CUSD428 Board Meeting 11/16/2021

001let's go ahead and do a roll call we have the hermits here anthony david president sarah moses here ariel president here president okay um first up we have uh public comment members of the public who wish to speak to the board to complete a request prior to start the meeting this section of the meeting will be reserved for comments from the public all comments should be limited to three minutes criticism of individuals is not in order all right next up is uh committee reports and correspondence does anyone have any committee reports or correspondence i'm sorry um i had a chance to go to jefferson to observe the rise intervention last week so that was really great that's pretty it's wonderful i had an opportunity to attend the veterans assembly at hawaii middle school awesome event

002as well so good job to everyone there and i think since the last time we met i went to the mensah program and talked to wendy bono um and just kind of got a little bit more detailed to be able to see it running like in action with a lot of our students back in our community instead of having to be transported half an hour to an hour and a half away it's really exciting i also had a conversation with uh one of the teachers at huntley when i was visiting there about and just kind of dialogue we have small dialogue about some potential partnerships that we can create with some of the centers at niu potentially that we want to bring up in in the near future so i discussed it with ari because

003she's actually the assistant director of one of those centers creating just partnerships and starting to bridge those connections between the district and the university i did attend the curriculum council meeting monthly meeting that went great there were some nice proposals that they did and then also safety committee this week so always great discussions going on there and they're also looking for more interest from the community for people to join so anyone in the community northwestern someone from northwestern so they're looking for more people to join really good information i too participated in that meeting so i uh compared with what amanda said and also last time we met i mentioned that my fraternity was participating in a community service event that we did on thursday we donated hats gloves and scarves to the students at

004clinton rosette middle school excellent okay lots of stuff going on um i did want to bring up doing um a board self-evaluation which would uh occur the week of my calendar um it would be that last week in november first week of december and laura martinez would be available to come out for board self evaluation uh either monday the 29th tuesday the 30th or thursday the 2nd of december uh if if everyone could right now let me know your availability um if we could if we could get at least a quorum and ideally the whole board uh to do that key process so monday the 29th tuesday the 30th and or thursday to second and what time is this well we can determine a time right i mean evening i would probably be ideal by

005six wait there's oh thursday the second step right thursday the second yeah after 29 i have a seo committee meeting um with the district i have the same one from three to four but i should be available after that so we're gonna do three as well after 4 30 and once monday is a thursday right i'm not available on thursday okay so thursday is also hard for me so monday and tuesday's tuesday work for daisy i cannot do tuesday monday for ari can you do the secondary yes okay i'm available in any of those okay um david monday and tuesday are not good thursday is a better day for me okay and when you say not good isn't all right correct okay okay sam did you tell me um monday and tuesday would work better

006for me but i can make thursday work and i can make thursday work only to pass up at 7 30 because i have a prior meeting 7 30 on thursday would work for me okay i know that's late but okay how long is this event um i think that it would probably it would probably take i would guess like two hours max because we've already really done protocols this was like updated protocols and then just to talk about um you know just that one dot i'm currently slated to be in town that week those are always flexible but as of right now i can probably make any of them apply um i would say thursdays usually are safer only because i'm usually coming home thursday night even if i'm gone okay something later they would

007probably be better okay i mean as long as everybody's not opposed to later and it's gotta work for laura but i mean she said she's i'm sure she'll she's always good about it so i mean it's from 5 30 to 7 30 so i'll probably give her a couple minutes does that work for you thursday's the only day that works for me oh okay okay so it looks like thursday and chance this isn't executive session closed session so you don't have to be there so you have that night off okay um but we will definitely fill you in so okay so we will go ahead and move forward with our board self-evaluation on thursday december 2nd most likely we'll have to have it maybe like starting at 7 45 so i will touch base with

008lauren martinez let's get that in the books yes yeah can i add um ari and i worked together to kind of like come up with a couple extra or another iteration of the mission and value our mission and vision that you and dacey had worked on previously i didn't like prepare it tonight but maybe this would be a good time to bring that if that fits in with our protocols um i don't know let me double check with her because this this will be a closed session gotcha and that makes sense uh that would be open so we could we could talk about though if we do go into open after that because i know there's a couple things that we may need to vote on okay that we could share it there and i'm

009i'm thinking i mean it might be as simple as just sending out kind of what we've got to get some like sure feedback to you so that you can perfect yeah okay so just so everybody is aware that it knows um based on the feedback that we received or actually based on the goals um that the previous board actually approved um and based on the recommendations from some of the town hall meetings uh that the community attended and provided us feedback with um sir and i started working on the mission vision and venues and beliefs for the district based on the feedback and obviously making sure that it aligned with everything that was provided and the goals that the previous board came up with um so we kind of worked on some stuff to obviously

010bring back to the board at the last board meeting ari and sam and samantha um volunteered to provide feedback and support on that so they worked on the vision of the mission to help us wrap that up so that we can officially bring it to the board with the feedback of the community in the town hall meetings so thank you to the community members that attended and provided support with that as well absolutely all right anybody else anything all right okay moving on to our next item is the music boosters presentation hi everyone thanks for giving us a few minutes of your time for those of you i have not yet met i'm jill mccormick this is my 20th year in district 428 i teach music at founders but i'm also the music coordinator for

011the district i also have children in the secondary music program so several years ago i started becoming involved not only as a teacher but as a parent for my children in music boosters so we had some really exciting things happen recently music boosters and i'd like to introduce our president this is mrs tammy farrell who will also be helping with this presentation we've expanded our bylaws and we are really excited about it and this is one of those positive presentations it's always good to be advocating for music that's a huge part of my job as coordinator a huge part of tammy's job as president of music boosters and it's always good to hear positive information so um on to our next slide mrs farrell will continue here so the dekalb music boosters mission as the

012primary advocate of the music performance programs of dekalb school district 428 is to serve and assist the music performance programs and their directors so we support our music students and their teachers across the district we have a long history of that and so it is our sole purpose uh to uh foster their enjoyment of listening to uh and making music a lifelong activity and if you know a lot of musicians or music teachers or music lovers you know that we are a passionate bunch of people that are really proud of what we do and i really feel like the pandemic made people realize even maybe casual music listeners who go to a concert now and then just how vital music is in our lives and our communities when we couldn't attend a lot of those

013live performances and we couldn't see our children performing live i think a lot of people that hit really hard during that time so um so our role in music boosters is to um i think i skipped one there we go um it was formed in 1999 which was shortly before i started here um and it was formed by a passionate group of music parents and the original vision was to support 6th through 12th grade ensembles so those of you that are familiar with our award-winning music program know that we have a band orchestra choir and then we also have jazz band as our main ensembles we also have lots of other outreaches in orchestra and in choir to support that like acapella that a lot of you know about um string band things like that

014so originally um it was supposed to sort of mimic what our sports boosters our bar boosters do is supposed to support the ensembles as sports were supported by parent volunteers um i think it's safe to say that you would already know this information that we are very very proud of our music program here and so the music boosters over that 20-year-ish period has given many many thousands of dollars in financial help to our directors and our students for a variety of reasons but really a huge part of what we do as well is the volunteering so we have a huge number of events that are big events that are either hosted here because we have the beautiful facilities at dekalb high school or that involve a lot of students and so what we need is

015a lot of manpower for that and we also are able to help give teachers more opportunities to students by helping to fund certain things so that was the original goal it has been sixth through twelfth grade supported as long as i have been here and so we thought maybe it was time for a positive change and so we decided to include um in our bylaws kindergarten through fifth grade yes which we feel like sorry about that huge cause i didn't mean this but i was like is that the right side we have uh just so you know dekalb school district has an incredible elementary music program because we see children twice a week so a lot of neighboring districts see kids once a week we see them twice a week so in many ways we're

016able to provide nearly twice the curriculum and twice the foundation which is why our music continues to be so strong in six through twelve because we give them such a great foundation here it's such a gift to be able to have them twice a week so um we thought tammy actually brought it to my attention and said what do you think about this and of course yes was my answer um but it has been a certain way for a long time so we needed to to do some legwork on that well in a little background i mean when i came in to the district when my son was a freshman he's a senior now you know i do not have a long history in this district my son was in private school but he's a

017lifelong musician he started in early music education when he was a toddler and so you know we're we're a music family and so when i joined music boosters right away when we became a dhs family i was surprised to learn that there was no support at the early level and um and so i made it my mission to change that so i became the vice president and then i became the president and then moved to get everybody on the same page with me and i i really got no pushback at all because i think everybody believes in equity here and uh and we all want to foster that that same support and and when you start earlier it's better so that's what i wanted for us and that's what's happening so in october we agreed

018we voted and it's now part of our bylaws so i'm very excited by that that we have that kind of support in our community in our district and absolutely um didn't have to convince me to go along with that but i also feel like it was kind of one of those things while it's always been this way and so with us sort of fleshing out why we thought it needed to be k-12 i think people really support it quickly and and just in our vision at least currently we don't really see a lot of that support being financial at this point a lot of it is advocacy and getting them sort of to know who we are and getting kids you know excited about music and continuing music and pursuing it later so a lot

019of it at least currently is going to be advocacy and support and you know hopefully parent volunteers will come with that and when parents feel supported they stay in it and when uh when a parent feels that they cannot afford something they start backing out and we don't want that to happen so if we can provide an instrument for a student if we can provide support to their teachers so that we can keep because of you know grant funding uh keep a child in camp or you know maybe bolster some support that way financially or provide a meal whatever that support is we try to fill the gap there's lots of ways that we can fill that and so you know sometimes it's not direct support to the parent to the student it's through the

020teacher because it's the teacher who sees what the deficits are and they reach out to us and they say we need this and they give us a request we say absolutely yes we want to we love saying yes to requests yes it's nice to say yes um and so we've kind of gone over this but some of the main things that boosters do that you may be aware of are scholarships for kids going to college to pursue music we have summer scholarships for kids to go to summer camps and then uh what tammy was saying about a lot of experiences and things that we're able to help provide through that and the volunteering so as tammy mentioned on october 7th was our official bylaw um new revision to support kindergarten through 12th grade and so

021we are just so proud to come to you and and say that we're out there we're here to support kids it's really a special place for me to be as a parent and a teacher and a booster it's a it's a really kind of the perfect trifecta for me to be able to see everything that's happening and just be excited to tell everyone about it um so this is uh some photos that and it's a little hard to see because there are several photos there but there are some photos here of things that the boosters have helped donate to on the very left is cut off a little bit but um they helped to purchase a beautiful harp for the dekalb high school the second harp that we have for orchestra um if you don't

022know that's not very normal to have two harps in an orchestra program it's an amazing purchase and actually historical instrument over 100 years old and it came back to the community found its way home and it's so exciting that it can be on the stage at dekalb high school also pictured here in the upper left is our jazz ensemble led by steve lundin incredible performances so if you ever get a chance to see them on the right that massive group is uh the choir that uh dhs has led by mr erickson travis erickson um and you'll if you squint you can see some of our symphony orchestra members uh also joining them then on the bottom you see travis erickson holding up a choir robe those were replaced a couple of years ago and we

023helped to subsidize that purchase it's very expensive to buy new uniforms in the middle there i see our marching band at the recent uh pumpkin festival parade in sycamore and there are lots of groups that are kind of branches of us one is the band parent organization that helps to volunteer and get together to help the the marching band and they are also part of us and we help them heavily also and then on the right you see our dekalb high school symphony orchestra on stage with sheila felder so that's just part of our music program and that is just what is happening at the high school and part of what's happening at the middle school so we're very excited to continue to expand and help all of our elementary schools as well because they're

024doing amazing things too i think one of the biggest opportunities that we have coming up is this actually happened uh we were planning this for 2020 and of course you know uh so we were at the end of the school year we were going to do a fifth grade mentorship program with the middle school and the high school a cappella group so we were really excited about it we were going to rehearse they were going to put on a performance and then of course the world shut down so we weren't able to do that so this year we have that on the books already i believe it's maybe february that we're planning to do that this year so that is one of maybe the first opportunities that we would have for fifth grade uh to

025be present and to be supporting that event so we just again thank you so much for your time does anyone have any questions that we can answer i don't know if there's anything that you would need to know but really like i said it was more of a positive this is a great direction for our music boosters to go and we wanted to let you know about it cheese and sausage sale which ends at 11 59 tonight visit our facebook page if you'd like to place an order those pickups will be on the in december and we'll deliver to your house if you like um but that those are major fundraisers that we have and they go directly to our teachers for our support of our programs so so fruit meat and cheese yes yes

026fundraiser tonight music poster today yes yes the name of the page you can go to facebook and just put in uh decal music posters thank you thank you so much thank you so much and personally thank you so much for all the support has always shown our music department we cannot tell you how much that means thank you for everything you're doing all right next up is our consent agenda items a through k and it is recommended that the board of education approve consent consent agenda items a through pay board meeting minutes personnel action items purchase order requisitions payroll for september approval of purchase order requisition approval of accounts payable for october and approval of financial reports is there a motion someone second roll call anthony david yes zero moses yes ariel ellen yes jimmy

027olsen yeah ac maris yes david seymour yes okay next up is new business okay so up first is the dhs dance team usda nationals trip yes hi good evening everybody james horn high school principal our good news our dance team is qualified for united dance association national competition uh that is held february fourth fifth and sixth friday saturday and sunday better news is held in orlando disney world so we have 18 students that are going to be participating two coaches for locusts and 20 people cost a thousand dollars they are looking to fundraise with the goal of being able to afford to cover at least half of the cost for each of the members of the dance team families are aware of the cost what i'm asking for from the board is just permission to

028take the other state trip oh okay um so it is working at the border anybody have questions congratulations okay so that's why it's actually information good luck it is wonderful it is recommended the board of education approved the dance team's trip to the uda national champ nationals competition in february of 2020. is there a motion casey ramirez yes david seymour yep andrew harness yes yes thank you thank you next up is out of state travel national instructional leader academy philip i am good evening board i'm here to ask for permission to attend the national institute national instructional leadership academy i was recently accepted into this highly competitive academy for january may and october of next year the academy gathers district leaders from all across the country to work in professional learning communities the topics for

029the three times that i will be attending are leading student-centered leadership equity focus and culture and leading quality instructional systems okay and this is action or information and action yes so this is just for the permission to attend uh permission to attend and um the cost of attendance which is which is 7645 is that cost the total for all the sessions because i saw some were remote some were going out of state so that's multiple out of states everything okay and then is it do we have this as information action because there there's a time sensitivity or um it's information action uh because there was some time sensitivity around when i have to let them know that i'll be attending okay what's what was your deadline um it was seven days um after i was

030admitted i was submitted one seven days ago so they're making exception and waiting for me awesome congratulations on being admitted and you feel the slow direct leap has or positively impact the work you're doing for the district absolutely and it also ties into strategic priority one and four priority one is student achievement and strategic priority and number four recruitment development and retention correct okay okay are there any other questions okay is there a motion second roll call ariel yes jeremy olson yes daisy rears yes david seymour yes amanda harris yes anthony david yes ceremonies yes okay thank you again next up uh this is also information action and it's peter goff out of state travel good evening how's everyone today what i'm asking for to attend is the national athletic directors association's uh national conference

031in denver colorado i am a executive board meeting with an executive board member with the iad the illinois athletic directors association i recently ran our state conference going out there i have on the sheet things that i'll be attending uh culture building just a lot of numerous things to help one is to come up with a better student-oriented uh handbook ideas to go to talk about how covert 19 has affected students so those are the types of things i'm going out there to research i've also been put up for president-elect for my state association so if i'm nominated then two years i'll be the president of our state association so they've asked me to get more involved in the national uh convention so we're you know i'm asking to go out there okay and then

032the cost is eighty 806.80 yep okay and that's that includes everything yep includes travel i got a round trip for 126 and hotel and so yeah if you feel it'll directly impact uh positively in the district the work that you're doing i believe so because you know when we give our state of uh with athletics what we're working on is a lot of culture building with the book that our coaches are going to read so it kind of just goes hand in hand and then there's time sensitivity around this it looks like because it's december 11th yes okay so is there uh any questions any other questions okay is there a motion still moved second roll call jerry nelson yeah stacey murray yes david seymour yes david yes sarah moses yes ari allen yes thank

033you for attending thank you thank you next up is um miss tammy carson and this is the district fleet replacement cycle thank you as you all expect we have a number of vehicles trucks and equipment that we use to be able to maintain a district our size and uh back in 09 10 11 12. we replaced the majority of our vehicles and trucks and equipment and haven't done a lot since then except one here and there and we're at a point now that we would like to get into a fleet replacement cycle over a three-year time period to replace several of our vehicles at a time there is a state purchasing program we can utilize so that we don't have to do competitive bids to get this on the streets we can do it through

034the state purchasing but there is an extremely long lead time as many things are right now for getting equipment and materials and such um so what we are recommending at this point as you can see is we're looking to replace three of our trucks with i'm sorry four of our vehicles three of them are would be with trucks one with a van as i always called the super size vans and then with the trucks we would also be needing plow kits attached to those since we do our own plowing all in house in the district so and in addition to that we also have two food trucks in the district that we utilize on a daily basis to deliver our food or they're considered box trucks we actually technically have three but one of them

035is not in service at this point so we're looking to get rid of that one and then move our oldest box truck and and replace it so that we can maintain the schedule that we need to deliver food around to our buildings we also use it for a lot of moving as needed throughout the district when it's not being used for food service so at this time what i'm asking is to bring this back next board meeting for approval to start the fleet replacement and that will also be based on as budget constraints and what we have available if we have the funding available still at the end of this year we will look to visit fitted into this fiscal year otherwise we will be working on that for the next fiscal year and then

036rotating it over the following through two years so i'm not sure i'm clear what that 38 000 represents of the super duties because i know you're not buying them for that i'm sorry which ones the three trucks i'm just looking at the numbers it's eight thousand four thirty times three four hundred fifteen thousand for the three uh twenty twenty two ford super duty so is this like a like a rotation cycle somehow or how does it how does this work though the thirty eight thousand is what we would be buying paying through state bid for a truck per truck years really yes we've already priced it out with the everything we need in the truck um that is included that's the advantage of using the state bidding and being patient and waiting for them to

037build it to our specs oh that's very cool oh so the office so we are buying brand new we're not oh yes we're not going to use like 2021. no we would be buying new uh we would also then be looking for the vehicles that we're not looking to maintain in our fleet we would auction those out at a later date and that could be put back into the but i can't say what those will go for at this point to really factor that into our decision and so the reason is it's built up to our specs excuse me that's how the state bid works if they're always built to spec so we make sure we get them with the running boards and you know the equipment that we need to be able to utilize

038them the only thing it doesn't have is the plow kits those are the things that we would have to buy locally and have installed locally okay uh questions consensus to bring those back for a vote next time yes yes yes yes thank you thank you thank you and then next up um request of the hms kitchen renovation with tammy carson this is a this is information in action it is again because the time sensitivity of as we were designing the bid specs for the hvac projects that you approved tonight large portions are at huntley middle school and those also impact the kitchen and the serving area at huntley the kitchen and serving area are an area that have not had hardly any renovations as long as any of us can all remember we've just kind

039of been getting by but it is our second production kitchen in the district and mike chamnis is here from food service if there's anything specific to food service he can answer that answer for you but they do serve food to three other satellite kitchens in the district on a daily basis what we've determined based on some of the renovations we're doing with hvac is it would be best to alter those plans that we originally have put out to bid so that we can have a better efficiency and also make sure that we're bringing everything up to code in that kitchen and so it was at a later time after the bid that we talked about this with the architects engineer and mike's crew and opted that we put one to put a plan together to

040go out to bed to renovate the kitchen slightly um but slightly has some higher price tags to it because anytime you start touching plumbing or the hvc or the air the air systems air handlers we still have to go out to bid for this so what we have done tonight you accepted all three hvac bids which does incorporate some improvements in the huntley kitchen but the contractor that you awarded the bid to has already stated that we would have a change order for approximately a hundred and forty thousand dollars which would have reduced one of the bids the third bid that you approved tonight that money is then a portion of this estimate of five hundred and eighty thousand i will also state that was a very high quick estimate by our architects and engineers

041because we wanted to turn this around so quickly again materials equipment long timelines we need to get this on the streets as quickly as possible to see what the actual price comes in at and then i would come back to you in february with bid results to determine if it's something we do want to move forward with or not so with that it'll again bring us up to code on everything as renovations require us to do as well as improve the efficiencies and the safety in that area and it says so if we do this we would use esser funds does that take us our funds away from a different project that we were already planning or i know they're kind of fluid right now because we don't have them all necessarily set on something

042but no it does not yeah because we have some excess funds that we're trying to fit into their tantrum the more we know the exact hour amounts of these things the easier it is to see how much we have left so yeah and i will also mention if we do not move forward with this bid um and continue with the hvac bids as they were designed um currently we really are not going to have a lot of opportunity to make the changes that we would want to do in this project because we're bringing in a certain size air handler and duct work into an area that we would want to alter with this bid so that down the road it would just be we'd be tearing out brand new equipment to turn around and try

043to do this at a later date you mentioned um as a renovation is this just an hvac project or what are some of the other things there's some other plumbing that's going to be factored in as the equipment and is being removed around which includes putting in a floor drain some hood um yeah new prep sink some hoods moving the kettle number of things which are going to create a more open area and for example like we said with the kettle right now we we don't have a floor drain to easily drain it into so we have to manually drain the kettle which to me sounds not exactly our safest option our best option for our staff so we're looking at a number of these things to just improve the overall efficiency beyond the fact

044of that the kitchen will end up with air conditioning and better air quality and those things that were already going to be incorporated into this plan okay thank you so it is uh recommended that the board of education uh approve administration to go out to bid for renovations in the middle school kitchen is there a motion second yes jeremy wilson yes thank you thank you okay next up is item f emotional table yes i'd like the motion that we remove okay so there is a motion to table item f is there a motion second volca david seymour yes amanda harness yes anthony david yes sarah moses yes ariel yes jeremy olsen yes yes item f is table next up is item g additional 4.0 fte registered nurse position for the remainder of the 21 2022

045school year kyle grace hey good evening hello so i'm here to request some additional help for our health offices this school year in the form of four additional registered nurses or what we've referred to in the past as procedural nurses so these would be nurses that are equipped to support students that have various medical procedures could be diabetic care could be various g-tube feedings things like that the reason for the request is um kind of a few different variables at play one is obviously the impact of covid on our health offices and the amount of time and resources that it takes our staff to kind of process through situations where there is a positive case and then all the contact tracing that comes with that and that's in addition to their normal job responsibilities what

046we found is that that process can be very time consuming and pull a lot of resources from the health office which leaves other things unattended to and so in addition to that we've seen an increase in our student enrollment as well as the staffing shortages that have impacted i think a lot of industries have also impacted our health offices so whether it's absences due to you know personal leave or medical leave or for child care reasons what we find ourselves doing almost on a daily basis is trying to figure out how we pull people from other buildings to make sure that there's at least one health professional in each of our school buildings up until probably about two weeks ago we had done that pretty successfully although i personally am concerned with the the toll

047that takes on our staff because it is kind of a they come into work and then they might be asked to go to a different building and over time i think that kind of weighs on them and impacts their ability to do their job in their home building most recently we found some we've had a few situations where we didn't have anybody to cover a building in person and so in those situations the concern about having somebody on site um is magnified so one of the reasons or one of the ways that i want to go about trying to address this is by adding four diff additional registered nurses that can help with kind of the day-to-day things that covet brings the other rules that our nurses play but then also gives us some flexibility

048in terms of being able to cover our health offices when people are out for various reasons the estimated cost for these positions would be for the remainder of the school year total cost of the district would be around 43 000 passed for various reasons that price might be different road and get a contract from somebody in which case i would bring that back to the board for approval and this would be funded through our essr dollars it would be for the remainder of this school year as we get closer to the end of the school year we can really evaluate our needs and what things are looking like heading into the summer and then next school year questions so how many fds do we currently have for those positions right now so we have a

049good question so we have a combination of if we're just talking health office staff it ranges from health assistance then we also have our registered nurses then we have registered nurses with designation and then we would have our certified school nurses so it's kind of a one big pot i don't have the exact ft fte off the top of my head but i do know that additional fte that the board is approved this year would be for additional health assistance as well as a covenant nurse we've had a little success finding health assistance the cover nurse we haven't this would be the first time coming forward asking for a registered nurse um role so let's work on how many we have now i'm sorry i'm just trying to get like a percentage here because i

050don't know if we're adding four ftes to four or five designation we have two certified school nurses i believe we have an additional three or four registered nurses and then we would have a number i believe of six or seven health assistants so right now we don't have a registered nurse a nurse with designation or a school certified nurse at each of our buildings correct the way this predates me in this position but the way we've kind of um from my understanding is kind of done this is we try to make sure that there's one person in each building so for our smaller buildings that might have any medical procedures what we typically do is have either a certified school nurse or an rn with designation cover the special ed or 504 components of those

051buildings but on any given day it might be a health assistant that's in the building or a health assistant and are in that alternate days so the coverage kind of varies and it varies by building and need within building but they all perform different roles and have like health assistance don't quite have the ability of the training to do some of the things an rn can do and how does that impact you when you don't have an rn in a building what what is the result if something happens are we calling for health medical assistance 91 to get an ambulance or it could be based on the severity of what's going on the way we've kind of addressed it is like in the event of an emergency you always call 9-1-1 the nice thing about

052an rn with their medical training as they would be able to do an evaluative evaluation of the student and determine severity of what it is and then make it their own professional judgment on what needs to happen next so that's the preferred way to go for sure um it looks like we have eight nurses right now and you're suggesting we both got up to 12 for the rest of the year right that seems like what i'm here yeah so my thought is that we would definitely add one position for the high school their volume even though they have a higher number of staff i don't think it's quite enough to meet the needs of all the students that are there and then what we would look at for the other three is looking at some

053of our larger buildings elementary wise we'd be looking at founders and probably cortland getting some extra support and then we would also look at our two middle schools and how we would maybe allocate those ftes to those middle schools but also having the ability to float so if we needed somebody in another building we can make that call as well and again this will be with esther funds correct correct i appreciate you also mentioning you know the the stress or the added you know work that comes with of obviously asking so much of the staff so thank you to the staff that does that already but if we could definitely support it that would be great thank you for pointing that out thank you they're they're holding it together for us but i know you

054know not only this year but you know going back into when we were back last year it's been it's been hard on our health office staff and they're doing a great job in spite of it and we appreciate it so i can't think of promoting that because it's important any other questions or comments so is there a consensus to bring additional 4.0 fte registered nurse positions for the remainder of the 21-20-22 school year uh supported by esser funding at for a vote next meeting yes yes thank you thank you next up is uh information and this is administrative salary adjustments principals assistant principals deans and supervisors managers mrs salas and mrs carpenter so as we've talked since july about the salary study our salary study looked at luna districts like ourselves at different salaries and

055helped us to determine average salaries for certain positions as we've taken that information we've broken it down by different categories in the district at who we're looking at any given time at this time we've moved towards the categories that were mentioned by the board president our supervisors managers our principals our assistant principals and our deans we looked at the information that was provided by our consultants and we've reviewed the current salaries and making recommendations of where to move people to align the salaries to the um the averages where the board has requested everyone to fall that information is coming to you as information and then at the next meeting upon your approval to bring it back we will you will vote on that to adjust the salaries accordingly questions um i don't see dollar amounts

056um we're actually going to share with the board and then the board will bring back the decision for consensus to move forward okay understood okay so um it is recommended for board of education agreed by consensus to bring the recommendations forward for approval at the december 14 2021 uh meeting i guess we don't know what the recommendations are yet but we we go back in to discuss that because we talk about specific conditions okay so consensus yes yes yes thank you thank you next up is my buzzing concerns this is cindy carpenter this is good to read a statement that the district as well as first student helped to put together and we do have a couple representatives here from first student to ask any question or you know be here to if you have

057any questions or any comments so dear dekalb district 428 families please accept our sincere apologies for the hardship that cancelling bus routes has cost for so many families over the last few weeks we appreciate your support and the partnership and finding ways to transport your child when you are able we have continuously strived to do our best to manage the shortage of bus drivers daily we manage more than 100 bus routes providing a service to dekalb school district serving three local communities dekalb malta and portland and several schools outside the boundaries of dekalb school district not being able to fulfill this role at 100 has been a heavy weight to carry for all of us there are never any easy answers to fix such this issue we are working diligently to minimize the impact and

058provide as many students as possible with safe and reliable transportation special education routes are taking priority and our running is scheduled depending on daily staffing levels other regularly scheduled bus routes may need to be canceled the decision is based purely on whether or not a driver is available to cover the route across the country there is a great need right now for school bus drivers most school districts are reporting severe staffing shortages many have had to alter services considerably first student increased its pay structure last year increased sign-on and recruiting bonuses offered and providing short-term attendance incentives to retain and recruit new drivers for district 428 first student currently has a four potential new bus drivers joining the team soon it does take time to move an applicant through the hiring process to become a

059qualified school bus driver there are strict background checks licensing requirements and training standards that must be met to safely operate a school bus with that being said our hope is to open more routes back up next week and in the following weeks we will continue to be a be creative the best we can without causing any additional hardships on the students families and the classroom teachers of district 428 we know this has been very difficult and a great hardship on so many and for that we do sincerely apologize most importantly we want to convey to you that having your children in school is as important to us as it is to you sincerely dekalb cusd 428 and first student so we really just wanted to put that out there it has been very difficult for

060families and and i know first student has been working very diligently and hard to provide the transportation to our families and things are looking better so we have more additional routes that were put in place this week and hopefully we'll see more coming soon as well so we've minimized um or we're at a low point in terms of how many routes that are currently not running so have to have any questions or any information you want from her student directly um so i have a question i know that we got a letter from um the social justice discussion committee i think it was a discussion group at um clinton rosette middle school with concerns about you know how this was impacting different student groups in terms of you know who was able to come to

061school regularly and who was not able to come to school regularly and they had mentioned a solution that that rockford school district the school districts are using in rockford where they are um you know adjusting the bus routes so that even if a route is canceled um you know that those kids like you know different students different routes are cancelled at different times so that there's always like a rotation so all children are at least getting to school you know a similar amount of time versus like one group of kids who you know their bus routes cancelled consistently and this group gets to go all the time this group's not going oh so do are there any solutions like that that we're looking at to potentially support students you know getting more regular school time

062that's my name is lindell aspen the area general manager uh for the first student and cindy had brought that up with me last friday and i've reached out to mike's life the director for rockford i live closer to that community and i believe what they're actually doing with the regularized transportation is for the same student population they're actually routing less buses so if they can accommodate you know in a normal time for 200 buses to accommodate that population they're actually setting the transportation for let's say 175 routes and then they're assigning more students per bus than the bus will carry and then they're assigning a certain percentage of the population to not ride each week so on a rotational basis over a course of a month each kid let's say may not ride the bus

063for one week so it's in that way it's a it's a pure distribution it affects everyone in the district um i think it was chaos out of the gate like there were a lot of questions in the community about whether that was the right solution but with the shortage that they had in the summer i think they were 50 so that one time on about 200 225 routes it was something they thought was necessary i have reached out to mike this week i have not heard back you know further detail but as we get more detail about how they did it we'll have to work with our our routes are routed out of first planning solutions in montana for the dekalb location so we'll have to plug into them to see what that might look

064like um i think at this point so through the month of october one of the stresses we've had we've been short right and i think that's that's been knowledge out of the gate this year um with absenteeism related to covenant quarantine and and those impacts it definitely got a lot worse in october i think as of this week jason are you guys is it about four routes that aren't running on a daily basis um we're down to two full routes that are not running and two half rounds we have four people testing tomorrow at the dmv so that normally it takes about 30 days to get someone from interview to driver seat on their own maybe 30 to 40 days it's almost double that right now because of the bottlenecks within all of those systems

065um so it's we do have four we have another maybe eight in training in various stages of training so we're we're optimistic that we're heading in the right direction um but we we still have a long way to go to get back to normal can you explain the bidding process you know when a bus driver has you know they have a bid for the route for the route sure our drivers are organized and it's seniority based so when we bid routes each year the senior person gets to pick usually they're picking an hour package that's greater um in some cases they're picking routes that are more desirable maybe you know a certain school has maybe they give up cookie that we try to you know there's all sorts of there's there are things out there

066like that actually so um and then there are routes that are are are left over often um in some markets and i don't know about at this location but in some markets we've seen certain types of sped ralph maybe for this you know behavior-related programs that are are left and not picked during the bid process they're not desirable by drivers that are bidding and um so it's there are routes that are left in our bid picks each year and those usually are filled as we hire more people to um to our roles and are there any um motivational ways to get folks to bid on those routes that are less desirable and in some cases things that have been tried there have been our or wage incentives put on some of those routes we actually

067have some built into our cda there are previews added to how we rate for certain types of routes so there are some things are already organically there in some cases if it's if it's related to behavior often um adding an assistant or a monitor to those routes for a period of time that often helps fill or calm the environment and get good people to want to be on those jobs we are struggling actually right now we're also short beyond drivers we're also short monitors or attendants so that's that's something that's impacted our student management for the district i'm more curious like um back to the incentive piece you know i look back at last year when buses weren't running oh we still paid i think 80 percent of our contract to you and now those

068same taxpayers that paid 80 of our contract for your business to survive their kids are going to school and so you know to me that's a little frustrating so yeah if there is if this is a financial thing and you have to pay people so eventually you're going to get to a place where you can pay people enough they're going to be on the bus why doesn't that be done i think right now that the challenge is understanding what that means and we work in all sorts of markets we we have markets where you know our new cba in the summer of 2020 was ratified in july by september we took all those rates up already so after six months of negotiation the first thing we did two months later is we took rates up

069further ultimately our the number one cost of what we do to a bid for a district is compensation and if we're making changes to affect the situation or improve the situation they have to make sense ultimately that's something that in a bid process that comes to play with our pricing back towards to a district we're struggling to understand right now what fills the seats and you know our basic package is you know two hours a.m two hours pm our starting rate is up to 20 now we're up to 18 now top rates are over 20. people could you know they build longer than four hours a day but in other markets where we've done some aggressive things um we're still struggling you know and it's it's not just in dekalb you know when they talk

070national and we're talking as a across northern illinois as we sit across 23 locations we're over 300 drivers short and that's after we've reduced a significant amount of routes this year just to be able to function daily so i think the true shortage across northern illinois is is closer to a thousand or over a thousand across 23 locations 24 locations um all markets were hit i i will say you you bring up a great point and this is this is a hard one you know i i we've got some numbers to show that with what we did with compensation last school year we had more applicant flow on a percentage basis at our decal location than we did at a lot of other locations in markets where we paid drivers all or most of the

071year we actually suffered less than what we've seen in in some other locations um i have access to you know out of seven locations that i represent there were two that did across northern illinois the overall group it was a very small number who had driver compensation in place but when you look at the numbers that i see for northern illinois and wisconsin where drivers were paid those locations actually had less loss than the ones that did not and how large of a company is first in nashville i think on the school bus side alone right now we're around including canada it's around 60 000 rounds and so so you're pretty sizable company and i i guess my concern here is you're in the business of fussing i'm in a different business but either way

072if i can't produce my company is going to struggle and we don't have a lot of options on our end in terms of of what to do here so i guess all i'm hearing right now and i understand this isn't your fault specifically but your organization doesn't seem to have a plan or strategy i'm hearing we still don't know we don't know and we don't know that's not consoling me because we're writing checks and our kids are not getting to school i understood so i when are we going to hear a plan and and when are we going to know what's going to happen before that's what i would like to know and i know i'm speaking for myself maybe not necessarily the rest of the board this is important i mean i i would

073agree with that too i think i mean it's critical that we get our kids to school we've got to figure this out and um where we are at this point is we are trying to understand what changes we can make to incentivize people for us i think that that's where we're at across locations we with the changes we made last year we tripled our new hire bonus this summer uh i think the speculation was that we were going to see more people fly back to the market once the unemployment enzyme is going away we saw a slight bump august into september it hasn't changed beyond that and i think that's what you know we thought we were on track um and at this point we have to regroup and understand what additional incentives we put

074in place you know do we go to twenty dollars an hour starting you know is that gonna do it i mean ultimately though we're locked in and that's where we have to be careful with with the commitment to it because if that doesn't do it and that's not the answer then why did we do it and how do we get out of it it's not you know we're and ultimately what i've shared with cindy is that we need to talk through some of the options that we have um further because at some point this impacts the district i'm hearing what you're saying but unfortunately i don't hear an alternative either right obviously you don't know if twenty dollars is going to work grand but what else is going to work right there isn't a plan

075b there's no other alternative so you know whatever you guys have to do is what you have to do to run your business and to provide the services that we've contracted for and right now and i know that's rough because i've watched a lot of friends businesses go under doing this this pandemic and it's not been trading it's not fun and i don't like having these conversations but at the end of the day we're responsible for getting our kids to school so if at the very least i would i would like you to come back at least to our next meeting with a plan or strategy on how you're going to fix this can i ask oh just on behalf of the company we are absolutely sorry for where things are it is is not

076our plan a for sure we we take pride in what we do in the communities i know jason and his team have worked hard to rebuild and you know when we entered we entered the pandemic much better than we are coming out of it right now and we are sorry for for the service to the to the school district and all the constituents can i ask um are we we've kind of maxed out like combining routes and things like that yeah our we have and i think that's where that's where things really hit in october because there was a there was a reduction to start the year to maximize routes that took things from a normal route number of about 95 down to i think 70 around 74 right so that compression was maximizing the

077schedules that existed what about even adding even if kids are getting to school late an hour late they're still getting to school for a full day so what if we add a third tier to busing is that a possibility maybe something to think about and i say that having been a bus driver with jason i worked at that first student and knowing that that was a very hard job when it wasn't a pandemic and when we didn't see as many of the social emotional you know trauma induced issues that we are seeing and behaviors that were seen it was a very hard job and um so i i want to just say i do appreciate all the bus drivers that are hanging in there and doing the job every day it's really really appreciated because

078it's so important to get our kids to school we know that even one day miss compounds that loss of learning that's already compounded by the pandemic and so just trying to make sure that we are getting them there even if it's late even if we have to add you know i just something something i mean we would have to think about too if they're if they're coming late because i was thinking about that as well we would have to think about then they're going to be going home late but we'd also have to have care for those kids after school i just came i don't know yeah i will say that we currently do that um where we can we have actually tried different things but understand that like you said everything you do is

079a domino effect so every move you make impacts someone else so that's what we have to be careful we we do piggyback what we call piggyback so that we can pick up group kids and take them even home but it's a strenuous you know process you know to get the parents to buy i would say i say that as a parent who knows my kids live we're bus because of a major street that separates us from the school not necessarily because it's too far to walk but and knowing that they don't get home until almost 4 30 some nights you know when it's a few blocks from their school so i do understand the complications in that but i and i hear what jeremy's saying though just some may throw us something some kind of

080play and then talked about that on a greater scale to do it where it would where effect and actually get ahead of the current number that we have the different number of people um it would require a much greater impact to the district and you know to education schedules like if it would really disrupt across building buildings so it's something that could be modeled to understand and that's why we have uh we work with a routing group versus having you know relying on one individual at the location they can they can take on those challenges more quickly than we can and i want you to think that we're not going to go to group i think what we did last year and including 80 percent of our contract showed that it's just now we're sort

081of back to more of the same contract we need some options so yeah anything that you guys can throw at us we would consider i just got it we got to come up with something because this just isn't working and i appreciate your story but that doesn't address the issue so if you can come back with some some options or some ideas or maybe try paying people a little bit more and see if that works um you know obviously maybe that gets handed down to us in future contracts so be it but we got to get them to school the three polls we've seen and this is an awesome question that works where are people going hope unemployment better you know better benefits packages overall that's about a third i think from what i see

082of their statistics um there are maybe close to a third that have just walked away fear of coping retirement that sort of thing and there's a large group that's moved away from this area so i think those are the like the three drivers that i've seen that's that's impacted his team over the last 12 months 18 months and we see a whole lot of candidates that start the process but they get logjam at the dmv i have people that are spending eight hours at the dmv multiple times and they're still not getting through and that's something that we can't control we try different dmvs i mean we're driving different places um so that part getting them in the door that is really really tough um we're not getting up and we're working every single day

083but that probably is one of the biggest frustrations getting people in the doors that we are dependent upon the state to support us and help us get through and i personally i'm a state instructor and i took on extra work to try to help the initiation process which just which not only helps us but also helps other school districts in our county and i've even went outside of our county to help because i understand those log jams that happened but when they get to the dmv dead stop i had a guy yesterday that told me he was sent away he went to get his test and they told him we're under staff go somewhere else or come back so obviously like this i mean we're at a point you know where you're having problems finding

084solutions and it's like what else can we do as a district to come up with solutions to this problem what else can we do as you know on our end um i mean can we figure out some type of like carpooling you know sign up with parents or is there something that we can you know what how how can we bridge the gap if we just can't get buses to kids then how can we get kids to school like what what's what creative solutions you know can we think up as a district as a to to solve this as a collective and i think that's happening organically i mean it is and um you know we'll have that parent transportation reimbursement that's ready to get kicked off and um sent out the parents to just

085help i mean if they and hey you know if you want to call it uber although again there's a lot of safety issues too i mean these are yeah so you know you want to be real careful as to who's driving them to school and so that's what's difficult because it's you know we've got a lot of students and is there one um solution that's going to work probably not it's going to be kind of a variety of things in the community helping each other and picking each other up as well so but if we did have some type of like carpool sign up through the district where you know you had parents signing permission slip saying you know i'm okay with my kid riding with so-and-so and if there's a situation a better circumstance

086that would work or i mean i don't have we reached out to back is that a possibility are they i don't know i know everybody's been feeling i mean even like the growing place they they're having difficulty just getting their little buses running or even niu yeah the bus service yeah and i've looked into husky bus lines as well so yeah but i mean there's various options we can look at i mean and then also work in conjunction with first student too to see if there's some creative ways that we could um take care of some stuff yeah it's hard it's just again the abdominal effect it's like you well i know it's not just you synthetic yeah you know i mean this is like no absolutely no this is obviously yeah it is not

087optimal for sure absolutely yeah i mean we lose a lot of sleep over this yes i mean because we worry we worry that the kids aren't getting to school right that's not what we do the other thing we have to consider is liability of course so you know if somebody says i'll drive the kids and something happens well that's why i'm saying it would have to be like a parent permission slip saying you know it would have to you would have to have parent buy-in to do anything and i don't know all the legalities around that but at least throwing out solutions and ideas and then we can look into the you know the logistics and the legalities and i just feel like that there's a couple of options like a third tier that we

088can think about we also talked about switching and i know that you guys had that conversation from friday right um about switching some around so that we can get so yeah like rotating some of that right so rotation so i think that we need to make sure that we've exhausted those opportunities or those options before while we're still trying to be innovative thinking outside the box of what other opportunities might be there so you know and we're open to hearing from anybody the community has you know um viable options that we can consider more than happy to hear from you all to let us know what that looks like no absolutely yeah and it's not you know and that doesn't make it any better that it's not just us but yet all districts are struggling

089and i've reached out to other school business officials what are they doing and they're having the same struggles and just really just trying to come up with any options that would work so yeah thank you for everything and looking into things as well we really appreciate it um also publicly i want to say thank you to all the parents that have volunteered to take the other kids to to school um i mean i've seen it on facebook i even volunteered myself um two people at you know reached out um so i didn't mind it but i also recognize that i have the privilege of you know having a car where other people may not necessarily have that so it really is going to take a community to to get us there so i appreciate the

090patience and i know it's frustrating but i also appreciate uh the clinton real estate middle school social justice discussion group and bringing this to our attention as a possible option because it is important and we hear you um and we are definitely you know working to try to see what putting our our creative thinking hands on so that we can try to get somewhere so please know that we appreciate it thank you thank you okay next up is cindy carpenter again and this is the approval of the estimated tax levy for 2021 tax here all right is here's 2021 tax levy request i'm back in at our meeting in october i went through a presentation that had some additional information about the tax levy that's in your board docs if you wanted to look back

091and this is more abbreviated because um you know we've got that background and now we're actually looking at the tax levy request tonight that we would need to approve um and then we come back in december for the actual adoption so here's our um levy calendar just like we had in the last presentation we approve our request tonight we have to post it in the paper no more than 14 days or no less than seven days prior excuse me to the public hearing we hold our public hearing on december 14th and then we adopt the levy that same evening and then we need to file a levy with the county clerk by the last tuesday in december which is december 28th of this year and i actually walked that into the clerk's office and washington

092i'll be joining you this time oh that's right we will go there together we'll bring um some chocolate or something so the property tax extension limitation law i covered this last time as well just as a reminder that we fall under this um particular legislation which they a lot of people call it the tax cap legislation but basically what it's doing is it's um capping the extension that you can ask for on a year-to-year basis and not all counties are under this particular law we have an ogle county which is just to the west of us and lasalle to the south that are not under this so they have a little more flexibility year to year there's the three things that change um our tax levy each year three um variables our the consumer price

093index new property growth um including any tip increment that's being recovered which is a big piece of what's going on in our tax levy in this particular cycle and then any change in the district's annual debt service or debt payment for our buildings those types of things and for this year the tax extension can only increase by the consumer price index cpi of 1.4 for this tax levy year or five percent whichever is less so obviously we're looking at that one point four percent number so some tax levy considerations um i'm always in contact with the assessor during this time of year to see what sort of estimates that they have because everything we do right now is based on estimates so as of november 8th the rate setting equalize defense value is about 914

094million dollars which is a 13.3 percent increase from our 2020 number and the reason for that is because we have some new growth which includes fair candy which is just to the south of us so that is inclusive of why we're seeing this big jump in eav which is very unusual usually it's much less than this also part of pierre candy does have a 50 abatement agreement tax abatement agreement per the enterprise loan agreement that was passed a number of years back also within our eav increase is we have the dekalb central tiff that expired and so now that increment that growth that has been occurring over the last it's been about 30 years that that tif has been around we've got about 59.1 million coming back onto our tax rolls that we have access

095to and then also we have a small 3m abatement of about 500 thousand dollars that this is the last year that they have in that abatement agreement and we also have some good news in terms of the state property tax relief grant um if you recall back in 2021 there were no additional dollars added allocated to this grant because of the covered fund of things happening with cohen but in 2022 they do have 50 million dollars available allocated for the grant and this was part of when we went to evidence-based funding part of that legislation included the 50 million dollars that they're going to allocate annually for property tax relief for us d428 out of 840 plus school districts were 37 on the list meaning that were will qualify for the grant we would receive

0965.4 million from the state to support the property tax relief and then we have to evade 5.7 5.8 million so we will have to take some money out of our operating funds don't only about 350 000. so like i mentioned we're in line to qualify for this grant and we are required to abate property taxes for this tax levy year 2021 which affects our 2223 budget and then also for the 22 tax levy year which affects our 23 24 budget so we'll be going through the same process at this time next year um then after the uh we get the initial grant of the 5.4 million that 5.4 million gets added into our evidence-based funding formula so in the next year we have access to those dollars in that formula to support the 22 abatements

097and then after that it's in our evidence-based funding from now until until they decide to change the formula hopefully they don't because this act this formula is actually very very good for us so after that two-year abatement um the funds are unencumbered and available for use for for other purposes or to continue to do a business as well if we wanted to so here a summary of where we're at in terms of our estimate for 2021 our rate setting equalizes assessed value from last year was about 806 million and as of this november 8th date we have existing property growth up to 827 million and then you can see the different pieces of increase in eav which is the regular new growth which includes foreign as well as the chief recovery of the 59 million

098so right now we're estimating our equalized assessed value our rate setting equalizes that value so this is basically the number we use to calculate our tax rate is about 900 and just shy of 911 14 million and our tif recovery and new growth is 86.7 million typically we see we're in without all these other new things coming we'll see new growth of like two and a half to three million dollars a year so this is very unusual this is kind of a one-time infusion for us so the estimated change in our ea from the prior years 107 million dollars and then it which is about a 13.3 percent increase which again is a fairly decent increase and here's just a little more of a tax levy calculation breakdown so you can see how much more

099money we can request because of the various pieces of the tax levy calculation so for the cpi increase which is the one point four percent that that is about 744 000 of the total additional dollars we could receive and which gives us an operating rate of 6.522 then we also have the estimated increase and what this increases is the actual dollar amount that we can receive not necessarily eav but extra dollars that the district can receive from the new growth is about 1.7 million and you can see from that recovered tiff above 3.8 million so you can see the breakdown of the different various things and and how much more money we could receive because of those um one-time infusions so in totality with the new the growth from inflation the growth from additional property

100and then the recovered tif is about 6.4 million dollars in additional revenue which would make our estimated operating extension just shy of 60 million 59.5 million then that's the operating extension then we look at what our debt services and our bonded interest levy for the 2022-23 budget year is about 6.9 million that's how much that basically what that means is that's how much on principal interest we have to pay our bonds for 22 23. if we subtract the abatement that we're receiving from the state then the net that's actually going to be levied for is about 1.2 million so the 5.7 million is not going to be taxed to the taxpayer it's just the 1.2 million so that gives us a total operating rate of 6.6496 so this is really the guts of the tax

101levy request based on the estimates from the assessor that i just went through if everything was basically perfect and this is where we ended up this is what our operating extension would look like we would see a 6.4 million dollar increase in the operating levy but then you can see we have a substantial decrease in our abundant interest levy by 2.6 million because of that property tax relief rent and not assessing having to love you for the entire amount so our total um estimated levy would be 60.7 million an increase of about 3.7 million or 6.2 for support 6.62 what we do with the levy request is we add a little extra because we just don't know if there's going to be other things that fit the eav from now until they finalize things in

102march so we call that ballooning things oops and that's just so we don't leave money on the table let's say you know we want to make sure that we're asking for enough but they're only going to give us based on the detail calculation so the various things in terms of the the request we're looking for here is we're we are capturing the increase for inflation the 1.4 percent and the new growth including that tif dav that's being recovered it does include again that bond and interest tax abatement of the 5.7 million that's being funded through the property tax relief grant and we will have to fund a little bit of that ourselves with about 350 000. the debt service levy like i mentioned before um we need to pay 6.9 million we're going to get

103debated up 5.7 million so we're only going to um levy for the 1.2 million and when this is all said and done the estimated total tax rate is 6.6496 percent our actual tax rate last year was 7.0649 so we actually have a decrease in our tax rate and based on that tax rate if we're looking at a homeowner if their house was worth 150 000 market value in 2020 it's looking like about a 99 decrease in their tax bill for the 2021 um property tax levy so i always go through this because i think it's important to know that we've done a lot of things the last few years to to mitigate the effect on the taxpayer including and this is even before we knew of property tax relief grant funds and all those things

104we were taking money out of our operating funds to abate the bond and interest levy we did that in 2018 for 1.7 million in 2019 we also received a property tax relief grant so we did the same thing we made it about five million dollars for our 2019 and 2020 levy and then we also went through a multi-year boundary structuring process which incorporated some of these property tax relief grant dollars um and then we also had use we had got three million dollars in some tip surplus funds that we used to pay down principals so we're paying less interest on those funds and we did the same thing in 2020 when we were refunding we used 10 million dollars from our reserves to pay down principles so again these are dollars that the taxpayer is

105not paying we took those out of our operating funds to support that and then remember last year at this time the board chose not to increase the operating levy by the consumer price index which is 2.3 percent um in that particular year which is a 1.2 million dollar reduction in our levy for 2020 and then every year thereafter because if you don't levy for in one year the effect is a cumulative effect because then we our jumping off point is less so really that's a permanent cumulative savings to the taxpayer but also a permanent cumulative reduction to d428 revenue but that is what we decided to do for that particular levy cycle to help the taxpayer and here i just want to give an example of if there was a 150 000 market value home

106in 2016 and if we apply the increase in eav over the years on that particular home you can see here in 2017 the taxable eav is about a third of the market value less a 6 000 home exemption so here you see the taxable eav which is the number that is used if the tax rate is applied to to get to what the tax bill is so you can see over this period of time that we've been doing these taxpayer savings the cumulative savings for someone with a this home is over about one point about one point one thousand dollars i mean eleven hundred dollars basically that we've saved the taxpayer over this period of time so so we've been doing a lot to really mitigate that to the effect to the taxpayer and that's

107it i know if there's any questions or again we'll bring this back we what tonight what we do is we approve the levy request and put that out the paper then actually have a hearing and then the adoption at the next meeting and we can actually make tweets to it at that time too because i'll get more information from the assessor but then too just to make sure we're on track with everyone anybody have questions or comments okay thank you very much thank you all right so it is recommended that the board of education approve the proposed tax will be requested for the 2021 tax year for publication is there a motion second local anthony david yes sarah yes ariel owens yes yes okay uh next up is subject k board protocols uh which is

108me i'm going to go ahead and motion the table this because we have not gotten to talk about the board protocols in their fullness or their entirety and that's what we'll be doing in that board self-evaluation and uh second so is there a motion still moved second roll call sarah moses yes alright yes yes and then next up is the spring attendant reports and presentations good evening everyone um we have the state of the school address that we'd like to share with everyone so this is the data that we have collected since we've been here and so i'd like to call your attention um to the powerpoint presentation i'll make sure i am running so welcome okay okay so the agenda quickly welcome and then we'll do a vision mission district priorities director updates beginning

109of the year voi data and then any questions or the q a that we can do with you all am i too far okay currently this is our current vision and mission as board members have mentioned there is an updated version that is going to is being discussed and reviewed based on all of the work that the town halls have come together to discuss and along with feedback so this is currently our vision and our mission our district priorities are connected to the core values as determined through town halls and the convergence with the school board they are the student student achievement community engagement and marketing financial stability with equity loans human capital recruitment development and retainment then there are two links one is for the strategic plan that is priority driven driven by data

110and the work through the committees and then there is the district committees and both of those are live links the district committees are committees that are driven and or facilitated by unaffiliated and affiliated staff and are based there are there were up to 32 different committees those have been reviewed and some of them had been eradicated however the work between those committees have now been fulfilled in other parts of um in other committees so the work is still being done it's just going through a different committee those are available so that you could see who is on each one of those committees how many folks are there and what their purpose is and who the facilitators are so up next i'd like to have cindy carpenter the director of business and finance to do a

111review of her just really quickly um we again received our certificate of achievement for excellence and financial reporting from gfoa and as well so two organizations that could oversee uh what we do in business classes here at the school district and for governments and for the fiscal year 20 and that's our 11th consecutive year of doing that everybody else in that process is a great report it's a good law report so if everybody you know but i encourage people to take a look at there's a lot of great history in there a lot of good statistics if you're a data person it's awesome data to look at so and then we will continue to um um on that path now that we're there we're going to keep it going so we will again when our

112audit is just about completed almost done and now we're working on our comprehensive our comprehensive annual commission report for that year and submitted again and then also we continue to work on our s3 budget that's been kind of the long process just because we do have a pretty substantial number of dollars that we need to that are having allocated to us and we want to make sure we're using it appropriately you've heard asker s or s or a lot with a lot of budget requests and those are looked at pretty carefully to make sure that they fit within the requirements of that grant as well as it's um is it something that is going to be a one-time expenditure or is it going to be something that is sustainable and making sure that we can't

113incorporate that into our actual budget and yes thank you very much in a nutshell right now thank you cindy all right up next is a curriculum and instruction director kimberly vaughn nice doesn't like me there okay there's a lot that's been happening in curriculum and instruction um these are just a couple of the highlights based on the strategic plan professional learning has just started taking place about math talks and a little background on that as it's conversations that students are having about math to increase their vocabulary to increase them to struggle with and their background and bring forward more information into solving problems um oral literacy it works on that skill as well another thing that we're working on the humanities department at the high school has been making progress on their audit of seeing

114if they have all the common core state standard shifts and if they don't where can we add those in our curriculum so that the curriculum is more rigorous and those are things example like academic vocabulary making sure we have a lot of non-fiction um informational texts um helping kids to pull text evidence for their writing and their reading so those types of things and i hear it's going i understand it's going very well and they're finding more we have it than we don't which is a great thing when you're doing an audit um this past institute day in october there was a professional learning session secondary on you will hear the words dok in the district coming up over the next semester but it's called depth of knowledge um and so they started that already

115in secondary um looking at assessments and basically that's the four levels of um that you look at with students and making sure we give them content at four levels so for example level one would be i ask you to recite math effect level four is more in depth and ask students to do more for basically like it could be a problem where it has world real world things they're solving in there they're bringing in other subject areas and it's taking everything down and condensing and it makes the students the students have to really really really problem solve so we want to make sure of the four levels we're going to expose our kids more to three and four which is what a lot of our teachers do and a lot of the assessments that we

116put in front of our students are levels three and four so we want to give them more opportunities to do well on that and then the last thing i wanted to mention there's a menu of supports that was put together to help in elementary for balanced literacy it is a phenomenal document if you'd like to see it it's just amazing and basically it has on there the components of balanced literacy that are expected to be taught in our elementaries but it also has presentations that many of our teachers have done for professional development it has research articles to back up why are we using guided reading or why are we doing shared reading as videos for staff to ask for support they need help doing instruction and some of those videos are our staff doing

117it modeling for other staff um it is it's a phenomenal document that it'll continually be updated joe wanted me to share that will continue to add to it so that the teachers have supports thank you thank you ken facilities and safety carson director most of my projects usually come forth to you so you already know about them but just a little bit of background on one large one that you approved tonight that's the education center remodeling an hvac project we did incorporate the flooring and painting and some other remodels so starting october of next year if you weren't aware we will be moving out of the ed center and completely everything will be removed and we will be out for about six months and we're finding some locations at niu where we're working remotely for

118that that project will last about six months starting next year so in addition to that our other big projects that are non-hvac projects are going out to bid in december and january so those results will be coming forward those include some flooring throughout the district uh see some asphalt concrete projects and then some other smaller projects that are out there one project that is underway that's not up there is the alpha energy efficiency project which you approved earlier this year where we were going to be looking at saving approximately 250 to 280 000 a year in energy savings those projects get started a little bit ahead of schedule so we're going to be able to take advantage of some additional energy incentives that were available by completing some of these before the year end of

119the year more information will be coming out so we can show you how those projects have impacted our bottom line we'll be able to show you those in the future for safety the only thing i want to mention is that we are you approved the bid going to maybe rfp for the safety audit i'm anxious to find out who we'll be working with on that and working together with uh ben and the others in our safety task force and our administration to identify areas of improvement see what we can do to help across the district thank you tammy thank you all right mr joe europe human resources so human resources i'm busy like everyone else but we are building partnerships with educational programs to create a pipeline and grow our own candidates we're looking to

120take folks from paraprofessional to teaching positions working with niu working with programs such as grow our golden apple and partnering with other districts to make make this financially solvable for our employees enhancements to the onboarding off-boarding process for our district staff are looking to incorporate more technology like everybody we learn through covid that we need to be flexible and agile and able to meet the needs of people whether they're in front of you or afar and then finally building and continuing to build and enhance relationships between administration and collective bargaining groups um through a variety of opportunities whether it's labor relations or working to solve problems or to identify opportunities for growth thank you thank you teacher improvement innovation building director thank you good evening in terms of my department we'll be having a conversation

121with stakeholders starting in december to make sure that we're updating this strategic plan based on the needs that are being serviced at schools so the strategic plan is a living document and we want to make sure we're responsive to the needs that are growing and showing up now so just um foreshadowing that there will be some changes um there's also a school improvement plan work group that's been started by myself and a couple of other folks in curriculum and instruction we're working really closely with school leaders to revamp the school improvement process um looking to shift more towards school-driven school improvement plans than more districts directed the other piece is the mtss work group i've identified members to join the work with the work group and also identify nine example our frameworks from across the

122country that we'll be taking a look at to possibly adjust or adopt for our moments here yes the last piece is social media engagement this is baseline data for facebook and twitter um as of 11 9 that's last tuesday we have 4 300 followers on facebook and um from august 1st to november 9th over 15 000 profile views on twitter we have nearly a thousand followers again that was as of tuesday last tuesday and we nearly have five thousand profile visits again from august first to november thank you phil student services director congress so i'm going to touch on there's a lot going on within the realm of student services i'm going to touch on the things that align to some of the work we have within our strategic client so so far this year

123we've been providing professional learning restorative practices which is essentially um i'm going to oversimplify it a little bit but the way that we form maintain and repair relationships between individuals between the school community we've been providing that training to our administrators our teachers and our assistants and that work will be ongoing we are currently working on our internal audit of how we are writing our iep goals and those would be individualized education plans for students that receive special education services at our october institute day our staff receive the staff that are responsible for writing those goals and reporting on our progress received uh training um that was really well received the idea behind that is that if we are able to um identify a way where we're writing smart goals which are uh specific measurable

124attainable relatable relevant relatable and then timeout so if we're able to write goals in that way then we're able to monitor student growth and then we have a way to look back and say there are students making progress we need to change our approach for our instructional practices and then last but not least our teachers and our assistants have received training and coaching related to supporting students in crisis most recently we provided a professional development opportunity that provided some content but also a lot of time for collaboration and sharing of ideas among staff that was really really well received some of those professional learning opportunities will continue in the december and second semester focus on um strategies or practices thank you all right ben bale director of technology good news wonderful news received uh 996

125from the fcc based on a grand bureau um those funds are directly impacting our students and our families we were able to use those funds to tackle the digital divide the homework gap so that's for our families without internet access and we have enough funding that will continue us all the way until june of 2022 so that's our funding piece there as well as our 22-23 uh school year chromebook rotation cycle it covered the vast majority of those costs again not digging the general fund and also offsetting the burden from taxpayers uh the remaining laptops for secondary teachers have arrived and those are being rolled out to help high school currently and as we get the devices back from mcallen high school those are trickling down and we'll be mobilizing our entire workforce with mobile

126devices um our two additional uh it supports specialists at e have started and the turnaround time and our closure rates within the health desk destination system uh we're already seeing vast improvement so um we literally just needed additional fte to tackle all these sort of things we're like detroit's like hey we need more tech sort of things so we're gonna do their like innovative awesome let's do it they need people so we got the people and now we're making progress um so the staff students and families are receiving quicker response times to their needs and that again ties to our support and services to not just our students and staff but also our families and then core services and infrastructure that everything runs on we have been able to maintain an on-time 98 or better

127so everything is running as it should and that's what thank you ben great news all right miss peter goff good evening again um great news from us since 1977 the boys cross country team had that advanced estate and they did it this year hey so you finished 23rd dhs junior rally newport finished third out of the top six he was the only junior so high hopes for him for next year he did break the school record for the three miles since 1976. it wasn't 14 minutes and 15 seconds i don't think i could have made it down the hill that fast uh but he broke a record from 1976 from 14 uh though it was 14 15. he broke it was 14-19 winner season has started competitions are away the girls won last night girls

128basketball so they they're underway um and coming this coming monday before they start uh teacher conferences i'm going to do a book study with my uh my coaches all my coaches you run in the locker room first i do have copies for all of you to read it's a great read it's a wonderful book it doesn't find pop sports it talks about how you get things motivated and one of the co-authors is mike smith the former head coach of the atlanta falcons that was one play away from the super bowl i met him he spoke at our iada conference and he's going to be doing some zoom uh meetings with my coaches so a lot of good things happening great fall but that's just kind of the highlight we have a lot of good things

129with wrestling dance all that stuff coming up in the in the winter so thank you wow thank you peter i want to i want to say that i appreciate the work of each department as they bring convergence to our work as a unified school district of course this work has been some of it's been in the making for a while some of it has just started as we've come together but we i want to make sure that people know that this has been a great opportunity for all of us to work together to converge to talk about equity to be fair and that we will continue to follow our strategic plan to make sure things happen great things happen for children and for our staff and for the families so thank you thank you to

130everybody for that um next up the date all right so i'm going to start i'm going to pre preface this right so this is the beginning of the year we're talking september october maybe the first week of the september october data right attendance data is the first quarter that i'd like for you to know about and we're going to go through this i know that this is the first time children are coming back to school after been being out so don't be alarmed right at this moment it's it's unsurprising as children are and families are getting used to coming back in we have covet we have bus issues we have a lot of those things so i'm just prefacing that all right so if you take a look at this the first column there is

131the district overall average our district overall average for attendance is 89.11 okay the line that you see across is that 89.11 anybody over that line surpasses the district's average so schools like brooks cortland founders jefferson lincoln littlejohn and malta are over that 89.11 percent um even oh i'm sorry huntley is at 89.73 clinton rosette is at 88.48 um so they're right you know either right they're straddling it but i just want you to know that that is the first quarter attendance across the district if we look at attendance by grade somebody's gonna have to click for me or something go over there so if we take a look at grade again that line is at 89.11 you'll notice that fifth grade takes the lead for actually being in school more often at 93.19 percent and

132then we have variations based on where we are we of course need to take a look at high school high school obviously has a different you know set of numbers i would normally say 95 or better we'd want to see at the elementary that's from k to 8th grade and then 90 would be what i would want to see at the high school level okay do we have a jumping off point for this from last year i'm sorry from last year what was our average so last year we were not really in attendance maybe you're before i i suppose we can get updated uh um numbers from probably 2019 but yeah we'd have to do like uh prior to march 17th march 17th is when we went out so it would have to be if

133we can probably get you something from 18 2018 2019 to to be comparable to where we are right now this is race and ethnicity and how we're doing in relation to which students are making it to school in a timely basis and as you can see this the area of our students is that black and therefore african-american students are the ones that are not making it to school quite as often at 84.16 while our native native hawaiian white students hispanic students asian students and american indian students are making at 90 or better okay one more sorry it worked now so here we're talking about the student group again 89.1 so if we're taking a look at not the um the grouping in regards to students with special needs and or i can't see that so

134i have to say that i'm sorry about that i think so unlimited english students our lep students are at 91.67 they're the ones that are coming to school a little bit more often along with our uh not low income students otherwise than that for other groups of students are not making it into school quite as on time right although it's not much of a difference but it's it's enough of a variation for us to be able to notice and market okay question well any attendance questions well yeah really quick when we're looking at this this plays a big role in what we were talking about with the bus thing it could be yeah yeah okay so so all of those issues are around that right so that's why i prefaced it for recovery you know

135the the whole issue around that so it could be it could very well be you know that that's happening yes so when we see these um differences or gaps between student groups either by race or ethnicity or by um english language learner iep or income status are we looking at it then as what do we need to do better to get the students and like what are we not doing so that's that's missing you know why are we seeing these groups of students specifically affected right is that how i mean what is the frame well so part of it is that transportation issue that we need to talk about the student's not making it to school because of whatever that is then there are social emotional trauma needs that are being addressed through the professional

136development that is happening with staff so those two are the first pieces that we're doing making sure that we are we have what we need some of them are beyond our sphere of control such as transportation obviously you know for obvious reasons we've discussed at length and then the other is to make sure that we are working with our staff to ensure that when students do come they feel like they belong that they feel like they're you know that they're engaged with their learning uh kim also talked about the dok the level of rigor making sure things are engaging for them so you know our teachers are doing everything they can i visited a school yes uh today where most of the things that kim talked about and have been discussed were very obvious students

137were very engaged i think that the more that children feel that way the more often that they will want to come if they can get their themselves to school so again the sphere of control but what we what we can looking at potentially what we can do to make sure we're engaging all of our students yes or each of our students absolutely and i don't disagree with that however if we don't know what we're starting from for example if i were to go back and look at the data from 19 weeks from 2018 and see that actually our african-american students were only attending 80 okay we would actually be seeing improvement without having a jumping off point we really have nothing to compare to in other words are we better or worse so if you're

138going to put together a plan to fix something i think it's best to start to know where you're actually at and so i would actually love to see that in the next data presentation sure we don't know where we're starting from i don't know what we're going to do just just as long as we realize that the group of students that we had then would not be the same group of students we're talking about now right that comes out so yeah and then also number and percent is always nice to see um only because if you have a very small student population yes clearly just one or two students missing from the data so if you could put that in the columns as well i agree i agree with that i'm a big numbers next

139to the percentage so i do i did discuss uh doing that so we can have an updated version of this in comparison for 2018 2019 to this school year just understanding that kindergarteners that back then will be third graders this year so that we can you know see the difference between that we just have to be mindful of that it's at least a data point sure sure absolutely absolutely even if there's been an improvement that's great but if there's a gap that's still showing that there are inequities there yes we're not reaching student populations the same way absolutely so that's the clarification point right so this is really uh this data is really about where we currently stand where we are today right uh or we were first quarter and how we're going to be

140moving on the students that we currently have in place where they are all right so this is voi beginning of the year this school year assessment data so students are assessed on a couple of different types of discussions but the first one is going to be around the nsgra and that is the next step in guided reading assessment that is given to our first group students the line is 69 69 percent is where the district says that we are not our students are not where they're supposed to be at that time of the year right so just to keep it simple so if you if a school is below if the rent is above that line that means that they're not they're doing worse than what the district averages if it's below the line they're

141doing better so this is first grade remember first time children have been in school right so they they miss kindergarten probably were not in pre-k and so this is their first time that they're being this house do i have to explain more than that no okay so here's the same thing again this is by reading level and this is by race ethnicity so if you look around the bottom it's districts overall asian black african-american then hispanic multiracial than white here is our performance for second through eighth graders on the map reading which is the nwea assessment that is usually done to progress monitor across second through eighth grade so it's a measure of academic progress is the line that you see across 63 is the combination of yellow and red which are the bottom two

142quartiles okay so if you go across anytime you see yellow passing that line what means we'll be you know where we have more than 60 63 percent of our students not making that green and blue are great numbers of students that are already there that they're making uh that they're where they're supposed to be at the beginning of the year right so they're having a great start across the bottom you'll see that it's brooks portland founders jefferson lincoln little john then we have malta tyler clinton how remember in this one you're the color red and the yellow is the number that should be the smallest versus the green and then the moon so just kind of read this correctly then it would say that brooks and tyler and lincoln are like the three least performing

143is that correct so so versus tyler are and definitely lincoln are the numbers and foundations but we also have specific programs in those buildings with children with special needs there's a lot of other uh programs programmatic things that are occurring there that might also show why we're having that data don't look the way that it looks so here is again the map by grade level district overall again the princess dial is at the purple line that goes across and this is by grade level so if you're looking at our eighth graders actually we're doing a little bit better so you know by the numbers right just by the sheer fact of the color i think numbers here would help us definitely make sure what those look like across all of the schools but notice second

144grade of course second grade is where i expect that we would have a little bit more trouble only because this is the first time that they're in school right if they were in kindergarten fine if they weren't then this is why we're seeing what we're seeing so again second grade needs to have needs to be approved again here we are with english and this is across our race and ethnicity if you take a look at the asian group that seems to have the most students on track for based on progress monitoring our black and african american students are the ones that need more assistance in this case than hispanic than our multiracial and then our right students we give the same tests in spanish for students that are spanish speakers so this is where we

145are with that in relation to who services those students so we have portland congress this would speak to where students are actually able to read and digest conceptual information in the native language i have a few questions around that but not until i see the middle of the year data well we know that if it is truly a language issue or it's another issue we'll be able to tell a little bit better okay same thing for my grade for the spanish for those that take spanish in this case you take a look at our second graders and that kind of flips the script there they remember that they're doing much better here than they are in the english sector transition usually takes about five years for students to go from taking a native language spanish

146into english unless they're in the dual program that's two-way then this could speak to that as well so let's come back here's math take a look at that right right so these are our elementary animal schools across the district and where we currently are math we know is an area of growth for us hence the reason we're doing that talks we have envisioned schools are getting training we're going to be coaching teachers and the support that is needed for the for the schools that are working i was at portland earlier today actually uh visited uh one of the classrooms that was being observed by a peer where they were coaching and training each other so the support is there and then they had better use the program in their building it was a third grade

147classroom i believe and the teacher was a bilingual well one-way teacher and then here is math again uh take a look second third fourth grade are the school are the other grade levels that we seem to need a little bit work on i'm going to say across all grade levels we need to work on mathematics a little bit better to make sure that they can transition into high school so we'll continue to push mathematics professional development and support for all teachers and then again here we are by race and ethnicity again i rely on african-american students and our latino students latino students are in most need of additional math support we'll continue all right so any questions i mean i hear you i got numbers coming we'll make sure that we get that for you

148any other questions all right suspension data again first quarter that's in game process so we got the calf high school cleveland hotline brooks portland founders jefferson lincoln middle john malta and then tyler so you see that we're sandwiched by the cowboys and title uh you take a look at portland and jefferson there are zero so zero instances of suspensions that's that's cool i'm wondering what's going on how can we borrow right that's what i'm looking at and then we have founders and then lincoln and also who are a little bit a little bit further ahead maybe a few more i'm wondering how they're differentiating what that looks like so we'll be diving deeper into that as we're building out our student court transact and making sure that we're taking a look at how students are

149being suspended and then of course the other schools the middle schools the high school not kind of surprising brooks in thailand i'm going to say we'll need to take a look and see the programming the students that are there what are the reasons behind being suspended and so we'll have a deeper conversation with the counseling and the administrators there again this is first quarter the big large blue bar is black foreign the number is close to 70 69.22 so we know who's going up correlation between this attendance and and you know how they're doing at assessments how we progress monitoring there's your there's our root cause it could be part of the root cause so we need to take a look at that a little deeper to triangulate between those three things that's not to

150say that we shouldn't do that with the rest of them and then how many of those are individual students versus how many are instances that it's the same student overlapping so to disaggregate this data a little bit more by school so that we know who we're looking at and supporting where they need to be supported yes sir of the lines that you didn't draw across again can you tell me rose came from so the purple line is the district average so we just wanted you to know so the first the first one was the district i was thinking that then i thought you said something about like we're doing good if we're above it or below you just mean that specific schools are above average this is what i yeah exactly so i just wanted

151i wanted you to know this is what the district averages and then across all the schools or grades this is how it compares to that district average so the follow-up question then is just to confirm that are we going to have like what we mean is we could say like 100 even on like the math and so forth are we going to come up with what you know a minimum acceptable number that would have to get me into or are we going to just look for marks improvement or both i guess i'm just wondering how you're planning on yeah approaching that so there's there's a couple of things uh one of them is we're putting in a lot of new things there's a lot of things that have been stabilized by teachers right so there's

152we'll find out a couple of things we'll find out what has been working what is going to continue to work again i'm very hopeful and i believe that the reason that we're seeing this is because we're coming back after 18 months without being out right and so now they're finally in front of good sound teachers good learning and we should see we should see some major growth in relation to assessments by middle of the year my expectation right definitely by end of the year my so the thing is is like what are we so this year is kind of a tough call to say 75 of our kids should be on track to matriculate to the next year having learned the standards that they need to that's a number i'd like to see eventually right

153but if i don't have that data based on the fact i can't compare this data to the data that happened in 2018 because they had been in school previous years and now we have an 18 month gap where they haven't been right and so we need to start where we are right now is there national data available i mean we can compare uh to other districts and how they did based on our number and then our demographics you can take a look at that uh phil if you don't mind taking some notes we can we can share that with you um we can i have to imagine like everyone's up against this right it would be it would be interesting to see how we've done just comparatively to a bigger number of locations of history

154i i will say that with my colleagues here with the other superintendents and this roe we're seeing very similar things i also have relationships with people like in forest park in lake forest in freeport in elgin and waukegan pretty much kind of the same thing mathematics seems to be something that everybody is struggling with you know our numbers are actually better than other people in regards to mathematics but uh it's still i i'm hearing the same thing i'm i haven't compared their data to ours i'm just going based on conversations that i've had with them but i'm sure we can pull like-minded or similar districts on how they did in relation to how we did the other thing that you'll have uploaded into the board docs is the 120 page illinois state report card the

155district report card there's a lot of data missing from there and that's going to be true because we don't have anything to compare it to but that's definitely a place that you can take a look at if you would like to take a moment to take a look at the iirc which is how you can compare other districts in the state of illinois you can pull up any school district and see comparatively how they're going to us i i rc right phil yeah illinois interactive report card thank you i couldn't remember what the acronym was but that's it well as far as the i mean the suspension rates i don't think that those are really any different i think we've been failing to relate to and failing our black students for a very long time

156they're not new yeah it's nothing no that's what i'm saying it's not new it's that in fact i think our school is in the top 20 percent for disproportionality and suspension rates by race and ethnicity and that's based on the three previous years that's not even that has nothing to do with right now so one of the things that we noticed is early on was that there isn't really a student code of conduct so expectations of how students need to behave and then what the consequences are across all schools all schools have varying different um consequent level right so what i might do inappropriately at tyler um might garner me you know a one day suspension and over at i don't know portland it might be a two-way suspension so the other thing is making

157sure that there's a fair uh field of consequences across the school district is one of the areas that we're working on can i ask as soon as you point that out that we make sure we have representation of our communities and and that whatever committee is looking at because there are definitely some values that are norms that are not necessarily norms in all cultures and so making sure that we are adjusting i mean so kyle is actually leading that work kyle did you want to speak to that yeah where we're starting with is a small group of you know administrators primarily but then our discussion at our initial meeting was what other stakeholders are we bringing around the table along this process some of the conversations around who are the people that are impacted by

158would be most impacted by the code of conduct or have been impacted by these suspensions in the past let's bring their voices into the process as well so i think it will be a part of our the process we go through so this process isn't something that's going to be an overnight kind of turn you know it's going to take us some time kyle has been a part of almost every suspension or big issue that needs to occur so that he knows and understands like what those issues look like and what we're talking about so that when we're talking about that at this commun committee level that we can give prime examples of how we need to consider it in different ways right so once we know what the levels of you know consequences are

159and um based on what actions or inactions you know what that might look like then we can begin to train everybody else on how to use that there are restorative practices that we expect you to use there are different levels of trauma training that we have we will begin to to share with folks so all of those things will also help us i believe to mitigate some of this but until everybody's comfortable and we understand what the process is it's going to take us some time and just like cultural competency too for staff teachers administrators which i know we've been doing a lot of capacity building in those areas since we've approved the diversity plan and even before that there's been initiatives to to build that capacity but i think we have to make we

160have to see changes now yeah and i understand you know covet has impacted a lot of things and has disproportionately affected students of color students living in homes with low incomes but that's out of our control so we have to meet students where they're at and do what we can in our control because it's not fair and it's not just then it's not equitable right i i really don't disagree with you no i know i just i i do if i it it's hard to look at this data absolutely and show it to our community and say this is what we're doing and how we're serving our students and so so one of the things that is imperative for us to be able to understand is the cultural responsiveness right so cultural responsiveness leads to

161a lot of what you're talking about right so if we don't understand where people come from we believe something different there's a bias that is implicit or explicit sometimes and so that kind of training that removal of those things needs to be out there which is one of the reasons that i was would like us to consider us getting the training that i know is very expensive but you know at some point or another we're going to have to break it down so that we can do that training to support what we need to be able to make these these changes we not to say that we can't make them it's just that if if all of us are working in the capacity which we currently are and we're not getting the the constructive learning

162that we need to make it better it's going to take us a little longer to get there and and you know i'm not saying that it's not right it's just that sometimes taking it slow kind of builds that resist that that resilience yeah and i understand that our teachers we have to meet them or they're too and it's also been genetic for them uh the last 18 months so it's a lot to deal with but we can't fail students especially i think it's i think it's important for the public to understand that culturally responsive teaching is is based in neurobiology its foundation is scientific and it's evidence-based and so it's it's it's something that is um you know essential for for students uh to learn to have their basic needs met to you know address

163the whole child absolutely so that's yeah absolutely daisy did you have a hand i was actually gonna say okay we're actually sharing or we need to share them and i think also just i mean just looking at it's definitely disheartening to look at that but we know that this is not new so i appreciate this information being brought to light i think that there's definitely opportunities for training to take place also and professional opportunities for us to maybe collaborate with people or professionals outside of the district that can provide support right and training on restorative justice practices even at niu niu just got nominated as being one of the top or leading institutions of diversity equity and inclusion work right and maybe building or thinking about collaborating or providing or collaborating really with with niu

164and that's we are creating partnerships to see how we can better support the staff and having these dialogue conversations about you know diversity and equity and inclusion and seeing how we can hopefully bridge some of these gaps that i've never seen or opportunities for growth and i think learning we do have a strong history of partnering with niu so that makes sense to rekindle that partnership and not just obviously on obviously just race issues but really also on gender issues um uh document undocumented student support services right lgbtq um services and there's a lot of trainings that niu offers to our like currently to the staff that we can possibly partner up with and those are some of the conversations that our and myself were having with our that we were having um that derived

165out of a conversation that i had with a staff member at huntley so you know there's definitely opportunities for growth in that um and i think when we're addressing the student holistically and serving the student holistically a lot of these issues you know are big and in their identities and we have to understand that obviously our second identity is our thing right and our students may be facing a lot of different challenges depending on you know where they are i mean that's a valentine but you know i'd love to have anybody from the board willing to be a part of this that can make connections this is my job there you go ari and daisy are up for that work and anybody else i feel free so again i'm just going to iterate to close

166is that we know that this is a moment in time yes it is right now it is not the future it is where we started for those of you that are teachers and that are watching that are teachers and the aides and the school leaders and everyone else i have full faith that this is just this moment and will be celebrating completely different middle of the year so we'll probably have that data filled that would be february march yes so february march so that we can completely analyze the data break it down and be able to share it with you and then in between there we'll try to get you some data in between so that you can see the comparison from the 2018-2019 school year to the school year okay phil i'm also hopeful

167and i want to make sure that i reiterate that that we we do appreciate everything that everyone is doing from teachers to you name and janitors administrators everyone we know that this is it's not easy but i appreciate also this information being brought to life because it is important it is something that we are working collectively to support all of you and making sure that we provide the appropriate support as well to make sure that you'll have the tools to feel confident enough to have these conversations and move forward absolutely thank you oh different cultures because there is a time where a teacher had a discussion with us or we just said what we felt about the school where we had things that we felt like that was an issue and i think a lot

168of students appreciated the time that the teacher took to just be able to talk about the problems that were happening and like we kind of saw an improvement with the relationship with the teacher too because when you don't trust with the teacher it makes you be able to look up some look up to somebody so that might be a solution to that so you said incorporating programming that can allow discussions to happen where students feel validated or their voices being heard so that they can build relationships with the teachers thank you thank you for sharing thank you other comments but i just want to touch basis on two things that came out of this meeting i just want to make sure that we have a board consensus around this updated version of the presentation with

169data from 2018 with numbers percentages and also coming um yes consensus for that yes yes and then also um solutions to our transportation issues to make sure that we're getting our students to school directing that from the board as a as a request to to address is that consensus yes yes yes okay and with that we will go ahead and recommend that the board of education will adjourn is there a motion i'm so sorry i i just want to make sure i said a couple of things yesterday was illinois school board day thank you very much the school board for all you do and pravala for being a volunteer and working with all of us uh just at fy fyi um cal is now completely set up with the immunization and health data that it

170needed to send to the district so we're good with that and then again i just wanted to make sure that you know that the state district report card is listed on uh posted there so thank you i'm sorry about that no problem so um we uh we will be uh adjourning the meeting and we will be going back into closed session so uh i'm we're going you can go and sorry i'm sorry it is recommended that the board of education during the post session two uh is there yes