DPS 109 Board of Education Regular Meeting:5/26/22

001okay [Music] um mr lowe can you un unmute on the zoom complaining hello dr fertura can you hear me okay i can hear you hello everyone all right i'll be with you one moment um thank you i've been gone for a little while so [Laughter] welcome everybody to the may 26 2022 committee of the whole meeting of deerfield public schools district 109 this is not the regular board meeting that will be starting at seven o'clock this is the committee of the whole meeting where we discuss a particular issue among the board there will not be any votes taken at this meeting just for discussion purposes a live broadcast of the meeting is streaming on the district 109 website and the recording will also be posted there so we'll call the meeting to order at 604

002pm can i have a motion to approve the meeting agenda second all in favor the next item on the agenda is the teaching and learning audit so i'd like to uh introduce dr elise futura and uh colleen i'm blanking on your last name camper camber uh so to tonight's meeting we've got a presentation uh that will last for approximately a half an hour or so this is not the last time the board will be discussing that uh this and if uh dr future's report is anything like the last time that i conducted one of these it is talked about very frequently at the board level uh among administrators and also among staff so this is the first opportunity for us to review this and have time for presentation and then also time for questions following

003that so i hand off to the the doctors thank you very much it's nice to see everyone again i have to look very specifically so i'm elise pater for those of you who do not know co-founder of ics equity along with colleen capper uh colleen is also professor emeritus from uw madison and i'm professor emeritus from uw milwaukee and first of all we just want to thank the district for asking us to do this evaluation i mean i think you know you have a wonderful district and it was truly an honor to be able to do this evaluation we especially want to thank the teachers and the parents the students the administrators and who participated in the focus groups as well and for taking the time to do that we also want to thank true

004north uh kurt schneider helped us out with some of the interviews for students and parents and community members so we want to do a quick shout out to him as well and and thanks for the support so we're going to go ahead and share our slides um i'm going to just talk a little bit about we have three primary areas that we want to review one is the quantitative data which we define as the equity audit and colleen did a lot of this work with danielle and so clean will be reviewing the data specific to the equity audit and then i'll go into the focus group themes and the sub things and then delve into the essential next steps we're hoping to spend the majority of our time on the essential next steps and we

005are trying to finish in 30 minutes um i can't remember the length of the report anymore um but um we will just do a quick overview of the essential next steps so that we can open it for question and answer so i'm going to go ahead and turn this over to colleen to start us out with the mission and vision and go into the equity audit so good evening everyone thank you so much for this opportunity and i was texting at least when we got started about just um just the honor of working with school board members and just we how much we appreciate your commitment to public education and your service to public education so i just want to say that we um just respect that so much and again appreciate your commitment to

006this work we are inspired by your most recent mission and vision that you had diligently worked on and approved i just want to draw your attention to it again uh and in the vision statement that we'll develop each student so that's what i took to heart so each and every student to be emotionally resilient etc and so um that's what i know you're all about in this school district that you really do care about each and every student you want each and every student to succeed and that sort of forms the context for some of the data that we'll be sharing so again i'm going to just do a quick highlight it's going to go quickly then we'll go over to elise he'll do the focus groups and the next steps in the report we

007have like 65 graph data slides so i have about eight or nine uh here or so they're just going to give you a couple highlights so the quantitative part again we collected data across demographics social class race disaggregated by race language disability gender etc we looked at in programs like special education response to intervention your gifted your math pathways your extracurricular i also just want to say how much we appreciate all danielle's work on the equity audit and your staff's work and collecting the data is outstanding you gave us additional data beyond even what we had in the equity audit you disaggregated the data from your math pathways and the extracurricular which is really um just a model for other districts actually so how much we appreciated that and then we also collected data on

008achievement math and literacy achievement and also truancy attendance and discipline so again just some basic demographics um related to your district again you have about 16.1 percent students of color about 1.7 students receive free reduced price lunch the district did update some of this data like really recently so i think your free juice price lunch is actually 2.9 right now um students who receive ell services of about four percent and then 13.8 percent are students who receive special ed services again this is our uh with educational identifiers again you see students live with disabilities 13.8 percent students who have a 504 plan 8.2 4.0 again students label ell you have 0.3 students who attend an alternative setting um six point nine percent are receiving tier two tier two or tier three interventions in response to

009intervention about two point point two percent of students labeled advanced learners um and your district again is a very specific definition for that so i'm just going to talk a little bit start out with free just lunch and so again as a small percent now it's like 81 students in your district 2.9 but i think uh one point to show here is just like in your math pathways as you know you have three math pathways and we talked about this in the quantitative data because it also came up in the focus groups and so at least we'll probably talk talking about that as well and that's how we bring all this data together so um 40 of the students who participate in the pre-algebra pathway are students who are receiving for reduced price lunch so

010again that's just like something to be thinking about as we go through this i'm going to be talking about who's represented in the in the in in that pre-algebra group um for students we're seeing friday's price lunch again 1.7 in the district but yet these students are over identified for special education you can see 3.4 percent and also overrepresented in students receiving tier 2 and tier 3 interventions so one thing we wanted to think about is this connection between um a lot like um how students are being served and then your outcome data so this is how students are being served they're getting you know more special education more response to intervention so we wanted to what the data shows us in terms of achievement that is like you know one measure how effective how

011how effective is it our practices so again we can see where these students are being served so we go and look into the um this is the reading achievement and freedom's price lunch if you look on the left side you can see in the in the orange bar students receiving freedo's price lunch 38.3 are basic or below basic in reading and so again that's sort of like one measure right it's one measure like oh they're getting response to intervention they're kind of getting more special ed they're kind of in the pre-algebra track but you know how is it going in terms of our outcomes and so that's a connection but i think one point we want to make on this graph is as you see on the left side is 9.3 percent of students who

012are middle to upper class in your district are at the basic or below basic level so again you're on the other side you can see advanced proficient is outstanding you know 86 90 percent except 86 percent on the right side again but to think about okay but remember each and every student in our district and you know your high achieving district give for all your students and so um again nearly 10 of students are middle to affluent are also basic or below basic and reading and you see the similar idea here in the math um in the math data with again 44.7 percent of students produce lunch are basic or below basic again eight percent of kids who are middle class to affluent are basic double basic and math then we turn to students of

013color so this is um who are receiving response to intervention so again sorry this one programs that we do in all districts engage in and so you see students of color in the district are 16.1 percent and then but in receiving response intervention are over represented in there in terms of 27.1 percent and then you can just go across the board you can see black students are far overrepresented in response to intervention hispanic students more twice as likely to be received response to intervention so again that's the you know that's a practice so then we turn okay so how is that related to our reading scores um and then you can see like uh black students 60.9 percent are basic or below basic in reading hispanic students point one percent etc so again you have

014some really high scores you see your asian students ninety seven percent high you know native wine pacific students uh native american students 10 percent which which is outstanding multi-racial is above 90 again so you can see which is really awesome and then again we want to come back to you know again each and every student how can we continue to improve in our work with all our students so we look at the pre-algebra pathway again so here we see that 75 of black students are in their pre-algebra pathway so again we see and then 17.7 of hispanic students as an example um so so far we see you know pre-algebra pathway as kids more kids are free of sludge more kids who are hispanic and black or in the pre-algebra pathway so then how does

015that relate to our math achievements again if you look across here you can see basic and below basic is in green and black students 65.2 percent are basically blue basic and math hispanic students about a little over 20 percent native hawaiian pacific islander students 25 are basic and below basic and math so again we want to make that connection you know what can we do to increase math is the pre you know do we need to rethink how we're doing our math pathways is one example when we think through this then we turn to students who are receiving ell services so again you have about three point six percent in in your district i was looked at the numbers before you get on time that's about 110 students and so again students receiving ell services

016are over identified for special education at 7.4 percent also over identified in response to intervention you know four times more in terms of 12.5 percent um and then zero percent are actually in the geometry pathway which i'll talk about um here going forward so if that's like again like uh um the oh and these are in the um oh yeah and advanced math courses i said that correctly so again for students receiving yellow services and this is representation advanced math achievement and i think this is a big kudos to the district so you actually have um 50 of your students who are receiving yellowstone services or scoring is advanced on the math achievement that's that middle bar there so more than half so more than half of your students are receiving ell services are scoring

017advance advanced and math achievement which is outstanding i would say like if you stand above most districts in that respects that's really something to like uh you know recognize in your district at the same time you're curious so but zero percent of students in your geometry pathway are students who are receiving ll services you have no students so danielle clarified like well to get into geometry you have to be on the 95 percentile um you know on your on the test that they're taking so they're not making that cut point but i think it's again something to be thinking about we have all these kids in advance in math like um you know how can we continue to boost these students going forward and then this is just an example of your extracurriculars which with

018that was an important slide again students receiving yellow services 3.6 percent of a district on the left side but then you can see our underrepresented and extracurricular at 1.7 underrepresented in athletics underrepresented in clubs um they're equally represented in the arts you know so again with this is just one example and so as you look across your extracurricular you know what could we do to boost student involvement in our extracurricular because research is really clear connection to extracurricular also boosts achievement and that would be something to look at across your demographics then we turn to students who was receiving special education and 504 services and so now we look at reading achievement now this is proficient or advanced this is what you're looking here so 58.2 percent of students with a disability who have an

019iep are proficient or advanced compared to 86 percent of students with a 504 plan and then 92.1 percent of students not receiving um special education services so 50.2 percent proficient advance in reading like that's for a kids label with disability that's you know that's it's probably higher than some districts and then at the same time we want to remember one percent of our students with disabilities actually have an intellectual disability and so all the others by definition don't have an intellectual disability and so again i think that's when you come back to your vision statement that's an aspiration we can have is how can we boost that even further so then again when we look at that pre-algebra pathway we see that 35.9 of students with a disability are in that pre-algebra pathway so again

020pre-algebra pathway is more kids with more kids to reduce lunch more kids who are black and hispanic um and so again that's something that we want to be thinking about how is that going with our math achievements so this is basic or below basic kids with dis who are having iep students with disability on the left side you can see a little bit about a little over one-third of kids with an iep are basic or below basic and math and again that's probably something that we want to be thinking about so just to pull all this together i know like that's like a motorcycle through an art gallery a little bit of a presentation but just one thing is think about who's in that pre-algebra classroom so mostly for reduced lunch more than more than

021one-third of ieps high percent of african-american hispanic students so one thing to think about is and this is just origin as one example you could say the same about response to intervention also has more kids who are black and hispanic more kids on friday's lunch are also in response to intervention which are probably often delivered you know outside the general education classroom um he could say the same thing um you know with special education so it's probably more students are free to use price lunch is what our data should more students of color are also have an iep so i think one thing is what messages is sent to the entire school about who is capable and who is not it's like that's what happens in these spaces and this came up in the we're

022saying this because it came up in the focus groups teachers were talking about students were talking about this when you see you can you know know who's who is seen as smart and capable in our school and who is not so again how important it is to link our educational structure to student outcomes that are achievement data reflects the effectiveness or not of our structures and that's something that we want to think about and that ties right into the focus group data on that at least collected and i'll turn it over to her so um i'm gonna out of all fairness i asked colleen if she could do the quantitative data in 10 minutes so that we could do 10 minutes on the focus group and 10 minutes on the essential next steps um but

023i think i talk quickly but a motorcycle through an art gallery so i just want to take a break here and see if you do have any questions specific to some of the concepts and multitask data that colleen just shared and i know you want to do the q a all at the end but maybe let's just take a breath and just see if you have any specific questions i have a couple of questions real quick um in a country where wealth is certainly tied to access and opportunity especially in education um it's not i don't think anyone's surprised that folks who have significant economic advantage tend to also have significant enrichment advantage as well i'm kind of curious to if there's going to be or if this is not an appropriate question but i'm

024kind of curious about matching correlating the economic data we have in terms of free and reduced lunch with the other subgroups because i don't know if we're tracking race and ethnicity or if that's actually just another way of really seeing the effects of economic disparity so i'm wondering if i you know that if we're going to try to connect which variables are correlated and which are simply independent variables the second question i have is how i feel about the data is influenced very much by what assumptions i make about how long have the kids been in the district so i'm curious if you know a student who is not performing as well as we would hope if they only arrived to the district or to the country last year i might feel differently about that

025data than how that if the student was still performing at a lower level than everyone would hope for after having been in the district for half a dozen years so i'm curious about those two components yeah those are two really good questions that second one i can start with that but that's a great question and that now and so here's what our hope is with the equity audit you have the excel spreadsheet now as the district that you keep um and that we ask that you update it annually so this is a way to mark your progress um and that uh the district has done such a good job pulling this together it would not be hard to update annually and then to actually include that data so you could pull that out so you

026could take the kids or basic of you you know i would start with below basic and then of those students how many were new to the district or not and like that would be that would not be difficult data to track and i you know i we would encourage you to do that so that's a really a good point um and then this the second one is that what we know from the research actually is that schools have a greater impact on student learning than families themselves like that's a jeffrey borman did a whole analysis of the coleman report as you know in the 60s which basically debunked that sort of idea that families are the greatest variable actually they're not it's actually the school's greatest variable and so what we've seen in districts who

027you know really committed you know each and every student what can we you know in an achievement and really target making sure kids on a produced lunch um you know address that and specifically are able to raise student achievement in that way as well and so it's um yeah so we can't assume that just because the child is not free to lunch and they come to school that they're going to be you know not do as well because i you know school itself is the actually the has the greatest impact about i don't know if elise wants to add well yeah because also this came up in the focus group of teachers and even parents talking about lack of access and so lack of access defines what you know as well so when children start

028out the school year and are placed in low-ability groups and you're in low-ability boost for six or seven or eight years you you receive less information so therefore you know less that's one thing the other part is that parents brought up more than anybody else and teachers is the whole idea of outside evaluations in order to get accommodations and families who cannot afford outside evaluations their kids are not getting those kinds of accommodations which builds in an equitable system we address that in the essential next steps of really looking at what do individualized service plans look like for all kids because parents shouldn't actually feel like they have to go for an outside evaluation in order to have the needs individual needs looked at and given your mission and vision statement it actually leans right

029in so we do make a strong recommendation for really looking at the possibility of individualized service plans for all kids that lift all kids up but help the district will focus we'll also talk about a structure that can actually help support those plans we don't think it's something that you jump on right away that most of our essential next steps are in chronological order because it's important you know to crawl before we walk right so hopefully that helps but perceptions matter perceptions matter and so biases matter and so the work that the district has been doing around identity development has to continue but also includes social economic right also include the intersection of their identity social economic and race right and language so just thinking of the intersection so the districts has started and embarked

030on some work around identity development we're also pretty strong in our recommendations that that will continue because teachers perception of kids capability matters and if i believe that child is not as capable just based on their background they will do less well we also want to talk a little bit just about service delivery because when kids are removed from core instruction for tier 2 and tier 3 we talk about this in report but stereotype threats occur and so kids who are experiencing a stereotype threat do less well they just do less well so i think the important thing for the district given who you are um you know i had the opportunity to interview board members and i have to say it was um it's just just strikingly um humbling because of your interest and

031your um support and your knowledge base and so um we honestly believe that deerfield district 109 can pull you know these pieces together and knock it out of the park not just for kids who are predominantly um affluent but for all your learners and do exactly what your mission says because as clean says the research is very clear it's about the school not the family so i want to just clarify my the first question which we address second which is about the economic opportunities i not by way of disputing or being misaligned with anything you just said because i i embrace everything you said i think the point i was trying to flush out was a little more nuanced which is in a environment where 109 exists there are relatively affluent many relatively affluent families

032and many of those families give their kids what we all want for our kids which is significant opportunities for additional enrichment and tutoring and augmentative academic acceleration outside of school and i'm just trying to understand and this may be rhetorical i don't know that it's answerable yet but in the back of my head it's still this question where it seems that comparing academic achievement between some kids who have those advantages that more affluence brings with kids who aren't getting those augmentative opportunities because of economic they're not in a comparable economic environment that must have some impact on how kids do in school that is sort of beyond the reach of school and i just i i don't know that it's answerable but it's just some it's nagging at me in the back of my head

033that i'd like to try to figure it get a better understanding about the answer to that question as we go through this process absolutely and um but absolutely but keep in mind so that's exactly why we made the recommendation of first of all really looking at access as opportunity so you're a strong inclusive district you want all kids to be included and so when kids receive pull-out services it's one of the most fragmented services they can get often they get it 90 minutes a week or something like that and it puts it on them to bring the information back from one environment like ell services back to the court teaching and learning and it's up to the child to synthesize that information across all content um and every day right so seven hours a day

034five days a week so so thinking i and and i understand your question i think it's what does the district have control of what's your locus of control and you have some control of things that you can that you can actually increase opportunities for kids that don't have those opportunities within their families one of them is thinking about individualized service plans i mean the fact that some parents can afford an outside vow that gives those opportunities even within the school day not to mention the opportunities that occur afterwards so it's not about it's it's about bringing all kids up it's it's not about um [Music] holding any child back but but increasing the opportunities where the school has the ability to do so and i'll talk a little bit more about that just one comment

035on that andy i think that part of the answer to your question is based on data that we don't actually have i mean we know that that happens we know that a lot of students access extra support and help because they have their parents have the means to do that but i don't know that we have any hard data on how many families do that and things like that so um i it i don't and i don't know how we would go about collecting that but that's a discussion for perhaps further planning down the road but i think it's an it would be an interesting uh uh it would be an interesting piece of data to have for sure absolutely as elise pulls that up i mean i think you have an example in your

036district already of kids who are whose home english whose home language is not english or multilingual 50 of them are advanced in math so i think you know i don't know i don't want to make assumptions or stereotypes that i don't and i don't know what kind of like sort of outside help and so i get i think like kind of the kind of in public education what we want you know think about is like kids should be able to maximize their opportunity within public education without the need you know they shouldn't have to like you have to have a family that's sort of getting you outside help in order to do that and so that that's the exciting part of our school is like you can we our schools can actually do that and

037then and that's what the essential next steps that elise is going to talk about gets into and i'm also paying attention to the fact that um you have a board meeting starting in 27 minutes so very quickly the focus groups we did as two primary open-ended questions and then a significant number of follow-up questions but what is working really well and where do you think the hiccups are and as board members you experience those questions i know there's a lot on this slide and so i was a little leery of taking too much just the quick strengths and i'm not going to read every one of them but just some quotes out of the report of across all focus groups what were mentioned as strengths so every teacher goes above and beyond to help answer

038questions and support students the school board discussed the pride they had in the district i think everyone discussed the pride they had in the district as well right differently through different examples the community is very supportive of the teachers people talked about it how incredible the teachers are teachers talk about how they felt supported by their colleagues administrators and families uh many people commented on what happened during the pandemic that and i shouldn't actually talk about it as a past past tense but held itself together navigating difficult waters during a tumultuous time and then throughout the focus groups the conversation that it's a research-rich district and so it's really about how do we use those resources to lift all kids up regarding equity many talked about the books that were provided by the district that

039had a diverse range of authors and subject matter across identities teachers shared the work that the district has done in supporting students with disabilities and moving towards more inclusive practices and then just the clubs and opportunities but again you saw colleen's data that um looking at who has access and who does not and then just um students and so i left this in here because student share teachers are doing a good job we have a lot of good teachers that are super helpful yet they want to have kids figure out problems on their own i mean that was a quote from a student but it's helpful in the long run other students shared that teachers allow for breaks if we need it teachers are really nice that's good um and they really like the shortened

040day on wednesday it was a nice rest day that made you all want to know that at any rate um so the interviews we then go through them and we code them and we go through and first list and take all the interview notes hundreds and hundreds of pages of interview notes and go through and look at themes so the four major themes are district leadership identity relevance student service programs and then instruction curriculum and then as you can see under the themes the report is put together really focusing on the sub-themes so mission and vision family involvement district culture structure and diverse hiring under district leadership identity relevant identity development for all staff just the professional development di committee conversations professional development across the board not just around identity but special ed programs and

041inclusion certainly mtss i'm really looking at two and two three so as queen said it came up in the focus groups section 504 the outside evaluations what we talked about linguistically diverse advanced learners and then under instruction you'll see identity relevant frequent instruction tracking teach collaboration alignment and behavior um so then we took that information and really tried to put it into a framework that really focuses on high quality teaching and learning for all kids i mean that's that's what equity is right in the end it's high quality teaching and learning for all students absent any experiences of my generalization either by perception or by structures or by instruction and curriculum or what our policies and funding look like so we leveraged it all in that direction which aligns to your mission and vision and

042then you can see under the framework of different areas that we focused on and then we put your essential next steps under those so i am not going to read all these essential next steps i did put it in the executive summary but um but i am just going to quickly talk through them and keeping an eye on the time well first of all it was clear during the focus groups that there was inconsistency of why we're doing what we're doing so um so should kids with disabilities be included and why is that happening what does it mean for pull-out services are we not supposed to pull out kids that are eligible for tier two and tier three and really we think it's important that they know the history of marginalization through education how how

043you know over 400 years and schools of public schools have been in this country since i think it's um sixteen or something like that so 1632 but so really thinking about how have schools evolved and um two main focuses of our history of education is the fact that we typically blame and label kids and families we see them as needing help versus the system and so our report really is steeped in systemic change within the system and then the second thing that happens is the more diverse our schools become the more we respond with segregated practices or ability grouping right and then that results in lack of access and that's been a history that's covered over 380 years and so it's important to know that so that we don't go backwards right um so we

044thought starting out with that um language matters how we perceive kids matter and so just as far as really understanding that um that how we talk defines how we think and we're recommending that the district really work on shifting from deficit-based language to asset-based language and how we refer to students and families and using person-first language they're not iep kids or students with disabilities some of that because it it also helps us in having higher expectations of all our learners and then we go into identity development and the district has engaged in work around identity development we're just recommending that you continue that work that it's ongoing the more that we offer that kind of support not just in large group but what does it mean authentically within the different schools how do groups of

045teachers keep it going what book clubs are available how are we learning across identities of race and language and social economic and ability sexuality and gender so keeping that going but also making it very authentic to the building level and then applying the equity research there was confusion around um especially on the conversation of inclusion that teachers want to be inclusive but what does that mean and what does the research say about it and including kids with disabilities but removing kids for tier two and tier three gives mixed messages so really spending time on what does best practice really say ability grouping according to john hattie's research has no impact on student achievement co-teaching has little to no impact on student achievement right and so it's an and he's done certainly one of the most

046the broadest types of research available then we go into recommending principles of excellence and um this is really important because it's it's seven or eight principles that actually operationalize equity they're often defined by the inverse of current practices that aren't effective right and so what's the inverse of that and then moving to principles that help us operationalize equity and there are examples in the report of those as clean said doing that equity audit it's true it's absolutely beautifully done danielle thank you and we would recommend that that continue this is and i was a director of student services for 13 years and i have to say this phenomena happen to me as well but really looking at district office as a structure and how do we model what we want to see in the schools

047and sometimes district office we ask our schools to do things like inclusion of kids with disabilities and kids without but we're actually not modeling that within our district office so we're asking that teaching learning and innovation and student services really figure out what ways they can overlap and work together to actually is in a very symbolic way but a very practical way model what we want to see in the schools um the assistant there's there's a lot there's lots of there is a significant amount of layering in special education and as far as oversight so just the question of the role of the assistant principal as oversight for special education for your size of districts seemed questionable and so you know the question is really do you dissolve that role or how can it proactively

048better support all learners i think would be an important conversation to have and then we also staff talked about the need for monthly meetings across the district k-8 in specific areas like speech and language etc in order to actually implement more individualized services for all kids there has to be a really clear structure of how teachers function so we did recommend and go into more detail co-planned conservative learning teams but really strong collaborative teams we put together tables that really aligned um staff there are plenty of staff you are well staffed um and sometimes i wonder that but that that so some of the focus groups um people did not feel like you were well staffed and thought we we you needed more additional additional staff that often happens in a system that actually hasn't

049completely restructured themselves in a proactive way and so teachers have one leg and kind of this deficit based system of reacting to and seeing the child as the hiccup versus the system and so we're recommending that at by grade levels teachers form collaborative teams um we know that again john hattie's work research on teacher efficacy and collaboration has the greatest impact on student achievement and then kids don't have to go someplace else so when kids go someplace else for 90 minutes a week and teachers could actually collaborate kids could get all that individualized support embedded in the core curriculum again you know seven hours a day five days a week so we go into a little more detail here of realigning staff you'll notice um colleen did the proportional representation uh grid throughout all the

050tables and really looking at if there's a specific amount of kids in proportional representation really looks at what percentage of kids with disabilities are in every classroom under educational identifiers kids with a yellow kids in tier two and tier three and that they're they're proportionally represented across all classrooms versus the 70 30 rule which ends up being more clustering teachers and it also ends up being volunteer of what gen ed teachers will take what students and so equity is a diverse classroom and that all kids have access to a diverse classroom because the research is very clear that the more diverse our spaces are the more all of us learn and so that it would be clustered into one area or another being cognizant at the time this all leads into identity relevant teaching and

051learning for all kids so when when schools have c3 teams the identity relevant professional development has continued they can use those teams to proactively support all kids you know part of your principles of excellence would list it this would list collaborative teams for teachers by grade level and then they can they can really design identity relevant teaching and learning for each and every learner using their individualized service plans as well and so we go into that and then also just the conversation of the books have been great other staff talked about um really looking at the actual content within the classrooms and the resources that were available and so really looking at what also is being used within the classrooms and then relative to identities um just looking at the people non-discrimination law uh and

052then social emotional came up it came up at the board level came up in the focus groups and you know we do want to say the more proactive a system is the more teachers work together to proactively serve all kids the more kids social emotional needs are met the more kids are navigating a structure that actually is focused on a core and it feels like they're always trying to get into that core and some are and some aren't actually ends up being pretty traumatic for kids right when kids receive stereotype threats it's traumatic and so um we do believe in the social emotional curriculum and how and it's useful and we know the district is going through an evaluation with that and so certainly that is important um but also just doing social emotional without

053thinking about realigning uh to collaborative teacher teams to proactively serve all kids or individualized service plans won't solve all the problems right but kids have high expectations and they're stressed right we are bad right um and anxious and so um we also believe that the collaborative teams will help with that the kids will feel more comfortable and confident knowing that they have the rap they have a range of teachers that that are wrapped around them to support them and then we go into hr there was a significant amount of conversations of representation we believe this starts from posting positions and can lean into your principles of excellence or equity equity non-negotiables is just thinking about um the more equitable the district is the more the language is used of of who you want to be

054and how you want to function the more your postings and interview questions actually attract a different range of diff a more diverse group of people because that they can see themselves in the district so i we do believe it's important that um being able to align position descriptions and interview questions to equity principles will actually help attract more or a more diverse staffing pattern for the district again then going into funding policing procedures we did not do a funding analysis um the only conversation that occurred within the focus groups was research um just how well off the district was as far as resources um but resources used in a in a kind of reactive manner end up being band-aids that actually don't provide kind of the proactive meat support that knocks it out of the

055park and then policies and procedures really aligning those so that they're leveraging all the work forward we did align some of our essential next steps also with some of the illinois wrecks that are for higher ed teacher ed programs and administrative licensing programs that are all around equity they're embedded in the report um and there are they're absolutely beautiful but if if teachers and administrators are coming out of universities and colleges in the state of illinois with those expected skills it makes sense that the district knows what those are you'll see an attachment to the report as well they completely align with our recommendations within the report um and and that gives the district the opportunity to really build the capacity of the current staff knowing that you're going to be hiring people that are

056coming out with requirements of being identity relevant and requirements of functioning in collaborative teams and requirements of being able to use their knowledge of identity relevant across identities and intersections to apply instructionally and in curriculum um because the point is there's not an educator out there where there's not a curriculum out there that's going to be identity relevant for all kids across all identities in their intersections if the teacher isn't identity relevant themselves and so working on it at a personal level and then through those collaborative teams will lift up all staff and lift up all kids and so we'll okay nine minutes which i'm sure it's more like seven we'll open this up and i'll stop sharing but open this up to questions um i have a question and hopefully it'll be a quick

057one we have a dei committee as a district and i know it was brought up a few times in the equity report do you have a recommendation for next steps for the dei committee that would be tangible for our district well so clean might have a recommendation as well but for one thing i'm a little concerned about a dei committee that is not completely inclusive of all staff and all administrators a couple reasons why because then the expectation is that team is in charge of equity and the truth is every single every single employee in deerfield is is responsible for equity but the dei committee can be that advisory committee and support committee in a really healthy way so reading the report and really understanding that and how they can take their role and support

058the work of the district but the essential next steps were written for district leadership and school leadership to actually own and be responsible for the work of equity let's have a quick question so i love data right we were we had our 4-4-0 committee meeting and now we have this so we have data being thrown at us the right and left this is a question for the administration you have this report and there's so much information in it but in the end there's so much resources to go around so do you work with the administration to come up with the top three priorities you can't tackle everything all at once everything's a priority but we have to how do we decide what's next i'll i'll take that one i i'm not sure if it was

059directed towards me or towards dr capper and fetura but i think it is the administration's next job is to read the report very carefully clarify some things uh one of the quotes that sticks with me is in order to be effective we must be vastly indifferent to a great many worthwhile opportunities and if everything is a priority nothing is a priority and so you have to no matter what organization you run you have to do a triage and say these are the areas of greatest need of greatest focus that's part of the work over the summer for the administration and doing the strategic plan i will take the data from our 440 meeting and from this uh and then i think we'll without any question we'll probably be calling uh doctors uh capper and future

060again to say okay so if you were going to tackle three things what would it be first they've done a nice job of saying there is some foundational work that you have to do uh professional development from for the board for the administration for the staff is one of those foundational things but that's that's the next thing for us to do is to figure out what's our one-year plan our three-year plan our five-year plan anyone else i won't ask any more questions i know we're out of time i just wanted to thank you guys um i know mr simek sent us the report and said you know meetings tomorrow you're probably not gonna have time to read it i read every single page i thought it was fascinating i thought it was so well summarized

061and put together the data was very accessible so i just want to thank you for how user-friendly it was thank you and kelly stole my thunder i wanted to thank you also although i admit that i did not read every word of it yet because there's just so much there to unpack and my daughter graduated last night so [Laughter] so i look forward to reading every single word and digesting it all and and unpacking it so i really want to thank you both for the incredibly detailed um and the depth of work that you did on this report and i know that it's going to provide a lot of um good information and recommendations for us moving forward so thank you very much thank you very much we want to thank everyone um we really

062appreciate the opportunity and we know how wonderful you are and how wonderful you can be too so thank you thank you for the opportunity thank you okay the next item on our agenda is open community participation we welcome your comments and questions on all matters if you wish to comment please fill out a community participation forum located on the counter in the kitchenette area or at the front reception desk you can give those to rebecca rudd sitting here to my left at the end of the table and we'll call you up one at a time to the podium to speak please limit the length of all comments to no more than two minutes and for anybody who just joined us this is a community participation period for the committee of the whole meeting we will

063have our regular uh two opportunities for community participation in the regular meeting which is starting in about three minutes okay no community participation at this time board superintendent other hearing none can i have a motion to adjourn second all in favor all right we are adjourned at 6 57. thank you is all right evening everyone this is the may 26 2022 board of education regular meeting for deerfield public schools district 109 uh we'll call the a live broadcast of the meeting and streaming on the district 109 website and the recording will be posted there as well we'll call the meeting to order at 702. can i have a motion to approve the meeting's agenda second all in favor and the first item on our agenda is what's good in 109 all right thank you and

064so what we're going to do is a little bit of a whip around the district and then i'm going to hand off to mrs arnold and uh she's gonna take us through the rest of the the the star-studded show with the kids you guys are the stars of the show best part of every board meeting is having you guys here best part of the job for me is from that seat over there i get to see all the moms and dads faces and that is like the best thing ever you have a very distinguished audience here as well not only you get to speak for the board and the entire community but we just for you brought in congressman schneider okay uh the resident of the district and also spent time at kipling this week

065so we're thrilled to have congressman schneider here and he's going to speak later on the agenda but you guys come first okay so we have our priorities straighter on here all right so what's good in 109 for may uh usually mr steckling does this he's at home with his newborn william patrick also known as liam and he's a little guy who's got three kids under five at home so he has no time left over okay so across our district our newest students visited their schools with their families for kindergarten roundup principals teachers families and incoming kindergartners had a great time and learned a lot so at kipling at the k2 art show it was back this year may 19th our artists celebrated uh with uh with each other and had an open house and then

066excitedly packed up their artwork this week to take it home uh may 10th at south park we had five students that joined mrs zhang as guest librarians during the afternoon these students qualified for this experience by reading a thousand minutes or more during the recent read-a-thon fundraiser they helped check in and then shelve books they read stories to early learners classes those littlest kids in the district they set up a book display they cared for our library butterflies which i didn't know that we had so i need to go check that out and more helpful tasks in the south park learning commons as well early learners are enjoying the abc countdown last week the kids got to wear their pajamas to school and spent extra time outside playing learning and listening to stories the certain

067students also really love getting to learn some essential signs in american sign language to help them navigate a quiet day at walden last week was the philanthropy fair it was a huge success with students selling their own creations to raise money for the bounce foundation and on friday commander horsteen and officer carner joined school resource officer maldonado maldonado and principal stringer and assistant principal berwick for donuts and bagels all health food hosted by the pto the team of uh of first year destination imagination the competitors took third place at globals is a very big deal around here all right mr steckling there's love in the room for destination imagination if you're watching the state track meet stars we want to congratulate audrey and jamie on qualifying for the 2022 iesa state track meet both will

068be headed to peoria to compete against their peers from around the state of illinois audrey will run the 400 meter race and jamie will compete in the mile run first friday's open mic crew from may 6 for the final open mic uh for the school year also took place and then at caruso we had seventh graders had a big surprise for their kindergarten buddies at wilmot the middle schoolers surprised the little kids for project kinder monsters middle school students collaborated with their kindergarteners to imagine and draw a monster three weeks prior then the seventh graders handcrafted the drawing into a stuffed animal version to bring their imagined monsters to life see the dps109 youtube channel for the full story what a cool idea and so tonight's featured school is wilmot elementary okay [Applause] and i

069would like to introduce uh danielle arnold to present i am going to be super quick because i'm going to turn it over to our staff but i got selected to introduce that team because i have the good fortune of often being approached by talented educators in deerfield 109 with an idea or a brainstorm that could be really good for our students and my job often allows me the opportunity to collaborate with them by saying absolutely yes let's do it and so that that is my only part in this is getting to give them permission to inspire kids in the way they have this year and so i'm really proud to introduce that team which includes tracy hoyt instructional coach priscilla sims the steam teacher at wilmot maria golonis our innovation specialist in deerfield 109 and

070stephanie bean the assistant principal at wilmot elementary school well thank you so much for having us danielle did part of my introduction but i am stephanie bean the assistant principal at wilmot and dr brett wishes she could be her her daughter is graduating from eighth grade today so i also get to say yes to great ideas that happen at wilmot so we're like yes oh let's ask danielle so it's a nice job to have so we are honored to present a team of staff and students to share about the innovative coding program that our fifth graders piloted for the district the project represents a collaboration between wilmot steam teacher our instructional coach and the district's innovation curriculum specialist also fifth grade students as well as our broader community including students from highland park high school

071and jonathan whelan illinois coordinator from first robotics interestingly this project is a perfect reflection of dps's new mission touching on the three c's where challenging experiences foster confidence collaborative relationships build community and creative environments ignite curiosity we want to thank our thank our mentor team state champions rest in peace for bringing this idea to wilmot and now let's hear from this wonderful team i would like to introduce tracy hoyt [Applause] so in district 109 we are always looking for ways to evolve and improve upon our instruction and learning this could be tricky in the stem arena due to the quickly changing nature of the discipline as educators we know the importance of programming skills critical thinking and problem solving for our students futures we are always on the lookout for new engaging ideas to facilitate

072these organically with students i'm going to give a quick background on how this project came to be at 109. my son jacob hoyt is a junior at highland park high school and is captain of his robotics team robotics teams are affiliated with an organization called first which stands for for inspiration and recognition of science and technology first is a non-for-profit that is supported by companies such as disney qualcomm nasa and other technology giants each season first has a huge reveal of the challenge game of the year and that starts the team off on their competitive season earlier this year jacob and his team were asked to participate in a think tank for a virtual video game-like version of the robotics challenge from last year named vrs or the virtual robot simulator they were asked to

073set up this video game version as a booth at some of their robotics tournaments for spectators to try out based on the engagement of the young children witnessed by the team the idea for the vrs coding unit was born rest in peace felt that school systems could use this free tool as a vehicle for teaching elementary age students coding critical thinking and problem solving in an authentic arena mixed with a little friendly classroom competition additionally they believe there was a tremendous need to expose all students to the possibility of joining a robotics team in their future the same way kids are exposed to playing basketball dancing and soccer in hopes of joining the high school team later in life robotics is referred to as the sport of the mind and early exposure to this type

074of team deserves the same attention i would like to introduce jacob hoyt after after several meetings with the virtual robot simulator developers my mom and maria gallanis rest in peace created a seven-week unit that was pre that was piloted at wilmot in fifth grade steam classes our 15-lesson video curriculum was enhanced by rust and peace members teaching in person welcoming students into the world of engineering and software development using the first competition platform additionally students documented their learning questions and reflections in their engineering notebooks the unit ended with an awards assembly where each class's winner competed for the title of school champion awards were given to outstanding engineering notebooks winning autonomous programs and the best reflection videos similar to actual first robotics tournaments i would like to introduce priscilla sims who was the steam teacher

075that led this project with the students all right together with jacob tracy and maria we were able to create a scope and sequence of lessons and plan out the best way to make this work in the steam class we knew this was very advanced material and we needed to ensure that skills were scaffolded in a way that fifth graders could find success i would like to introduce zoe and jesse who will explain what the students did each day [Applause] at the start of the unit we were put into teams of two to three kids and were asked to come up with a name for our team each day miss sims would put on a video in the front of the room the video would be of a rest in peace team member who would teach

076us a few of new coding skills each day in the videos the team shared about the first robotics organization and what is involved on being on a robotics team finally we were taught a new skill that was part of the vrs and watched the high school kids demonstrate what we would be doing and how to do it then miss sims shared the video of us and it was our turn to try it out the high school kids kids kept reminding us throughout the video that this was really hard work and we would often get frustrated but that's okay and they were right when we are stuck one team member could pull up the video and guide the others through on how to do the task we are able to figure out and find success i

077would like to introduce david and sydney [Applause] once we were on the vrs platform we were first given a day to use video game remote controls to understand how to play the game and what the goal was using remote controls is called teleop and it means it is controlled by a person next we had to program the robot to play the game without using any remote control and instead read the code we created that was really hard we had to try and fail over and over in order to get the robot to move exactly where it needed to go in order to score points we had to learn about how motors and actuators work this was really tricky but in the end we were able to code the robot to score points and drive around

078the virtual field besides programming we also kept our own engineering notebook which is an important part of robotics an engineering notebook and then we would reflect on what we did that day in journal about what was hard and how we tried to figure it out we would write questions we wanted to ask the team when we talk to them next i would like to introduce sasha and elin [Applause] an interesting part of being on a first robotics team is that there are lots of different roles that are needed and it isn't just for kids that like to code or use computers some other roles on the team are builders designers outreach fundraising journaling and drawing in fact some of the team members never touch a computer or the robot during the unit we learned about

079one of the most important parts of being on a first robotics team that is something called gracious professionalism this is understanding that each person on the team is equally important and there is an expectation to help others on the team and players on the other teams too this made us how other teams is our class then we're stuck and suddenly we figure out something new again disaster [Applause] at the end of the vrs unit it's time to celebrate all the new skills learned and crowned a wilmot school vrs champion on the day of the assembly the fifth grade gathered in the gym where the entire rest and peace team is waiting rest in peace set up a robotics field and demonstrated how the real robot competed in tournaments they showed us the different attributes of

080the robot such as how the robot would intake blocks and balls next we watched their autonomous run finally they demonstrated the teleop portion of the game where the team used remote controls to move the robot to score the most points possible all the things the team showed us for exactly what we did in the virtual version we were using vrs i now like to introduce justin after the robot demonstration it was time to give some awards to us fifth graders awards were given to each classroom champion then those four winners competed against each other to see who would have the highest score and be named the wilmot champion our entire grade trade for their classroom and friends my team team beast had the highest score of 185 points and became the wilmot champions in fact

081we set a new world record for the highest vrs score ever there were also awards given to the best engineering notebooks from each class and the best reflection videos about the vrss unit the videos will now be shared with the fourth grade is to get them excited about the special fifth grade project now i would like to show you a video of my code and the world record setting anonymous wrong [Applause] one minute there we go somebody tell us what's going on here do you want to explain justin explain narrate it for so what the robot's doing is it's collecting rings as you can see when it's backing into the piles of rings and then it's shooting it out onto those small like sticks that are new points and then the cones in the blue

082squares can also earn you points and how did you make it get to those different places in order to score the point uh i just use code blocks to move the motors and then those motors would move the wheels to make it go in to the right place to shoot the rings what are we seeing on the left of the screen explain what the left side is the left was my uh entire line of code so each of those lines is a different portion that he put together in order to enable the little robot to go in all those different places and it's it's very intricate and if you wanted to move forward or backward how many seconds how many deals turn and they would have to play around with different values to change those

083in order to have it in the exact right spot to shoot into the hole in order to score the most points so it was very very challenging but they did an incredible job how much of this did you know when you started not much so lots of trial and error then yeah okay and on the right hand side what you were seeing was the the virtual part but in real life when the you know high schoolers did it that's that's the real life field they build the robot and they got to experience it all virtually so uh we believe this experience gave our students exposure to coding and programming while exposing them to the fun of participating on a robotics team and inspire them to explore robotics in the future since having the wilmot pilot

084we're excited that all the 109 elementary schools are using the unit this year with the fifth grade students and additionally we plan on using the new updated unit with the new incoming fifth graders in the fall in the upcoming school year okay our teams our team's long-term goal was to bring this free vrs unit to underprivileged schools many of which lack any access to stem or engineering classes we are excited that after observing our unit at wilmot chicago public schools is adopting this unit next year additionally i'm traveling to washington dc this summer to talk to congress about the importance of funding engineering opportunities in schools for every student regard thank you for giving rest and peace the opportunity to pilot at wilmot and thank you dps109 for collaborating and innovating with my team [Applause]

085questions or should i just fire away here all right so tracy if you would so one of the really great things uh tracy is not only figuratively proud mom to all these kids but she got literally one of her kids here as well so we have uh certificates zoe it's so good to see you again saw you at an earlier thing uh for each of the kids and students you guys really really did a nice job i mean we got the we got the slide deck with 63 slides like oh no right but you moved it along you're really well prepared really well spoken answered questions uh in the middle of it so very very well done and congratulations to you and maria and and just really superbly presented so not easy to do so

086thank you i i have a quick question i echo everything mr simmick said it was an amazing presentation i just want to see a show of hands of how many of you uh who did this pilot program are going to do uh try to do the robotics team in high teacher and school we made a pre-assessment and a post-assessment of uh before we started and it was really interesting to see kids having any exposure knowing what this was about and then after the experience how things changed for them and i think that was a really important part for us to sort of see it being meaningful and knowing that it has an impact on them and that there are things that we need to do as educators to ensure that those sorts of things are

087available for them moving forward can i ask a really quick question and i'll do the hand raising thing too that was very effective so how many of you guys experienced failure during this okay awesome and after you had that moment of failure were you getting tons and tons of help from teachers or did you guys have to problem solve with each other maybe with the robotics leaders on how to fix it you have you by yourself with your teammates so do you guys think that having the failures was terrible and awful and it made you want to quit the program or do you think it was actually a really cool part of the process what do you guys think do you want to say real quick when you failed it sort of made you want

088to try again and once you got that once you got everything right that you failed in the beginning it makes you feel proud of yourself and that you accomplished something so it makes you want to go further because you want to keep having that feeling of accomplishment you should write a book alright that was amazing i just want to give a shout out though to the high school students because they modeled that so much for them i walked in one day to a video jacob that was playing a view and you guys were sharing your own experience and i remember directly the quote that you made relative to that which was which was this is really hard you are going to try again and again and not be successful keep going [Applause] oh great kids

089if you wouldn't mind coming and joining us up here i almost forgot the picture okay that's a picture [Applause] all right you are all welcome to stay for the balance of the meeting but you're not required to okay so thank you great job really well done [Music] thank you very much it's an amazing program well tonight it's a congressman [Laughter] all right we're just going to give everyone a minute to uh to to leave apparently no one wants to stay for the rest of the meeting we'll be back in just a moment um but i will say just as a follow-up to that i thought that your question kelly was great about failure and how you felt when you were able when they were over able to overcome the failure because that's something that we

090heard a lot in the feedback in our strategic or in our mission and vision work was a quality that we really wanted to instill and our constituents really wanted us to instill in in our students was that resilience and grit and we we worked really hard to get those concepts into the mission and vision without using the word failure so it's great to see that in action i have a quick question about that mike do you know if that was program was if that was done during the school day or was it after school before during school when what period of time where did that come from where did that time period they have they have a stem or a steam block that is included in their special schedule at the elementary school thank you

091so that's where they must be out there that would be awkward we've lost our congressmen you are coming back good i thought it was done all right i'm back the the next item on our agenda is a legislative update and we are fortunate to have with us tonight uh congressman brad schneider who's going to talk to us about all the updates in legislative what's going on in education in the legislature so thank you very much for coming did you want to add anything i'm just so pleased and proud to have uh congressman schneider years resident of the district proud dad in the district and i've one of the things that constantly impresses me about you congressman schneider is that you are just so available we've met any number of times in dc and you remember

092people's names you come to our schools and we're just so fortunate to have you in the district and so pleased to have you speak with us here tonight well thank you it's it's a privilege to be here i want to thank you for having me go after those extraordinary young people and them speak uh their their remarks were um really uh extraordinary uh and congratulations to uh the struggling family you said the baby's name is william and uh that's uh that's pretty cool and it took me a second by the way to realize that rest in peace was a name of a program not a person as i kept looking for uh um rustin and i'm gonna reflect on that program for a second um before you go into more serious deeper stuff i'm partly

093feeling feeling old because i realized that when i was in 5th 6th grade i was in a computer program and then i realized looking around the room i can say not only was it before these kids were born it was before many of their parents were born it was a long time ago but we had an olive eddie underwood underwood teletype machine in the janitor's closet of the school slavin's elementary school in denver and i was a group of selected i think there were five or six of us who got to use this computer i remember mr carpenter was the teacher and he told us that there was a it was olivity underwood that there was a little italian guy inside who was actually doing all the typing that's the first thing i remember about

094it but we were coding to do basic math addition and subtraction and learning how to do that and you would type it in and you'd see hit the thing and it would do on the paper and it would work and i'll get excited obviously what we're seeing these young people do today is literally light years ahead of what i did 50 years ago but the lessons are the same you asked the question about failure and they talked about it it's hard and i can't tell you how many times i think about not just mr carpenter and this is to the teachers that the impact you have on the students last them literally a full lifetime but being a part of they didn't use the word stem them but being a part of that program had

095a significant influence on me to then go and study engineering in college and stay focused on sciences in my adult life and as a representative i'm very proud we have a program called steam scholars and i talked to jacob he's too old we select sophomores and juniors from local schools and we take them to various places around the district our most recent visit was to ravinia um backstage and the amount of science that goes into putting on a show at raviniya it is the audio and it used to be i mean if you remember growing up you would have the echo hello hello hello they now rather than projecting sound literally drops sound onto people where they're sitting and it's remarkable but it's also the lights and the staging these kids were just blown away

096by it now they're they're very smart kids but they're not all-knowing we went through if you have a chance to go see the music box uh thing at vinnie i think they built this disney style experience that is really wonderful i highly recommend it but after we did that we went in and they have an exhibit a beatles exhibit and when the guy asked him who's heard of the beatles not a single one of these kids had heard of the beatles so they still got a lot to learn but not the who the beatles the um let me get uh serious for a moment i said this earlier and i apologize for repeating myself if you were at the village hall steps tuesday was a dark day and it was a really hard day for

097any educator now it was particularly hard for me because tuesday at two o'clock i was right here at kipling reading to mrs buckingham's or miss buckingham's fourth grade class third grade class um sat and spoke with these kids and i should be wearing my jacket i mentioned this earlier these kids were extraordinary and you saw an example of what our kids are like here in fifth grade so in third grade and these this is the end of third grade so they're uh nine years old but i wear on my lapel uh flag pin u.s and ukrainian flag i've been wearing it since february and they had hundreds of questions they're just rapid question after question and someone asked about the the pen why and they recognized it was a ukrainian flag they said why and

098i explained why and we talked about that for a little bit and asked what laws i had passed we talked about that for a little bit but this is what made me really proud of these kids in our community um as i got up to leave these nine-year-old kids looked me in the eye with utter sincerity and said thank you for standing up for ukraine we teach our you all teach our kids to have compassion beyond the confines of their self their classroom their community they understand what's at stake which is really remarkable and you're going to speak after me right you see it as it goes with their kids they get older i'm not going to take away her thunder but as i came out of the classroom is when i got the news

099about the shooting at rob elementary school and this was a fourth grade class one year older than the kids i was talking to kids the oldest one's 11 the youngest one's nine two teachers if you haven't seen the news today one of the teachers her husband in his grief had a fatal heart attack leaving four kids um the work you all do as leaders stepping up and thank you for stepping up to responsibility for educating our kids i think it back what it was like 50 years ago i wandered down the around the halls of slaven's elementary school i walked down to the um again it was the janitor's closet to uh explore the possibilities of that olivetter olivetti underwood teletype machine that i envisioned was going to give me the skills to send someone

100to the moon and you guys are dealing with kids who are taking on real real real world problems unlike anything i ever experienced and we have to do better and i know we can do better and the burden really falls on the institution where i work congress congress has to do more so let me touch on that a little bit in some of the legislation i'll start first talking about keeping our kids safe in the house assuming you went to schools as good as district 109 schools you know there are two sides the house and the senate in the house we've passed a bipartisan bill for universal background checks we've passed legislation um that would ban ghost guns a bill i helped introduce we've done quite a bit to try to keep our communities including

101our schools safer problem is in the senate and the way the senate is structured and in the last congress or two congresses no it was the last congress when mitch mcconnell was the majority leader he celebrated the fact that the senate was where bills go to die he actually had a display you may have seen the graveyard we've got to get our congress working so that it is doing the work of the people and standing up to special interests and saying ninety percent of americans believe in in sensible uh laws that can keep our community safer such as universal background checks let's get that done and i'll continue to do that um we've been working on these issues for a long time i was elected actually right before and took office right after the sandy

102hook tragedy one of the pieces of legislation that i'm proud made its way through and ultimately did get in this case the president of president trump's desk for signature is legislation that puts it's a pilot program at this point but puts the emergency button in teachers in the classroom under the teacher's desk and the inspiration for that was when the capitol police came into my office and put it if you come and visit me in my office i'll greet you i'll be very kind and i'll say but don't sit there because at the end of the table there's a button that i'm just petrified in my nervousness i'm gonna accidentally set off but it's a panic button it's a button that says get here right away in my case it's there mostly for security but

103if you think think about a classroom yes it could be for something like what we saw on tuesday but it could be because there is a kid having an anaphylactic reaction to a food or a someone sees a tornado off in the distance and time matters and if a teacher can hit that button and say not just get to this school but get to this classroom in the school that can save lives sounds like a simple thing but as you know school budgets are constrained and any assistance we can provide for putting those in and giving those resources make a difference assistance for security cameras for hardening the security of a school whether it's that doorbell video button before someone actually can get into school i don't know what was in the system at rob

104elementary school but i have seen the video of of the shooter just kind of walked in the door i can't i don't know if it was a front door or a back door but it's devastating so those are some of the things that we've been working on um but we also need to and i'm committed to making sure that we're investing in educating our kids for the skills and lessons they need to succeed in life what we got to see here tonight that uh presentation of uh rust and peace and the robotics um steam program and i love that they're calling it steam as well those weren't just technology skills those were life skills and what you saw they described it it's some people may never even touch the computers to do the coding there's

105fundraising aspects of it there's marketing aspects of it they're running a business but it's the success and failure i wanted to jump up and said thomas edison tried to create a light bulb ten thousand times before he uh got one that actually worked and he said he didn't fail ten thousand times i learned ten thousand ways not to make a light bulb those are the lessons that these kids are learning and that we need so that um they'll be the ones that secure the future so um it's just it's an honor to be here and i'm happy to take any questions i know i kind of rambled uh but there's a lot to talk about and hi ryan let me for say ryan's on my academy uh selection committee and so he does more than

106just school board and one of the i get to talk to young students all the time uh one of the best things i get to do is talk to these seniors who decided they want to apply to the military academies of which there are five army navy air force coast guard and merchant marine and these kids every single one of them are remarkable so thank you i have a question sure did the has the house passed an assault weapons ban no and yes and no 90s there wasn't yeah i know that was signed and then it expired right like in 2000 or something 2004 i think okay so and what's the status of getting the house to pass that um probably slimming nil unfortunately uh i think you can talk about our levels we saw

107what happened here in deerfield and in highland park the gun lobby is very influential far more influential than the support they have in the public as i said 90 support universal background checks and i won't move in the senate um the arguments on on the assault weapons is it's hard to define what's an assault weapon it's hard to you've heard all those arguments and what are we going to do with the hundreds of thousands of if not millions of assault weapons already in people's homes so the the first thing i would hope to do is say all right let's find a compromise and ban the future sell of assault weapons but i guess what i'm wondering is look i know nothing right i'm a school boy right but if i was in congress and i

108believed in that which i'm assuming you do yep it would seem to me that under this the current scenario in and it's so tragic what's been happening that we have to change something like i i feel like i would you know stay on the house floor and hold the floor 24 hour 7 not sleep i would go on a hunger strike i would chain myself to something i would call out that the nra is financed by the gun manufacturers i would call them out by names i would do something significant to change what's going on and draw attention to it because otherwise we're going to be just keep going in circles yeah like you're up i mean you're there go do like something dramatic you're you're right couple thoughts um first on the dramatic we

109actually had a meeting on part of a gun violence prevention task force that was put in place in 2013 after sandy hook and we had an emergency zoom call yesterday and we were saying what kind of things can we do to draw that because in 2000 and either uh 15 or 16 um if you remember i i won i lost and so i i had what i call my sabbatical on my sabbatical um john lewis let us sit in and i remember in my kitchen watching that literally crying and wishing i i was there i will as an aside i now sit in the office john lewis used to sit in so i do feel his presence um so i think you're going to see some of that um more emphatic statements right and i

110it's not drama it's statements but that's not that what it's not what makes makes laws and i'll share with you another story that's just a reflection of the challenge and my own personal frustration in 2017 with senator durbin i introduced something called the domestic terrorism prevention act uh it doesn't create a new statute moving forward um it didn't go anywhere in in 2017 so we reintroduced it again in 2019 um made some refinements worked to create bipartisan and in september of my bill passed the house on a voice vote you guys know what a voice vote is so i want you guys to do it here right so good go over to the senate uh we were hoping it would get unanimous consent in the senate and ron johnson a friend just to the north

111blocked it so we got to start over i was all right we'll introduce it again in january well january had a little blip we had the attack on the capitol january 6 but i said i'm still going to move forward and on january 19 2021 i introduced the bill again with three democrats three republicans as my co-sponsor so bipartisan we were going to build build it up and and move it should have been fairly straightforward um it hasn't been so the plan was to bring into the floor last month for a vote and we had problems with some of the people on the far left who had a misunderstanding we dealt with that we got resolved after the buffalo shooting i reached out to the speaker speaker pelosi and said we've got to move this

112and she called me sunday night so the shooting was on saturday she called me back sunday night said we're going to move it this week and so last week we did and i was calling my republican friends i was talking to the three co-sponsors we had grown to 207 co-sponsors the problem was it was 204 democrats only three republicans long story less long when we voted on thursday the three republicans who were co-sponsored voted against it along with every other republican the only republican who voted for it was adam kinziger what happened same bill what happened is the politics of the country right now we are so divided that things we agreed on just two years ago we can't agree on today um and we're talking about night and day it doesn't create any new

113definitions there's no new statutes no new penalties all this bill does is creates offices in the fbi department of justice home and departments of homeland security empowers those departments to work with each other on what they're doing to identify threats track those threats and intervene before they become actual incidents and report back to congress twice a year so we're doing our oversight today um it was blocked in the senate that it passed in the house went to the senate today on a 47-47 vote you need 60 to break the filibuster it died so you know i'm not giving up we'll keep trying we'll keep pushing maybe there's a path this year if not we'll keep doing it next year like i said i don't you know i'm only one person and i don't want to

114take up all that but if it were me trust me i would be doing something that would be momentous it would be very visible because children's lives right are affected by it and i i don't know what it would be yet but it would be something that um the country would know that the seriousness with which it is important i i appreciate i hear you and you know think things that were discussed you know of giving floor speeches while we do that i've done that the first speech i ever gave as a member of congress was about gun violence in 2013. uh you know marching to the senate side and doing a sit-in on the senate side their thing but the fact of the matter is until we can get enough republicans to join with

115democrats to pass legislation is that good and this shouldn't be a partisan issue all right can i have one question over here sir it's good good to see you again and um yes i came from more of the practical side in the question of you know i get that there's a split you know within the country in terms of what we can agree on what we can't but there's some practical things that you know it's come up even in the state of illinois in terms of for instance weapons and schools because of lack resources or distance between schools and first responders exist or at least that was some of the justification that was brought up associated with it so funding for schools related to sros nobody you know funding the police right funding sros within

116schools i think is something that could be you know something that should be supported or could be supported hardening physical security you know funding schools especially schools that can't afford it to have bullet resistance to glass secure their front door secure all their doors those types of things these are all things i think that are practical measures that i think some of the states or some of the school districts are not able to afford um that could use some support and i think some of that was done through like say the grants for you know cameras those types of things if there are you know programs that exist that could be continued or expanded or extended those types of things i think is is stuff i know the symbology associated with you know large you

117know protests or or or demonstrations i think are you know important in order to show you know values and show what we all support with kids but i think it's really you know about at this point what can be done versus what should be done is the sad part of it but you know you need both i i think if you haven't i commend you to watch steve kerr's press conference on on tuesday night um i was a fan of steve kerr when he was in college i was a bigger fan of steve kerr when he played for the bulls and we were winning those championships he's been a great coach but he stood up as an amazing citizen on tuesday night look politics is the art of the possible so you have to do

118what's possible and we can talk about all those things and they're all important ideas and by analogy it may not be the best analogy i know when my kids started driving you worry about them on the roads but the combination of things you want to make sure they always wear their seatbelt you want to make sure that they're not driving there's no distracted driving you want to make sure that the cars we have are safe so government gets involved in the ntsb and make sure that cars are built to a certain standard you want people to follow the the rules of the road and you look to the government to make sure that people who shouldn't be driving who have demonstrated they shouldn't be driving don't have a license that doesn't mean that sometimes they

119don't drive but we try to keep our roads safe we should be able to do the same common sense things keeping our schools our churches our grocery stores our communities safe and i'm part of this group called the problem solvers caucus bipartisan democrats and republicans and i may have started the conversation on the texas thread i said if ever there was a time for the problem solvers this is it and you know hopefully we're going to try to see some movement on that it looks like there's a a task force forming um i don't know this can be a task force i think it's the whole caucus is saying count me in count me in but and by the way there was i saw a tweet mitch mcconnell test john cornyn to find common ground

120with with the democrats if that is true that's a step in the right direction uh thank you for coming it's interesting we all keep talking about gun laws and gun protection and i wholeheartedly agree with that but unfortunately a lot of it comes down to mental health and the funding for mental health in our country is lacking we don't have enough people in the industry to help adults students children parents with mental health resources and so we're trying to solve the problem by the item but it's so much more and i'm wondering what can be done as a country to help with mental health because it's it's a disparity between who has and who hasn't we don't have enough resources in the nation to help people with mental health and i think we need to

121kind of also start there you know i i appreciate it i've thank you for bringing it up and thanks for the question i i'm trying very hard to keep them separate we have a problem with guns and we have a problem with cancer community and all that uh we absolutely have a problem around mental health and covet has been an exasperating component of that um you know the the folks who were young during the depression whether they were babies or they were in school were forever more known as depression babies the depression defined them i think this generation of students will forever be the govit babies and are defined by it and you guys know it better and our teachers know it but even being closer to it that the stresses and strains on our

122young people from kovid are at least as great if not greater than what their parents have gone through and are having um rippling effects throughout their lives and we're going to need to invest in in mental health services we talk about mental health parity i'm going to shift for a second we talk about mental health parity and the idea that if someone has diabetes or you know kids diagnosed with diabetes or diagnosed with asthma or a chronic disease we make sure they get the care they need and i'm still i'm in the middle of a book called healing which i highly recommend about mental health and it's still something from what the author said and i don't remember his name right now but if if a generation ago kids that i grew up with with

123diabetes parents were really concerned about that they were always checking their blood they had to prick their finger and it was a burden parents today no one wants to have a child diagnosed with diabetes but if they are diagnosed with diabetes we can manage it extremely well there are devices to you know they've got the pumps and monitors and they can deal with it it's not a good thing but they can deal with it we've invested in in making diabetes a manageable issue a kid with mental health issues hard to get them the resources they need to even get that first visit but then beyond that uh the the constraints are going to be well six visits this year and then we'll revisit it again next year where does it get diabetes you're gonna go

124to the doctor as you need it we're gonna get you to a healthy place again this is from the book the idea that we don't have a mental health system we have a mental crisis management system a mental health system means and this is i may be putting some of this back onto to the schools is we've got to work to teach not just our kids but our adults how to strive and achieve a healthy mental state and to deal with the stresses and strains of everyday life and to have the resources provide assistance when some of those strains become overwhelming or catastrophe happens and if you want to talk about catastrophe what mental health resources are going to be required to help the community of uvalde or buffalo recover from what's happened there and

125what are we willing as a nation and as states to commit to make sure that we help these families get the the care and attention that they need one of the concerns obviously is that a week from now or two weeks from now there's going to be the next story that's going to squeeze it out we can't forget the people of uvalde or buffalo or of the hundreds of shootings that have happened already this year and the kids in communities were just walking to school as a combat zone taking their life in their hand so 100 we need to be investing in that and uh i'm on the ways and means committee i'm on the health subcommittee that's something we focus on very intently i i'm part of something called the um i just forgot

126the name of it i'm having one of those senior moments but uh the the societal aspects that contribute societal contributors to health um seoh are the initials and i'll remember it when i walk out of here but uh we need to um understand what other factors contribute to health access to healthy foods grocery stores safe parks to go run and play or even just walk your dog or social determinants of health that was it i knew i remember um i want to thank you very much for your generosity with your time i also want to thank you for your work in helping through the pandemic with getting schools the sr funds to help um defray a lot of the costs that um that we incurred to make our schools a safe place for our kids

127to to come and to help our educators educate them when they couldn't be in person so thank you very much for all you do for our community and especially for your support of the schools happy to do it and our office is always here to help anything you need anything that relates to the federal government whether it's education issues but immigration veterans affairs social security medicare whatever it might be we're here to help so thank you thank you for the time um the next item on our agenda is the superintendent's report mr simic yeah that in community too many mics all right oh that's very cool [Music] i wanted to begin i don't want to share i want to do slideshow it keeps kidding share i want to begin and speak with uh great candor

128and directness about some recent events and i typically don't speak so passionately and emphatically but i certainly feel the need to do so tonight overstating my disgust for our nation's repeated school shootings would be very hard educators feel these events personally and viscerally we know that our leaders don't have our children's and staff's interest at heart it's obvious from the silence and from the phony thoughts and prayers messages we hear from too many of our nation's elected officials who will strive to wait this out and move on to the next issue which so often lately is bashing schools and undermining public schooling it is even more repulsive given the fact that in 2020 firearms became the leading cause of death among children ages 1 through 19. let that sink in for a moment more than

129car accidents or drownings or drugs or cancer or a million other things that we worry about for our children guns kill our children and the response arm teachers it's the guns folks our kids are not dying from butter knives or bicycles or balloons if latex balloons were killing our kids we would have banned latex long ago they're dying because they shoot themselves or shot by others they fish around in parents purses and discharge weapons and they're killed by accidental discharge of weapons the most trained and professional military in the world our u s armed forces require weapons to be checked upon entering bases and when returning from missions there are good reasons for doing so for me our nation's obsession with gun rights over common sense and protecting our most vulnerable citizens is also personal

130many of you know that many of my closest friends and colleagues live abroad i send them the headlines and often ask some questions such as do you have an active shooter drill requirement or do you design your schools like we do so that certain colors of carpets and elementary schools indicate children cannot be seen in the shot from classroom windows their answers are one of two things what do you mean or you've got to be kidding me they don't even know what i'm talking about and when i visit them we walk around their schools they have no vestibules they have no bulletproof glass they have no metal detectors they have no safety checks and it is like 1980 there they live in a pre-columbine world and we live in a world that is post columbine

131and refuse to learn from it and every other slaughter of innocence that follows it is disgusting and it is revolting and i also dare say it is intentional last year the 109 board of ed approved an illinois school board association resolution advocating for restrictive gun storage measures there are state laws governing appropriate advocacy and boards must be mindful of them for example school boards and administrators are restricted from spending school resources to press for political purposes but that does not mean that you parents and community members cannot margaret mead said never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world indeed it is the only thing that ever has our parents can advocate in ways that boards and administrators cannot and i encourage you with all of my heart to follow

132your passion and act upon it with conviction and persistence and now i'm going to speak about some things i'm going to ask john philippe to speak about some of the things we do in our schools it bears underlining that people in other countries don't have to do these things dr flippy yeah so um as mr simek shared he asked me to share a little bit about some of our emergency operation plans and procedures i've seen this play out before and typically after an event such as this we receive many questions about what our emergency operation plans are where they're posted where parents can review them we don't publish them publicly so that they cannot be studied and defeated but there are some things that i can share publicly about what the district does we conduct

133a number of annual safety drills with our staff and our students evacuation drills in the event of a fire or evacuation more broadly shelter-in-place drills bus evacuation drills and certainly a law enforcement drill for an active threat on one of our campuses we subscribe to a training called alice training for responding to an active threat on campus alice is one of the recommended run hide fight versions of responding to an active threat on campus it's something that our staff train for annually and it's something that we do train for with our students annually in collaboration with the police we have regular engagement with our first responders and we have a tremendous working relationship both with the deerfield bannockburn fire department and the deerfield police department they have great familiarity with our facilities um and in

134fact they conduct some of their training in our facilities and certainly the highlight of that relationship is our sro lauren maldonado who is in our schools each day engaging with our students and with our staff with regard to our site security we engage with outside experts to conduct physical security audits of us our facilities as well as audits of our emergency operations plans um but the the one thing that i would highlight the most is that keeping our kids safe in our schools is a community effort um and um one of the things that we have put in place over the last several years uh is an effort to deter someone who may be on a pathway to violence and we have our staff a number of our staff that are trained in the dewey

135cornell model of school-based threat assessment which can identify and as a way to evaluate a threat that may be brought forward to us so we would encourage everyone our students our parents our community at more largely that if you see something say something bring it to our attention and we can work collaboratively to address it and i'm both pleased and sad to say that the district follows devotes a tremendous amount of effort to that and john you've done a terrific job leading all of those things it's a great deal of time and a great deal of effort and each time we go through that exercise it cannot it's never lost on you that what if it happens here so i really appreciate your devotion to that john i want to also shift gears here i've

136asked joanna to speak to our current shield numbers and other mitigations we all wait for this update with bated breath shield numbers um you know it's you'll see kind of the the recent updates and trends you know we we did see an uptick there you see from uh may 3rd to may 10th um you know good news is we have seen that decreasing but in full transparency we've also seen a decrease in the number of students participating in shield testing so i want to be transparent about that we are still waiting for our overall results from testing this week um and then that last bullet point is just kind of a snapshot of our overall positivity rate this school year you know in terms of the tests that we had seen you know trending since

137we started testing again at the beginning of the school year we are not going to be shield testing during our esi or summer programming but we will have our families still continue to report through any positives through home tests that'll be the route we're going during extended school year and our summer programming and we are confident in you know being able to move forward with that right now i'll let dale comment on any current staffing shortages to get us through the next uh week or so here and that is the goal is to get through the next week um i have never been as an administrator a fan of countdowns or number of days this is the year that i'm really looking at my you know alarm each morning with we've got to make it

138we've got to make it we've got to make it it's no surprise through my career that whatever you see passing amongst the students with illness is almost certainly going to affect the staff at a similar ratio and we are now really suffering with how to cover absences with staff members who are coming down with coven so it's it's rough right now we're seeing the same numbers we saw in january with staff not able to get into work because they are coveted positive and i i can only hope that the end is in sight for um needing coverage for that in the next week because i don't know how much longer we can keep the ship afloat being honest with you and it bears repeating our thank you uh to joanna and dale uh for tireless

139efforts to follow the guidance that we receive to keep our kids in school and to keep our classrooms open keep as many kids in school as possible um i said johnny would you like to speak to to this as well or should i do that um yeah i'm happy to i mean again um just to get us through the last week of school here it continued a huge thank you to our families our parents guardians and community members in terms of everyone is doing a tremendous job partnering with our building nurses and and honestly reporting anytime their child is not feeling well reporting those coveted symptoms and and uploading the home test that's been a huge plus you know once we were able to do that so that we don't have to necessarily wait until

140the afternoon we're still offering that offering the testing here at district office but we are not seeing the the numbers we were seeing previously because people are able to use the home test we wanted to continue to offer that through the end of the school year so that we have equitable access for those who don't have home tests available at home so please continue to report those symptoms if your child is not feeling well and we are still notifying we absolutely are notifying if we have multiple cases in a classroom and we we want to make sure we're offering that additional shield testing to keep a close eye on certain classrooms or settings and you know continuing to let parents and guardians know obviously um if they choose to have their child wear a mask

141and then we we have that last bullet point there but um at this point probably people won't be signing up to to opt into the last week of shield testing but you know certainly participating we are testing through um next week okay thank you joanna so we're in the midst of preparation for graduation or promotion uh promotion or commencement it goes by various names we have upcoming caruso graduation uh and shepard that is on may 31st so it's tuesday when we return we're also working hard planning for our strategic planning as well we have an all administrator retreat that is two full days in june and we plan on an august presentation of the strategic plan to the board of ed in august and that completes the superintendent's report any questions uh just have a

142comment first off thank you to the entire administration on the various aspects of it of what was just presented but mike in particular i'm very very appreciative of the passion and strength with which you opened this and uh i couldn't endorse it more and uh and you know you made me proud here and i think you made every i hope everybody else proud too very very appreciative of what you uh presented thank you and to be clear i am not speaking when i say our public officials of congressman schneider we appreciate so deeply your consistent support for our efforts in the district whether it be s or funds whether it be the full funding of ida but most importantly on the recent issues of support for sensible legislation to keep our kids and our families

143and our communities safe so thank you very very much for that okay the next item on our agenda is community participation relative to matters on the agenda we welcome your comments and questions tonight the first period of community participation is for items related to tonight's agenda and the second period of community participation near the end of the meeting is open for all matters if you wish to comment please fill out a community participation form located on the counter in the kitchenette area or at the front reception desk you can give those to rebecca rudd sitting here to my left at the end of the table we will call you up one at a time to the podium to speak please limit the length of all comments to no more than two minutes um and i'm

144going to uh exercise a little bit of uh discretion here and i was privileged to attend the village vigil this uh this evening at five o'clock that related to the events in in texas and i heard a number of very moving speakers including congressman schneider and many others but the most uh impactful speaker in my my opinion was a student from deerfield high school named rebecca harfield and i asked if she would join us here tonight so she's here to share her remarks as well hi my name is i'm 17 years old drive my brother and his two friends to school last night i was fortunate enough 19 families high school cafeteria is some other state will be saved my children urge all of you to use your voice is vote for politicians there's no

145better time [Applause] thank you so much for coming especially on such short notice i appreciate it thank you is there any other community participation okay the next item on our agenda is informational items 7.1 freedom of information requests mr flippy dr flippy yeah there are five in the packet um there are two from a parent seeking records related to a permissive transfer request or or requests there is a commercial foia seeking information uh student directory information there's another commercial foia request seeking information about the when network project and there is another commercial request seeking some accounts payable information are there any questions on the freedom of information act requests thank you 7.2 science and social studies curriculum update ms arnold i didn't know if anybody else was hard to speak or not okay that we

146would be here in the spring to update you on some of the committees that have been meeting throughout the course of the year in particular our science and social studies curriculum updates can you go ahead or jay are you controlling it thank you okay so i'm going to turn this over to the leaders and some of our teachers in our school to provide most of the information this evening but i'll start by just reiterating a little bit about the social studies leadership team and how the review has gone and why we stand before you at this point in time so that committee was actually formed in the spring of 2021 it is a k-8 committee and it has representation across our grade levels we began meeting in june actually to do some visioning work for

147the team for social studies before we even started considering what that would do in terms of our curricular review in the fall we we made some decisions at that point to phase in some of the changes that were going to happen in social studies because we saw some significant need in k-5 and we knew that that was going to impact some changes at 6 8 as our students exited our elementary schools with a a better social studies curriculum so that's why you're going to see later in the presentation that we'll be addressing grades six eight next year and you're hearing more tonight about five through eight in the winter we began reviewing some materials listening to vendors piloting some lessons in our classroom barb meston our social studies curriculum specialist has been very benefit been

148amazing at working with our classroom teachers to get some things tried across grades and across classrooms and across buildings the entire committee sat with vendors in february to learn more about a narrowed source of narrow pool of resources that we were looking more closely at and in march the committee along with the feedback that we had received from teachers across the district made the decision to pursue in k-5 a curriculum called inquiry journeys and in april we began planning what that implementation might look like and we're here today to tell you a little bit more about all of that i'm going to turn it over to barb megan was on the committee so i think she's gonna you know it was so it's so great to work with the teachers and have their input and

149discussion and you know we were all excited about social studies that was for sure but it was what is the right program and which one will advance our kids further so i don't know if you want to speak a little about your involvement on the committee or yeah so i this is my second year at deerfield and i'm a fifth grade teacher at walden elementary school and being on the social studies committee was really fantastic for me i came from a district previously who used kind of a really old school traditional social studies program so i was really excited when all the programs that we were looking at kind of offered a lot more hands-on approach critical thinking really challenging our students to become global citizens it was really exciting for me to kind of

150especially after the last two years like feel the excitement of co-workers around the district and also the students like the renewed excitement about social studies was really awesome we spent a long time kind of working through curriculums and analyzing what we wanted our kids to know when they were leaving fifth grade and then making sure that the curriculum we chose ultimately had all those components that we were looking for which was a very lengthy list but i'm so excited to be i guess piloting or working with in choir ed next year it's i think the best by far curriculum that we looked at and it's really exciting the kids were so excited to pilot some of the lessons this year and i just want to thank barb and danielle and jason for doing such an

151amazing job just kind of guiding us through that process and it's just cool to have megan and all the you know we've got a couple teachers at each grade level that are part of the leadership team and they spend a full day planning and thinking through the unit and figuring out how they would really implement this in the classroom so hearing their creative ideas with this curriculum was really exciting so it's it's fun work i'm really excited i feel a little bad because you know the earlier presentation is a little you know upsetting but we're really excited about this program so we'll have to turn turn the mood a little bit uh could you change the slide a little bit we'll tell you a little bit about what it's about inquiry journeys and there were

152a couple good programs but they were kind of the routine programs for one this intertwines the discipline so if you're talking about geography you're going to talk about the economy and you're going to tie the two together so it's it's much a higher level thinking um for in a lot of the activities it's not everything kind of isolated the global perspective i think we all loved even a simple concept like rural and urban it's not new york city and iowa it's you know kenya or the philippines and whenever there was an opportunity to kind of look at a window on the world they would do that so we really we really really wanted that for our kids we've talked a lot about mirrors and windows and wanting our kids to see themselves but also to

153get out of deerfield bubble a little bit and understand what the world is like and and give them give them that opportunity the cultural responsive updates and diverse perspectives is huge um the illinois standards are um changing this summer and some of them are getting you know i we love the standards but they're they're a little tricky they're adding a lot of phrasing to them such as and talk about how this affects diverse you know individuals throughout the community or whatever and this diverse perspectives we see again and again and again and this program really has that for us it gives teachers the language to talk about some really tricky topics and to kind of introduce some of those subjects um it's also they update continually this program so it's the kind of thing where

154they're continually looking for better resources and better materials so we're really really happy with that um the scl integration is phenomenal um the kindergarten programs and i'm from eighth grade so kindergarten's new to me they have growth mindset so they literally are talking about growth mindset with our kindergarteners they're taking brain breaks there's a there's a lot of things going on very early on with this curriculum which is just it's very forward thinking uh the inquiry model is really key uh so we're going to kind of phase that in over the next year but that idea that you start with a question and then you go through your disciplines and you you evaluate your sources uh primary and secondary sources are being introduced at the first and second grade um in this program and that

155idea that kids are going to be historians and they're going to analyze materials themselves and draw their own conclusions as part of this program so the inquiry model is is really what's called inquiry journey so obviously it's got an inquiry model and then at the very end they have a larger inquiry question and an activity where they take action so we'll build towards that it is a chicago company which we thought was important and kind of nice because illinois has its own standards it's not the national standards we kind of you know tweaked them a little bit in a good way sometimes but it makes it a little more challenging to find materials and finding ways to address them appropriately we also have a soft rollout so it's a one-year commitment but i don't see

156any reason why we wouldn't go forward teachers are really excited about this program and i thank you i think you'll hear about it there's um there's just a lot of exciting things in it so we're looking forward to it oh i should share this i'll go to the next slide is that middle school well that's some of our pictures so that's cute that first picture is um supplying a supply chain issue so not the not the problems that we're having but the kids are doing supply chain some of the teachers took vowel town and did it with their map studies and added compass roses and did all sorts of things so i loved when the teachers started to intertwine the social studies with the ela and the other subjects that they had and at the

157end the kids made flags so just a couple little slides of what the kids are doing uh this is kind of you know 608 has been waiting in the wings so they've been watching they've been listening they've been involved in some ways but they're really anxious now to review their program and see how this is going to change that program in the future um so we're ready to go and i think to have some really candid discussions on what we're doing and what could we could be doing better we do have kind of a middle school statement so to speak um our goal is to develop citizens who understand where they are in the historical continuum and how we can use that knowledge to critically think and to gain empathy and respect for others in

158their views so that's kind of our goal um one point of and this might be something we can all relate to i think most people in the room probably took a constitution test in eighth grade or by eighth grade that's no longer an illinois standard you don't need one until junior level of high school we're going to teach constitution it actually starts i think in second grade with inquired where they're starting branches of government and really building towards that but it gives us you know an opportunity to figure out where that fits and how we'll fit that and maybe um you know it does start early on and we'll kind of include it over the years so there's a lot of thinking going on six to eight so we'll have more news um for you

159guys on that next year danielle before we go to science is there do you want to ask social studies questions now or save it all for the end that's fine go ahead just because the teacher's up there um my only question is is what is currently happening in k-5 in terms of social studies is there a curriculum we're replacing or is this the this is new to k-5 right we most of our units at the elementary school have been developed in-house and mostly through the integration of ela so we are having to really dedicate some additional time within the elementary schedule to make sure that social studies and science which we'll talk about in just a few minutes have that isolated time to really dedicate to that one of the things i would add to

160what barb said about what and this is what i love about our committee structure being the k-8 and bringing all the teachers together at the table is that you have middle school staff that are directly partnering with our elementary teachers to design units i don't want to steal thunder from another presentation i'm going to bring to you guys in the future but we have middle school teachers that are working directly with second grade teachers to do lesson planning and our middle school staff has actually suggested that they would like to go into our elementary classrooms to support and assist next year so that's really amazing they're really excited is the current curriculum um inquiry based the we have been piloting inquiry-based pieces throughout this year but again we've been developing them we've been using some

161of inquire ed but we haven't gotten to all of the inquiry practices so it might be starting with a question but as barb said at the end of these units there often is a call to action for kids some sort of project there's even opportunities for kids to maybe present to a city council or um do something that would be action oriented and we haven't gotten to that point yet so but just so i understand what our current situation is you see like the current socialized curriculum um k5 i guess because there's six eight is different um when was that adopted like what could you give us some history on what is the current curriculum i i read what the proposed new stuff is going to be but i want to know the transition what

162what hap what's going on with that how did it tell me a little bit about it if you don't mind well and that i think i've provided a little bit of an overview of our entire committee process in the board the board packet or whatever but the last time so i would say that our k5 social studies curriculum was in need of desperate review and deep a deep look because the last time that we could find that it had been closely examined was almost a decade ago and but was there was so you're saying it's developed in-house was it so we didn't have a curriculum like we're buying this program just the social teachers together worked collaboratively that said hey third grade is going to be this fourth grade is going to be that is

163that what you're saying yes yeah so this is going to be a much more robust opportunity for our elementary age students um okay thank you sorry i got one question on so um social studies so is i think i heard you say this i just wanted to see if i'm thinking about it right so it's the idea to try to embed some of the concepts within the other other subjects so instances like a you know there's a you know math you know module that's being taught and bringing in concepts of you know different things associated with it and using math or or even on the ela side of the house in terms of writing papers or writing whatever is that the concept i think a long-term goal for us is definitely that integration across departments

164so that if they're learning something in ela and we can connect it with social studies i think for this initial year we're really going to follow the curriculum that is outlined in inquiry journeys and go deeply there and then talk about the interdisciplinary options because i think it's i mean some of the i mean i don't know you guys obviously have this discussion when you guys are talking about your strategic planning plan and that process but you know project-based learning and um i think we spend quite a bit of time discussing and focus and we're going to talk about science here in a second on stem and you know and math and you know in english and those are things that obviously you know are at the core and the foundation and we all you

165know as parents are are focused there but the reality is is that the contextual aspect of what that learning is is really related to social studies right and so i'd really love to see how this is my two cents as you guys tier retreat right i'd really love to see how we can eventually get to that integration right um in terms of our learning across the disciplines and not be so siloed in terms of if this is just math it's not right we've had a lot of conversation about how the engagement in social studies and deep engagement in science will actually make our children better literacy learners so that has been a large part of our conversation okay um somewhere scott kluge is uh applauding your efforts yes i remember he was always requesting this

166review he was i'm going to talk a little bit about science this is dan and i have been on this journey for a little while with the with sue who is here with us as a representative from the leadership team as well so the science committee was formed in the fall of 2019 a needs assessment was developed there was the formation of the committee they worked deeply to develop the instructional model for science in district 109 that we shared with you in the fall they began screening resources and by the spring of 2020 had really decided that they were going to pilot three options open syed phd science and amplify and then this thing happened called covid okay and one of [Laughter] so as you might imagine like science is something that you want kids

167to do you know they're not going to just hear about it you want them experiencing it and modeling and living it and so we had to delay the pilots of those curriculum and we ended up beginning the pilot instead of in september of 2020 and we started in september of 2021. they our elementary every single elementary classroom in the district was piloting a particular resource and staff and students gave us feedback across all of those pilots everybody from our intermediate to our middle school students and our littles were even giving us thumbs up or smiley faces or frowny faces about their experiences with science and our committee analyzed every single detail of that feedback from both our staff and students and one of the things that i would say is that when we received the

168feedback about those pilot experiences there wasn't much enthusiasm actually about the programs that we had spent some significant time piloting we weren't hearing a lot of energy around either of them and so the leadership team dan and i went back to the drawing board and we said let's try something new and so we stand before you today with a recommendation that is receiving great feedback from our students and our staff to pilot smith or to use smithsonian science for the classroom and i'll have dan talk about that thank you danielle um so if you could flip the slide please smithsonian science for the classroom was not one of our initials too as danielle mentioned but we really wanted to take teacher feedback to heart and so um teacher and student alike the feedback for the

169phd science and amplify science which we looked at initially was not glowing and so um went back looked at what were some of the other options that scored favorably but just didn't make that uppercut and so smithsonian was something that really seemed like it fit the bill and based on student and teacher feedback with this experience the the upgrade was demonstrable the units are designed around explaining phenomena and designing solutions to problems meaning that there is a built-in incentive there is an obvious point at the outset to get students um motivated and engaged with what they're figuring out throughout the process while that feature is not unique it's something that kind of shine through more palpably with this program than with the other two uh it's very hands-on so one of the pieces of feedback

170that we got is that it felt uh less drawn out it felt more pithy it felt more engaging it felt more hands-on it really leveraged the modalities that our elementary school students prefer to learn with and have success with and with that said you know through my lens as a curriculum specialist you know i felt very confident that it was hitting those key marks that our committee set out to hit in the first place and i think that the feedback from students and teachers really speaks for itself in terms of the degree that it really found the niche that we were looking for that we didn't quite have with that initial pilot experience and so we do have sue johnson first grade teacher from kipling to share a little bit about her own experience she's

171kind of in the unique position and as a committee member she was able to pilot over the past three years all three programs so she can really speak to the nuances and the benefits of smithsonian so first of all when i started on this science review committee i was really excited because i felt like what we had wasn't very engaging and it certainly didn't touch the standards that we're expected to teach our children now so when we started this we examined all of the the different curricula available came up with the two and i i piloted amplify first and at first i thought wow this is really good and then it became repetitive and repetitive and my kids weren't excited anymore so then i piloted a phd and while i fell in love with it

172and my students fell in love with it my peers did not so that was a big stopping point for us on that as at a grade level meeting first grade teachers talked and they said well you know nobody listens to us anyways we don't really care obviously we're going to choose phd and i said well that that's not true so when the word came out that we were not adopting either one of those or we weren't going to recommend to adopt either one it was a really feel-good moment to be working in d109 so uh we just finished piloting smithsonian and overwhelmingly the students loved it staff loved it kids cheer when i say it's time for science and i teach first grade so they cheer for a lot but so so engaged with the

173smithsonian it's very hands-on they get to manipulate things they get to work in teams they keep science notebooks they're true scientists so i look forward to working with smithsonian so we got a couple photos there of students in action i think we've got first and second grade if i'm not mistaken so that kind of demonstrates the handout hands-on aspect of it that you know really resonated in the feedback as far as six eight so similar experience we had tried two programs amplify and open syed the net feedback from students and teachers alike was that i mean no neither one of these really represented a net upgrade as opposed to you know if we were to try and swap out what we do for either of those it didn't feel like a net upgrade however with

174that said there were aspects of it that resonated and one of those was the digital modeling and simulation tools that came in both of those programs and so given that that feature was you know more of an adjunct feature as opposed to a core feature of those programs what i decided to do is to go take a look at an alternative that's really geared towards those components specifically and that's called gizmos by explore learning it's a program that another teacher had tried uh last year as on a trial basis just kind of independently it's something that i had used myself in the classroom and had good experiences with and so it sounded like there was a niche for a resource of that sort and so we went back we piloted that uh in the winter

175and as with smithsonian the feedback was really positive and so that we feel like is going to really feel a nice niche something that you know there's free resources available that go down that route but not as robustly as explore learning's product does they've got hundreds of simulations digital modeling tools they're quantitative you can manipulate variables measure data things of that nature and so we're pleased that we were able to find something that really hits that target i also added an honorable mention for open syad and the fact that it is an open source resource and there were various activities and features that teachers found of benefit and that did resonate with students so it's something that we can kind of pick and choose a la carte the components that we find to be most

176valuable and really bolster and enhance what we're doing currently to go along with that lab equipment is being refreshed so things that over the years either due to the fact that it was purchased i think the two schools did not purchase some of the same equipment at the same time with the last curriculum review so there was a disparity there that we're able to refresh the the equipment that was not initially um and so yeah on the whole i think even though we didn't come to the conclusion to adopt open syad or amplify i think was a positive experience i think we found resources that we will continue to use moving forward and the fact that many of them are open source really there's no no downside to it so i would consider that a

177success one more slide i think one more so in addition to our kids and our staff being really excited about science and social studies what we want to ensure that we do is set um send something into motion that makes sure that they feel really prepared to do so um so we again that's a recommendation that's come out of committee so our next steps obviously after this evening is we're going to begin purchasing the materials and prepping for that we're going to be updating all of our curriculum maps we've started doing some of that with the committee also behind the scenes but the most important part is probably the professional development most of our teachers have expressed an interest in really having time with both barb and dan to do the professional development instead of

178doing it with someone who comes in from the outside and doesn't know our staff and our students and so that is already starting in june 7th and 8th we have one option but if people are unable to come on june 7th and 8th we're offering the same option on august 10th and 11th i think we already have 80 plus members of our elementary school staff signed up to attend and only a few that are unable to come and we'll work with them on the opening days to prepare for their first unit and then the way k-5 science and social studies works in the elementary schools is that they share the same space in the schedule so kids would engage in a science or social studies unit for five weeks and then they would five to

179six weeks and then they would shift to social studies and that rotation would continue throughout the course of the year so what we're doing is barb and dan are going to go into each of the four elementary schools individually they're going to work specifically with the grade level teams to do some unpacking of the upcoming unit they'll spend a couple of hours with just that team preparing them for what lies ahead and getting ready for actual implementation in a very timely way they'll do that about a week or two before the unit actually rolls out with students and so i think there's a lot of excitement about both of those opportunities being provided to them and then six eight i have team planning summer tbd but that's because the social studies leadership team is working

180on finding a date where they're all available to come in and work together to continue the process of their review and dan is working with our sixth through eighth grade teachers in science to find a common date so that the entire team is also available to do that and the middle schools have typically done that year to year so that is our next steps um again i think we're very excited but i don't know if there's any questions about science but we wanted to make sure that the board was updated on both i actually just have a macro question on the process so i'm a new board member this is my first year what traditionally has happened in our district in terms of piloting programs and is this different than what has happened in the

181past or this is always how we've piloted programs there's can you guys speak on you know it seems like there's so much collaboration and teacher input and the fact that i'm so sorry i forgot your name first grade teacher so miss johnson the fact that you brought up the fact that the teachers assumed uh something was going to be adopted because it was one of the two choices and that you said no we don't have to do this i'm just curious like what's potentially different now that wasn't always in existence do you understand the question i guess okay i think we've been around the longest i haven't been around long i'm sorry this is only my fifth year teaching um i think and i'm i'm honest with that this is just my fifth year teaching

182um i had a prior life um before this world that i gladly gave up um thank you i think that curriculum has always been piloted and looked at by teachers but i think the decision was always kind of made prior that this is the path we want to go down this time was totally different where we talked about it as a staff led by dan we met over and over again we went through the data the reviews of everything as a team then we talked to our own teams out in our schools to get feedback we talked to the kids to get feedback um and honestly you know they they give us exactly what we need and when it wasn't right admin didn't say well here we're rolling this out next year they said we've

183got to find something different that's going to fit us so that's from mike's at my experience i you know i taught for 20 years at crusoe and social studies and ela and we've never had a social studies review in those 20 years truly the books were from the 1990s that i was given and so never we've never hit a pilot um there has been and i know some of you know this in teachers minds there is a feeling sometimes with committee work that the decision is already decided before you're on the committee so that is kind of a concept so um i think it was kind of really cool what happened with science i think a lot of teachers were really tickled by it and and like really tickled by it and kind of jumping

184for joy that they were listened to so that was really important so it was a good thing i'm really glad those were your answers that's where i was hoping my question would land and i just think it's important that it got flushed out and we could all hear that you so you predetermined what the outcome was i've never felt so called out in my life he said what he said is correct but ultimately i'm just really thrilled that this process is hopefully one that can be replicated for all different types of future district work and that the teachers felt very validated very heard and very part of the process so thank you mike repeatedly says we're only as good as our teachers right we're only as good as our teacher so um and we believe

185you know we believe that we need them to be really excited about it to really engage our students at their very best and so you know when we received that feedback dan and i went around to every single grade level team in k5 across the district to decide next steps so i i i feel really proud also of the process and i think it's going to be a great implementation of both in 2020 before you hold off i know that was like a closing remark but i do want to return back to one of the things on the social studies part so i want to say that a few things first i'm very differential to the committee i mean you guys first off are the educators you know what it is and you're the ones

186who did all the evaluation and everything else so you know i have to trust that completely that's how it is um i did take a look at the um inquiry journeys you know their website and try to learn a little bit more about what actually is that they're showing and um and i do believe in an inquiry method of instruction i think that's a good way to do things you've got some sort of a problem or question let's figure it out get that answer and you're going to learn the facts that way rather than by just rote memory for example but it all turns upon how good the question is that starts it off so um for example on their website they have a third grade curriculum and they have the following question i'm critical

187of the question i've looked at look at i'm not so thrilled with this particular question and i'll tell you what it is it's how how can we act as global citizens okay that's the question that sparks this inquiry well i have issues with it because what is a global citizen anyhow you know i mean it's just we're just born on the planet you're not really it's really saying what can we do to be responsible to the planet and its people so i think it's really what they're trying to get at so like i would if i were to draft something like this i would say something like um like what are the similarities and differences between our culture or whatever it is our culture and that of you know country x let's say and how

188do those similarities and differences affect the relations between the countries and its people and what if anything can be done to um improve those relations now if someone presented that kind of a question like hey what are the similars and differences what um what uh how does that affect the people right between them and um and what can we do about that that seems some now hold on hold on before you i recognize i pulled one question out from one one portion of it but i just wanted to be and it's really more rhetorical it's not much of a question it's just a statement i'm making that had a little bit i was just going to comment what you were saying you wanted the question to be is very much what the lessons were about

189like you were almost stating some of the standards that were addressed in the global connections unit so i i think you'd be happy the way the unit unfolds and the way the lessons are sold yeah because they do go in that direction okay i just wanted to make sure that people are thinking about that and and it looked like the program had a choice of different questions that you yeah they give one with each module and teachers do like those questions it helps them especially if you're new to inquiry it gives them a starting point but you don't have to use that question i mean the whole inquiry model that we'll get into teachers need to work into it they need to spend a year working into it is having the kids design their own

190questions so that's ultimately the goal is for the kids to create the questions but those are nice guiding questions for the teacher some were emphasized in units more than others and i think some were better than others and so sometimes the lessons went back to that question a lot and i thought it was a great question others not so much so it kind of varied okay but ideally the kids will create the questions originally when i first made my inquiry i wasn't even going to read my notes and think about it because i was like you know it's kind of done i am going to do that but i felt like if i didn't at least voice a little bit of that it would go home thinking i probably should have at least said something

191so all i'm really trying to say is i hope the teachers are being critical when they're looking at that and evaluating it and saying what's come back they are even in the day of planning they were it was really great to hear their thoughts and have them think through what was going on i appreciate it thank you for listening one of the misconceptions around the inquiry model too is that there's no direct teaching in which there is like there are lessons modules where they're direct teaching to students and then an inquiry process so i just want to make sure that that's also evident i have two things one the description of the science um work for the k5 sounded really exciting i wanted to take the class i mean it sounded right um i think

192i just i the science for um was it six through eight with the gizmos um i just i think maybe i missed something in in the middle school do we have a curriculum and we're keeping the curriculum and we're augmenting it with these um sort of supplemental gizmos is that is that that was the just okay but but the okay great um and then the second question i had was the part about the k5 science sounded really hands-on and collaborative and inquiry and project based i had a question when i was listening about the social studies k5 it sounded inquiry-based but i was listening for um like i know that review started a long time ago and now we have sort of put in front of us like a new mission and vision and that

193has to do i i think the way i'm interpreting it um is that there is project-based activity and small group and collaboration and et cetera and i heard that in the discussion of the some of these but i'm just can you can you i'm sure the answer is yes but can you just put my mind at ease that yes this work and recommendation is harmonious where with where we think we're going on a mission vision for this new plan yes so thank you we're good okay okay okay i just wanted to put andrew morrison signing off thank you okay you got it well you know there's so much we could say i'm not sure but you know i've been thinking of some of our goals that you were talking about with sel2 and i was

194talking in the hallway with some teachers about what they thought their kids were missing with coven and what they should do and how you know they think they're fine academically but they're worried socially and are they going to be able to talk to their friends and interact in class and a lot of the social studies lessons especially k12 deal with those issues how do you problem solve you know how do you treat each other there's so much civics and citizenship going on that those lessons will be some teachers are like i'm not only going to use these in social studies i'm going to use them throughout the day there's definitely a hands-on process that the kids will get into so after they have their inquiry and kind of work their way through the modules they'll

195have a big end of the unit activity or or question or or call to action and i know depending on the unit i know people are talking about having a deerfield days and doing this and that and the other thing because there are some really exciting ideas and projects that can come out of that the kids are supposed to initiate that and determine what they want to do but i know teachers already have ideas in their head about the direction that the the units can go in well for me this sounds really exciting and i'm really looking forward to seeing what you and the team with the teachers do with it it sounds very prominent we're really excited we are we're all excited i also want to just applaud you for um not settling for

196something that people weren't excited about because i think that's probably the path of least resistance a lot of times and you know the idea of kind of going back to the drawing board when you've invested so much time and effort and certain you know curricula is a little daunting and overwhelming and so i appreciate that you took the time and effort to find something that everybody is on board for and is really invested in so it sounds great for the kids and i'm very excited to see what happens thank you any other questions thank you very much thank you thank you okay the next item on our agenda is 7.3 isbe consolidated district plan for federal grant application and management i can take this one this is on for info and action tonight i apologize

197for that but we do need to hopefully move this forward so that um danielle and i and support from our departments have the fun task ahead of them writing our our grants shortly thereafter so thank you guys for hopefully helping us with that a big thank you to danielle and jason and christy and kristen from my department um along with patty clayton it's not really proud this is a lot of work to put this together i apologize that it is not very user friendly to read if you tried to get all the way through it and the way it prints but um you are probably if you've been here um before to to read this familiar with the process this is like the road map that kind of lays out the planning for those grants

198that we will then complete and apply for each year pretty similar to previous years except this year a little bit more updated with the new mission and vision work and then we'll align with the strategic plan but really um just continued obviously to support the work from teaching and learning and what they're doing and then um aligns also with what we just heard previously from the team with the equity audit pd around inclusive practices and a continued really heavy focus on social emotional learning and support professional development for our teachers and support directly for our kids what you'll see in in the grants coming out of both of our departments any questions thank you thank you for all your work on that the next item is 7.4 architect of record archon associates dr flippy yeah

199um as the board knows um our current architect of record is green associates and we began this conversation with the facility development committee of the board earlier this year we are uh poised to embark on a master facility plan and a 10-year life safety study this summer and we really felt like now was the the right time for us to evaluate um our relationship with an architect um certainly not dissatisfied with green in any way but having this big work uh before us prompted us to issue a request for qualifications to which we received 12 responses the administration narrowed a finalist candidate pool to three green associates dla and arkhan associates and then the fdc uh convened to interview the three finalist firms the highlight of which was ken being a stand-up comedian all evening

200long but dead pandit on a number of occasions um but uh the consensus choice that emerged that evening was arkhan and so before you you have a contract to engage arkhan as your architect of record green will continue on and finish the pro the projects that are currently in process the auditorium our life safety work and any other summer work arkhan would be picking up with the new master facility plan and 10 year life safety study i have a comment and a question the comment is because i'm on the fdc um the way the teachers were talking about their excitement about the curriculum is kind of how i felt about archon like i'm really excited so for those of you that haven't had a chance to get to know them i hope you'll join us

201in the excitement for kind of the vision that they bring would you agree john well i would just say that i thought all three of the finalist firms did an outstanding job and would be excellent partners but it just felt like our con was the right fit for us at this time so it's exciting um my uh question was with the cruze auditorium so anything that is currently ongoing will continue be overseed solely by grain and associates there won't be any like that's correct okay thank you and that's up for vote next meeting correct correct any other questions on the architect yeah i have a question i have a question about the fee schedule so i don't know very much about architecture or the business of architecture so i did some research which of course

202does not make me an expert at this but um i saw some other templates for how architects charge for their services and um and some of the ones that i saw looked like they charged a different percentage that gradually ticked to a lower percentage as the size of the thing went up um which i noticed sort of is in this and i noticed that the fees went up or down as a percentage based on the complexity of the work how difficult or complicated the work would be so it's sort of a two matrix you know how how how how big is the contract and how complicated is the contract um and so one i observe that again i'm not an expert in this you may be like you're looking at bad data and i would

203accept that but i have to ask the question um the fees that are in this contract the the things i saw show things were complicated on a scale of one two three four or five five being most complicated um it seems like all the fees that are laid out here anticipate that all the work we're gonna do is among the most complicated of work based on these other things i saw so in other words it's a little bit high unless we're assuming most our work's complicated again the second thing i noticed was that the i saw a number of things where the scale where the fees gradually ticked down might have gone down in like three or five million dollar increments but our increment scale is like 12 million or 24 million dollar increments and

204those seem like pretty wide shelves i mean it seems like putting aside whether the fees or percentages are higher than average even if we didn't even like no no no those fees are fine it seems like there might be opportunities for narrowing those bands from 24 million and 12 million to put six million dollar ban so that as things got more expensive there are opportunities for further sliding scales for reduced percentage was that articulate did you follow that yes and actually their first offer to the district included more bands but i negotiated them down to fewer bands with a lower percentage rate so you know if that's something that the board wants to entertain is further segregating those you know that's something that we could explore i benchmarked this agreement with arkhan against five peer

205districts in our immediate area that are also working with arkhan and this is consistent with the fee structure that they have in place with our our neighboring peers [Music] um all right thank you any other questions this is information only tonight andy do you have follow-up before we have a call to action on this item or did that answer your question um compared to the things i saw this seems high but it sounds like i really wanted to understand a little bit better about the process and it's uh i feel like john sort of answered the question that there were more levels but it was part of the negotiation that helped reduce the percentages etc so i i feel like i've asked my diligence question and i feel that he's responded to it to my

206satisfaction thank you 7.5 fiscal year 22 amended budget dr philippi again yeah this is um one that's a bit out of the norm for us but one that i think that we need to undertake is the textbook way to account for um what is a pretty significant expenditure out of the capital fraud projects fund that was not contemplated in the original draft of the budget and that is the uh construction and progress billing that will come due with the caruso auditorium um so what you have before you is uh has two changes to it one is that um when we draft the original budget we have to put in what we have uh i believe our estimated beginning uh fund balances because we have yet to close the fiscal year and the auditor has yet

207to do their work so we've updated the beginning fund balance for each fund because those are now known but the big change is that we are proposing to add 3.5 million dollars of anticipated expenditures to the capital projects fund and the reason for that is twofold one is that we know we are expecting to be invoiced for approximately two to three million dollars worth of the uh construction project for the crucial auditorium in the current fiscal year and then also as you may recall we finished the prior fiscal year with only a hundred thousand dollars in the operations and maintenance fund due to all of the extraordinary covet expenditures the lion's share of that is coming back to us in fema reimbursement dollars but the illinois emergency management authority has told us that we can

208expect those dollars right around june 30 which is not very helpful to us because i don't know if i'm going to book them in the current year or next and so this will give us a little bit of wiggle room we have three quarters of a million dollars worth of shepard roofing project that we've already booked in o m this year we could always just move a little bit of that out uh to give us cushion and have positive fun balance i'm surprised i don't know this now that i'm on the you know doing the finance committee but um you can't accrue for that you can't just put an accrual in there for that reimbursement i guess no okay no i mean you i don't know you don't know i mean just to make it

209easier for you i'm just saying you have like a bunch of public schools you're accounting all right yeah i don't know how you can't have like a piece of paper that says i owe you just stick it in the file the the answer is perhaps um but i talked with the auditor about it i think we're best off i mean it doesn't really matter right it's just yeah i was just trying to make your life easier i wasn't even sure that was possible in public school accounting so and just to clarify on the um uh movement of the funds um to capital projects it's not that um i'm sorry not in the movement the amending the budget i'm getting ahead of myself amending the budget it's not that we didn't have the funds to pay

210for um the caruso auditorium project because we have those funds we just didn't budget them for this fiscal year because we didn't know that we were going to be undertaking the project when we were doing the budgeting correct absolutely correct yes does that require does that create some sort of public notice you know number six yeah sorry yeah well no actually there's public we you treat you treat an amended budget just like you do the regular budget so there was notice in the newspaper 30 days out of the june 16th board meeting and we'll do the you know ask three times on june 16th okay perfect and i think siri asked my question but just to confirm this is just a different way of looking at the money this isn't like we're in a deficit

211or an overage there's no change to the money we had this is just a timing issue that's what i figured yep thank you any other questions okay 7.6 resolution to set a public hearing interfund transfer from the education fund to operations and maintenance fund yeah this goes back to the finance committee meeting when we discuss the tax levy for to fund the 2022-23 year the board may recall that for the past i think it's four levies now we've elected to abate the debt service levy and have saved the taxpayers roughly four million dollars in funds that the district otherwise could have levied to pay bond principle and interest in the prior three years we had made a transfer from the education fund to the debt service fund to pay bond principle and interest with the

212coming master facility plan and 10 year life safety study we're expecting that we're going to have some fairly significant capital needs that are going to emerge so we talked at the finance committee about using uh fund balance in the bond in the debt service fund to pay our bond principle and interest but make a transfer like we've become accustomed to out of the education fund and this time put it in the capital projects fund that requires a kind of delicate dance of resolutions and notices we actually have to make the transfer from the education fund to the operations and maintenance fund first that requires a resolution in public hearing and then later in the meeting we can transfer it from o m to capital projects without a resolution so this just gets that ball rolling

213any questions thank you the next item on the agenda is action items 8.1 is our consent agenda 8.1 the consent agenda includes 8.1.1 personnel 8.1.1.1 resignations and retirements 8.1.1 8.1.1.2 leave of absence 8.1.1.3 employment of certified staff 8.1.1.4 employment of educational support staff 8.1.1.5 employment of at will staff and 8.1.2 bills for payment can i have a motion please second roll call mr ashman aye ms jackman aye mr kuo aye mr morrison aye ms wenner hi i'm president montgomery aye motion carries 8.2 approval of the amended 2022 2023 public school calendar for elections day i have a motion second roll call miss jacommu aye mr quo aye mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye and president montgomery aye motion carries 8.3 april treasurer's report can i have a motion please second roll call

214ms jacomew aye mr morrison aye mr kwow aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye and president montgomery aye motion carries 8.4 recommendation to approve life safety work can i have a motion please second roll call mr quo aye mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye ms jacomew i am president montgomery aye motion carries 8.5 recommendation to approve led lighting and i have a motion please second roll call mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye ms jacob you aye mr kuo i am president montgomery aye motion carries 8.6 recommendation to approve olson transportation renewal and i have a motion please second roll call ms wenner aye mr ashman aye ms jacomew aye mr kwow aye mr morrison aye and president montgomery aye jim carries 8.7 resolution to approve treasurer and assistant treasurer

215can i have a motion please second roll call mr ashman aye ms jacomew aye mr kwow aye mr morrison aye ms winter aye and president montgomery aye motion carries john you're stuck 8.8 uh resolution to approve uh surety bond of treasurer and assistant treasurer can i have a motion please second roll call miss jack amu aye mr kwok aye mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye and president montgomery aye motion carries 8.9 recommendation to approve the sale donation recycling or disposal of surplus material and equipment can i have a motion please second oh that came out you're making her life hard we were on a roll roll call please miss jack of you hi mr quo aye mr morrison aye ms winner aye mr ashman aye and president montgomery aye ms jim carrice

216um on my list this says 8.1 but is it really 8.10 oh yes i'm sorry it is 8.10 um recommendation to approve the isbe consolidated district plan for federal grant application and management can i have a motion second roll call mr quo mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye ms jacomu i am president montgomery aye motion carries 8.11 recommendation to approve the desa collective bargaining agreement i have a motion please also move second roll call okay mr ashman abstain ms jacomew aye mr kwow aye mr morrison aye ms wenner i am president montgomery aye motion carries 8.12 approval of regular meeting minutes from april 21st 2022 and i will abstain from this one and i have a motion please second roll call miss jacomew aye mr kwow aye mr morrison aye ms wenner

217aye mr ashman aye and president montgomery abstain thank you motion carries 8.13 approval of closed session minute meeting minutes from april 21st 2022 can i have a motion please second roll call ms jacomew aye mr kwow aye mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman i have a question i was here for half of that meeting so i'll abstain thank you and president montgomery aye motion carries okay thank you the next item on our agenda is committee reports we had any committee meetings i will do a true north committee update we had a good meeting the majority of the conversation was on budget i know i normally don't go into the weeds with my updates but i felt it would behoove us to hear just a tiny 30 second snippet on the budget because obviously

218true norse budget impacts district 109. dr schneider just reviewed a few things that over the past four years they've reduced their annual operating budget by 15 million dollars they've reduced staff by over 128 staff members over the past six years and then it goes on and on you know 6.6 administrators over four years they have built a complete new financial model they have flat tuition rates with very nominal increases over the past five years so what they're trying to insinuate is while obviously the budget is the budget and their programming costs would it cost that they have done in my opinion a fairly remarkable job of of auditing and tightly uh controlling every single aspect of their services to ensure that the most product is delivered for the most reasonable fee so that's just my

219take and it's an extraordinary amount of work on their end so i just want to applaud true north for the work that they've put into it and certainly i'm sure john and mike if you had any questions you would have asked them already or or gone through their fred which is what they call their financial model so that is my update from true north thank you any other committee reports finances next wednesday which nick will be chairing just policy committee just policy we just received the press package for updated um press recommendations and we'll be getting a meeting on the books in the near future but nothing is planned yet great anything else who's fd are you are you fdc ken we did a ftc meeting but it was just the architectural um which we've

220already gone over thank you okay community open community participation we welcome your comments and questions on all matters if you wish to comment please fill out a community participation form located on the counter in the kitchenette area or at the front reception desk please limit the length of your comments to no more than two minutes no community participation thank you mr heinemann for joining us this evening board superintendent other i have a couple of things and and all my time on the board i've not done this before but i felt the need in light of the events of this week to say something so i appreciate mr simek's remarks and congressman schneider's discussion and of course rebecca harfields very moving comments but i wanted to to add a couple of my own i just want

221to take a moment to comment on the horrific murder of 19 children and two teachers at rob elementary school in uvalde texas it's really hard for me to find the words to adequate adequately express my utter sadness despair and hopelessness that i feel after hearing about yet another school shooting and if you know me you know that i'm rarely at a loss for words there have been more than 250 quote unquote mass school shooting incidents in the 20 years since columbine and yet nothing has changed not after 20 innocent first graders and seven staff members were gunned down 10 years ago at sandy hook not after 17 students and teachers were killed at marjory stoneman douglas high school in parkland florida in 2018 and those are just the most notorious all told we've lost nearly

222200 people in mass shootings in schools and that does not include those that have been injured or those that have died by suicide accidental shooting or cases that don't qualify as quote unquote mass shootings because less than four people were shot i can't help but wonder who will be next because there will be a next time and a time after that and a time after that because for the last 20 years we've not had the political will to enact common sense gun legislation that would help protect everyone but especially our schools far better than our heroic teachers can there have been nearly a thousand school shootings since the tragedy at sandy hook in 2012 and every time i walk into a classroom i will look at the children and teacher and my first thought will

223not be about how eager the children are to learn or how engaged the teacher is in teaching or how every year a new family is formed in each classroom in our district instead i'll think about how i can keep everyone safe so that every child and staff member that arrives in our district each morning goes home to their families every night but the fact is that there's only so much that we as a school district can do to keep everyone safe we can put in vestibules and cameras and ensure that all of our doors are locked we can install enormous planters so that no one can drive into our buildings we can hire a school resource officer and implement programs to help identify and support at-risk students we can hold active shooter drills and teach

224our students and staff what they should do if someone with a gun gets in the building but none of these measures will be enough to stop anyone with easy access to a gun and it can happen here just as easily as it happened at columbine and sandy hook and parkland and uvalde and the hundreds of other schools across the country that never imagined it happening in their schools until it did my point is that we all have a responsibility as individuals to take action to work to prevent something like this from happening here and in the broader community we're fortunate to live in an amazing community with families who are passionate about their children in schools we've seen time and time again that we have parents guardians students and community members who are incredibly resourceful

225who know how to mobilize when an issue is important to them and they'll put in the effort to do so my ask is that each person take action in whatever way is meaningful to you to help address this deadly problem of proliferation of gun violence in our schools so that our students and staff can feel safe in these sacred spaces so thank you for indulging me in that i think it's important that as a district we have something to say on this issue that keeps happening over and over again and with that happy note i do have some thanks i want to thank mike for his comments as well i want to thank john for all that he does on the safety committee and and with all the plans to do what we can to

226help our keep our schools safe i want to thank joanna for all your efforts with covid and for the consolidated plan and danielle for the consolidated plan as well i know that's a lot of work it's a lot of work reading it i can't imagine all the work it takes to write it um and danielle also thank you for all your work on the equity audit and the curriculum update very impressive and dale thanks for keeping our schools staffed we couldn't do that would do it without you and they're not here anymore but i really want to thank thank the the students and staff at wilmot and the kids from highland park they did an amazing amazing job in the fact that that program that was piloted here is going to be adopted in the

227chicago public schools where those kids a lot of those kids don't have the access to resources that we have here i think is an amazing amazing program and it was a great thing that we were able to pilot it here so thank you danielle thank you to everyone who made that that happen and with that i will turn it over to anyone else that has anything to say i want to say congratulations to a we have a new doctor in the house dr bjalk say congratulations [Applause] [Laughter] anyone else okay with that can i have a motion to adjourn second all in favor aye we are adjourned at 9 28. thanks everybody you