand this is speaking to uh the culture of leadership in the organization because it has persisted over time with uh a vast array of leaders in the organization so pinning it down to um you know this it's harder to put it down to one specific thing is what i'm saying right it's part of an overall uh culture of leadership within the school that we need to examine i think it's it's also a cultural shift because even going up just one percentage point um is i i think it's tied to the more collaborative work that we're doing

144as an organization and that is my hope knock on wood that it will continue to increase it may not increase as fast as we want it but i think that it we will begin to see an increase yeah thank you thank you so much for that and um thank you for the report too there i i'm with jackie i probably will have more questions but there's so much information that was really i found really valuable and useful and um i was really appreciative of in the strategic growing when dr poot adams when you went through the strategic sections and demonstrated like the pieces that came from ccb recommendations the pieces that were relate you know that's really i find that that's really important information because we're getting it from we're get we're getting input from

145a number of areas on what to what what students want to see right and that that feels important um i also want to just publicly just publicly acknowledge that you know um last last board meeting my words were very harsh with you all and um i wanted to publicly acknowledge that that is not the way that i would like for us to be in relationship as board and um administration and so i just wanted to publicly acknowledge that i i feel as my words caused harm and um i value and appreciate you all and wanted to say that publicly um so but thank you for this report i know i know i have more questions but i um i'm really appreciative of what i've seen at this point so thank you thank you um ralph

146or craig or matt i'll go um so i i really appreciate the report and i particularly as and some of you will know this really appreciate the dashboard and the data driven approach it's been something that um we've talked about in um for for a number of years and and and i think it's uh i i think it's fantastic that it is starting to really come together um so i know that doesn't come i know that that's a lot of hard work and so i'm very appreciative of that and and all the work that was put into it i did want to try to articulate a question around it and now that we're starting to be able to see the data and present the data um you know we we we have a strategic planning

147process we have all these different pieces but joylin this is really kind of a question to you and to sort of your staff which is now that you have the data how do you how are we going to use it to um you know structurally improve or systematically improve where we're going what what what what are you how are you thinking about that um as we have our conversations in our weekly meetings we are looking at the data we are actually as we do new things and move forward we're taking out that um equity analysis tool as well and and looking at them one of the things we realized is we can't we were working in isolation you know we had the um bobby central's over here we had the strategic plan over here we

148had the illinois state report card over there and we had the data dashboard all of it comes back to the strategic plan and what we have to do is consistently look at the data and see what the data is telling us that's one of the reasons greg presented the logic model because it actually identifies what the outcomes and changes we need to see in the adult learning and the adult actions that ultimately have an impact on the student outcomes instead of going from a student perspective only looking at it that way and so our conversations have have changed within the organization our conversations have changed relative to not everyone doing their piece but all of us working collectively for i'm going to pick on greg's telt committee your tel group which consists of the technology

149aspect the racial equity aspect the special agent education aspect as well as the instruction the supportive learning environment and the data aspect with christian's input and so instead of doing things in isolation we're looking at taking a more deeper dive into data and letting the data drive the direction that we are taking greg you want to add to that yeah i want to have two uh two examples to that so with kristen mckee as our coordinator of learning analytics she has helped us to identify protocols for analyzing specific data that are relevant to the exact teams that we have you heard me earlier in the pres in the presentation talk about the monitoring of this grade data and our attendance data with pss teams there's a specific way that that data is packaged and brought

150to those teams in a regular basis and specific questions that we're asking for specific actions based off of that data you also heard me reference that we broke down this grade data by department and by tct right by course teams and so on and so forth exact same processes have been in place the exact data that we want to package for that group the protocols and questions we want to ask ourselves to help us move through that and then the actions that we can take based off of that analysis those are conversations that are happening in the organization in our division head leadership meetings separately from the transformative leadership meeting and in our pss teams based off of uh you know the drilling down of the data that you're seeing a big picture of here

151so it's it's been operationalized is what i'm trying to illustrate the data that drives the work versus working and then hoping the data comes out changed so the data is what's driving everything yeah um i i think that's fantastic and and i'm hoping that as as the as this we go through the spring too that we can start and it won't be all at once but if we can start to connect the resourcing to the data to you know i just think that that'll that's that's the next another step forward so anyway thank you and again thank you for all the hard work on this bro for matt i'd have no questions the really good ones have been asked i wouldn't add to i would just also echo especially what craig said about the dashboard

152this has been a real great um need and i'm you know excited about our ability to do more with some more dynamic and you know [Music] drill down-able data and and i just think it's also important for us to really uh think through where sometimes the data can be just the sample sizes of it all uh you know the the struggles of our students this year um you know across the board a lot of struggle is happening i think it's just important to to make sure that we um address as much as we can without you know overlooking anyone and so i appreciate all this effort that's all andrel yeah you know i certainly appreciate the work that went into this i've gone through this in two different school districts now i know how hard

153it is to put together these database dashboards and and start utilizing them to make system-wide database driven decisions but that's clearly the right way to go and clearly the way we are going i actually appreciate a lot of what dr pruitt adams said here and on the issue of differences in achievement on race in particular i'm talking about both the statewide and the national data one thing that's abundantly clear and greg answered this exactly right is it's not about interventions for the the african-american students as much as it is about identify using the data to help identify where the flaws are in your system from an educational standpoint that are reinforcing racist whether implicit or overt racist practices in grading and assessment and in challenging of kids because it's it's really not a situation where

154you you resolve your problem through an intervention focused on the kid an iep those kinds of things that the educational system is good at this is really one of those situations where the educational system needs itself to be evaluated within the building and you can't do that without the data and you can't do that without taking a data-driven approach so i think that's exactly the right way to go and it reinforces some of the best practices in this area that are happening elsewhere in the state and in the nation so thank you all very very much it's clear that a lot of work and preparation went into this presentation um the part that always gets me is the five essentials i just um a really tough nut to crack and i i'm really curious to

155know more about what's been sort of plaguing us when it comes to that effective leadership quadrant um but thank you very much for that for that very very comprehensive uh presentation so the board has now the board and the administration have been sitting here since 5 30. um i suggest that we take a five-minute break uh and then reconvene for the next part of our meeting so it would be until like 9 52. okay thank you okay i'm not entirely sure who's back yet i see a couple people um see tom and i see i think matt i see jackie and essie gina uh i think ralph is there and there's jackie i think everybody's back yeah i'm here i'm here perfect all right um so up next we have uh the boards racial equity

156book read um so part of our board goals when we were doing our assessment at the beginning of this year um our first goal was to do a book read do two book reads the idea being that it'll be one each semester um and then we'd have time to discuss it and sort of hear from our colleagues their thoughts and their perceptions on the book so the book that we chose this time was a recommendation by gina harris called stamped racism and irish menu and it's by jason reynolds and even kendy um this is actually the book that d97 and the library i think did a joint book read using this book um and so we thought we would do a book read with them so um lavar i don't know if you want to

157give a little bit of context for the authors yeah thank you i'll i'll do that so um and thank you sarah so in this book um stamped uh just for some context on on the authors we have ibram uh ex kindly who is uh recently noted for writing how to be an anti-racist and also just stamped from the beginning um and his partnership with with jason reynolds who is um an author and poet uh or writes uh author of novels and poetry for for uh young adults um and this partnership has allowed this book to be a bit more accessible not only for youth but for folks who are uh just on this journey and having conversations about about race on this ongoing journey so that's just a little bit um about the authors and

158some context for them um in our uh discussion tonight i just want to speak to a few uh uh personal standards right um around uh just these conversations in general these ongoing conversations so number one um you know uh with just constructive intent right uh we're here to engage uh and ultimately to really challenge ourselves uh these conversations about race uh encompass everything that we that's around us but ultimately this is an exploration of self so uh we just want to be constructed with our intent understanding that you know we're we're digging into ourselves into this conversation and secondly uh just to have a focus uh communal focus um you know as we are you know thinking about supporting one another in this work uh in this exploration of self just being a a sense

159of support and providing some grace in this conversation so uh and ultimately it comes back to our leadership right and how we show up for leadership and in these conversations about race so uh i open it up with the first question relative to to the book um and i'll ask uh so in terms of the word uh race it's always been a charged uh word throughout the history of our country um but today there's a different edge to it right so my question for the board is why do you think race has become such a uh even more polarized uh of a word in today's society if no one wants to go i'll go um so i think part of the reason that race has become so so polarized is because you know as as

160we've evolved you know at times we realize how little we've evolved right um you know i think that especially in the 60s and with obama there's a lot of hope about change in a different day and a different um different construct around race and the reality is that not much has changed at all um and i think we've seen that uh certainly on the national level uh but i think we've seen that locally so you know i think part of part of why it's such a charged word is because it's so pervasive and so intractable seeming and so painful for so many yeah thank you for sharing sarah um anyone else um you know what do we think about race and and how and why has it become such a polarizing um conversation and just

161word for about today's standards i'll offer uh two cents um you know and i think what i've heard so far from both you dr ham and anthony is so true i know a lot of people would just rather not look at it and i know as a white man that i've had the privilege of not having to look at it really that much in my life um not much for me personally and certainly not much um within my family and and so um it's been a gradual process and an uneven process for me of really having this you know increased awareness i came from a real lilly white community in the suburbs of boston and you know boston is notoriously a racist city um at least you know uh when i lived there into the

16280s and so i'm sure that you know just a lot of unconscious bias unconscious upbringing that brought with it and so in recent years as you know and over time as i've you know had a diversity of friends through different arenas that i've been in i've been you know i i've been exposed to things either personally but a lot of times it's anecdotes i was blown away and so saddened to hear when doctor put adams talked about the experiences that she's had with her with her family with having to follow a child to school to make sure they'd get there without being harassed by a police officer things like that and so it's it's um it's it's horrible and so um and a lot of it is just i think the difficulty of talking about

163it for a lot of people and why there we had we felt like an hour of silence when you opened this up um and sarah bravely was first was the feelings of being misunderstood and and that the minute i know that i open my mouth or that i put my pen to paper um i'm running the risk of being misunderstood and so um you know i just i guess this may or may not be the right time and that so with a little trepidation i will say um to be clear in the in the environment the last three plus weeks that i stand with all of our communities at our school but specifically i think support that i declare that i stand with a muslim community at the high school from the students to all

164staff members uh everyone in oak park were forced and beyond and um so you know you do not only belong you're highly esteemed and you're loved and that's something that i i just will say and i know actions speak louder than words and so um i'm looking forward to having the opportunity to demonstrate that and i feel like i've demonstrated that in my life and i hope that uh i hope that we are all as i hope to be as gracious to others as i'm hoping they are towards me but i can't control that and so thank you for opening this up and i'm now going to press mute which is how i usually am when it comes to this i'll go although i want to go um so the question this question was um

165about the word race and as you as you asked it or as i read it i was kind of reflecting on on the current climate and i guess my answer my perspective is as we as a nation become more diverse such that the the quote-unquote white majority is being reduced i i believe there's a lot of people that are threatened of losing what they had or perceived had that's just kind of the way i i listened to that but then as i say that i reflect on on you know the book and and in my earlier days and before when i was really young the same challenges that we have today existed then so it's kind of but but i'm kind of more reflecting on the current political climate that's just has really you know

166in my mind become divisive i'll stop all right thank you for sharing yeah those are some uh some great points about the of course the current climate and the idea of of uh of being threatened um uh with with change right the increase of diversity as a threat to um the dominant culture and matt brought up a great point about um kind of the dangers of of growing up in homogeneous areas right and kind of the the dangers of not having a diverse um um area uh in terms of your connection with people so thanks thanks for sharing um anyone else on the um the term the word race conversations about race and and how polarizing it is today there's is mark terry you know a lot of it so i'm gonna take a little

167bit of a historical perspective you know a lot of it is most people that are white were conditioned to not think about race or consider race through their education and through their social interactions i mean that's just the truth and then more recently politically beginning with the sub you know when i say recently the late 70s early 80s the southern strategy and the demonization the regimentization of black americans um i think made whites look at race in a very destructive way whether or not they understood that overtly and whether or not it just became implicit because when when if you look at how the white strategy evolved over time words black and white weren't used but they were they were certainly euphemisms used and then you fast forward to the current environment i think the

168advent of the internet has been very polarizing where people can just go and get their information from folks who don't necessarily have any credentials to give them their information but could just reinforce their preconceived biases right so i think that that further polarizes us and then in this polarized environment we had a president who used traditional populist racist language and approaches in his politics and we also had the high-profile murders of black individuals by the police or by white folks like the guys in georgia that weren't police that were murdering blacks in this polarized environment subtly made race a very hot word so i think there's a lot going into that you know levar honestly uh and it's it's had a long history one of the reasons i appreciated this book although it cracked me

169up that he kept saying it's not a history book this is such a history book uh and and it's written in a very specific historical uh his style called an aeriatology which i was a history major so i kind of loved how this guy was playing with folks that don't know history where you you write your history in a way that provides some sort of moral judgment of what's happened in the past and some moral assessment for what could be in the future and they did that very well um in the book but it cracked me up that he kept insisting this is not a history book it must have repeated that ten times i'm like oh dude you're just playing with us because this is absolutely history book but anyway uh that was just

170me being a history major enjoying that right thank you ralph else in this first this first question and i'm sorry one thing i forgot to mention up front that i'd meant to is that in the interest of time knowing that we had such a lengthy meeting planned for this evening we made the determination to split this into two so it tonight is part one and then uh our next meeting in january will be part two so there are additional questions that we will be discussing then um and my hope is that at that next meeting we can choose the second book that we will be discussing so um so these questions are really meant to be prompts like discussion prompts not uh necessarily wed to having these specific questions answered um so i'll just throw

171out the next two and people can see what they're interested in um so with regard to conversations on race what terms have you heard throughout your life that have been recontextualized uh and then the other question is after reading the book what is your understanding of assimilationist versus anti-racist or if you want to talk about something else i thought it was a great book so if there's something else you want to talk about too we would welcome that so sarah it's time um i'm going to take the second one but it's more just kind of uh kind of my taking from it um which i thank gina for recommending this book by the way um i it was a a good read for me um i found it interesting that the you know historical figures

172that were referenced through the book were going through phases where they were you know uh assimilationist and then uh um anti-racist so it wasn't like i am this and i am this consistently but it was that there was change as through history through evolution i found that real um interesting you know and i don't know why but um i i guess it's because of the the climate they're in what i i'd like to understand more uh it shows the power of the human to kind of adapt or change based on situations but it wasn't like i am uh assimilationist and then 100 of the time others i i i i'll jump in i don't want to dominate i guess um i'll keep it short i mean i see a simulationist as someone who goes with

173the flow and just it doesn't say i'm gonna it's through inaction that they they may be the sin of omission of not stepping up and standing up and and speaking out and actively being an anti-racist is my you know assessment from what i've read and and what i've seen in general um and that an anti-racist wants someone who is active that if you're not on a side then you've picked a side your inaction is the decision and that you don't have a choice but to speak up and to speak out when you see something that is wrong in the area of of racism so that's that's what comes to my mind i feel like i always have a lot of confidence when you have these conversations and tonight i'm just feeling like there's so much

174not being said so i'm not really i'm i'm not i don't i don't feel because of based on what we're dealing with in our community right now i'm not feeling in a space that this conversation could be really highly productive as i as i would love for it to be but um yeah so i'm just a little bit challenged by our conversation tonight in light of everything that's going on so i think there's i i'm so grateful um thank you tom i'm so grateful that everyone agreed to read this book and that because i what i found what i can share about the book and the process of being in the book with a number of people and in our community is that the book really challenges a lot of assumptions it really makes us

175look at what we've been taught if you could hear the conversations the students are having about this book um and them really like some of the things that they're saying like i can't even believe that was a thing like they're they're incredulous um so you know i um i'm really i'm appreciative and looking forward to our next discussion of this i just um i i would be remiss i'm not there's a lot of other things going on that are keeping me from being fully engaged in this in a way that i feel would be authentic right now thank you for sharing gino yeah i'll just build a little bit on gina i am also not uh it's also a little difficult to for me to feel to discuss tonight but um i guess a couple

176things you know the and i'm i'm going to diverge from the questions a little bit but i mean the book forced me to think about things through a lens that i didn't grow up with i mean i grew up not having to think through that lens and it's it's interesting to me because it really highlighted to me the impact of things that were done [Music] and how what really matters is impact not intent um and the impact that has on people on society on everything and um and it it just it all comes down to that and i guess that was just one element and then just another random thought because we're talking about contextualizing terms and i don't quite know how to put this in the room but from my own perspective i and

177something i try i'm trying to make sure i understand is that it you know yes we've recontextualized lots of terms but to me and i i think to some other people other people too and maybe it gets back to your first question about why race raises such an emotion we can recontextualize terms all we want i when somebody talks about white supremacy to me i understand the context people are using it or whatever but i grew up with it in a different context and it hurts me when somebody does that regardless of what that context actually their intent is it's back to impact and i just think we part of this was really thinking in this book was that what are the intents what are the impacts on us in society so anyway my two

178cents i know i got off the questions but i'm just reflecting on you know the things rattling around in my head about the book now when you get up the questions i think that's when it begins to really get good right the questions are hopefully just springboards um so thank you craig so i i loved the book i thought it was great i couldn't put it down and i really appreciated that it was such a heavy topic but written in a way that was so light i mean there's some joy there was there was humor i mean it was really just a remarkably well crafted um set of narratives and i could see how kids would just love it um i certainly did and uh it really made me think about history in a way

179that i never learned in school right like none of the names seemed you know the names were familiar um but the story suddenly seemed very different and that um i think really caused me to reframe a whole lot of um you know assumptions i sort of had about how things used to be so i i appreciated that that push that paradigm flip uh that was i thought was really powerful i'll just uh weigh in i thank you uh gina for uh recommending the book and uh i am not in the the space to do anything other than reflect on this given our uh current local climate and the uh hurt harm and divisiveness that is happening um and we discussed that uh earlier but uh i'm glad that we'll have an opportunity to revisit this

180and i i do just want to say that um you know craig i appreciate uh your comment about uh hearing white supremacy and connecting it with something that not how you understood it and i i hope that we're can come to a place maybe even in our next discussion where as we're discussing all these terms uh that we can uh the pastor at my church used to say you know if it you know if you understand it or if it if it uh resonates say amen and uh if it's too close say ouch so uh i think you know ouch is is perfectly acceptable but after that i you know my question for us is so i hope that uh when we continue our discussion that it will be grounded in what our actions can

181be and what we can do because as much as it is uh talking about history the the biggest thing i take away is uh history is present and um it wasn't way back when when um a lot of the trauma of lynching or redlining or you know racial disparities in education and environmental pollution i mean all of the racisms the isms that we're trying to combat are things that i hope we can talk about and as the book as a springboard to to really dealing and delving into our leadership roles and how we can see ourselves being connected to the work that we say we want to do around racial equity and truly you know social justice and anti-racism and i i think it requires us to come into the present with the knowledge of

182that history and that's harder to do but so necessary if we're ever going to model for our uh community and our students what leadership around uh anti-racism is really about thank you for sharing that jackie and that same awareness that you're speaking to is really what um pushes us i think beyond our our convictions and ultimately gets us to a place of being change agents is what we're ultimately looking to to land so thank you for that so there any other thoughts before we i just add something really quickly craig thank you so much for saying that about how when you hear the word it hurts you know um because it is uh it has been the experience of my life that certain words hurt you know and it's interesting that you hearing that word

183hurts and the idea of that when i've lived and most of the people that i know specifically black people have lived with a number of words that hurt on a regular basis right so like i feel like there's um there's an ability for us to begin to have an understanding of like similar ex uh not similar experience but like a an experience of what that harm feels like for words to just be that you know like words that other people have a perception of right because if the if i go into a space and someone says well you speak so eloquently you know it's like based it can as compared to what right so that could be considered such a compliment but for me it could be it feels such like an assault like compared

184to what do other black people not speak eloquently is there a right is there some so like when we're starting to have these conversations about how words impact us and the taking a part of the words i'm just i'm appreciative that you said that so thank you for sharing that and and gina i didn't want to i went in saying it i didn't want to say that there's anything i think it i think it's a very i think using the word the way we're trying to use it is great and i'm sure i know because of my own biases that i've said things unintentionally that hurt other people so it's not like i'm asking for any any treatment over it i'm just throwing it out there as a fact because i realize i've done it

185and i want to just talk about it thank you craig are there other thoughts that people want to add okay well i feel like we've had a lot of high emotions this evening um so if folks want to wrap this up for now we can revisit it in january we will we have additional you know i think it's three questions or so we will send those out as we did this time ahead so that folks can kind of take a look at them you know ponder them a bit if they'd like um i'd also ask if anyone has a recommendation as to our next book we should probably look to pick that soon because time flies i had talked to lavar about finding something that's um uh more contextualized for like school policy specific um

186so i don't know if any of our academics have any thoughts done on books that might be useful in that space well i would like to recommend the book we want to do more than survive abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom by dr patina love because it does contextualize school and education and the system that we are a very integral part of shaping and supporting okay all right if anybody else has suggestions certainly we will take all suggestions gina's one for one so far so she's got a good record of books we like so um i guess uh we will end this here um and part two will be coming in a month yeah and thank you all for engaging i know it's a tough time right now but um but thank you

187again for leaning in yeah well thank you lavar for your help as and and dr purd adams as well and [Music] thank you all right you're ready for the next item our next item is item 10.3 project one update um making this presentation tonight mr ron anderson joining him i believe is jock cerniak and took it off my screen um and mike this from fgm i'm not sure who else is there but i'm sure he will introduce them this item is in compliance with strategic plan priorities one racial equity two transform nevada four facilities and finance and then it's also in compliance with district policy 2 colon 140 and 2 colon 220. mr anderson ryan ryan you're muted and we don't see your face mouse issues for a second there all right good evening board

188sister since the final phase of the schematic design the the architects presented in 29 november 2019 we've completed the summer 2019 construction and the ongoing um project of the src which is on schedule who's clicking from i'm clicking um tonight tonight we're gonna we're gonna update the board on the budget alignment progress the minority business enterprise which is the mbe the women business enterprise wbe business inclusion and workforce program the construction camera the current timeline construction phasing and project one design update the budget alignment will be presented by fdm thank you ron so a brief update on the budget alignment progress the the last time that we were came before the board to discuss the project one budget construction estimates and the bid period five award recommendation uh we or i i made a promise

189to to the board that just because bidding had come completed at that point for the south cafeteria in the src uh that did not mean that the design and construction team would stop looking for ways to uh to reduce cost on the project so so and and we didn't and and so that's really the brief update for for this evening uh working with the contractors that are working on the south cafe and src we've been able to reduce cost by approximately 260 000 uh dollars and then that comes through budget alignment work or value engineering with the um with things that really don't affect program or space so in this instance we were able to make cost reductions through revising the hvac and electrical systems uh without sacrificing uh performance and um we'll present a

190clearer picture of how that process and the process that we applied to bid period six when we present the um the bid award recommendation to the board in january for for bid period six pepper we'll talk about the mbe process hi everyone i'm ashley stapleton with pepper construction and um one item that we implemented for vp6 what's the mbe and wbe business inclusion plan and with this the prime trade contractor so each subcontractor that had a contract with pepper the goal so it was a project goal versus a requirement nbe was 15 wbe 5 alongside the actual prime trade utilization with the mbwde we also spoke with all contractors about having workforce utilization goals if they could not meet the initial mbe and wbe goals so that as well would be a minority of working

191on site and 5 women um working on site as far as trades people go for our bp6 uh we were able to send out the invitation to bid to 75 plus firms um and although we did have our bid opening yesterday conversations are ongoing because as mentioned the wbe mbe and workforce utilization goals are goals so we're constantly pushing and letting each of the subcontractors know how important this is to the district and to all of us um to make sure that they meet those goals um and make sure that they live up to the need you know to make sure that we're following what the district wants so when we actually present the work order we will also have information on how many people again 75 plus will also be able to break that

192down further to show how many people provided a bid on bid day and of both people who provided a bid on bid day how many of those subcontractors were actually awarded the contract so we will have that information in january as well so we have construction pack we we installed a construction camera and this allowed us to view a town that's video which we'll provide to um a short narrative version of construction camera once i can get over to the screen and pepper will narrate it alrighty so what you'll see here it's a three-minute video but it's actually going to walk you through the moment that we took over the mall and to where we are now um so what you see here is demoing of the exterior portion of the cafeteria as you move

193forward along in the video you will see all the steps that we've taken leading us to where we are now which is in the underpinning excavation and we'll also be starting concrete foundations as well and you'll also see partitions that have been built and those are to protect your existing building from being exposed to the elements um sorry it jumped a little bit so um and then as well there's also ers and a little bit further within the timeline you'll see some large machines in various stages of the project and they're actually placing steel so that they can the earth retention system is literally to retain the earth so since we're building a building with existing on three sides we have to make sure that all of the soil and the earth beneath your existing

194building do not begin to fall when therefore the building comes away from the structure so that's what the system is built for so as we're finishing up you will see an ending shot of where we are today and um there just to throw it out there there are hard hats and hide this clothing if there's ever a time where any of you would like to view the project we can definitely schedule a quick walkthrough remind you that this this video could be found on the district's website um it takes 15 minute interval i mean 50 15 minute interval pictures and makes it into increase this time that's video for everyone to all the stakeholders to be able to view this at any time how long how long ago was that like are we a month

195passed when that video was done like what was the time period for that so it was up to 15 minutes up to 15 minutes ago so at the end here is up to right now 15 minutes ago okay wow thanks ron so um the uh the next thing that we wanted to um to discuss with the board is it's been it's been some time since we discussed the overall timeline for project one the capital improvement work was going to occur uh concurrently and the health by safety projects that were going to occur concurrently as well so um you you've now seen where things stand in terms of the south cafeteria and the and the new src and uh that construction will continue until the beginning of december uh next year however starting next summer we

196will be working on the the main entrance the welcome center and student commons phase one of special education phase one of the classroom and faculty office renovations uh the all gender toilet rooms on levels one and three capital improvement uh projects healthy safety projects uh and the commons balcony alternate if that ends up being accepted by the by the district and then phase one of the classroom renovation alternates if that is accepted by the district as well all of that work from id item id 2 through 9 will be completed by the end of the first week of august once the new southcaf and src are complete the existing library tutoring center and makerspace will be vacated and those spaces will be transformed into the uh the new classrooms and science labs uh that are

197going in that in that in those locations in the northwest corner of the building that work will begin in approximately around december of next year and it will be complete in may of 2022 and then on the heels of that in the summer of 22 we have the uh phase two of special education and and phase two to um pepper is going to show some phasing plans next and it'll make more sense in terms of where all of these things are located uh in the building so in addition to phase two of special education in summer of 22 phase two of the classroom uh and faculty office renovations the completion of the all gender toilet rooms on levels two and four the north elevator capital and more capital improvement work uh and again some of

198the alternates if those are accepted by by the board next month and then finally to to round out uh the entire project uh in summer of 23 we'll have the remainder of capital improvement work the remainder of the health safety work and then any of the remaining capital improvement alternates that the board may choose to accept uh when we're back before you with a bid award recommendation next month so so with that i'll turn it over to to josh warner with uh with pepper construction and he's going to take you through the the phasing plans sorry it is a-okay so um i know that josh just did a high level um and i i can distribute these or these can be distributed as needed but the idea is to have different color codes um just

199explaining what is considered each year so you are aware and as a whole you know what areas are going to be disturbed in your building um each summer and this is broken out by floor there's also a version that's broken out by year so there's multiple iterations of this as well um if you need a different version come the january board meeting we can also provide that as well if it's the day by year that'll work better but first floor as mentioned the summer base bid work that you see is the main entrance commons you have a special education phase one as well the orange areas the darker orange areas are summer 2022 the base bed the lighter orange area is the alternate and then summer 2023 you have restrooms that are an alternate as

200well so this is more like i said a depiction of what areas of your building are going to be disturbed on each floor um by year we can go to 4-2 so similar to what josh was saying this pinkish area is the library infill area so that's december 2021 through may 2022 so as soon as you all put everything within the south cafeteria and src we'll start on that work um the orange areas are basic classrooms versus alternate classrooms we have the commons in the dark blue we have the light moving the balcony overhang which is the alternate a little pink area not too far off of the commons um to the left those are some offices and again colors are just showing what areas are going to be disturbed per year you can go

201to floor three similar to other floor this floor has mainly classrooms along with the library infill area whether it's summer 2021 december 2021 and then the bathroom or the elevator are later years and fourth floor fourth floor again is mainly all classrooms um you have a few within the library infill you have the elevator bathrooms as well i know that was high level um there are some items miscellaneous items that are not shown such as et upgrades we have hls varying work we have excel accessibility upgrades as well and since those are scattered throughout the building um that's more of uh we can list rooms if we need to fgm's plans are very detailed whereas it has everything labeled um so we just did the main areas with the most disruption to your building last

202one is the roofing forgot about the top floor so this one um we have masonry tuck pointing and roofing we have tuck pointing from summer 2021 through summer of 2023. since we have some of the larger areas that we are doing tuck pointing in um we're staggering so an area that we took point in 2021 we will do the roofing in 2022 which is why you see in summer of 2023 it is only cup pointing because the roofing would come in 2024 so that is about it for facing us of right now okay uh we're excited to share some renderings and some animations here for uh the renovation work here for the remainder of project one wanted to start at the the exterior here the welcome center um really the the photo there in the

203bottom left corner really explains the existing entry it's kind of a it's it's a very dark space um on either side of that entry there are some tall hedge lines and as part of the renovation work here we're looking to propose some lower landscaping along those edges to kind of open up things visually in addition to uh expanding the welcome center and the size of it we're actually creating a new vestibule underneath the existing canopy roof structure there you could start to see the that that glass storefront system there um and and then uh refreshing some of the finishes there with the the roof fascias and it relates back to some of the finishes we're doing at the exterior of the student resource center and south cafeteria with some some of the metal panels and

204the colors mainly that that terracotta color there which really plays off of the beautiful clay tile roof you have there on the north side of the building but then also improving some of the the wayfinding signage here adding the school name to the front and then uh some main entrance signs there on either side as you're walking along scoville from from the north and the south you could go to the next one rod so so here'd be uh this would be a interior view of that new entry vestibule air lock and you can see we're starting to bring in that that same terracotta color into the ceiling of the vestibule and introduce some new uh linear lighting as well to brighten that space and now we'll have a series of video animations to walk you

205through here starting with the the new welcome center renovation i think if you go background i think hit spacebar um oh why is that working is it possible to hover over the the lower left corner of the image okay over here there we go great there we go um so here with the reconfiguration of the welcome center we're able to move some office spaces around and capture a little bit more daylight there with that window introduce some new uh imagery there reinforcing the you know the opr spirit colors here you're seeing that the new greeters desk uh there's a four panel uh video wall for messages next to that wall is a door into the new attendance office location and then we were able to capture some more space by capturing the existing ticket box

206office taking that function and combining that with the new attendance office location and we were able to create this little alcove area for a seating area and you could see uh again looking at some of the great history there at oprf and introducing a vinyl wall graphic which actually shows an image of when ontario street used to bisect your site which used to be the one one of the the older entry main entries to the building then here we got another animation there you can see the attendance office there on the the the left side and here we're looking at new finishes on the walls ceiling uh ceilings and lighting and uh creating some of the some of these uh seating platforms here we know one of the big goals of the imagine master plan

207was to create more student collaboration space and by adding some seating areas within the the student commons both both on the first floor and the second floor it was a great opportunity to start to introduce some of those spaces here you can see we've uh we're actually expanding the uh the staircase that leads you into the auditorium and creating this platform space which could actually how which could actually fit uh 30 students there so you could take a class or it could be a great place for before or after school as well go to the next video so another great uh historical piece that's currently in the basement of the school is what used to be at that original ontario street entry and that's the book of learning piece some really beautiful limestone pieces that

208we're going to have cleaned up and installed into a display case there and then as we turn here to the left you'll see a new location for the tradition of excellence plaques kind of front and center in that student student common space where we're also looking to redesign those plaques too and then moving towards the the back of the commons here you're seeing a display case for your your bronze uh opr crest and then the blue wall back there is actually a tackable surface we know a lot of a lot of your student groups and and clubs and things like to hang up things and it gives an opportunity to still do that here in the commons and then we'll move to the to the next view here um so part of the part of

209the plan here too is to introduce a wheelchair accessible ramp to bring you to the auditorium level and then as you we swing around here you'll see a a better view of that student collaboration space where the back side of that book of learning display case is actually a teaching wall it's a magnetic dry erase surface and then the ceiling of this space this is actually currently today it's a two-story space and we're looking to expand the balcony and this would be an add alternate to the project that the district could decide on later when uh the bids are finalized and again that could how that could fit a class of students as well and then the next slide will give us a view of what that balcony starts to feel like the wall on

210the left here would be a teaching wall with a projector dry erase surface and then similar to the to the first floor of the commons we would be uh refinishing walls and providing new ceiling and lights and new guardrails here on the second floor in addition to a new tackle surface for what's currently and will remain as your your art gallery space okay uh so now we want to move on to some of the classroom renovation and some of the interior views here um there's there's two color schemes both schemes are working with uh the school spirit colors the blue and the orange here you can see we we've created the the teaching wall as really the focal point in the room and the remaining walls are a lighter neutral color because we know a

211lot of a lot of classrooms in the school are on the you know on the smaller side of things and you're also seeing carpet tile on the floor which has a fine orange pinstripe in that one of the one of the things we heard back from division heads when we had our various meetings with them to review the classroom designs was a preference to maintain as many of the wood floors as we can and we did study that um unfortunately some of them aren't in the best of uh condition and we're looking to provide this uh carpet carpet tile uh to cover some of those but where we can save them we are definitely doing that and then here you have the other color scheme with the orange wall and then uh you could you

212could go to the next one here we have uh one of the two science labs that will be displaced by the special education renovations on the first floor so these would be relocated to the second floor where the exis the existing tutoring center is at and one of the goals here of this space working with the science division heads was to create a flexible learning environment you could see lab tables that are unlockable casters providing overhead electrical cord reels and really maximizing storage as much as we can for for everything that's required for science moving back down to the to the first floor where the special ed programs will be um there are some minor uh design modifications that will happen in the corridors here and that's mainly where we're uh we're introducing new door

213openings into new spaces for on this floor it would be for special education offices and some of the classrooms but then this will happen in in certain places on the other floors too for some of the new classrooms uh here you can see a view of the special education there's this is one of two team classrooms and in our conversations and work sessions with uh the special education division heads uh we talked a lot about the uh the life skills kitchen currently the team classrooms share a separate life skills kitchen and in those conversations it made a lot of sense to provide a kitchenette within the team classroom so each of the two team classrooms would have that kitchenette within their space they also share a fully accessible toilet room and there's also there's also

214a site program classroom which will be configured in the same way and then the last slide here gives you a view of the single occupant all gender toilet rooms that'll be towards the north side of the building there's going to be two of these per floor that are stacked going all the way up and that concludes the presentation if there's any questions anyone have any questions on the presentation i had a couple yeah the through the presentation i heard the word alternate used a lot what where are these alternate ideas coming from the these are the alternates that were discussed um in in pretty uh in a lot of detail with the board previously we we had we had recommended additive alternates to the project to give the district a form of cost control management

215for when the various portions of the project go out to bid and so any of the alternates that were mentioned this evening are the alternates that we reviewed with the uh discussed with the board and in some instances the board actually said no to the alternates that the design and construction operations team had proposed and we had then created other alternates that the board agreed to uh that the board felt those made the most sense one of those being the the balcony extension in the in the student commons okay all right sorry meetings all run together i don't remember an extended conversation of alternates yeah i guess craig what what might help is at one point the design construction operations team was was recommending uh looking at the student commons in its entirety and the

216welcome center as as alternates and and relatively unanimous unanimously the board said no those are those are sacred and so we we really had to look at other things uh to make alternates and and and so given the given the project one scope the other alternates and this may sound familiar 30 of the classrooms are an alternate and they're broken up into uh groups of ten and then um prior to going out to bid in bid period six because there was some concern of of of fluctuations in the marketplace we added an additional eight classrooms on the fourth floor as an alternate uh but those were all in the in the bid documents so the contractors were had have provided pricing on all of those and then we're gonna be coming to the board in

217january with recommendations uh not only on the bid awards for base bid but then also the all of those alternates the rest of the alternates are uh in terms of capital improvement projects so again giving the giving the district a form of cost control management on the overall scope of work so in the context of discussing alternates i i mean you're the architect of record as well for the building right yes are we should we be discussing maintenance issues as well why are we discussing these things as two separate items we tried once to bring them together and uh then it became confusing and we were told to split them out am i correct i'm i'm not sure craig i understand that you understand well my only point is we're not really spending two buckets

218of money we we have a lot of maintenance issues that we have a lot of tension over how do we fund and and i really have a hard time having a conversation of alternates additions to program one while we're sitting there with budget while we're sitting there with maintenance items that we're really struggling to approve and fund so that's just kind of i don't think the alternates were all add-ons it was no it's my memory certainly the alternates were when we presented it and it was coming back like way over budget and we had to go back and take some things off and when we took those things off we said these could be alternates okay all right all right that that's fair go ahead enjoy them i just also say with the maintenance uh

219the last conversation i remember about the maintenance and the update keep was we went back and color coded we had the board asked us to color code those things that were like urgent like red green yellow if memory serves and that would have been sometime like september october right i mean we we kind of have a priority list of things and we know what the priority list is right right and all of this is following that priority list there's nothing adding on that wasn't part of the original scope it was just pulled out to make the budget and depending on where the budget comes whether where the bids come in things will be added back in okay thank you and craig i think one thing too that will be be helpful and maybe for the

220rest of the board and the community as well is is when we say additive alternate that does not mean added scope that was never in the program additive alternate means that the contractor does not include the pricing in their base bid wherein a deduct whereas a deductive alternate they include it in their base bid and if you chose to accept the deductive alternate then it would come out of their bid okay all right thank you and also also remember that capital improvements and health and life safety are all inside of this bed pack as well okay all right we'll look forward to seeing the rest of seeing the bottom line in january have a question sarah if i can jump in um so obviously we're living through a pandemic that we hope is once every

221century or or longer um and obviously the design i would think the design is conducive to anticipating the need for separation there's flexibility in these spaces i'm curious though as we move forward with more decisions over the next number of months and years to what degree should contemplation of what we're dealing with now inform some of those choices you know or do we is it such an outlier event that it's not feasible to do that so i just i'm curious about that from a philosophical modeling kind of standpoint sure great great question matt it's it certainly is not feasible for schools in terms of maintaining social distancing if if we were to say if we were to draw a line in the sand now and say every project moving forward needs to accommodate at a

222minimum six foot uh distance between occupants uh the the schools uh would need to be approximately three to four times larger than they are now and that's not just for oprf however there are some there are some things that that can be done now that we think make good sense and and are maybe arguably a little more fiscally responsible one of those things you saw in the design update for the welcome center previously we had heard kind of more leaning towards that the new greeter's desk should be open and what you saw tonight is it has glass it doesn't have glass for security it has glass in direct response to this pandemic and airborne pathogens and and so things like that and then also looking at new hvac equipment that is going in throughout the

223building related to project one or capital improvements the the filtration systems going into that new hvac equipment are are all uh specified with merv 13 or higher filters which we know from the uh scientists and and mechanical engineers that that's really one of the best ways to uh trap as many of the airborne pathogens particularly sars cov2 and that particular micron size so um so we have done things but but it's it's a it's a tricky balance made even trickier when the budget was as as tight as as it is thank you for addressing that sure others any other questions all right well thank you so much for that walkthrough it's very exciting thank you we're we're excited as well and and uh and uh it's it's gonna be neat to see all of this

224unfold and and see a really serious transformation on on your campus uh that uh the students particularly are are going to benefit so much from so but thank you for thank you for allowing us the time to present this thank you the next item is item 10.04 saliva screening okay thank you so as you know uh the district in our efforts to get our students back on campus uh as soon as possible in a health and safety manner has been looking at two um two different screeners and i want to say that today i'm going to give you just want to start the discussion uh around the screeners that we're looking at can you look at the next five please so what you see here is the swiss cheese model of risk mitigation and how

225that works is that there's really no single solution that stops the virus spread but by combining different layers of public measures and personal actions can make a big difference and so if you look at the first slice of the swiss cheese is wearing our mask the cloth mask that everyone is wearing maintaining a social distance and cleaning and disinfecting the area and hand washing well for us another layer like another layer of ppe would be to use a screener a saliva screening and the reason behind that is there's not one specific way of curing coronavirus or maintaining it but we believe that with some type of saliva screening or some type of screening we will be able to reduce the probability of cases on site which will ultimately impact the community and reduce the amount

226of spread in the community should go to the next slide please and so there's two agencies that we've been looking at and we want to discuss them with you tonight so we've looked at safeguard which uh was developed by dr edward campbell and he sits on the board in one of our school districts in one of our neighboring school districts but he also is a doctor at loyola and so he is the uh designer of safeguard the other one we looked at is shield and shield is out of the university of illinois chicago u of i and so what we did was we we've talked with the dr campbell and we've talked with beth heller who is our contact for shield and so just quickly want to go through just a couple of things with

227regards to availability and those items that are discussed in the board item so right now safeguard is available right now but i do want to say safeguard is not a diagnostic tool not a diagnostic screener it is a surveillance screener and if a person were to test positive on it they would have to then do a follow-up it uses a rt lamp which is a little less sensitive than a pcr it we can either collect the samples on site or collect them from students homes but i once again stress is not diagnostic the cost for the safe cost surveillance is 11 per test that does include the vials and everything that goes with it we were told that two people can collect 900 samples an hour and that's what the students coming in or either

228doing them on site and putting them in the container they can actually do about 900 samples per hour that is not testing them that is collecting them it typically takes four to eight hours to get the results back so if a student or an adult tested on one day we would have the results before the start of school the next day but they do guarantee that you will get the test within 24 hours when we asked about the false positivity rate we were told that it is less than one percent uh we do we have to store anybody's information you know how would that work we don't so what we would do with safeguard is to protect the identification of individuals the district were responsible for uh developing barcodes with the assistance of safeguard making

229sure that this barcodes are placed on these sample tubes and then once a person tests positive what would happen is safeguard would then contact the district the district would then contact the individual and have them go get screened with shield shields right now is not available they are actually waiting for fda approval they anticipate going um for fda approval the first part of january which then meant that they would be able to begin to work with us in february it is a diagnostic test and that's what with the fda they would get their u their eua which would then allow them to be a diagnostic test which is more sensitive than the one from safeguard it is a pcr test the collection is similar this test cost twenty dollars uh per test and it must

230be done at school so they that you take the test in school you go through a process of giving the people your info your your name they look your information up in the system give you your kit you drool in the kit uh under supervision and then you turn it into someone else um this too has less than a one percent positive false positive rate the results are guaranteed back within 24 hours on this one we would have to share our identifying information uh with the institution for students and for staff because what happens is someone tests positive on this because it is a diagnostic test they would then notify the school notify the uh the student or the employee and then they would also notify the illinois department of public health would you go

231to the next slide please the pros and cons of each when you look at safeguard it is available now it is at a lower cost uh fewer staff to collect samples and there's no need to supply personal data the con of that though is just a screener and it will require a follow-up diagnostic test the pro of shield is diagnostic no follow-up test is needed however the downside right now is the date of availability is uncertain uh it is more expensive there's more staff required to collect the samples and then we must supply the personnel data right now there's also what's not on here is the capacity issue right now if you heard yesterday on the news that shield is actually working with the area colleges and universities first once they get the fda approval

232then their hope is to begin to do the k-12 program if they are not approved by the fda to be a diagnostic tool then they will revert to being a surveillance screener i'm going to take a moment and go back to the item the board item and share some additional information with you from the original item if i can get it to act right i did ask in both conversations what school districts they were working with us safeguard gave us the names of 12 districts now that they are working with and when following up with those districts they have indicated to us that they can't get people through in an easy amount of time that they do allow for some students to take their test at home some to take their test on site in

233both situations we would have to make sure that the samples get delivered to the labs the labs were for shields would be in maywood so it's pretty close and so as we look at how to transport the vials we thought that would be important i do want to add that also but it's not a part of this presentation also the government is providing school districts with the bio next now which is the nasal squad for people who are symptomatic and we see that too for us as another level of surety and safeguard to reduce the spread and so if we went with safeguard if we got back a positive result we would use if that person was on site while we would refer them to have further testing we could also use the bio next

234which would help be additional support to encourage them the other piece to that though is if we have a student or an adult in the building who on any given day is showing symptoms of possibly having covet we would use the bio nets now because if that may not be a day that they get tested and then we would send them off to have a formal test done we could also do the same with shield we do have cost factors right now with our with the rough calculations that we've looked at and this was prior to getting the opt-in opt-out information we are looking at approximately 2 900 tests per week and that would be we would test three days a week for students and we would test for staff you know on a rotational

235basis and we figured we would do approximately test a week with the safeguard it would cost us with approximately 3 500 a week and over 17 weeks approximately 545 thousand dollars which shield with twenty dollars per test it would cost us uh over the 17 weeks approximately nine hundred and forty nine thousand dollars i am prepared to answer any questions that you may have of me this was to have a discussion we do have um we have a contract right now that our legal is looking at with safeguard and i will be forwarding a contract for perusal to our legal consul or shield just to look at both questions yeah i have three questions um to start one is um i think you the way you presented it with the two different tests the frequency

236would be the same is that correct yes one once a week for students we could actually test them prior to coming on site so if you are a student who will report on monday you can test on friday and that way we would have your results and the notion is that uh it would also lower the risk of students doing crazy things over the weekend because they know they have to come into school on monday okay so so my two key questions that i have are one when you talked about where these are being used our district you know are the districts using this data to make decisions on keeping kids on on bringing uh and retaining kids in school that's my my first question i'm gonna ask two before i forget okay my second

237question is really between those two tests and i would say a third option is no testing just to put it in the mix what what's going to get us um the most students in the building the fastest i believe a screener will because that's another level for us of ppe when you ask the question about what how other schools are using it it depends on the school that you ask they are using it to reduce the amount of spread it has been found that the spread is the students in the building are not the issue it's what they bring from the outside into the building and they're using it to reduce spread neutria however who just upped their um student attendance on their hybrid and they i believe they have based theirs on the the

238results that they are receiving as a result of doing this doing the screening that they are seeing uh positive results from it not positive in terms of having covet but reducing the the amount of spread within the community so thank you i mean i just want to come back because you said i believe so you said i believe a screener so how i guess how because you know that's a an investment right and how will that investment um do what i believe we're trying to do with this which is get the most number of students in the building safely so when we had our conversation with the medical professionals on the advisory committee which was comprised of pediatricians infectious disease doctors and so forth it was the consensus of the infectious disease doctors that to

239have some type of screener in place would allow us to reduce the potential of having an outbreak or a number of covet cases which would also allow us to revisit the metrics that we currently have and get kids in the building faster okay yeah i think and i guess that's kind of goes back to the point that i said is that if we if we don't use it in making decisions then i don't understand how you know as you said if we don't bring it into the metrics to say this is showing favorable results and we can do something or it's showing that we have an issue then i don't see how i i i'm i'm a little cloudy but i'll i'll stop my questions and yield the form others i have a question and

240maybe it's been addressed and i missed it but the the notion i have in my mind is that we can start to test students and you know and staff before we actually even have classes scheduled to see what the population is evidencing in terms of their health right so so like for a week or whatever window of time we test to see who do we who do we catch with it and therefore that helps us see what the percentage is work you know so that even if the other indicators aren't as promising in terms of community spread and so forth we go wow so is that is that part of the plan or not i guess that's an option that's not really what we discussed um the members of the advisory group that talked that

241met with us when we met with shield uh suggested that if we test the student before he or she is due to enter the building we could ward off having a student who is potentially symptomatic or asymptomatic enter the building and then we're more in a more reactive mode versus being in a proactive frame of mind right and so that was the notion about having them come in sooner i agree i mean i just and and i know there's it's a very complex thing but i think this is one element where if we could be aggressively proactive about that and say okay we're not going to have hybrid at least until we've already said january 18 or something that you know but maybe to have that be the week where we start to hey for

242those who've opted in let's do let's go through this you're going to come to the school whatever the logistics would be and and then see from there i just otherwise i feel you know i i feel like we might be waiting longer than maybe we needed to and again i realize it's a complex thing so that's something i want to put out there and and i don't know if it's been discussed much before i do want to add that with you know with whatever screener we use um and that's to say we i think i believe we need a screener it none of them will be fully up and running before february and i say that because shield number one won't even go before the fda until february the first time we could bring something

243to the board would be at the cal meeting in january with state school there's a 30-day pilot and that pilot is to make sure that you have that 50 percent of the population being tested so you can begin to see where you are and whether or not you're going to get the results that you're intended to have and so um i don't want to send the message that once we have a screener that's the only metrics that's count because it does not it is an additional layer for us that we believe will keep our our students and staff safe but also help to begin to build a sense of safety with reducing spread in the community as well gotcha so early february is is the earliest best case scenario for us to start to get

244the hybrid going and so that's not the hybrid the screener the hybrid you know if the metrics are where they where our current metrics say they can come in before that our tentative date right now is to have uh students began to come on site november 19. i mean at night okay and so so i guess that's another question though is to what degree would we be comfortable as an organization to have students start to come in without a screener and so that's another facet that is a good question so all right i'll mute but we didn't we did not you know i was asked why we didn't have the screener in a plan i did not want to put the screener in the plan until we knew we were going to have it and

245then once we have it then we can go back and revisit the metrics but i don't want to say that now until we have it in place okay thank you i i i would love if other board members would weigh in with if you think you know if the track that i'm suggesting would pursue is a worthwhile track or not because i'm just one voice and i don't know if uh greg roxanna or karen want to add anything at this point i i just wanted to i was going to underscore something on that on that point and that's just that uh you know we did we designed our metrics independence underscores which only just said we designed the metrics independent of the screener and so the rules that we have in place according to the

246plan that you've all seen are in some ways assuming that nothing like that exists that answers your question matt right so the metrics would be in place and we would have people in the school as soon as those those metrics allow that's what yeah so can we so i guess that brings the question to mine is can we change the formula in the metrics with this in the mix once we once we have a screener then we can go back and revisit the metrics but i guess from i guess it's anyway so i'm very in favor of having a screener because i want us whenever if we're able to resume and have some in-person learning happening i don't want it to go back and i think a screener is a great way to help that

247happen yeah i'll add one two one more thing two doctor put adams and that said um you know our current metrics are in three categories right we take a look at um what's going on within the school within the surrounding community and then within the county right and uh so in some ways the data that we would get from a screener plugs very very well into our metrics when you think about that first category it kind of implants that and the question is how much does that you know does that affect the weight of that within our calculations as a result of that we have a completely different way to gather that data with the screen it would probably would most surely change the weightedness so i i'm just trying to understand what we gain

248from going with the more expensive tests um over the screener test i mean obviously one's diagnostic and one isn't but i'm not sure that that that translates into any difference of making our students safer right like i don't know that our students are safer if it's diagnostic versus screening um i don't know if any any of the doctors talked about that people what they said to us was any screener is is better than no screening the diagnostic screener is more sensitive and that's why it can it's done with a pcr machine and not an rt lamp um what we did here from safeguard is once they get two or more like false positives they then revert to a pcr uh screener what what i got from the doctors with regards to what your question is

249if it is diagnostic you don't put that cost on uh parents who may not be able to go out and afford the new test another test but you know today they talked about one being the growth in the stores for 25 dollars but that was one of the things that was shared with me today that extra cost the other i think is you don't have to do the contact tracing but the pros and cons kind of go back and forth they uh the feel is that whatever we do will reduce the spread but the diagnostic is more conclusive jaylin is do do you have any numbers on the difference in accuracy between the two they were quite similar less than one percent of false positives and when we asked both they were running about between

25097 and 99 accuracy okay so they detect between 97 and 90 okay good so they're not that different right um last just one question you talked to a number of schools it sounded like they were using this screener are all those schools in session now not all of them depending on their area if their community spread was at such a high level that they are not but all of them are planning to go back at some point in january some of those times all you know fluctuate um there are some schools that have multiple buildings and so you know the rate of positivity rate in the buildings uh alter but i will tell you they are seeing fewer and fewer kids who are coming in who are testing positive which is allowing them to keep

251their schools open longer so so they are in the context of the spread in our community successfully making the environment safer for kids yes okay and some of them are actually nutritious actually doing weekend testing that's the other thing that both offered that if we needed to bring samples on sunday or have kids screen on sunday for school on monday they could handle that i'll need to be honest and transparent though that with each with a shield there would be a staffing concern we believe in our conversation with our lead nurse we could handle the process with safeguard but with shield there would be some staffing concerns we do each each um each screener would cause us to have to transport uh we can either transport the test ourselves to the labs or we could

252contract with a transport company to do that um there is so there are some concerns with both capacity uh is one what what the young lady at shield also told us this there are some districts that are going with safeguard now that may revert back to shields one shield is up and running okay thank you i had a question about um you went over how long it would take to administer the test but i'm not clear on like who would administer the test do they have their staff come in and do it or does it does no so if we use safeguard the kids could do their sample at home and bring it in or you they can do it on campus and they actually drool into a vial and seal it the work we

253would have to do with safeguard is to make sure that the labels are printed that the labels are put on the vials in the appropriate manner when the students or the staff bring them in or take their tests on site they themselves could put it on the rack and then our staff would box it up with with shield you have to do it on site and so someone you come into one station and at that station you you show the person your id they have to look you up in the system then they print out the label they give it to you your label in your vial then you go to another station where you have to have somebody also station who watches you drool into the vial and once you drool into the valve

254then you go to another station where there's someone to make sure that you turn it in and put it away safely and then you have someone that kind of supervises all of that so those supervisors would be for shield that would be their people for safety no no they would be our people we would have to hide that's what said there'd be a staffing consideration how many people would be required to do that it depends on how many lanes there are three people per lane one to make sure that you you they know who you are the second person is to actually observe you drool and then the third person is to make sure that you put your vial in the correct place so do you do you think that the um those would be

255people that you would hire or people that are already within the trained if we had the staffing we could train them but right now i don't i don't think we have the staff thank you i had a question um one's a rudimentary question that has to do with uh the saliva the drool test versus the nasal swab and uh just curious if there was a if there's a greater cost to the uh the nasal swab asking that because just trying to imagine a lot of drool around and how with high school students and uh i'm not sure though even with the transport issue if self transport is allowed with it seems like a biohazard so i don't i mean i'm just wondering if that's been thought you know if that's been talked about self transport

256um the only self tran when self self transport would be them bringing it from home to the school that's the only thing when it goes to the lab the district is responsible for transporting the boxes with the vials in them whenever they're packed there is a process to wipe down everything to make sure that everything is sanitized with regards to the nasal swab the one that we're getting free from uh the government is the bio next now and that one is just uh for you have to be symptomatic to get that and that's the one where you go up into your nasal passage we have i don't know the cost for um what's being done with the nasal swabs is a test i've not heard of any school using the nasal swabs as a diagnostic

257test the only thing we've heard about anybody having anything with the nasal suave is the bio next now which is offered to all schools all public health departments they actually go to the public health department and then they distribute it to the senior living facilities and to the schools that is free but that is only to be given to those who are showing symptoms okay and i guess the reason i was asking is that just and and you know k-12 may be different than colleges because i know uh for both of my daughters their school has been uh testing uh three times a week and uh it's a self swab that you know it's supervised so that's what i was curious about it seems less cumbersome than the uh the saliva test so i was

258just curious if that had been explored if there was a aspect that's not i guess we could look into that but it has not at this point i've not heard of any school systems that are doing that i don't know uh karen if you've heard with your communications contacts roxanna if you've heard with hr or greg if you've heard in your group i have not it's not come up in any superintendent's meeting okay so and the the infectious disease docs did not know that okay the other question i had was um you know as we were talking about uh putting the the screening into the uh the metrics uh for our staff i was under the impression that one of the prerequisites or agreements had to do with screening being a part of coming you

259know uh being in the building for students or staff so is it i mean it doesn't sound like it's feasible for us to suggest that we can do this without that being part of the metric that was part of negotiations with the faculty senate was for the screening um and so if we go i have to be on if we go with shield then we would probably have to go back and renegotiate because she'll requires that you share the personal information right right i guess my question is more about the timing that regardless of which one we use uh the earliest for the other is february so i'm maybe i'm not clearing your question we've already done that work with the faculty senate is that what you're asking have we finished that part uh i

260understand the screening piece i'm trying to get the timeline piece that the suggestion that that isn't in the metrics now but it could be but that would push the date from what we have been as a potential from january to february no what i was saying is the current met our current metrics well is what we're using right now to determine when we'll be back on site once we have a screener in place and we have an agreement with the company and we're ready to do it then we can go back and revisit the metrics to include the screener but right now it is not a part of our metrics and i i i just try one more time because i could just maybe i'm not understand no i'm just trying to understand if the

261are our staff willing to come back without the screening tool yes if the metrics are such that they can come on site and and know that we're trying to keep them safe so we're we're putting in a self-certification app we're taking temperatures we've put in plexiglas we've we've tried to answer all the questions that we've received thus far from the faculty and staff to show them that we're trying to provide a safe and healthy environment they know that we have the form we've talked about the fact that you know people will either do the consent and waiver and take the test or they won't but they do know that the expectation is once we can bring people on site safely that is the expectation so by expectation you mean that's the mandate or is it

262still optional that is the agreement that they will be on site okay unless they qualify for an accommodation and then last question just has to do the does the cost that is being uh budgeted include the uh staffing and transportation no we're still looking at transportation costs if we go with safeguard we believe we can handle that internally with regards to staffing if we go with shield that's where we see the staff in consideration and so as we begin to look at when we could start because the the cost that i quoted was based upon a fourth of our students being in the building our staff being tested and a 17 weeks and so depending on when we could actually have the start date the number of students who actually opt for hybrid learning and

263the staff that signs the consent waiver will determine the number of tests that we would actually get and then that will be considered in the costs carolyn gus now is looking at transportation people who transport medical equipment and medical tests she's looking into that now we would not be bringing this to the board before the january cow and hopefully by that time we would have all of the information this was just to give the board an update on where we are uh and get a feel on what the board is thinking and questions that need to be asked okay so i that would be one of mine just um as we're talking about kind of overall costs um i've just imagined that transportation and these types of companies are in pretty high demand so um

264what you know if there's even some estimates of of what those costs could potentially be that that'll be all in when we come forward in the proposal thank you questions from others time do you have a question um so does the administration have the clarity that you were seeking joylynn or do you want us to give you a more definitive answer uh from what i heard uh there's a lot of questions that i that i took um i think i know what the board wants in order to make an informed decision um i did not expect to hear the boy tell me which one to go with but i expect them to for i believe the board expects me to come back with a recommendation that is sound that is going to meet the needs

265that we have for our students that's going to help us get our students and our staff back into the building as quickly as possible in a safer manner as we possibly can that is also uh fiscally manageable i have a question i just want to circle back earlier i had asked if uh if there was a consensus either way on my you did is is that is that important for you to know right now it would be very helpful okay because so that's what i want to reapproach and i don't know if others need me to recap it or someone can recap it more succinctly or better than i could but i'll try essentially um how in favor would the board be of us starting to do this testing as soon as possible even before

266having the students actually take classes inside the building i think that's that's essentially what i'm asking right you mean if that's doable with contracts and all of that right if it's doable do we want to do that incurring the expense but also to me investing in getting more clarity and perhaps having it be a greater weight that is assigned to the results of that so that my in my thinking it could help hasten the resumption of the safe schooling inside that building so so i'm wondering who shares that view man i'm sorry this may not be my place but i want to ask a quick question about that okay um if if it is the implications of the analysis is somewhat different depending on the tests we're talking about 24 hours turnaround time for one

267four hours for the other so if it's a four let's let's talk about the four hour one just for a second because it's the shorter time if we're talking about a four hour turnaround time um what benefit are you seeing would be possible for doing this before kids are in the building right i mean a day before is one thing is that what you're talking about before they come in or well before that okay thanks for clarifying or seeking clarification my point is for us to really get a pulse on the students who are looking to opt in and their families would look top their students in what do the results indicate and are they indicating oh boy we've got only one percent are showing up as having the virus or is it six percent

268or is it some other number i think that's really important data to understand because right now we've got these macro numbers county-wide and community-wide that really don't speak to our distinct population of students order to and i think this would also apply to the staff right to the staff so i do need i think i'm going back to greg's question if we go with safeguard there's still a 30-day pilot if we go with shield it's still probably going to be in february sometime and but if our metrics say we can come back in sooner than that then we can come back in sooner than that prior to having this area yeah that's right got it right so so that's good to get my head around so the idea being hey this so yeah to do

269the testing so i just don't know that can we even do the testing in late january or is it not even a can you say pilot a 30-day pilot i'm not clear well they they're doing the test but they're trying to get one of the things they both ask for is at least 50 percent of the people who will be on site taking the test yeah and so trying to make sure we have a consistent 50 or is it 50 of the total staff and the reason i said on students reading i said on site is because we have students who will opt for remote that won't need to take it right so definitely i'm not fully clear on matt's question but um i think that my uh what i'm what i've what i'm gathering

270is is this question about if we support doing saliva testing so that they could get back in the buildings faster and i think that um for me i just need to know that it's safe so if if the metrics say so and we have the ability to go back in the building safely with with all of that what that requires then yeah um to me having the saliva testing is that i really appreciated um dr pruitt adams the the swiss cheese um image that you showed like all the different pieces of how that makes it you know and the importance of the testing um i at this point though i i don't we there's some costs missing on this that i would just want to understand to just make it even more informed decision i

271support it i just want more information on the cost and the grossness factor for me is real about the saliva but you know they're not i don't i don't know about this fitting piece but um but i think that um and the i'm just concerned like to what the point that dr um moore made about the transportation costs and and i'm not saying that if the transportation costs are higher i would be like no don't do it it's not that it's just it's just having all the information all of the information absolutely and i do want to say with the swiss cheese and i want to be clear at the board that when if even if we have a screener you still have to wear the mask you still have to practice social distancing and

272you still have to wash your hands they all have to work in concert with each other also can i just reiterate that even with all of those things and the test and everything the classrooms are still going to be socially distanced and yes i meant to say that going to look like it is not going to look like what school what what i feel that our community seems to think that school is going to look like because it's just not the same teaching socially distanced so it's just for people to not have i just really would hate for folks to have a false idea about what it's going to look like in classrooms and you you're absolutely correct and we've tried to to communicate that even with the opt-in opt-out uh initial we we've said

273it will look different it is not pre-pandemic classroom instruction thank you dr poot adams you guys you all have done a really great job of reiterating that over and over again what i'm already hearing come down the pipeline is after they get back in the classrooms are the concerns from families that but they're not getting this they're not getting that and it's like but we that's so i know that we are i know that you all have said it repeatedly and i know that we have reiterated it and it's been brought up but i just can't stress it enough because i i just don't think people outside of education fully understand what happens in a classroom and really understand what difference it's going to be going back in sarah can i ask a follow-up okay

274um so i'm just trying to understand so as i see it we will not be testing um right now the testing wouldn't really commence until probably february is what i think i heard is that right yes so what that means is we can and that's just because of the logistics of getting everything up and running yes okay so i think i might have answered my own question but let me just continue my quick thought process which is you know what what i i believe we've seen is that for other districts the the positivity rate when they've done testing it has shown a better a lower rate which is what you mentioned earlier uh than some of the macro numbers that we're seeing in our communities in our yes that is correct that's what's that's the

275the the data that's in my head so my concern is if we're going to have our metrics solely based on those macro numbers yet there's a possibility that you know within our schools we would have a much uh lower rate than we would be losing the opportunity to have our kids in school but the react the conundrum is you can't test them to get the data because the the macro metrics are are high so it's like we're kind of pinned until we can get testing data right that tom you're capturing what i was saying just for the record that you're saying it more clearly than i was thank you well if that's more clearly so so i guess the question is how could we get to me the if we're going to pursue testing this

276which i am in support of the sooner we can do it and and and rely on it it's the best measure of our actual population and i'll stop that yes okay if there are no other questions i think that concludes uh i i'm sorry i have to jump in again in the past we've said we need to give you consensus and i don't hear it and so i i i'm a little unclear as to why i'm not hearing from others on this either way but tom and i do not a majority make and so my tone is a little bit angsty because i don't think you have the answer you need dr pruitt adams well what i heard was there's still some more information needed i didn't hear anyone say don't pursue looking into the

277screener i've heard get the information bring it to us we'll make a decision and get it going but i didn't hear anyone say it's dead in the water okay as long as you feel good as long as you're good i'm good thank you thank you um that concludes all of the discussion items i'm going to turn it back over to president spivey for the action items okay we have still the levy left to approve um so adapt to the 2020 tax levy gail i did not see emotion in here when i was looking at it um is it just to be moved to approve it is that all it is yes it says for the board to adopt a 2020 levy as presented okay so i move that the board adopt the 2020 levy as

278presented um second uh any conversation on this would you call the role please yo you're muted cindy looks like she's trying to talk i'm saying she was muted oh sorry sorry sorry um mr eisley yes yes yes martiri yes miss harris yes yes dr moore yes you miss dixon spidey yes okay um and then the next one is the approval of the substitute rate increase um is do is roxanna still here to speak to them she is but you usually do the motion before she she's still here yeah okay i just i hadn't seen her all right um so i moved to approve the increased um daily rate for substitute teachers to reflect a new price of 150 per day is there a second second so just a little bit of the background to this

279request our current rate is 120 a day um and as you know substitute shortage is a widespread problem uh nationwide uh but it became even more pronounced was pandemic we did a survey of all our substitutes and uh we've had a number of substitutes who are not willing to come back uh we also had a position posted so we were able to hire a few more but the poll is extremely shallow um we also know that we are competing for the limited number of available substitutes with other school districts and the survey of other school districts has shown that many other school districts have raised their rates uh so therefore we're asking to increase the substitute daily rate to 150 dollars i'm happy to answer any questions what's the just a quick one and i'm

280sorry tom yup go ahead bro uh roxanne you said you you've talked to other districts or surveyed other districts and they've raised their rates is the going rate around 150 a day is that where is that how you hit up it's actually between 140 and 190 so we'll try to land somewhere in the middle my question just was what so what's the annual impact of this change it's hard to predict it depends on how many absences we have that we need to cover but i mean we have historical data though i mean we have something that we base it on don't we cindy what's our ad or our average spin on subs we can't hear you you're muted uh annually it's between 650 and about 000. but we've had some savings from from this semester

281correct broadcast this is um it's gina tom i'm sorry were you done i'm just waiting if there's any answer or not i'm just trying to get a uh sin do you want to repeat what we normally sure sure we spend anywhere between um hundred and fifty thousand and seven hundred and twenty five thousand annually unsolved so if this is about a twenty some percent increase in the rate of pay for sub on a per day basis will be talking about something like that overall for the six hundred plus thousand dollars twenty some percent increase in that yes but it uh also too don't forget we didn't have we didn't use the sub pool that much in the first semester so we're coming back into the second right but he's still wanting to know what the

282potential cost would be relative to what we normally pay yeah and that's why greg asked you about the 20 yeah yeah i got it so it it would be it would be about that except remember we don't know how many steps we're going to actually have to hire that's that's the only thing too so yeah i could say yes it could be 20 but we may be low we may be high because again it depends on how many if i'm ongoingly the anticipation is in future years when we don't have the pandemic that this would be a built-in new number right so in a typical year 25 of 650 is around 160 grand so roughly 160 grand increase to 180s i'm thinking from hearing the raw numbers so it's a 25 increase but and and

283for that this half of a year it would be less than half of that probably or maybe more but that's just me okay does it does it make any i i mean does it make any sense to make this number um sort of like a coveted surcharge and then revisit the number at a later that you know the ongoing number a later time we absolutely can do it we could do it as a temporary rate for carbon and then revisit it do another survey to see what other districts are doing we want to remain competitive so we can uh cover our absences but at the same time we absolutely don't want to raise our costs unreasonably so i agree it's a temporary solution could be a good one and that's yeah we plan to use

284the subaccount but it it's also being monitored as a the co part of the covet expenses i think that there's a there's a definite financial cost but the larger cost of not having anyone to fill those spaces for teachers and having to double up students in spaces that we already don't have because they're you know it's needing to be socially distanced and being competitive is really huge in the sub market right now because they're not um they know they're in high demand and they are going where they're going to get paid yes they are definitely going to where they're going to get paid because they know the shortage is real so getting um getting a pool of subs that you actually can keep and maintain is like it's like gold right now so um so

285this i i appreciate the idea of it being a temporary measure because of covid but what i what i've what i am sure of is that the teacher shortage is not going in a direction in an opposite direction yet and so the need for them is not going away anytime soon even postcovid but i i can appreciate for now as having a conversation about temporariness but yeah i support you all raising it i think that it's going to be um even with the race it's going to be a challenge still to maintain the amount of staff that you're going to need and getting people to come in to actually come in and be subs during covid while we when we go back in buildings there's there's a lot of barriers for this so i'd say

286i say i yes i'm a yes for that if i'm a broach just hearing all this insight i wonder if we may want to consider raising it higher than 150 i heard the range being 140 to 190. i don't want to be pennywise and pound foolish and jeopardize the return of students to classes so you know to me 180. i mean again with everything else that were that's on the line and knowing the competition just having a glimmer of it here i don't know why we wouldn't be on the upper end of that range to compete and then maybe after covid we can readdress it and say hey you know what move it down to something else but you know that's just something i wanted to broach i'd defer to the recommendation of the administration

287who's pulled the audience and come back to it so i'm in support of the recommendation as is yeah i'm i'm with tom but i do i do think this should be a temporary thing that we revisit once coveted done and reassess the market because we may want to adjust the number up or down after that i mean so when covid's done we'll see where the teacher shortage is as gina says it's a very real thing and it's not just in our state it's in other states so um i think doing the adjustment that the administration recommends right now makes sense but we should do it on a temporary basis and revisit it in the fall do um gail do we need to amend the motion then to indicate that we're going to revisit it in

288the fall no no okay we just need to roll a call whenever you're ready okay mr martieri yep mr baron yes mr eisley facemaster yes miss harris yes yes dr moore yes and miss dixon spivey yes thank you that concludes the items for action you're muted you're sorry i'm struggling i'm so tired okay we do have um future agenda items i don't know if anybody wants to mention any we also still have to go back into closed session for a little bit and then come back out to vote on the personnel item so should we just uh what is it recess open session go into closed and get that done okay there are no agenda items so yeah yeah but we just we have to come back for the personnel item okay so another zoom

289zoom yeah so greg greg roxanna and cindy you're in closed session everybody else good night good night everyone everybody okay i'll be a few minutes i'll be just a couple minutes to get closed i'm going to step away for a moment as well wow oh you all look familiar i'm a whole day older at least me [Music] so second and do we have everybody i think jackie's coming let's see i'm here oh good okay all right so we're back in open session um and we are here for item 9.01 personnel recommendations including new hires transfer and retirement i move to approve the personnel recommendations as presented second uh gail could you do a roll call please baron yes your eisley yes miss harris yes mr kovsky yes dr moore yes mr martiri yes and mr

290spivey yes is there a motion to adjourn second honey again all right pick all of us good night y'all