DPS 109 Board of Education Regular Meeting: 10/28/2021

001the executive order renewed by governor jb pritzker on october 15 2021 mandates that all individuals present in public and private pk through 12 school buildings wear face masks including teachers staff students and visitors thank you the governor has the legal authority to issue a universal mass mandate pursuant to the illinois emergency management agency act to address a public health crisis that's 20 ilcs 3305-2a2 consistent with the order the board of education will require universal masking for attendees age 2 and over at all board meetings until further notice individuals refusing or declining to wear an appropriate and well-fitted face mask will be asked to leave the premises they may watch a live broadcast of the meeting or the video recording of the meeting which is posted and maintained on the district 109 website if attendees at

002board of education meetings refuse to wear face masks upon request the board reserves the right to vote to recess the meeting for a specified period of time like about 30 minutes all attendees will be asked to leave the premises to ensure their health and safety when the board of education reconvenes shortly thereafter it will do so on a remote platform consistent with the illinois open meetings act 5 ilcs 7e okay can i get a motion to approve the meeting's agenda so move [Laughter] the first item on our agenda or the next item i should say is uh what's good in 109 mr stuckling i'll start up here so we have an easy transition to our guest today obviously a very full house a lot of good things going on so i will get through my

003part of this pretty quickly giving you a glimpse into some of the great things that have happened this month across our district as you can see here if you noticed as you walked in today we actually one of our young artists come check it out with their family today we have started a rotation of artwork being featured in the lobby of the district center these are students from caruso middle school eighth graders who have had their artwork home here they will remain up for the rest of the month then we have a rotation with the other schools so all six schools will have their art represented over the course of the year so very cool every month when you come in for the board meeting or any other business check out what's going on in

004the lobby it's been really great to see the beginning of this month was custodian appreciation month national custodian appreciation month but really our schools do this almost every day these are the vital people that make day-to-day operations of our school possible so it's been really great this month to see some gestures of kindness thrown their way i was at wilmot when they surprised mr marcos with a whole bunch of cards and a big sign and more donuts than one man could possibly eat i know that kipling for instance takes care of mr rodrigo during the holidays there's just year-round appreciation for our custodians and we really can't thank them enough for that this might play some sound here we go this is called history in motion tonight [Music] eighth graders wouldn't be wanting to do

005that and think like that's not cool but they all begrudgingly participated in it and it looked like they even had a little bit of fun too so a really interactive way to teach kids about history this stuff has been really trending on social media this week obviously we are all excited for halloween for different celebrations across our schools tomorrow i know the elementary principles are really hoping the weather holds out but all four of our elementary schools and really all six of our schools have had pumpkin decorating contests and these things have been getting a ton of likes on social media because the creativity is just off the charts on the left you see mrs stranger the principal of walden elementary school represented in pumpkin form this is the first time she's been uh emulated

006in pumpkin form and she thought it was a little different but is very flattered by the gesture and then on the right a video actually from kipling the first graders there were assigned to give their teacher a halloween costume just given that head and a blank body and said give miss friedlander a costume this young lady picked a talking pizza for her but we did interviews with eight of those kids a really cute video up on our facebook page so check that out athletics off to a smashing start really in the fall season we've had a lot of conference champions in cross country the seventh grade girls at caruso won the conference championship along with the eighth grade boys the eighth grade girls at shepherd got second place and they wanted to make sure i

007gave them a special shout out because they actually didn't have enough girls to run so there were a bunch of seventh grade girls running with eighth graders and they were still able to get second place which is really good and then jamie chandler you see there he's the individual conference champion of all the middle schoolers in the area eighth grader at shepherd so congrats to him just an advertisement here here's my chance to plug the second annual 109 gives back second annual food and supply drive that's going to be taking place all next week in november 8th through 10th at all six schools if you go to dps109.org 109 gives back lots of information about that you'll see your principals send out information about that in the newsletter tomorrow as well and one of the

008cool things i really wanted to call the board's attention to is last year we kind of threw it all together in a pandemic and just hoped for the best this year we've really gotten a chance to let our students be involved so we gave for instance kipling this flyer use this flyer create your own flyer do whatever you want when i was at kipling today i noticed on the front door they're already making their own flyers and posting them up there using them as our own kind of recruitment agents for the food drive so it's been really cool to see that segways me to our guests tonight the fourth graders from mrs cassiopo's class they have been up to a lot i'm going to let them take over here job is to not talk and

009to let the kids run the show okay hello welcome to our presentations today we'll be talking about all the fun things we do in class every friday we get to share something great like what happened over the week or what you are going to do sometime soon we also share our talents with the class sometimes we might make a slide with pictures of what happened that is why share something great is fun here's a list sorry here's a list of things people do in class musical talent different artifacts from home creative artwork and writing hi i'm going to talk about our french pen pals we wrote our pen pals letters we also skyped at them last friday we got our letters from them on monday we were so excited to see the letters and pictures

010please start the skype video here are some facts about um our pen pals from france one of them is seven hour they are seven hours ahead of us they measure temperature in celsius it is warmer there and they were getting ready for a two-week holiday charlotte francis sorry i said i wasn't going to talk but it happened so by google it is 4 23 miles from deerfield we'll get back um so it's located in the southern end of france there was some other facts here on the side as well that we are happy to share in mrs cassiovo's class we have a very special job with the class tweeter every few weeks someone is the tweeter they are responsible for taking pictures of what we do in class and posting them on twitter it is

011a good way to share our learning these are some twitter posts that we've done this is us teaching our first grade buddies and mrs johnson's class how to make origami bookmarks this is us hanging up our friday fill up posters and this is us for getting our french pen pals letters we hope you enjoyed our presentation this was made from dawson cooper noah and juliet thank you [Applause] my name is julia my name is noah and my name is dawson thank you for giving us the opportunity to show what we're doing in our room thank you so much does anybody have any questions for for the fourth grade i have a question for dawson is that correct um the twitter that you were introducing what was it is it look like a giraffe stuffed animal

012or there was a picture was that special in your class it was like [Laughter] well he's very cute um i love the twitter that's an awesome idea and it's great that in fourth grade that you're already having responsibility for social media so thumbs up and then just one more question about the france pen pals is there something that you guys learned from your french pen pal that kind of blew your mind from our penthouse their handwriting is the most amazing thing i've ever seen was the were the was there a language barrier did they write to you in english how did that work they're learning how to write english and they're learning how to speak english so they wrote in english how's your french we're actually looking to hope to pair up with the middle

013school teacher to learn some french and hopefully be able to incorporate that nice what is a friday philip poster that was in your tweet uh i don't remember our friday fill-ups are well on twitter there was something that we saw about friday fill up and what it is is that it's a piece of instruction paper that says um take one and it has a bunch of inspiring words that you can take a post-it note authentic very nice any other questions i have a couple questions so uh how did the idea of the pen pals come up and can you tell us why the you were so excited when you were connected the video we saw was like a rock concert what was going on there so we were kind of all figuring out like like

014what each other were saying and yeah the facebook piece or it started on facebook and one of the groups that i'm in just for education and they were there was a fourth grade classroom in france that was looking for a partnership with 24 other students and at that time i had 24 students so i thought well great and then we have 25 but it worked out just as great so um it was just an opportunity where we were able to connect and and be able to do that and it works out well because they're seven hours ahead but they go to school later in the day so we were actually able to skype last friday and we started at nine o'clock which is four o'clock but um yeah it was four o'clock sorry and then

015um it was cute at the end do you remember what the one girl said at the end when it was uh when it was time for their holiday they were having a two-week holiday thank you for talking it was like we are our two-week holiday starts in five minutes so that's what that's how we ended our call and we're like see you later student has their own pen pal except for the our 25th student the news yes so we just buddied up with that yes did you guys put together the presentation yeah robert picked the guitar player guitar player epic i loved it thank you thank you guys yes thank you very much i think we have some certificates for you [Applause] [Music] thank you so much we're gonna take a quick picture with our

016students on the board you want us to stand or excellent i love that if you could see i was smiling through your whole presentation made me very happy thank you and thank you mrs cassiopo for all of your hard work and for bringing the whole class over today so this has been a very involved thing for you and thank you every day for what you do for our kids all right thank you thank you so much okay the next item on our agenda is curriculum and assessment update ms arnold yes all right okay so we are here today and i did bring a whole crew with me uh to share with you some of the good news of teaching and learning in district 109 i know a lot of the last year and a half

017has been focused on other things but such good things have been happening still behind the scenes between our teachers and for our kids and we just wanted to make sure that the board had that update as well this evening so just to tell you a little bit about how we're going to approach this we're going to talk first about the curriculum work that's happening we have some good news updates about some curriculum committees and leadership teams that are meeting in the district and then at the end of the presentation i will go through some of our most recent data to share with you as well we think it's really important to start with the curriculum work because that really focuses in on what's happening to get the outcomes which which should always precede the data

018the one good thing i wanted to share with you that this is really new to deerfield 109 at least in uh recent uh at least in recent years i'm not sure the last time this actually existed within the district but we do now have a formal curriculum review cycle on this slide you can actually see what that cycle looks like and it's a repeating cycle so that we're addressing curriculum very specifically on a rotation of about every six years it doesn't mean that we're not continuing work around each of those curricular areas as we go throughout each and every year because that's absolutely happening but it allows us to provide like an intense look at a singular curriculum area in any given year the great thing i'd love to share about this is that each

019of those curriculum leadership teams are made up of committees and in those committees we have teachers we have administrators we have teachers across grade levels we have teachers across buildings we have teachers across a job description so they're classroom teachers they're special ed teachers they're el teachers they're rti specialists we have everybody that is involved in them and our curriculum committees which these guys are going to talk about the focus of their work that's happening the number of staff that we have on a curriculum committee in deerfield 109 right now is about 35 percent of our certified staff so it's really important to us that we have veteran voices that we have new voices that are really guiding this work and these guys that are standing behind me that are going to talk to you

020in just a few minutes i think are critical to that work because i always talk about administration people in my role have a lot of ideology and those guys and the curriculum leadership teams are the things that make implementation work and so that's what we're going to share with you this evening all right i'm gonna isn't it pretty okay hi i'm sarah hogan i'm the math specialist here um so back in the spring all of the teachers met with their grade levels to provide feedback about the curriculum maps and then this summer the math committee actually made those changes so we changed and revised all of our curriculum maps and then our next charge was to revamp some assessments so also during the summer well actually prior to the summer there had been some feedback

021district-wide that the original big ideas assessments needed some revamping so over the summer the k-8 math committee started that work and now myself and some of our curriculum some of our instructional coaches have um kind of taken that on as part of our role to continue throughout the year so when we revise an assessment um first we're looking to restructure especially at the k5 level to make sure that it's like a kid-friendly format with enough space to show their work and appropriate questioning and then we're also cross-checking using the common core state standards to really make sure the questions that we select or edit are um really hitting the you know the meat of the common core standards um and then at the six eight level we are um creating some pretests in courses that

022they might not have previously existed and then just revising some of our assessments as well so the next charge of the committee is to create some fluency stations for each course so there had been some requests district-wide for regular fluency practice spiraled in throughout the school year and um so the first thing that we did as a committee at our last meeting actually back in our september meeting was really kind of think about what fluency means so typically when you hear fluency you think math facts that have to be fast and have to be accurate and all of that is true but recent research shows that not only do the facts need to be fast and accurate that math fluency also incorporates being able to use strategies appropriately and being able to be flexible with

023numbers so um we're kind of building the understanding of fluency district wide and then like i said we're working on creating some stations and some number talks to help classrooms out um that won't be rolled out until a little bit later this school year but that's been our committee work i was wondering that i feel like maybe now i was yeah yeah i think it makes sense to do it by subject since you're standing right there yeah not to put you on the spot go ahead um all right so two things one is from the fact fluency what's that website the new website the elementary kids are using for what's that called again oh the sd math so the um st math is like a math platform it's an app that we purchased for kindergarten

024through fifth grade for this year it's new um it's it's a really great app we did a lot of research on it and basically it's conceptual based so there's no like verbal directions or anything like that it's all um it's like spatial temporal thinking um and it's research based to show um to really kind of get students the deep understanding of math not just wrote practice so st math in itself actually does help with fluency right um but teachers wanted something a little more concrete also with like practicing of the fact there must be one other app that's specific to the math facts or at least at walden which one is it ixl no or science teacher that are you thinking of a specific school oh walden what is that one there's a couple of

025teachers that have a grant for reflex math so it's a game-based fluency practice i will say just from a parental feedback that reflex math is amazing my kids are just eating it up like pie it's amazing so i just want to give feedback on reflex math yes it's been i mean they they came home and they're just spouting off math facts to song which is incredible like instead of it being rote memorization they're all in song um and my only other question was does the math committee work with any high school math department chairs or math members to kind of look at how the middle school math programming can best feed into the high school math programming the committee itself doesn't work with the high school but i communicate with um blanche eskar who's the

026math department head over at dhs um and ironically one of our eighth grade math teachers texted me this evening and we're meeting we meet weekly i meet weekly with the 8th grade math teachers and we talked about compiling a set of questions for blanche some of them being like how did our recommendations go did students change placement things like that um i had a quick question um so i think it's we're in what year two of big ideas is that our third third year so how is it working with having the online everything online basically now there's no like hard book or isn't it it's all online or so my not regards like student yeah i mean our our students having trouble accessing things since it's everything's online our parents able to i know that

027was one of the selling points that parents could log in and look at the books and things like that so when we originally did the adoption we had decided [Music] on the k1 workbook just so that kids would have access to those materials at home they do include some games after they practice and we thought it was important we've continued that access this year but it's something that will continue to and is there is it integrated with the online book so if the students are having trouble with what's on the worksheet they can reference a section of the book online to review yeah and it depends on the class too but right now we're kind of rolling out for kindergarten and first grade um in the month of november we're rolling out a new feature

028that we hadn't previously used in the district called dynamic classroom so it's a really nice feature it's the questions parallel what's in the workbook but there's a feature where the students can tap and hear the question read aloud to them so if they're not a strong reader or a non-reader right now um it's really nice and then they can actually check you know there's a little check answer button so it allows our little little guys to be a little bit more independent that's great thank you so it sounds like it works in fifth grade too with my by the way i was gonna say it sounds like the website has more advantages than even a hardcover book because of what you just described yeah definitely um a lot of our middle school teachers use the

029assignments which are digital they'll digitally push students uh assignments and there's a lot of really nice features that teachers can attach on to there including like multiple um submissions for answers so they can check their answer and resubmit if the teacher allows for that there's also certain questions that um populate with a live tutor option or like a video option so it's really nice and then am i correct that geometry is still not under big ideas or does big ideas cover geometry we are continuing to use um holds holes yeah geometry so sort of a blend um because holt is what we've always used in the district we decided not to any initial adoption use the big ideas material and so far so good on the feedback from the eighth grade teachers okay thank you

030so prior to covid the big issues in the district dealt with math and large measure and you know we went back to kind of a third track of more remedial math rather than originally we were told by the administration that the number of students in that kind of third track that really needed it was relatively small maybe a classroom or so and everybody else kind of if you will push up with supports and there's a lot of you know difficulties with that so we've reverted back and i'm just wondering if you could speak to how that's going and give us some feedback it kind of i don't think we've readdressed that since pre-covert elise it's actually i hate to say it call it that because it's actually grade level mathematics starts in seventh grade so

031we're still having all kids together either in an algebra pathway which means 8th grade or geometry whoa and in 7th grade and then in seventh grade is when um we provide that option so we're still probably at 90 plus percent of our students getting through algebra one by eighth grade um but that pre-algebra pathway is serving under the data and see that they can grow mathematically as well and and there's no changes envisioned that this is a a path that is working we're not recommending any changes at this point okay thank you i will say just on on the topic of math and as we talk about committees this was our first committee that was formed in the district we started it to look at the math curriculum and that's when they we decided with

032the big ideas um curriculum adoption but that one started in 2018 and so when i go back to this slide and you look at the committee members like it's pretty much the same people that have been with us the entire time which has been great because as we monitor the fidelity of changes that we made it's it's great to have consistent voices on that team and this obviously you wouldn't need it exactly on these committees but i'm assuming you work in student voice in so when you're doing uh potentially piloting new curriculum piloting new apps you're getting constant feedback from the kids too right yep you're going to hear a little bit about the way that's looking in science in just a second yeah all right i just want to ask one quick question when

033we were talking about the math especially like in seventh grade and there's the the pre-algebra track per se how is that discussed talked about in the school so for the social emotional health of those students so they feel that they're successful that the other kids aren't judging like how is that sold to the parents and to the children of our district usually when we're having those conversations after sixth grade sarah and i and actually the middle school administrators have always sat down with teams and had really um good discussions about what's in the best interest of kids typically our teachers are making individual phone calls to families and also talking about their preference right like their benefits to making either decision and often times their voice is heard as part of that process all right

034we're going to move on all right this is the science committee i'm going to turn it over to dan but our science committee was actually formed the following year in 2019 so that we could look at our science curriculum and it was stalled a little bit we had intended to pilot the following year 2020. we're actually piloting this year and dan's going to talk a little bit about that i'm danny blonsky science specialist um so when we first convened the science committee two years ago one of the first things we did was kind of identify and put together a instructional model um for the district what are our priorities what do we value what are the central tenants of what we want science teaching and learning to look like and so um that was kind

035of like a number one for the committee before we could proceed any further um and so we came up with an instructional model based both on the um opinions and feedback and input of teachers as well as the standards themselves and making sure that we were fulfilling the vision as intended based on that we also conducted a needs assessment and one of the things we identified was there was some variation idiosyncrasies and scheduling time amongst buildings at the k5 level so that's something that we've attempted to try to have more of a commonality in terms of that area ensuring that all students regardless of building have the same time provided by grade level for science and and social studies is included in that as well um we evaluated instructional materials so we had looked at

036a number of different curricula um if we rewind to the previous science committee this was i believe around 2015 2016 if i'm not mistaken um ngss was still very new and so there was not a lot um on the market that really catered to that instructional model and so this time around what we found is that there were a number of alternatives that did not exist at the time and so i think that was really valuable for us to see how the instruction intended by the framework that the ngss is based on has translated to actual curricular materials and so we looked at a number of those and based on the feedback from committee members some of whom had a chance to pilot a unit from some of those materials we selected two sets of

037curriculum materials both at the k5 level and at the 6 8 level to pilot which was as daniel mentioned originally intended for last year postponed this year due to the pandemic and so at k5 every teacher is piloting either amplify or phd science and at the middle school level they're piloting one unit of amplify and one unit of open psy ed and so based on those experiences we're going to take input from all teachers and students as well um to get kind of a really broad robust perspective on which of those resources should be best at meeting our needs and if they have a role to play in terms of what science looks like moving forward until the next curriculum review cycle and so that's kind of where we're at at this point so we're

038in the midst of the pilot i think all teachers have piloted or in or are piloting um their first unit at by this point in time and so we hope to wrap up around february ish with that process is there anything i pronounce that's what i was going to say we'll be coming back to the board of education probably because this is a curriculum that is under formal review right now we will be standing in front of you with a formal recommendation for some some type of adoption probably by march yeah i know there's like a ven oh sorry i'm way into it um there's a venn diagram in between in terms of math and science here right there's the applied mathematics aspect of it so is there i mean is there interaction between the

039two committees when it comes to that like how can obviously as you're going along the science curriculum right and supporting that i guess that learning with the math that they're learning at the same time and how they work together and i think you know not looking at them in silos is that part of this process or we haven't done much cross-curricular committee um though work we're not presenting specifically on stem well a little bit this this evening but i know we've had a lot of conversation with our stem team recently about the overlap because that science technology engineering mathematics obviously is a part of that so they're interested in the work that's happening on the science committee as well as the math committee to make sure that they're integrating as well we'll probably get to

040some cross-curricular work once we have more formal adoption but we just haven't gotten there yet yeah and i get it you're still kind of like the where math was three years ago was just understand with the curriculum so i get that it's just at some point or another the i mean you can see it in the big ideas curriculum they're already introducing concepts that are actually science related as word problems for whatever the topic or the concept that they're trying to instruct it would be really cool right if the two worked hand in hand with one another because i think it just would supercharge both curriculum almost to a certain extent right i mean i know i can see my son when he's doing the big ideas and he sees like the they're doing i

041think volumes right right now right and there's some some discussion on it and it's applied to some sort of um i can't remember what the topic exactly was but it like it almost clicked for him right and then he could see it and he's very interested in science not some interested math but then when he understood that it was connected all of a sudden it became kind of a thing right so okay my question is so much sorry my question's a little silly but when you go to pilot two separate programs in the same building or buildings are the kids learning the same topics or are they totally divergent programs so that's a great question so at k5 half the teachers at a bill at a given building in grade level are piloting one or

042the other but it is indeed the same type so like if they're piloting a unit on ecosystems half the students will be having an amplify unit on ecosystems and the other half would be having um so yeah it varies we tried to have a representative sampling between buildings and grade levels so that you know there's it's pretty close to 50 50 in terms of how many students and teachers are experiencing each you're welcome okay thanks a lot thank you thank you we'll move on to social studies social studies is newly formed it's our new curriculum committee newly formed in june we also are saying social studies is a in a formal review cycle i know that this has not been done for a while and this has been a conversation of our board of education

043at previous meetings before tonight so we're really excited to share with you where we are on this journey my name is barb manson i'm the social studies curriculum specialist and we are excited um we've had three meetings so far and our first meeting was in june and honestly when we got together i think we were just excited that we were meeting about social studies and looking to create a program it kind of immediately became a focus on elementary because that's kind of the missing link at this point and what i thought was so cool was kind of the camaraderie between the middle school and the elementary school teachers the middle school teachers were helping the elementary look at their standards understand what they could do and they were just really excited to what their need

044was what they what their concerns were and we kind of flushed it out when we met this fall we've met a couple times and we've started to review materials and evaluate them again we've got teams that are k through eight so they're all working together and looking um over materials and deciding what we like staff members did take some materials home so we've had one meeting where we kind of introduced the materials they took them home and then they came back and kind of evaluated them we're looking specifically for that inquiry model which is how the illinois standards are are based and the national standards too we're looking for dei of course so the diversity equity inclusion is very important they all say they have it how much they have it and to what depth

045is kind of what we're examining and of course there's illinois mandates we're looking for creativity and engagement and all sorts of other aspects of the curriculum too but we're really digging in and it's fun to see what's out there there's some really good programs so we saw three last month and we'll see three again this next month behind the scenes there is some work so we are kind of starting to the staff development and educating our elementary school teachers in terms of what the standards are so they can start to learn them they're also creating sample lessons so we're taking some of the materials and playing with them and i do have to acknowledge our our coaches they have been incredible last year during remote they started to create so many social studies lessons and

046put them out there and so when i came in and started looking at them they chose geography which was phenomenal because that's a real missing link and you can kind of see the transgression and what our elementary school teachers are going to start learning and it highlights how it's going to impact the middle school program and things are going to really change i think i put a little picture there that little map activities from a kindergarten book and it's on introducing the compass rose and east and west they're doing that in seventh grade at the middle schools so you can kind of see this big gap again the coaches created these target lessons which were incredible all those things are being taught in seventh grade now so we know that as we transition to new

047materials everything will shift or change and we have to kind of look at things you know with fresh eyes um that kind of gets into this new faced plan that danielle suggested and everybody jumped on it right away we're going to kind of focus just on k-5 and develop a clear scope and sequence and really see what's going on in the middle school staff are not going to take a step back they're kind of really excited to stay involved and help the elementary school teachers develop this that will be our plan this year then next year middle school can kind of look at the scope and sequence see what's being uh developed see possibly kind of look for in the future and see how it will impact their program and then reevaluate and review what

048they're doing so there could be some major shifts in our middle school program and we're trying to look at it open-mindedly and figure out what haven't we been able to teach that now we can teach what units are missing do we need to realign them and it'll open that whole discussion so that discussion will go on next year and then the following year we'll hopefully implement some new middle school programs or materials or whatever whatever decision we make at that time so that's kind of where we're at so we're honestly excited we're kind of hungry i'm hearing that teachers are excited so we're looking forward to it i don't know if there's questions with the current k-5 what does social studies right now look like in k-5 and what do you optimistically hope to get

049to just in terms of hours per week or the day that's a good danielle question so in historically and this is not just unique to deerfield 109 but historically in deerfield and in elementary schools oftentimes social studies is embedded mostly into english language arts there often hasn't been stand-alone time but what we're talking about because we're running concurrently these science and social studies committees and now we do have 40 minutes of dedicated time in the day at the elementary for science social studies so these two committees will definitely be working in cohort barb and dan will be working together and this will probably be part of our presentation in march about rotating units of instruction each trimester so in that dedicated time and space within the elementary day we would do a science unit of

050instruction for a certain number of days or weeks and then we would shift to social studies and bounce back and forth throughout the year so the growth would be the dedication of the time that right now we don't currently have structure right it we do some um as barb mentioned though it's often been barb and definitely are instructional coaches at the elementary school creating okay um in-house units of social studies and sometimes it's been embedded into units of instruction in ela so this would be more of a dedicated curriculum dedication correct with a very specific we're targeting a very specific scope and sequence so one question or one i guess comment is i know there's a there's quite a desire i think at least in some of the conversations i've had with folks in the

051community surrounding um [Music] the lack of i guess or the homogeny related to the district right in terms of it's their experience i'm not talking more than that for the most part right um backgrounds you know um income levels you know you you name it right so i think within this this area is there is there a thought process within that curriculum to try to at least introduce our kids as much to the experiences that don't necessarily align with how they're currently ex what their experience is right i mean it's this is that one of the things that's on there okay yeah absolutely that's part of that rubric in terms of the evaluation of materials and i think that's happening across content but definitely as we study social studies materials right now that's one of

052the key benefits of the inquiry model of instruction like you can give kids historical facts historical content and so forth but then they they get to like ask a lot of questions about things and um and explore and learn experiences other than their own because there's this i mean there's this same thing like with science and math there's that that um venn diagram there's a bit of this with sel and there's also that outcome that we have right that at least on our current you know profile of an eighth grader that we want them to be good citizens right but part of it is that you know all of us as parents some of us come from different various backgrounds right and we have brought our kids into an area where we feel like we've

053done the best for them and put them in the best position but there's a downside to it right there's a bit of that you know they don't they don't necessarily have as many challenges as some of us have had right and so it's not like creating that so it goes to the grit a little bit right is at least having them you know understand where they fit in the world where the broader where where other where other kids at their same age what they're experiencing that's different than theirs right and it's not about understanding or appreciating what they're at it's more about that understanding that empathy right that comes with it um that i really would love to see and i'm sure you guys are working on but i would i think there's a real

054hunger within the community to have the school try to facilitate some of that as much as possible right and it naturally happens barb could speak way more eloquently to like the the sequence of social studies standards in the state and the common core but that's what the standards are really shaped like it starts in kindergarten with understanding my family and then it builds out to understanding my community and then it's supposed to go to understanding my region then my state and then my world right my nation and then my world i can tell you my current eighth grader can talk circles about communism right now so they are they definitely expand out of our neighborhood i look at it as saying there's like 20 25 miles down the road from us right and and it's

055the same thing from their perspective it's and i've always said this is how can we introduce our children right and with all the remote technology and everything else that's out there right to to partner with kids that are not necessarily of the same background that they are to basically learn how to to work with other individuals and that's part of this right um and it's i think part of what we want to do and it's across all subjects for the most part right i mean i'm but this is the specific disciplinary dei component and a lot of the programs we're looking at some of them are doing a really thoughtful job of starting things in kindergarten so they know that's a need i think not only in our district but across the nation so we're

056that's definitely not one thing that we're always really looking for and trying to check it out and make sure we're happy with it i'd like to pick up on something that uh ryan was saying too because those are some of my thoughts too on social studies and i have a personal interest i used to be a socialized teacher myself or at least degreed in that um but i want to focus a little bit more on like buzzwords and um flash points so right now there's critical race theory which is you know this kind of flashpoint buzzword kind of out there and i'm certainly no expert in it although i've done some reading in it and i'm wondering whether that notion is you know how well understood is it is it discussed in the committee and

057how would you answer the question from someone about whether critical race theory principles if you will are being taught in our district yeah i actually get that question on occasion from people critical race theory is not being taught explicitly within our district i often think there's a very big misunderstanding sometimes when people reference crt between culturally responsive teaching and critical race theory they ironically have the the same initials and so i think it often is confused when people call me about question and question me about that right and what is happening so we're not explicitly teaching critical race theory we do have a responsibility of educators as educators to be culturally responsive which i think goes to some of the questions that are being asked by you guys are we providing both windows and mirrors

058for our kids can they see themselves in text can they see themselves in the lessons and things like that and that's something we're looking at very closely as we analyze curriculum and design and make decisions around what we teach our kids okay thanks i think too um and i was going to ask about uh mandates but that sort of go feeds into what you're saying also every year and i think one this year or this week actually we have uh one of the policies on that we're approving tonight is the curriculum policy and every year there's more mandates of what you have to teach in the curriculum and a lot of that goes to i know that you have to teach genocide and you have to teach you know various other topics that touch on

059what you were just talking about and um not it's not explicitly critical race theory but it's it's around that topic um so my question really uh is isn't um is more you know how do you integrate all of these mandates because every year they're more and more and and you know they're all arguably very important um so how do you how do you effectively integrate that into the curriculum right well and that's that's why barbara mentioned that we're looking at illinois mandates and i can give you an example of one that actually recently went through legislation and will go into effect in 2022 and that's asian american history right asian american history has to be taught across all grade levels in the scope and sequence so when we're looking at curriculum materials that's something we're

060closely analyzing like is that evident in this curriculum at each of our grade levels it doesn't it doesn't get into the point of like the explicit how much you're teaching how many days you're spending on it but the evidence of it has to be there and we're looking very very closely at each and every one of those even though like they're a lot there are as you mentioned we've uh that was one of the first things we did when we gathered the committee together in june is that we had the state standards there and we also had the illinois mandates page sitting right next to it so that we could ground ourselves in that work and those responsibilities i mean even today we're going to be talking about resolutions for uh future legislation or that

061the illinois state um board association uh for indigenous people um as something so how you fit all that in it's got to be a jumble i think ryan had a good point in terms of and no one wants to get into the weeds of what you do but as a as a suggestion i thought you know there are neighboring districts or districts close by that are quite different in terms of diversity and and and demographics and and there could be real value in some how uh integrating um educational opportunities in that way that's a good point i'd like to propose that we rename social studies to windows and mirrors because that's brilliant just throwing it out there okay and we will see you in a year so asking for materials thank you okay now we're

062going to move on to a social emotional learning committee this is something i feel like has been happening across our schools for many many years but this is the first time we've brought together a group of people across the district talking about it more specifically so ally's going to go there okay good evening everyone thank you for having us this evening i'm ellie croman i'm the district sel specialist and social worker for district 109. last year we formed our committee we have about 25 members and a really nice representat representation of staff across our district one of our focuses for our committee has been on panorama this is a platform that we use it allows our staff like a one-stop shop for any kind of student data so map or iar information attendance information and

063most importantly and also allows for us to collect data and measures uh scl over time um panorama is also the resource that we use for our social emotional learning survey that we give to our students we've been doing that for about two years right now that is given to our third through eighth grade students and um is a representation of student voice and really where the students see themselves with regards to social awareness self-efficacy with math and ela self-management relationships and how they feel about their peers and their connections with teachers so danielle is going to go into a little more details about our sel survey results later um our sel committee received pd in june and that was really helpful for a smaller group of us to learn about the platform and then just

064yesterday our full district received this pd around panorama another really important thing that our committee is working on is the review of our illinois sel standards and our k-5 performance descriptors this is uh diving into this is really going to help us meet the needs of our students in the classrooms um and then also we're going to dive into a little bit more castle framework and we'll be exploring that more this year we also introduced second steps this year this is an sel resource that many of our teachers have used throughout the years they had these big boxes in their classrooms and they would use the curriculum and some of the younger grades had some puppets that went along with it and now that has moved on and we have this as a digital resource

065um this really allows for our staff to have an opportunity to add more sel into the classroom and also to build upon the principles at the elementary school with regards to a leader in me um so i'd love to highlight a few of our elementary schools uh sel things that are going on in the schools along with our leader and me in the elementary schools i won't go through all of them but i'll just highlight a few with regards to kipling they have a school-wide theme of leaders change the world and they are working this year to look at leaders and their theme for this month was leaders in sports at south park i would like to highlight morning meetings are a great time for classes to come together in the morning and really start

066the day together build that classroom community kids are typically sitting in a circle or i guess at the elementary school they're on their rugs social distance and given a chance to greet each other in the morning say hello the teacher might present like a thoughtful question for the day or a goal for the day they might do a mood meter or a temperature check to kind of get an idea about how students are feeling in the morning i feel like this really paves the way for our teachers to understand how kids are coming in in the morning and how to support our students throughout the day at walden i'd like to highlight lunch buddies the social worker and the psychologists are running groups during lunch the kids are bringing their lunch they're choosing different grade

067levels during different weeks and kids are coming in they're talking about relevant sel topics maybe doing some breathing exercises or learning about coping skills or just doing an activity and having some fun so that students have a chance to get to know one another they get to know those clinical clinical support staff in their buildings and then it will not want it to highlight the little spot sel curriculum the school psychologist and social worker are taking the lead on that they are using the little spot curriculum their their books that talk about feelings um and really teach kids about life skills the social worker is making some videos based on those books then the teachers are able to show those videos to the class and then they have some extension activities where they're doing some

068more discussion um the actu sorry the october theme that they um focused on or focusing on right now is belonging if you guys see in that top picture that's one of the bulletin boards that they created all the students got to make their own name plate and create it on their own and then they all got to post it up it's like uh i can't see exactly what it says but it's it's all about belonging and so they were able to put their their name plate up there um in november they will be focusing on diversity and then moving on to the middle schools our new name for our scl time is called excel students attend this class on wednesdays in the morning go their first thing the curriculum is generated by a small group

069of teachers at each school including teachers special education teachers and some of our clinical staff and the lessons are focused around our illinois state standards um in the bottom picture there is a sixth grade science class and they are in their excel class and they're doing what's called a check-in and the teacher just made a google form and it was kind of just some questions based on you know hey how's school going for you how are you feeling about things and then that way that teacher is able to get a little bit more insight as to where the sixth grade class is um lastly i wanted to highlight it's not on the screen here but just wanted to highlight alyssa's mission alyssa's mission is our signs of suicide and depression program um that we do

070every year this is about our sixth year doing that and um it's for middle school middle school students only um our sixth through eighth graders and our students will be presented with um alyssa's mission program and they will at the end do a survey which helps us to understand kind of what they're feeling and thinking and where they're at with their mental health with regards to next steps we are going to dive into castle school-wide sel rubric and observations protocol and this will help us to continue all of the foundation of the work that we're doing now and help us to grow better and better with our sel and our committee's very excited to do that i got a question about um root cause a little bit i mean i know we've looked at data

071in the past related to the district and it's being basically above the mean average in terms of certain you know certain like things in terms of anxiety adhd you know there's a few i think there was a few off the top of my head can't remember exactly right um and i think we have you know at times pontificated about the reasons why but we've never really valid validated or or at least as far as i haven't seen anything that's validated maybe some of these these thoughts behind it um i've had comments and i experienced it myself within my own with my own family that there are it seems to be a higher level of those types of things within our community than you would expect on average and the data has seemed to bear it

072out over time um have we ever thought about trying to root cause it and seeing if parents because at one point their discussion was some people are moving into the district because our services are you know are top notch in that you know and that people want to get those services but is that true right um is there something else that's at play that we need to identify kind of a root cause to to see how that may impact how we address the sel within within our our district does that make sense yeah yeah i can just speak to the data piece and then i'll let daniel take it but in terms of our overall numbers numbers they're pretty on par with comparable other north shore districts you you are correct in in stating the

073concern right um but in terms of other you know high performing districts we you know similar numbers it is absolutely an ongoing concern of ours we're partnering and ally can speak a little bit to the work as well with doug bolton um he's doing ongoing monthly work for us now it's a topic that he speaks with us about you know and works with us on our clinical team he's really passionate about the topic supporting our staff kids and families but certainly the numbers are high they're increasing but i wouldn't think like our district in particular in comparison to to comparable high-performing districts um but we we absolutely are very concerned about it um you know and continue to be yeah because while i appreciate you know that and i you know a lot of this

074is great stuff the leader of me program is amazing and you know and i think like i said earlier there's you know there's a venn diagram there's overlap with with everything else but um it just it seems to me that i think that we're not that there's something that's that's at play that's that's deeper rooted within the community i don't know what it is i can't you know take a guess at it i'm just wondering what efforts we could potentially take to be a little bit more proactive in terms of identifying specific needs um a lot of these are i would argue is a bit more general in nature does that make sense it applies to to every child which is exactly what we need to start with and do but like we talked about

075everything we personalize right education we personalize support and that's certainly in place too and that that's um i know it's not covered not everything yeah you know the work ali does is there's just not enough hours in the day is because she this is the the kind of tier one curriculum work you know for all students and then there's there's additional layers of of intervention and services and it's also assisting with parents in terms of early identification for sure applies to all and certainly does hit on those areas but then many many other layers of intervention for our kids who it what maybe it's one of those things where you guys are i mean i'm sure this is the case you guys are doing the work right but at the end of the day some

076parents including me and as a board member we're not fully aware of the the full level of it does that make sense no that's good and we're not taking advantage we're also not advocating enough to take advantage when we're seeing things at home that you haven't yet identified in school for various reasons because kids act differently sometimes at home when they're at school right and so i'm trying to figure out how we can make this more of a team effort right between the parents and the schools in terms of identification of it's it's it's more on the issue side of the house than it is on the general well-being sel type type activities it's more about those those specific issues right this is really related to the panorama data that we started to see last

077year and that we'll see again this fall from our kids relative to grit or perseverance or persistence through challenges like we often have seen our kids score lower than their national peers and those things because we started to see that we've been pretty intentional about about some of the professional development that we're doing in house with staff this year we have some book studies going on right now with a number of our school staff under the theme of the chasing childhood trailer i don't know if anybody has seen that but chasing childhood is kind of the follow-up to the race to nowhere and it talks a little bit about a nationwide trend that is being seen in this generation but some of our book studies are really particular to affluent communities communities of high wealth

078communities where kids have lots and lots of layers of support and while they're weaker in this area and sometimes as a result they see additional diagnoses yeah and they see and there's higher and higher levels of expectation as well right yeah and pressure that's essential that's associated with that so i mean and that's i think this is this is one of those areas and not saying that in any other subject that there isn't a you know parent school yeah you know partnership that goes on it's in every subject but if anything in this one right it is we did monday night i was like oh we gotta get the video uh doug bolton did a great presentation for us monday night um and we'll share you know it was gonna be the next um newsletter

079but we can get it out sooner too um focused like pretty much exactly on this topic but i do want to clarify because when we had talked about the um panorama data it was explicit that it's not going to diagnose flag etc anxiety depression like so when we talk about partnerships with families et cetera i think it's important to be clear what our roles are as a school district versus what our roles aren't as a school district and if i'm correct your roles at least globally with sel isn't to identify anxiety disorders identify ocd identify depression that's a very different potential pathway am i correct correct certainly if we have you know parents who are coming to us with specific concerns about their children that they want us to you know speak about further you

080know these screeners right serve a different purpose you know versus something ali's speaking of alyssa's mission which we've done for multiple years you know where we're looking from a different lens we have multiple avenues and we just reiterate over and over again if anyone has a very specific concern about their child don't hesitate reach out immediately you know start with the teachers reach out to the administrators and we'll have individual conversations right um so to kind of build off of that you had mentioned the middle school check-ins um kids filling out little digital google forms or whatever and i know the elisa's message does it as well i will say and you this isn't something you don't know but even feedback from some middle schoolers i talk to they say you have to just answer

081i'm okay or you'll get brought to the office and i know that's been kind of a reoccurring problem i know in the past there might have been some survey done maybe two years ago where whatever the kids answered it was like kids started getting pulled out of class and everybody goes oh i know why you're getting pulled you said you were feeling sad today and so i'm just curious as to if you guys are finding appropriate vehicles to get honest feedback from the kids and not feedback that's just write down you're okay or you're going to get taken to the office that that that is why no survey or screener is foolproof and why relationships in schools matter more than anything else okay good so that's not your singular indicator okay yeah i think you

082might be thinking about alyssa's mission it sounds like that's what you're well even that my my son did like on a wednesday morning in the middle school they did a little check-in and you have to say you're okay or they'll pull you right i see what you're saying yeah okay but yes and really submissions for sure i know they do that and we always try to brainstorm ways to inconspicuously follow up with students but you know the survey that we give at the end is you know very targeted toward you know red flags yes concerns about students and whatnot and about safety so that's why we're totally following up yes um all right so then two just broad questions one is uh these you know you mentioned the acl highlights the different buildings is there

083a vision as a district to get to more of a global six building program or do you guys feel confident that each building doing their own thing works best for our kids yeah to be determined i guess a little bit um sel is going to undergo we're going to be under formal review for sel next year we're taking a look at that obviously most of the district you guys probably know we were doing lead and leader and me k8 yeah um and while our school teams like components of leader and me they've also they've also told us pretty loud and clear that it's missing some things that they feel are really really important that should be embedded into our daily work and our sel work with kids and so that's why this year all of

084our buildings have kind of set unique goals to be responsive to their kids and then we're going to build from that so that's on the docket and then the other big one um love the excel name i love incorporating executive functioning such a huge fan is executive functioning theoretically also being looked at in the k-5 lens as well obviously the teachers do an amazing job on the daily but as your goal of an sel program is there going to be a focus on executive functioning at that group too yeah i think they're looking at it lightly the you know it's a little bit integrated into the work and of course we'll continue to look at whether we need to build that out we often though see that when kids start juggling multiple classes multiple teachers

085transitions all of those transitions are when you start to see that there's some difficulty for those kids who struggle with that organization component so that's why it's really really heavy in sixth grade got it and my last piece and then i'll share the platform for all of our learners who have come off a very unique year of learning remote hybrid the whole bit are you seeing from your uh feedback from your staff kids are settling in kids are feeling i want to use the word normal that's not the right word but are you still seeing a lot of work that needs to be done in some repairing of the sel that didn't get to take place over the past year i think both personally i think both of your um the both statements are correct

086i think that yes i think that the majority of our students are really settling in there was just a different vibe this year and from what i see kind of from the district lens is that kids are so excited to have started the year and and be in school um and then yes we do have a lot of work to do with mental health and um how we you know relay information to parents about our concerns um and give them resources outside of our community um and also you know how we make them feel safe and comfortable at school so i think both i thought you were going to ask about executive functioning whether the last year had impacted that oh i bet it did and yes yes you just wish you had more hours

087and more we always say that we're always wondering um gosh are we gonna you know hire more staff you know for those kinds of things you know that's what we always think about but um we have a great crew we we do it you know we've got two two uh clinical staff people at each middle school um and and also at the elementary buildings um and have an extra social worker and counselor at the middle school so um we're very well equipped i have a question i was wondering do you take a moment to explain the buddy program so the buddy program looks a lot different across the district um i think when i did the buddy program at um at shepherd we would find students who were lacking peer connections or having difficulty with

088social communication um and we would partner them with peers who were role models or who wanted to be part of a a leadership role um and come in and facilitate conversation and um you know be active and and play a game with with friends um the buddy program that i spoke about today um is or that was on the screen here um is where the you know fifth graders are paired with a first grade class and they haven't kind of what the the kids were talking about earlier where they have an opportunity to you know the fifth graders be leaders and mentors for these youngsters um and do a fun activity together so each school kind of calls it something different and it can mean different things in different buildings okay so the reason why

089i asked is because you know i have a great concern for those who are on the margins right the special needs kids or the unpopular kids and their social emotional well-being you know being feeling left out could lead to all kinds of different things not the least it was just pure unhappiness of not feeling it fit in and i'm wondering to what degree the district is identifying and trying to do that because the presentation had the buddy program and i'm familiar with the one you're talking about where everybody kind of butt the older kids buddy with which is a great program by the way especially the little ones you know they'd look so up to the fifth grade you know like that's my guy whatever but it didn't address that issue and um and you

090know having different clicks being in the popular click and sporty click the you know the left out click and i'm wondering what the districts or what your committee is doing to address that important issue yeah i really though can that that probably is not the work of the committee we're looking more at that tier one curriculum i do think that school teams are looking really closely at that administrators with their clinical staff teachers like at our middle school our teams meet with the intention of really talking about the kids and if they would identify that or see that or have that reported then that group would try to be responsive to to those kids needs and doing things like that with connecting them but wouldn't it be something that like i mean i don't know

091i'm not an expert in this area but i would think that if you had a program you know all kids should be made aware i wasn't exactly sure what you were saying i guess your answer your response because i thought my interpretation of what you just said was hey we're trying to identify those students have particular needs and then trying to address them on an individualized basis i think that's what you were saying and i'm saying something more broad than that that it would seem to me that first off it's not very easy to identify those kids those kids might very well be the kid who just is quiet in class goes home doesn't have any play dates and all that it might not be easy to know who they are and then secondly is

092that it would seem to me that something more systemic being able to say hey you know to all kids as a program that hey keep your eye out there's someone out there let's do that as part of our every day stuff hey sit with us today you know whatever the thing is that we're oh you're talking about like kids looking out for kids maybe i'm talking about a program so that yeah so there's some way that kids could be included with other kids yeah that's what i'm talking about okay yeah the difficulty sometimes when you create even programs around that is just like they're difficult to identify they often are unwilling to self-identify that they need that or want that right but um yeah that's i think kids might have that might be an opportunity

093for us to bring in kids voice because sometimes their perception could help us better understand i just want to um ask a question or make a comment so this to me is probably the most important thing we're teaching our children right now and we're facing as a district and there's only so much time in the day and i feel like as a parent in the community as a board member that you know all parents understand you know we might not understand what math is taught now but we understand math is taught we understand english is taught reading writing i think there is a big hole in parents understanding what this sel still is being taught in our schools and i and i and i think most parents probably will listen to the teachers i wish

094that we could find a way to keep educating the parents about what this social emotional learning is and also finding ways to give it as homework as a family right like my son brings home math every single day and he brings home reading 20 minutes a day he's never brought home sel homework for us to do as a family so this is the work you're doing is so important and it hits every subject right like if you're not social emotionally ready to do math you're going to break down in math so it's not just your subject your subject is goes across everything so i as we're looking at curriculum development let's look at curriculum development in a broader scope and also how do we educate the families as well i think that's going to be

095so important so but thank you for all the work you're doing just to back that up i think part of it is that like every school right now is it's different right and so but you've laid it out in the side before this in terms of hey we have a district as a district there's some specific outcomes and sections and areas that we're trying to achieve within the sel curriculum and we just may do it a little bit different by school which is fine it's okay it may be okay maybe the way you go maybe a different way right but i think that's one of the things is that especially parents as they move from school to school it's really hard to you know to to connect the dots so to speak if that makes

096sense right yeah and that's where i think you lose that parent that um school parent teamwork type of thing right associated when we enter into the um next phase of looking at castle school-wide sel rubric one of the things that we will be evaluating ourselves on is family engagement that's an important part of their framework and so that very well may be the an area in which we find ourselves needing to grow as well and it's big for our vision work frankly because it was one of the topics as we were looking at the current you know profile in eighth grader like how do we measure right how do we find the the metric or whatever the evaluation is associated with it right if there is you know i'm not going to say there is

097i'm not saying this but i'm saying theoretically if there wasn't that framework or that rubric that existed we would have a hard time in our vision work identifying how we're going to evaluate right whether or not we're achieving the outcome that we want to achieve so thank you i just i just have one other comment and hopefully then we can move on um so it says for the middle school i know in elementary we use leader and me in middle school it says that the sel curriculum is generated by a small team of middle school staff i know that throughout the years we've tried a number of different sel curricula none of them have really resonated with either the staff for the students or the parent community so i i guess i'm just wondering are

098we saying that we're are we going to try to find something else i don't know what the breadth is of what's available out there if we've tried everything but it would seem like that's a pretty tall order to ask our staff to be developing our own curriculum especially you know to incorporate things like maureen is talking about you know incorporating family and things like that it would be obviously a lot um more uniform and probably easier to implement if we had some some research-based curriculum yeah and and we obviously are going to look at i mean we haven't looked at everything but we've looked at a lot my experience in secondary schools though middle school and you guys know i come to the district with most of my career being spent in high schools is

099that most most of the time with secondary kids they want it to feel authentic and organic and meaningful and sometimes when you get into a boxed curriculum or program it can it can lose that aspect and i think that's the same feedback that we were starting to hear from our kids and from our staff and so they've taken on they've taken on this work of like let us look at the standards closely and really pull from a multitude of curriculums and make this best for our kids and for us so that it feels like we're delivering something that's meaningful to them and meaningful to kids and something that we can buy into so they're also using like second step which is another research-based program castle approved to incorporate in some of their lessons at the

100middle school as well i just don't know and this will come next year if we're going to land on something something specific and that's the only thing we use or it or it is something that's really embedded in everything we do i don't know if that answers that yeah thank you thank you thank you very much you know i told these guys i was like we're at 15 or 20 minutes she did i did all right have you seen our board meetings though you guys are doing the most important 20 minutes that's why we're here right yeah the teaching and learning hi everybody i'm megan christensen i am the ela curriculum specialist i am brand new to deerfield this year so happy to be here thank you thank you um i want to start out

101talking a little bit about the current practices and instructional models i'm going on in 109 so we'll start by talking about kindergarten through fifth grade so they use the workshop model for almost all of their teaching but particularly in literacy so we have a little um visual here of what a workshop lesson might look like it follows three main components the first is a quick mini lesson 10 to 15 minutes which is kind of what you think about when the teacher is up there kind of you know on the stage for about 10 minutes the majority of the workshop time you can see is applying the skill so that's when students are doing that work from the mini lesson they are maybe working independently reading or writing the teacher is pulling small groups the teacher

102is having one-on-one conferring sessions that's where most of that learning is happening and then they wrap up with a share everybody comes back together to share about their learning kind of put it all together um to consolidate it so that's what the workshop model looks like in literacy it helps to do this use this model because it really um facilitates the reading and writing pieces coming together along with phonics and spelling and word work and all that kind of stuff so all that literacy components can be transferred right readers our writers and writers are readers and how it all um yeah comes together so um deerfield adopted the writing units of study in so that comes from lucy calkins and it comes out of teachers college from columbia university and k-5 all adopted that in

103writing in 2017 and then reading in 2018 and then we just adopted the unit units of phonics for first and second grade in during all the craziness so um we are working on you know refining all of our practices in those areas and continuing to grow so i'll talk a little bit about that in a minute about our professional development as well in our middle schools sixth through eighth grade teachers are using teacher developed thematic units and um they're often tied to social studies as much as possible um differing differing between grade levels or campuses um but obviously that's like a really natural connection and barb and i already have been working together this year on different um grade levels and components actually between k through eight um and in the middle schools there they

104have a variety of text types that they're using short stories novels poetry etc they're writing different genres um and a lot of their themes or topics are things like dystopia and utopia or overcoming adversity and grit ties into the sel right things like perception versus reality or self-discovery so those are some of those themes going on in middle school so our committee has um when was it formed june june okay right before i came on board i didn't miss anything one meeting i think so we are doing a few different things depending on the grade level bands so in kindergarten through fifth grade there's a lot of work right now around grammar word study spelling and the first and second grade is unpacking that units of phonics which was just newly adopted and in sixth

105through eighth grade the sixth or eighth grade teachers actually one of their main goals for this year was to find a home run book for every student so that's like when kids say i'm not a reader i always say you just haven't found the right book yet there's just that one book sometimes that turns a kid into a reader so home run books has been our main goal for this year actually one of our seventh grade teachers over at crusoe jessica moss i was in her room talking with her and she created this padlet where as she's told her students as soon as they find that home run book that they're going to take a picture with it and then she's created this padlet and with a hashtag best book ever so i think it's

106been really one way that one of our teachers has been engaging the students in that like goal to find that book that really creates them you know forms them into that like reader now i'm really a reader so that brings me to talking a little bit about our libraries some district-wide things we have going on right now our classroom libraries is one of our initiatives scl and diversity making sure we have those windows and mirrors in our texts in our classroom and independent reading so those are some of our district-wide things we're reading around doing some professional development around and i know jason's going to talk a little bit about some of those topics as well so professional development and kind of what we've been doing already and what we're doing going forward our k-5

107teachers have been working with the chicago literacy group a lovely organization of two women who are carissa and maria and we've already done some work with them previously and we started our work up again with them this year really unpacking mini lessons and having all of our teachers kind of come around that same professional development topic of the importance of the mini lesson how to keep it tight to 10 minutes and just how to focus it and direct it towards exactly what their students need we're going to continue that work with them this year we'll see them again in the winter and in the meantime our k our first and second grade teachers will also be working with them to unpack those phonics units of study that are brandly brand new to us and really

108dig in and get to know those units better and finally our middle school teachers we have the amazing opportunity to bring a teacher and author her name is perniel rip she teaches seventh grade outside of madison wisconsin so she's somewhat local she's written the book passionate readers and she is going to be doing a couple of different professional development sessions with our middle school teachers to talk around things like classroom libraries independent reading um yeah and some of those topics we're really excited to have her too so quick all right quick question yeah it's the same topic yeah same topic i can hello uh for those of you who i have not formally met i am jason jesuit i'm the new director for learning i've been here since june working alongside danielle on some of

109these topics um literacy is definitely my background and my forte so i'm going to kind of dive in here and i know classroom libraries has been the topic of discussion for quite a while there's been a lot of interest um and i was fortunate enough to be around when someone walked by and said we have some extra money what should we do with it and danielle and i said well we know that we have some potential concerns with students coming back into the classrooms and that whole that what that learning loss thing over the summer uh which we can talk about later which we're you know not really seeing but one of the big things was reading and authentic reading instruction was kind of interrupted for about a year and some of the high leverage

110practices that we know um that really get the greatest gains it's been unequivocally proven and continually restated by every professional literacy and reading organization in the country for decades now is that the best way to become a strong reader is to read so independent reading students having text huge varieties of text being voracious consumers of books is the way to grow them so we said we actually i noticed when i was walking through the classrooms in june some of our libraries were a little old a little loved a little tattered and some of them were quite sparse especially for a younger teacher so we said well let's start with a new baseline let's revive and breathe life into our classroom libraries and so we went ahead and um you see some pictures here last week

111wednesday our kindergarten through fifth grade teachers in all four buildings got to unpack their brand new classroom libraries um k4 got 200 k3 got 200 titles each for every classroom and four or five got 180 titles the libraries were strategically assembled to have of equal balance of fiction and nonfiction our upper grade teachers were they're actually i was at walden they were giddy they're like look at all this non-fiction i've never had this many non-fiction books in my classrooms the kids are going to be excited inside of there there's a balance of genre and text types so we have graphic novels we have novels we have picture books we have all kinds of to really build um interest and excitement with the students and and the purpose of these libraries was to renew and update

112our libraries and to build interest in the classrooms along with that all of our our four elementary schools also received a library of about 900 books to be shared by teachers across the building this is what we're calling our diversity equity inclusion and social emotional libraries the books are ranged by grade level for appropriateness as well as some readability and going through coming back to some of our conversations earlier we're on social studies and social emotional learning we want to start embedding this into our classroom we know that some of our units when you look at all the mentor texts they're a little vanilla they're they're all very similar characters similar storylines and so these books i've actually spent the last couple of days digging through titles we now have actually african folk tales coming

113into the classrooms and korean tales um books with diverse characters um characters in wheelchairs characters that have autism ocd all of these things and so when we have students and students can start to see themselves in their books there's a huge array of types of characters text types lifestyle situations multi-ethnic families and really getting down to like some of them really pinpointed like this is actually pacific islander this is korean american this is actually african african-american lots of great stories positive characters so students can start to have more of those windows into the world around them so along with working alongside our coaches we're going to start looking at those into pulling apart and examining those libraries getting them into teachers hands getting them into students hands and identifying and saying these books can be

114used as part of our reading curriculum part of our writing curriculum we can hand them off to our social studies and to kind of start that process now a little bit ahead of the curve and so that's kind of the intention was we know that reading is important and we know that diversifying our classrooms and really getting kids interested and having access to that text was going to be a great way to kind of rebound from the last year or so that we've had in education all right um ryan is it accurate to say that ela as a curriculum is probably the i would say the more mature most mature it's on the path versus say i mean obviously math with big ideas is only a couple year a few years old right yeah this

115is the longest curriculum that we've had particularly at k5 so is i mean are you guys using this as a bit of a model i know the the committee has just started up but i mean it seems to me and if you look at the test scores and you look at the learning loss right that happened from from covid reading and that g there's multiple reasons probably behind that right that it had the the least up and we know that math nationally had a bigger dip and we kind of followed that trend to a certain extent but it seems to me that the fact that this is the most mature and now we're kind of i would say in the optimize in the continue to just kind of tweak and improve phase of it that

116that may have a a a pretty big impact on why our students are also able to survive that that year right and come back without much of a of a dip yeah that's probably true i mean we had to quickly modify like when when they talked about readers and writers workshop and what that looks like and then we had to take that into a digital or virtual environment last year that was certainly interesting but i think they you know they quickly did that um because because they knew that instructional model mattered so that's all we're doing now because it's continually refining and improving the instruction because my i guess my my point to a certain extent on that is that we we i think we've tended in some of the others to swing not having

117curriculum at all or you know to to locking it down but we i mean at least i mean i've only been on the board for five years i think five years now is it five geez um before maybe i don't know but um but even within the time frame yeah even within the time frame that i've been on it seems like we've kind of gone through different iterations within different within different subjects and at some point another we need to kind of settle and stabilize and mature and then tweak and i get education changes and i get that methodologies change but i think we have to be careful i think as we go forward with our curriculum to not go from one thing to another thing to another thing right because i think we're not

118necessarily getting the full benefit um in in in those transitions if that makes sense and that is what we talk about in these curriculum leadership teams more than anything is that the program really doesn't matter it is a program and a resource like what really matters is our philosophy about what high quality instruction looks like so i agree like i mean big ideas we big ideas is a great example right like we use that as our core resource but we also bring in so much supplemental that we know helps grow our kids even more so it's a research-based resource but there's way more to our instruction mathematically yeah and that makes me excited about the math program over time because as we get more mature within that curriculum we should be seeing the results of

119it continue to improve right um question about first of all so excited about these 900 books it's per building right per building yeah amazing two questions one is what was how did the decision to pick these specific 900 books was that just was there was there a resource you went to or the company that we went through actually um through the pandemic worked very closely with some east coast very very diverse school districts and those districts actually had diversity mandates and so even though they were using the the resources they were saying this is too homogenous this is two okay and so they were already having to supplement and grow these libraries and so in conjunction with these school districts and the experts there as far as with diversity equity and the communities and the

120teachers represented their communities they built these libraries and so they actually expanded them and put them out there for other people because they knew the work was going to be so there was actually really due diligence these were books that actually you know teachers of certain heritages ethnicities cultures were using in their classrooms as instructional tools to connect with similar students and so they grew that live right from there so very very well vetted yeah two follow-ups one is what type of professional development or personal coaching resources do you think our staff might need to use these books to the fidelity that they're intended obviously it's one thing to just put a book in a kid's hand it's another thing to integrate it into their like actual yeah so i mean our curriculum specialists are

121certainly working to identify books within those libraries that could enhance some of our specific curriculum units but our coaches our instructional coaches who aren't here this evening are also just taking to their weekly team meetings like copies of books and teachers and the coaches are exploring them together okay so it's not necessarily hey kids there's a bin over here access it at your leisure these books are intentionally trying to be brought into instruction and libraries emotional libraries are something that are being done and then the last question on that 900 books is there any type i mean to say to use the word assessment feels wrong i mean it's you can't pitch and hold it sorry is there a way to even get a sense like a year from now or you're 18 months from

122now where we're at with these 900 books either the value they brought do we need more of something like is there a way to get a temperature check on the progress that's actually the feedback we're hoping from yeah okay exactly right because we like these libraries are one copy of a single text and we're thinking what they're going to do is they're going to start using them in classrooms or they're going to see the value and having a morning meeting around a certain text or a title and they're going to say to us that's a book we need in every single room okay or for example i'm kipling with the social emotional and they're doing the studies of leaders okay and one of their units is diverse leaders from diverse backgrounds they're already digging through

123the libraries looking for biographies and specific exemplars of leaders so the korean american woman who created the um memorial in washington dc there's a biography on her lin-manuel miranda probably one of the greatest contemporary writers of our time in that way as far as bringing history to life and so they have these books and they're actually going to start incorporating them into that sel work that they're doing so they're being very thoughtful and strategic we're tracking it all and saying this building did it let's grow it let's let's yeah i think that was my biggest question i just would i would be so disappointed if the books just went in a closet somewhere and then right okay thank you that happened don't worry i have one one last question i'm also very excited about the

124libraries but i have a question about the classroom libraries it's great that you have a mix of fiction and nonfiction it's fabulous um what about um different levels of material um i know uh you know there there are some kids that you know can read every book and it's not challenging for them i think one year one of my kids had you know there they had the levels of books and there was like two books at the very high end and you know read those in a week and there was nothing else really for him to read in the classroom library so what how how are we addressing that question i get all the time so we started with grade level ranges and so the ranges of books every grade levels dips slightly below the

125entry point to that grade level and goes slightly above books books are expensive 200 books per classroom costs a lot of money right so eventually the next step of that along with looking at what from the diversity equity social emotional libraries needs to be put into the classrooms to expand that and sometimes the content alone provides more complexity for students because it's not the typical fiction story just reading an african folk tale with all the vocabulary automatically becomes more sophisticated but then starting to do some more strategic analyses of what do we have in each classroom and what is needed do we need more of higher level here historical fiction there what does it look like in being thoughtful and strategic versus now we just bought collections so we had to start almost from the

126beginning and now how do we thoughtfully grow them but that's part of the the plan is to really look where do the needs lie and i think for right now a lot of times actually i already had a couple teachers running next door the third grade teacher running to fourth grade saying i kind of borrow a couple or can that student shop in your classroom on monday mornings or whatever so they're creative sometimes so the teachers are paying attention to librarians also bring texts into our classroom and that won't replace that this will not replace that right thank you all right we're moving on to innovation i'm gonna owe everyone coffee [Laughter] [Music] hi everyone my name is maria glanis i'm the innovation specialist of district 109 thank you so much for having us here

127tonight i'm going to talk about three topics tonight i'm going to start with sapa sapa is the student online personal protection act and this is something that went into place for all school districts in illinois starting july 1st of the summer and it's worth mentioning because it basically um you know we revamped or we looked at every single digital tool that we've been using in the district to make sure that it was compliant and this sapa is actually just an added guarantee that the tools and apps that our children are using our students in in the school district their data is not being used for anything other than you know educational purposes it's it's putting student data privacy at the forefront which is incredible and so important and i think i think maybe we're the

128third state to you know have adopted sapa and this transition began in the spring we started looking at all of our tools our digital tools and it was really good to see that most of what we were using and are using is sapa uh compliant not all though there are a few that we're not able to use but i like to say yet because sometimes at some point maybe the vendor will come around and sign this agreement but for whatever reason and rj i'm gonna mention him in a moment he is the one who's managing all of this and reaching out to vendors and looking it up and on the right hand side you'll see that on our districts 109's website he has compiled this database and this is all the approved apps and tools

129that we're using right now or can use in district 109 um he manages everything on this so that's sapa and the next thing we're going to talk to you about is digital citizenship so our digital citizenship curriculum um grade level breakdown from k to 8 is in review our last update was in fall of 2019 the resources that we use primarily over the pandemic especially have been changed and more relevant now so we thought let's get on this so me along with our librarians and all the schools have gotten together we got together first meeting was last week and on the right you'll see the updated version which is in draft and one of the new components to our curriculum breakdown is that we've added four main strands digital safety media and information literacy digital

130well-being which incorporates a lot of sel and then social responsibility so all the lessons are going to fall under one of those umbrellas um one of the resources that are heavily used for our digital citizenship is common sense media and they have incorporated a lot of focuses with castle which we love and we think is so vital on the left hand side you'll see just an example from our seventh grade class that had an amazing discussion and relevant to sapa they had a discussion on student data and privacy i'm just learning and talking about what companies do when they collect and how they use your data so that's digital citizenship and then next i'm going to talk to you about the innovative programs and the integration in classrooms so we have our k-8 stem steam

131and cma throughout the district learning is designed to emphasize meaningful collaboration critical and analytical thinking creative thinking and problem solving and i love to put that first and foremost because the amazing technology we might have the tools everything is nice but we always have to keep the why and the purpose of what we're doing at the forefront and so in elementary school steam that's stem with a for arts it's a lot of exposure and exploring of all types of stem topics listed on the slide middle school stem they dive deeper into the different types of stem there's a lot more student choice they use smart goals for all other projects that they work on to make sure that you know what they're learning they're refining their you know presenting at the end and they embed

132design thinking as well um bringing in empathy and in their creation and problem solving middle school cma does similar uh layout with their learning as stem in middle school and cma offers students a way of storytelling telling different stories by using innovative tools creativity collaboration sometimes it's tech sometimes it's non-tech and they use different platforms to design and create their experiences so the next few slides are just i keep thinking this is clicking but you're clicking the next few slides are just some examples of our steam and stem program so k5 steam we've got coding with codable we just adopted k1 codable um actually i think all elementary for for k1 so we're really excited about that um on the top right you see fifth grade they created a vr world and they're viewing it

133in their vr goggles we have someone creating a video game controller with makey makey and we have a seven second grader building a rocket ship with magna tiles the next slide is our stem 6 8 7th grader coding a sphero rvr robot to enter the classroom on the top left 8th grader feeding a giraffe they created and built out of cardboard using the hummingbird hummingbird kit we have a flight simulation on the bottom bottom right a student was flying to france using those controllers amazing and then we have sixth graders creating a soccer match with azobots the next is communication media arts and okay so we on the top left is a tour of the one of the cma labs and it's just always just this and all the stem labs are just always an

134action incredible in the middle top is sixth grader using computer animation and they created something called coming together on the top right we have a student who graphically designed something that they are going to be printing or printed on a t-shirt on the bottom right there is 8th grader using the htc vive tilt brush painting and they did marvel thanos and vr it's so incredible and then a sixth grade stop-motion animation they this oh my gosh my daughter would love that little movie it's like a animation movie um just completely with stop-motion and it's quite it's like three minutes long so i thought it was the time and energy and um detail that goes into this awesome the next two slides i just wanted to highlight some of the amazing things that happen in the

135classrooms in different subject areas on the left you'll see 8th graders using oculus go to tour anne frank's life so i mean talk about being immersed and developing a different type of empathy viewing that on the top middle there's a fourth grade example of a student recreating their favorite scene of a book using the vr virtual reality co-spaces tool same tool is a sixth grader created a photosynthesis model in vr and then on the bottom right is merge cube and co-spaces using augmented reality to create a utopian world in ar and then the last one is breakout ideal this is just a different way of learning and a lot of times we use this before a unit or after or in the middle just to break things up and breakout edu is derived from escape

136rooms so instead of locking children in rooms we don't do that we there's a box and there's locks on the box and so there's clues all around and they have to solve the clues to unlock the locks to break out so a lot of them are content specific some of them are team building and you can see from the examples that i put on here we do it with early learners like the preschoolers it is the most amazing things to witness and then we did it just last week with 8th graders in science they had a lab safety breakout edu so i i did want to bring one like a couple locks and clues for this meeting but i knew time was not gonna be on my side but someday i wish i could because

137i think it would be so cool to experience it so those are my topics that i'm sharing tonight okay any questions am i going to be kevin i'll go quick i don't have much of a question i just uh you know i just wish i could take those classes like it looked so interesting and i wish i had that skill set and i think it's great that's awesome awesome um just a couple questions one is you mentioned the digital citizenship is that a curriculum that's taught during their stem and steam no no no that is so those are taught either with the librarian and the teacher or the uh the teacher can do it on their own for example if there's a lesson that has like some research the teacher might partner with a librarian

138and say let's do some media literacy research skills so it's within the classroom okay is under that umbrella and maybe the answer is no helping our students social media guidelines like is that part of that okay great yes absolutely and once we finalize that draft it can be uh you know we can share it so you could see all the teachers will get it it's it's it's really interactive and you can definitely take a peek at all like the breakdowns and stuff awesome second is are you uh responsible for securely or does that fall under your umbrella or that's all arjun okay and then my last question is um unlike i did oh three anyways um unlike ryan's comment about ela stabilizing right and i'm assuming it's the complete opposite for stem and steam and

139cma which is we never want to stabilize because i would imagine every 12 to 18 months there's an entire new something out there so is that like how does that get built in to your work every year in terms of like the next thing and then next week and how quickly is our stuff getting outdated well actually it's it's a really timely question because arj this is something that rj and our department are working on with those teachers together rj actually just brought in someone to meet with them to talk about that doing some visioning work like we don't want this to settle we want to be predicting the next best thing or be ready to put the next best thing in our kids hands so um that that group is really talking about that

140so that we're ahead of the curve the current instruments you have are they adaptable enough meaning like are you noticing things are getting outdated every two years or no we've had to recently make some updated purchases of some of those like robots and uh we've been partnering right and i know obviously items die or items stop working i get that or there are materials that are used and done i'm even referencing like the actual equipment itself does it reach a point where it's no longer viable because it's not fast enough or it's do you understand the question yeah no absolutely kelly you're right uh when it comes to tech uh trying to stay ahead of the curve is next to impossible a four-year plan has already outdated your two um but when it comes to

141what we're trying to focus on in our in our lab environments especially is setting up a foundation for whatever could potentially come through knowing that we don't know what's coming we really want to set it up so that the devices the kids have uh provide a solid core for them to research to explore to learn um and you know to to get just a little bit of rubber to the road you that is one of the things we're looking at right now in our specific labs is the devices that are there the printers the 3d printers those kind of things um what is their you know light useful life left on those um what did we see when we purchased them before and how long it lasted um and that's kind of helping us steer

142our direction moving forward i think that exactly is my question because inevitably you come back to the board with asks will you have a sense of saying hey wanted to give you some perspective we bought this in 2017 it gave us a good four years that's a good life span like just so we get a sense of potentially the lifespan of the things you're looking to invest in yeah it's uh it's also part of our refresh plans that we're putting together right now so we should have a four-year general idea about what this is going to look like so we no one can prepare [Music] thank you and one of the videos i don't know if you saw from seventh grade the merge cube i remember taking a video of your son making one thank

143you all right okay i am going to go through the data portion of this pretty quickly okay so you can i'll hold to the end and let me get right through this because we'll try to get through it as fast as we possibly can here we did want to give you an update a little bit about um our fall map data and um so these slides just to give you a preview of what this slide says this is our writ scores our mean writ scores at at the district level for math and then next you'll see reading when we talk about writ remember that writ is an interval interval scale ratio so ra is the same it is the same no matter what grade the child is in okay so if they get a 2

14410 it a 210 from a fifth grader is the same of as a 210 from a third grader it means that they're mastering or emerging within the same skills and even not grade specific even the jump between the k2 test versus the three okay yes okay so what you're seeing here um on on both of these slides is you're going to see our 2021 fall mean below that you're going to see a comparison of the 2020 fall mean i put both of those just so that we would be able to show you the impact of the pandemic on our kids so the 2020 mean they had been impacted educationally about three months because of the spring this fall they would probably have been impacted by the pandemic for about 12 educational months so 12 months

145of school below that for comparison's sake i did five years of pre-pandemic means so that you could look at the average of our kids prior to the pandemic and then below that the national norm okay and what you're going to see obviously when you look at the pre-pandemic mean the five-year average as compared to our 2021 fall mean you're going to see slight dips in performance across grade level with the exception of that kindergarten cohort our kindergarteners are coming to us smarter than they ever have which is so interesting but when you see when i say slight dips from pre-pandemic to this fall you're seeing usually between two and four-ish uh writ points and so when we talk about rip bands a rip band is from like a 181 to a 190 and that means

146that kids are doing the same skills within that rep band they just might be being introduced to that skill versus emerging in that skill versus being close to mastering that skill and ready to move on to the next so two to four points is no difference in the skills that they're learning it's just different in how they're attacking that particular skill so i point that out like we just wanted to highlight like one grade so that you can see that i highlighted fourth grade because we see a dip in the average mean from 215 to 211 what that means is maybe pre-pandemic our fourth graders were coming in have it being emerging in some skills and now we're introducing those same skills okay i also talked to our district a lot about comparing ourselves our

147fall main to the nation it's important in a high performing district to compare yourself to yourself because you want to stay high performing that's why people love our school system but it's also important to stay grounded in what is normal nationally so that's why we pay attention to that national norm as well and what you'll see there like when you look at that is our kids on average are 10 to 18 rip points above their national peers in mathematics dependent on the grade what that translates to in this slide i think is the best because you see the national norm to the right in that blue chart and i just point out second grade to you so second grade our following writ was a 185.9 that's where kids were entering school in the second grade

148if you compare that to where kids are nationally that is middle to end of second grade so they're already in second grade in comparison to their national peers probably six to nine months ahead by the time you look at fourth grade you see that falling rid is is 211.5 and that is where our kids are entering fourth grade but as compared to their national peers that is between fall and winter of fifth grade so now our fourth graders are already a year plus ahead of their national peers and then just for reference sake we also throw in sixth grade there which is at a 228.5 in the fall when you find that on the norms chart you see that in the middle part of eighth grade so by the time our kids are in sixth

149grade on average they are two years plus above their national cohort of pierce just to give us perspective okay we're going to do the same in reading quickly so i'll go ahead and dive back in for reading so same chart again that top row is our current fall map scores there students coming back after that 12 months of education impact looking at our five-year average we do see those same little dips but nothing was major again similar to what danielle was saying students who may have been developing or close to mastery and some skill bands are more emerging or developing in those skill sets but nothing no major red flags or alarms and again when you look at that difference from the national norms the the the point ranges still live in that whole you

150know 12 to 18 ish point range discrepancy from what typical students are where they're performing at um at the national level and so again with the same chart we kind of flow and look at our students in the same way so when we see third grade with the 200.2 right now our current third grade that's approximately one year above grade level um tip of their typical national peers that's fourth grade um fourth graders were scoring in that 200 range between the fall and winter looking at fourth grade this year with their score our current fourth graders are scoring where typically a fifth grader would score in the middle of winter so we're starting to see that graph that gap increase a little bit when you look at fifth grade and where our students are right

151now now they're they're testing and with the same scores we're in the same skill sets as early seven early to mid-year seventh graders and by the time our students get to se to sixth grade they're almost two full years ahead um comparable to emerging eighth grade skill sets across the nation so we see that gap starting from that nine six to nine months ahead in the early grades and we start we can we continue to grow that discrepancy between our students and their national peers consistent with math and then here we just pulled up some of that cohort data so you can see eighth grade down to second grade right now over the past several years with their map data and the only thing we've seen is maybe a slow in there but no major

152dips no major alarms every single one of those marks is going up the one little downtick you see in math is that sixth grade from the fall and that's because that fifth grade to sixth grade switch in the cage or the two five to the six uh 612 or the six plus assessment we always see that dip just because the test has a higher ceiling and that that if you look at seventh and eighth grade above that flat lines out and that's never it's just a blip in there in our data so that that growth is there we're heading in the right track and we're going in the right direction from our pre-pandemic levels to where our kids are currently right now learning loss the term learning loss is one of my pet peeves actually

153i'll just say that to the board of education i've said this to our staff because it's really when people look at that cohort data and they hear the word learning loss they think that they're going to see declines in kids performance kids did not lose knowledge over the course of the pandemic they continued to grow they just did not grow at the same rates as they were growing previous to the pandemic and that's really really important so we are using the words unfinished learning as compared to themselves we are not using learning loss i just wanted to point this out because we shared with you guys in the spring obviously we you guys are familiar with acra data in the spring acra data is um when when we look at ecra-data what they do is

154they look at our children's performance as compared to their own past performance and the local norms okay so when when they looked at our kids in the spring and they compared our kids to how our kids had done in the previous spring this is the evidence that red and yellow chart on the left is that they weren't growing as much as they had the previous year prior to the pandemic that's why you're seeing yellow and red on that side now what we wanted to see immediately in the fall and remember our kids have you know we're just at the beginning of the school year they're taking this test but what we wanted to see is green and blue for our kids because that tells us that already being back in school and in our classrooms

155with our teachers and learning in a more typical way is showing that they're back to growing as expected or even greater than expected we do see one little blip there in the eighth grade which we continue to explore we've talked a little bit about eighth grade previously and so we're just dipping in and looking at that data a little bit more specifically as that cohort so that's in math we're trending in the right direction there for sure and we're seeing the exact same thing in reading again we were we saw less less of a dip in reading when we tested kids in the spring as compared to themselves as we did in math but we're already seeing and reading this year again green and blue the thing that excites me most about that particular slide

156is that we're seeing blue in that third and fourth grade cohort if you think about your third graders they were first graders when the pandemic began fourth graders were second graders when the pandemic began and that's when they're really developing their literacy learning so we want those kids rebounding very very quickly and that's what they're showing us they're doing again we see that eighth grade blip so we've got to take a peek at that but this is trending in the exact direction we won't want to see it the other thing that we mentioned earlier is we have surveyed our kids on panorama this fall we'll be sending out individual student reports to families in the upcoming week but we're still seeing that same trend in data that we've always seen from our kids when they're

157self when they're analyzing and reporting about themselves a high high number of our kids have report having supportive relationships at both home and school so that's what we celebrate most we see growth in all of those areas like self-management social awareness self-efficacy about math and emotional regulation from the time they're in grades three through five to the time they get in middle school we see high growth mindset so our kids really believe in their ability to to grow which is really really important at grades three through five and in six through eight but that's that grit that we talked about earlier that continues to be a point of focus and i mentioned some of the institutes and the professional learning we're doing around that our kids still the way they respond to those particular questions

158about being able to persist through challenges is lower than compared to their national peers that are at the same age so that is some of the data that accompanies the work you heard about from our curriculum specialist all right data questions um i really like the metric or at least the evaluation related to the ritz scores um it's something that's the first time i've actually seen that um and i actually think that we should evaluate that as a metric as a measurement i mean for parents and communication saying because we have a hard time as parents saying what what does the risk score mean other than seeing kind of the chart and the growth of our children seeing this kind of information of where they should it's saying where are they against their peers against

159grade level right and if we as a district as a vision want to say hey we you know this is how we've historically performed and this is where we want to either improve that to what level this is a really good simple to understand metric that can be communicated and seen by parents and say yeah that makes sense like when you say oh i want to be at it we want to be at a 228 and ritz scores like nobody knows what that means right when you say that means it's a year or year and a half ahead of their peers on a national average that makes sense right yeah so i really do like that metric the grit topic is so hard because it could be evaluation of confidence versus actually their ability to

160persevere right or it could truly be their evaluation of themselves of what they can do through pers you know through challenges which goes to my earlier comment related to you know understanding or not necessarily having the same challenges as say some of their parents do in other in other demographics right it could be both and we don't we don't really and i know you guys are going to work to try to to solve that but there's a lot of information out there on how important it is right and grit as a topic i think is was so popular for a while and now it's turning into this is grit really that important kind of deal right and it's not so much that grit it's the word right it's the buzzword the principles underneath it i

161think are important somehow just to give you some perspectives there it's like some of the questions and and ali chrome and again is so good like you know i'm gonna misquote it but like one of them something around like when i'm presented with a difficult challenge you know do you do you go back at it multiple times or something along those lines you know to give you some perspective right and and a lot of the kids obviously were like nope i walk up you walk away right you know so one thing she was flushing out is like maybe during that excel time using that student voice to say you know because some kids might interpret that like this is a much lower level example like a really complex like i can't tell you how many

162times my kids dump out a lego set with a million pieces they take a look at it and they're like nope like i can't even imagine where others would spend yeah myself i told my son the other night it was how do you eat an elephant right one bite at a time it's a hard concept yeah right kids especially at that age but that was a good you know she was thinking through how to incorporate so an example of like when you think about using that excel time like how do you take a concrete example of what a question you know that's a a basic example of it but then when you apply that to more complex problems in your life like how would you come back at something that you would need to problem

163solve whether then be a complex friendship issue right or because those are things our middle school kids are struggling with every day that's really causing them anxiety you know leading to depression and and really bringing in when you see a question like that what does that mean to you in real life context right i mean this is such a and it's so interwoven right and so i was saying like forget the word grit those questions are perfect it's all those things and they're interwoven with everything that we've talked about tonight right so it helps us to to kind of you know see like okay when they see a question like that like what are they thinking of as examples right and then how do we help them apply strat you know strategic solutions the open

164question is is are we supporting them too much yep right and that's what i brought up that's what i brought up when we shared this data previously previously the fact that 80 to we're in the 80th to 99th percentile and nearly all of our kids say they have supportive relationships is worth celebrating but it also probably means that if they fail right that somebody picks them up instead of them like going at it again they don't have independent strategies to problem solve their own way out yeah they don't know what a supportive relationship is it wasn't until it wasn't until i got to college where i was in an environment where i was set up to fail on purpose to learn that right and and i think to a certain extent and the question it's

165always a question of what age but it is really i mean and i see it in my son a lot my oldest right it's it's how do you create an environment in which they expect to fail that they see failure not as a failure but as an opportunity for growth right and that's just a change in mindset because the expectations of the community the expectations of the parents in terms of their performance right doesn't help that right right it actually hurts it so perfect example of where we have to have that partnership with our our parents and our guardians so we absolutely are are prioritizing that which is also the letter grade versus standard standard grading conversation right it's you know getting an f may not be the end of the world it may be

166you know that it's that type of thing that is it's that zero defect mentality that exists that's driven by multiple things that we can't control right um but it's how do we build that environment of acceptable failure and seeing failure is not the end right it's actually rather the beginning yeah right and normalizing it in a lower stakes environment for our kids so it doesn't lead to what we talked about earlier which is a much more serious and i think that's where when i was talking earlier about root causing some of this is that are we creating that that environment in which it's feeding that anxiety through the pressure through the expectations through the zero defect mentality through the inability to create an environment in which they can fail and grow right which then basically

167just reinforces that anxiety and the pressure that the kids are feeling yeah right right um so it's and i know it's it's this is like this is like the what is it not the nirvana but it's like the holy grail right yeah of scl almost to a certain extent right it's like how do you how do you do that i know we have to move on i won't put yeah but but that's what ali was speaking of and i guess the questions too i think she's still back there but like when you think about how those topics come up naturally in those excel environments like that's what we're getting at well and i know even our elementaries are using intentional language sometimes around goal setting right like oh my gosh we set this goal three

168weeks ago and we're still working on this goal like some of that is just incorporating it into normal activity so that kids see that they're persisting they may not even recognize when they're doing it um on that panorama just to make sure i understand the data correctly when you look at like the self-efficacy about math ela et cetera so for example with um let's say self ethic well yeah fine favorable percentage percent favorable six to eight you have 71 percent for ela but the national comparison is 80th to 99th right am i interpreting that that we're technically under the national norm i'm confused no so that means 70 so when of our kids are require reporting high self-efficacy in ela and that is in the 80th and 99th percentile nationally this the word comparison through

169me okay thank you that clarifies everything i had about that and then the only other question i had i know um several years ago scott schwartz had taken this same [Music] data from ekra right this is akra data with the colors and i tried to understand it then um that was the impetus for advocating for the two-track math was to show years and years of lower-than-expected growth for certain cohorts so my question is is this blip in eighth grade is this reflective of programming or is this literally a blip so we're seeing that blip in eighth grade in both math and in reading so you know we're trying to dial into exact cause but i can tell you that we're using this data beyond just looking at grade level cohorts we do work to identify

170equity issues within this data so we're looking at ethnic groups and their performance across time and in particular this fall and how they've been impacted by the pandemic we're also looking at this data as pre-algebra algebra and geometry pathway right and and we're honestly you tend to see better growth in our upper level path and that's my question and i know tonight wasn't the night to go to that level of a micro but i guess as a board i would feel like that's important to know if you're seeing data trends reflective of programming decisions and if that's something that's needing to be discussed or if that's not needing to be and that so i think we as a system we have to be looking at that right now behind the scenes and continually monitoring it

171i would hate to use any fall data point to make a definitive programming recommendation or decision especially a fall data point that's fallen after the last 12 months of education but we do have to continue to monitor it that might be something to really that we'll have to look closely at and talk more specifically that's on the radar okay yeah oh yes i would say historically and i think we've made a mista and this is just my opinion right i think we may have made a mistake as a board sometimes going into that level of detail that's their realm right us right here this is the level for us right and and the thing is is that if you do find something that then that shows an equity disparity that may be that was my

172question right right if there is literally a cohort of students exactly we should be concerned about exactly but just saying that like when scott went through that a couple years ago we were at a level that was probably beyond what we should have been discussing at the time which has its pitfalls as we probably found out i'm even saying the same thing sort of about it my my view is a district view lens so i'm i'm giving you district-wide data that's our responsibility like our teams at the school and our classroom teachers are looking at individual kids and that's where that's where the magic happens right so i give you averages but certainly we have kids on both ends right on average ryan to your point really was coming from a lens of equity and

173making sure that there isn't any cohorts that have been there's certain things at a border and at some point within the visioning that's going to come out in terms of what our priority our priorities are what you know what segments and cohorts are important to us based off of information and what you know but at the end of the day i think where we kind of made a mistake i mean in my opinion at some point in that previous discussion was is that we were getting way down right into that data and it created i think it created an uncomfortable situation i think in terms of our discussion with the administration about like because it was getting to a level in which we almost were talking about individual students sometimes particularly when cohorts are so

174small that's why i've been cautious about getting into that i wanted to i find it interesting that for example in both reading and math but on the reading front the current eighth graders which has this little blip in growth was the blip of increased growth in seventh grade the year prior yes so that's one of the things that we've been um that happened you see that that they're the one cohort of students that actually grew during the pandemic so it's maybe their blip now relative to right good growth i mean that's yes right and then and it's it's not exactly the same but it's similar in math too because you can see in math in seventh grade they dipped less yeah exactly so it's kind of i don't know exactly what it means but it

175is interesting it's not like i mean the you know the notion is well they grew so fast before they're growing less now but i don't think that really applies but that's right and sometimes you will see yellow in the fall because there's that natural regression that happens over the summer months we're glad not to see that that this fall for more than just that cohort but that that is something exactly what you said has been part of our conversation i'd like to say something to you just a short compliment to you and the team i thought your presentation on the map scores was fabulous and that it shows something it shows either the longer kids are in school the more they're accelerating or maybe i don't know if it's causal or correlated or just the

176older they get around here but then the second set of data the ritz scores actually shows an impact of once they get back into school which tends to really point more towards causation and correlation and i just thought putting those two things together were just very powerful very exciting and i think it's a lot for you and the the dps 109 administration and staff to celebrate it's really very powerful yeah thank you now that's i mean this is we've been trying to look at it from every angle we went with the writ presentation and the comparison because we've talked a lot about numbers do not lie right numbers are numbers sometimes people don't understand the red yellow green and blue but you understand numbers and that's why we went with that but we wanted to

177continue to bring this back and remind people that those colors are representative of us compared to us so i just wanted to celebrate that it's really a powerful set of data all right all right good work and i've taken way too long so thank you thank you so much danielle and and yes it did take a long time but honestly it's so refreshing to be able to talk about students and the work that the teachers are doing with students and all of our staff are doing with students and not being so focused on the pandemic and i think that we're sort of making up for a lot of lost time because i don't know that we've had a curriculum presentation for over a year so um thank you to you and your team for putting

178so together such a great presentation um and all the work that let that has gone into to um to to what what you're all you all are doing so uh thank you for coming tonight and for sticking around we really appreciate it all right we promise next time the curriculum presentation won't be quite so long because we're really packing in like two years into into one one night so um okay next thing on the agenda superintendent's report all right we are going to move quickly through this and i'm going to ask for a couple of pinch hitters as i go along here so i wanted to provide an update on something that the board had approved at an earlier meeting and that is the 440 group so we've got initial data collection has gone very

179well there's focus on several areas national percentiles of students proficiency and growth of our students the academic access that our students have once they get to the high school and then there's a particular look at math pathways the next step is for curriculum leaders uh to meet and uh then align takeaways uh for later presentations to the board this is the first uh study of its kind like this this is a unique experiment if you will even among uh districts to have a regional approach to data like this it'll also be i believe the first time that we're going to have a more granular look as well as a higher level look at the same time of how our students are progressing as they head into deerfield high school one of the big challenges is

180that the feeders have uh the k-8s have a ton of really good data and high schools because of the change of the uh the act to the sat there's really a dearth of good data to examine there it's also a function of not having a suite of assessments so in 8th grade and 9th grade at 10th grade and 11th grade where you can see growth through through that suite there'd be presentations to boards that will be in the coming months from a leadership lens one of things that i want to comment on that i am very impressed with the work that ekra has done it is remarkably complex and you don't realize this until you get in the data meetings it's like man this there are just so many different ways to look at this

181that's why the curriculum people need to meet and then come back to us i think we should be very proud that we've taken a step to look deeply deeply at our students pathways and achievement because placement can mean everything at a high school especially a high performing high school so uh vaccination clinics uh dr philippe would you tell us what's going on there yeah we've been monitoring uh developments around the authorization for the pfizer vaccine for five to eleven-year-olds we anticipate next week that the final approvals from the fda and the cdc will go through and we've been working behind the scenes to prepare vaccine clinics that will be open to our staff who have children that are 5 to 11 consistent with our goal to keep our staff in the classroom where we know

182that we have a sub shortage but of course also to our families we have just under 2 000 students that would be newly eligible for the vaccine certainly not something that's required but something that we will be making available to families we expect hopefully that we will have some news out of eric's office to share with families tomorrow with sign up links early next week the dates would be november 18th and then it's a three-week follow-up uh for the second dose so november 18th and december 9th the 22nd to december 13th then the 23rd and december 14th we have initial capacity to serve a thousand five to eleven year olds with the ability to scale up as is needed that was my question you if if the demand requires this has the capacity to meet

183the demand or it does not we have the capacity on the three dates to serve a thousand students and so then we would uh look on the three initial first we would look to add additional dates as are needed sign up information so this in technicality could be a bit of a first come first serve in terms of sign up yeah parents need to be aware of that yeah so it does bear pointing out that all of this is pending approval final approval and it also bears pointing out that this would be an uh emergency use use authorization it is not a final informal approval from the fda on that and is the reason that we're only doing up to a thousand is that really because it's so it will be more widely available for

184our kids through other venues absolutely what we expect to see is that if if you extrapolate the number of students that we know uh that are currently eligible um it's around 80 percent so that would be 1600 109 5 to 11 year olds if that mirrored that situation when we saw our staff booster clinic we only got about a third of the people that we know went out and got the booster because everything is so widely available so families i expect a large number uh who are eagerly waiting for the vaccine for their five to 11 year old are going to be able to get it far in advance of our clinics by the way i like the way you're going to be here for a long time other button while we're waiting i'm really

185excited to see what we can do here in the spring once we get this done by the way so um i know i'm getting ahead of myself but um but i am i'm excited i'm trying to get back to i'll add another line i'm still going the wrong way i i can i can manually fix it here i'll add another line while we're stalling too oh boy okay hold on one second yeah um as dr philby mentioned to these dates it will be important that we mention in our messaging um that if you have you know if you want your child to be fully vaccinated prior to winter break these dates are not going to work for that and we will be very clear about that in our messaging so as he pointed out there

186should be a bunch of other means to get your child vaccinated if you want this is one service we're going to offer but parents need to understand they need to pick the methodology or the avenue that's best for their family and what they need it for all right let me get to the right place here and then joanna am i will the nurses then be sending out an additional link to parents that if they choose to upload their child's vaccination yeah so i think actually um i don't necessarily volunteer myself for this we'll see i'll do something but one of us will probably be present at like the the clinics to we were john and i were brainstorming this to say like either with chromebooks or paper copies like the what the lake county health

187department cares about is the second date so at that second date to say would you mind filling this out on site optionally optional disclosure because the more we can capture on site it's just easier for parents and guardians so that's our potential plan but yes we'd also follow up with sending that out through family access all right thank you eric for getting this back where i needed to be here again our dates this does not mean that this is the only place that students can get a vaccination students families that are traveling for example if there's a plan to go see grandparents over winter break they might want to take a very cl uh close look at the dates and get their vaccinations elsewhere okay so uh tests to stay we are uh really and

188we oh a great debt to our nurses they have been spectacular at every one of our buildings and we hear about this across the county so thank you in abundance to our nurses it is going test the state program is going very very well our shield positivity rate is extremely low we have a total of i believe it was 17 students at last count that tested positive out of 17 000 tests or something along those lines we do have one thing i did want to point out is that our shield test results are coming in later than they had in uh in the past year so that's delaying our notification of families and we were the first district that signed up for shield and now they've taken on essentially the whole state and they're not

189providing us the data as as rapidly as they once did our mitigations the locker usage has gone really well we don't have any sorts of issues there the daily certification i've gotten some questions about that the daily certification continues to be very helpful for our nurses and for our ability to keep kids in school and not have to have them remain home while we figure out who was where so the data that we get off of that is very useful to us indoor lunch is the next challenge for us that begins on november 1st and uh we navigated the tents uh quite well those had questions about why can't we keep the tents the tents are not snow rated so we cannot uh they would not continue to rent those to us even if we

190chose to do so we also want to ask folks to be cautious we are so close to getting students vaccinated we've got major holidays coming up and really want to urge our parents continue to be as diligent as they have been in the past can i ask a quick question on the indoor lunch just really quick to refresh what does that look like in the buildings the kids in the class it will vary slightly building to building because the space in each building is is different and so some buildings elementaries for example right have larger uh common spaces that they can utilize so it will be uh similar but not the same elementary to elementary one of the questions that was raised is will kids be eating on the floor uh because i know like

191when we have the rainy days eating on the floor so that was just some temporary because of the rain and whatever but that was while the tents were still moving forward november 1st they will all have a chair and a table top of some capacity correct thank you okay good thank good clarifications and then eric yeah i just wanted to bring up a probably can't say this enough because this has come out of some of our defined 109 work that we'll talk about but um as we look ahead and think about big ideas and and big issues we know that there are a lot of things that people want answers about now and there's so many people that work in different buildings with different extensions and emails that we have created a more simplified way

192for people to find answers on both the district and school level if you go to the district website or any of the schools websites there's a button there that says who can answer my question it will take you to this kind of handy grid of basically what topic do you want to talk about this is who you reach out to don't necessarily reach out to the superintendent or the board of ed right away start you know maybe more on the ground level first but that is available and that is updated as things change at both the school and district levels so i just want to point that out all right thank you eric and that completes the superintendent's report my kind of question can you talk there's some concern and maybe you could address it

193about masks during recess social distancing at recess and sanitation of hands when coming back from recess and maybe could address that a little bit yeah we have the the state and the the county rather lake county health department has provided latitude and a recommendation that students do not need to mask while outdoors and there have been some reminders that we've had to have principles issued to their students about hey we do need to maintain some level of distance even while outside um joanna i think you've been on in on some of those conversations yeah it was um you know we absolutely every time we're doing contact tracing we are revisiting all of our protocols we checked in with all of our building principals about our recess supervision and also hand sanitizing processes protocols just doing

194a checkpoint with our supervisors retraining supervisors seeing if anybody have any has any questions um and you know asking all of our building administrators when you're out at recess you know what are you observing what are your supervisors observing in terms of keeping that uh process in place you know whether it's grade level zones you know however they're um monitoring those kids out at recess but the recommendation is you know still currently the guidelines do not require masks outside is there handstands is it sanitization when they come back in yes so like there's the process in place where kids are sanitizing that is a time in the day okay yeah some of the kids are outside for example first and then they're sanitizing because they're then going in to eat right or if they're going

195back into their classroom okay all right thank you any other questions for mike great the next item on the agenda is community participation relative to matters on the meeting agenda pursuant to policy to colin 2 30. we welcome your comments and give them serious consideration before you deliver your comment please be sure to fill out the community participation form please identify yourself and limit the length of all comments to no more than two minutes is there any community participation no community participation the next item on the agenda are informational items 7.1 is a define 109 update eric hello [Laughter] yeah i'll give you a proper introduction todd so uh uh but one thing if you're gonna have your mascot for three hours no lumel nadis don't so um my name is tabataglia i work for

196eckland consulting um and we're here working on the define 109. we're here to give an update on what we've been doing getting a lot of data um in the last i don't know where we are all so this was a defying 109 in your words and this is our team mike uh is on there nate echoing is the guy on the lower right you've met him before i'm sure um alicia is our one of our um our co-workers who's going to be working she hasn't been able to be here yet and then the guy in the top with the glasses is actually me um that's me that's why i'm here it's easiest so i am the 109 parent um and i've been doing a lot of things here with in the last week was parents

197the reason we put this up is uh we put it up to re uh one of the things we've really been talking about and it really came up a bunch in the parent meetings was the the term that we like in this is that is that it's a refresh um it's not just a st we're not throwing out everything that we've done because this i just saw how wonderful doesn't i know i have an eighth grader and a junior so i mean i know how wonderful it is and we just saw a lot of the i mean that commun the curriculum program was amazing um so it's not it's not a we're not throwing everything out we're not starting from scratch but at the same time we want to look at it because the world

198has changed so so much and education has changed dramatically and it's and it was time um i do believe it's 2017 the last time we did this work see i feel this is the first time i've ever done this work and said we and really felt it was we it's kind of interesting it's been very exciting for me um so it was a while ago it was a few superintendents ago it was many administrators ago in some buildings and it's really it's it's exciting so what have we done so far we had due to kind of learning to be honest this is our first mission and vision statement in a pandemic we haven't done one before this is the first time and it in some ways it really opened up and in student surveys i

199think it opened up the chance for more students to be heard because we used the xsl excel time um whereas in the past it's more of like the group of the student council comes to talk to us maybe that's not the most diverse group you want to hear from but it's easier to only take those kids out of the class and everything else so this time 850 middle school surveys it's a lot of data these are the questions we ask them really we're looking for you know what are the most important things to them what are the things that get them excited um and then we ask those questions in a different you can see a couple different ways there and then what do they feel like they want to be in order to be

200feel prepared for high school um i would think that's important for them and one of the reasons we asked just the middle school students is you can see these are questions that maybe elementary students wouldn't be as easy it would be much harder there was an activity before they answered um the questions to kind of have them brainstorm in a big idea picture rather than them being very specific and uh i heard from my eighth grader on well i also heard on one of the data points as i was reading it and it said hi dad so i think i know exactly how he answered everything um and then the last question was if you had to describe your school in one word what would it be and we we made a a word jumble

201i forget what we call these things so this is what uh what it came out this was only actually the first um we have we haven't put all the the second group in yet but this was the first one you'll see some some you got an awesome sauce up there we also have a boring up there morbid was won um there's been there's some really interesting ones up there we have a prison um prison so i would say this and i was an la teacher i taught in the area for 10 years i taught 7th grade language arts and i would say i think the la program is doing a really good job of write the whole sentence when you answer so even when we asked for one word it was a lot my one

202word would be i'm like you're close but prison actually had a very an interesting description he kind of backtracked a little then he went a little further i don't know it was he or she um backtracked a little anyone she here she went a little farther that was a fun one to read so this uh this data has been great it kind of actually brings me back to teaching which um has been really fun and seeing those dudes right here tonight was really great too and so then we got into the community sessions and what we did with the community sessions was one virtual session that we had about 20 a little bit just over 20 people at um and then we had three in-person sessions yesterday um in about 10 i think 10 to

20310 to 12 to 15 at ever at every session virtual session was the first one of these we had ever done virtually and we uh unfortunately probably did short the time a little bit we took questions that we that we had used not necessarily in the past but ideas that we what we we're looking for is values we're looking for those values that's how you build a mission statement what's important to these people in this community and then the vision statement is what do we we want going forward so these questions are looking at that and so unfortunately the virtual one was a little shorter than we would have liked we've never timed one out before in that session we thought we had asked more direct questions so that they could we could get to

204quicker answers without because we wouldn't necessarily have the ability to like i did in the in persons walk around talk we played with all these beautiful boards and we did sticky note activities and that's where you can get into those deeper discussions and we weren't sure how that would work exactly on zoom and unfortunately it's maybe a little short but those were not these are not going to be the only opportunities community has to join in on this process so and we'll talk about that in a minute so you can see all the different questions that we asked we have some very big picture questions such as what are the main lessons we learned about education um some of the parents stuck to education at raj and some went specifically to d109 and either one

205we were able to grab themes out of um and so we'll be we're preparing and presenting those themes will be our next step oh no first of all we need a little more information and that'll be educator and educator and staff survey and we're also doing this one digitally which is really exciting because in the past it would be in person and you'd miss a lot of staff voice by people who needed to go to you know pick up their kids or coach a team so now we've been allowed some time on 11 3 to give them a survey so we're going to get much larger feedback which i think is is really exciting we've also had all the parent communities they've they've all received card from me and they all not only were able

206to speak and join in conversations they were able to write something down for those people that don't enjoy speaking as much although most of the people that come to the in-person meetings enjoy speaking but they did also write things down and then i took those as well so that and i took all the pictures of the boards and all the sticky notes in and um so we have a lot of data to go through alicia nate and i over the next couple weeks after we get this staff and data then we'll start putting that all together really looking at the um looking at the mission statement first looking at the themes those themes kind of turn into verbs if you've ever gone into uh doing done mission envisions work and then it goes it goes

207from there uh the week of 11 8 we're looking at another thought exchange for community because um we felt like we will we will need a little more information on vision just because the conversations were so rich even at the in person that it's the hardest part you know these parents are talking amazing they're having these amazing discussions first with themselves and with me we're getting all this information and you look up and you realize what time it is and uh most of them want an hour and a half or more um and i want to thank holly for staying here late with me last night and eric i wanted the work that they have done so far with us is i know he's an award winner and he's one doesn't want me to embarrass

208him already because you know it should say eric cycling award winner right there but he really he really i don't know what the word was for but he's he's he's been amazing and so is holly i wanted to point that out um so yeah so that'll be the next thing if anybody has any questions for me yeah so i know we all want to get a authentic read uh and learning about this if you can you go back like two slides yeah which one oh [Laughter] okay go forward younger than mine go forward one please okay two yeah two uh back one sorry little so this one so you have a few more sessions and information gathering left so i'll just point this out so if i i just was looking at your questions and

209if you look at the i haven't read all of them but the second to last one if you were speaking with someone considering moving to deerfield what would you say about 109 to convince them to move that seems very leading why wouldn't that question be what would you say about dps 109 period as opposed to your soliciting what nice thing would you say about 109 and i can answer that um so i just so so my concern it's probably implicit is that i to what extent are we asking sort of questions that are predisposing people to say nice things about us versus not tonight yeah so um with that that's a question that some parents brought up as well they said oh you just want us to say nice things about the district and and

210in the nature of the work that is what comes through this part of the work the mission and the vision statement is not really where you're looking at the little things that are going on and then going you know looking for fixes it's the value so what do we value most of the time when you're talking about values you're not talking about something that isn't inherently a negative like what's important to us um and that does that can come through like we added this the bottom question after the virtual session and you can't pull values out of there for sure what people are talking about is most important is what is important to them right um and so yeah we were we took that into account for the next two sessions but we we believe

211and then when we're looking into the future which is some of the questions too have this idea of the future that that's where some of those things come out well i'd like to see an improvement in this you know i'd like to see this was that not working for you so some of that comes from to be honest us trying to to make a smaller questions because we couldn't answer answer as many ask as many follow-up questions in that statement so that was a place that we we we saw that too and it was brought up to us so we made an adjustment for the uh for the in person to get some more data that way and todd i'll add yeah you asked that exact question the virtual session and i don't know if

212it landed exactly the way we thought we've debriefed after each of these sessions and made adjustments accordingly so that was not asked that way yesterday in the in person because i agree with you it's i don't even get to that one of them because we really focused on the yeah the values so when we get when you get to the end and you say here's what we've learned and processed will that be paired with what the cat what the stimulus was that solicited that feedback like you said we asked this question and this is what we got or will we just get like a something that's more like the word cloud oh no it won't be something like the world cup yeah but it'll be it'll be it you know um what you guys will

213get back i mean i'm not sure exactly what the process will be to which goes back to you but when the the group that starts the actual writing of the mission statement will have all the themes and then the notes that that come from those themes right now the themes are very widespread and some are you know we even did a continuum activity where we said which things are more important in which things are are you know less important and of course the same things where i'm both because it's individuals right so we we see that so there'll be notes and everything with each theme and then things to go from there and that will help in the when you when we get to this actual strategic planning part of it as well um the

214thing i want to say is this is great but how are you capturing people that don't have children in the district and never had children in the district and never want to have children in the district that was actually something else we did and the because another thing that we talked about was businesses are part of this community and so we have been talking about how to get those um in the past we've done in-person sessions and you know you can you can put it out and get the hard part is how do we put it out we could maybe work with possibly the park district or something but with the resources of the school district sometimes it's hard to reach out to those people but these questions aren't helpful well they would have a

215different set of questions okay so these this community information systems you mean community is only well in this case it was parents that was who we okay okay that's what i'm saying okay yeah especially yeah we would try to make it more specific for that for sure you have so i know you guys have done a great job i was at the library i saw a stack of the define 109 cards at the library i know it's been in the just the deerfield community-based newsletters if there are community members that what will they get if they scan the qr code or if they re like how what does that look like for a non-parent i think it's something we we need to talk about well when we talked in basics about it and since we

216still had time before the teacher one we thought we still had time to gather um and so that was that's kind of the discussions we've been having well those cards are starting to have those cards are now souvenirs because all those sessions have passed um but yeah we need to really sit down and probably as soon as tomorrow look at what was the turnout what was the demographics we got are there certain demographics we need to make another you know pass at in terms of getting feedback and input the thought exchange will help with that a little bit we know that won't capture everybody right that's my follow-up question so what does the thought exchange look like and then who is it being advertised to thought exchange the the first one that that we know

217we're doing we have like i said we need to talk about the business but we'll go back out to the community and it would be a um we since i did we didn't get to as many of the future looking the vision statement type questions we'd probably and we only have we would have one question to be able to ask on a thought exchange we would it probably needs a little tweaking but it would be something about exciting you about what's what's exciting about the future or what do you envision for the what would you like say it's hard to say it exactly so it's hard but you know something about the vision of deerfield 109 and for the elementary uh parents which are the ones we had the most of without i don't even

218think it was very close um you know they they really want to see five years from now unfortunately the high schools didn't do us any favors by throwing their whole thing in the works you know that that's kind of how can we look to the future when we don't even know what it's going to be and it was well this is what gets us to there i mean i i had to tell them you know flat out we're not involved in that and that's not what we're doing and you don't want to go rudderless until whatever happens happens and then they kept saying well what's going to happen i said i don't know is the thought exchange going to be applicable to anybody that wants to use it so if an eighth grader signed on

219if a grandma's signed on it does it is it applicable to anybody oh sure it should be the question will be broadly written so that it is more values based more future looking i don't want to give you exact language right now because we're tweaking it uh we are going to ask kind of the screening survey questions where we're able to figure out you know you can click i'm a student i'm a parent i'm a community member so we know this is what the top thought is amongst community members that might not have kids in the district this is what the top thought of parents are we'll find a way to extrapolate the data by group by demographic all those things i also want to reiterate and thank you todd um we have been very

220careful about not putting a timeline on this we're going to vote on this on march 15th or anything like that because we need to make sure we get this phase right so we need to sit down and look at all the data we've gathered last week and this week again as i mentioned what are we still missing where do we still need to hear from people what else do we need to make sure that we have gotten enough information to really get to the next stage of this process any other questions for eric or are we ruling out that our mission and vision will just be we will be awesome sauce let me be honest that's more because i feel like then we could be done with this whole process so like engage in power

221and spot some sauce inspire awesome sauce could be the slogan all right we're done thank you it was in our kitchen thank you very much for coming tonight and for waiting we appreciate it the next item on our agenda is 7.2 freedom of information requests dr philippe yeah we had four the first was seeking curricular and training materials the second was looking for information about unclaimed property the third was seeking information about uh covet 19 cases and the fourth was a commercial foia for business contact information any questions on foia thank you the next item is 7.3 the consultant agreement for the interim district coordinator for student services joanna yeah so we have um heidi lafleur who was doing some contact tracing work for us has now shifted over she's multi-talented but um many of

222you may know her background if you don't she's a very talented administrator principal um previously is now filling the role temporarily over at caruso as an interim district coordinator for student services um gotten some fabulous feedback from tim and the team over there very appreciative to have her assistance and she's got a great background in problem solving student needs and doing some work to that extent so has left a little bit of gap in terms of contact tracing but what i'll tell you is our systems are so strong at this point that we are able to pick that up in my department so again big thank you to really hasn't put more of a workload on our nurses but our director for student services kristin bornero christy hoffman who's our student services generalist um and

223myself we've been able to to work strategically and it has not been a big impact on our day-to-day and to my fellow administrators here they have all taken shifts um helping to man what we refer to as the the tiny house the um testing station out front um kind of overseeing our binax testing in the afternoon so that's been a huge help so is this in lieu of her current role in current correct so you'll see a new contract for approval tonight we are shifting and that null and voids yes okay yep any other questions on the contract okay the next item on the agenda is 7.4 iasb delegate assembly and the resolutions committee so you all should have received a copy of the resolutions report for the um that's going to be voted on

224at the triple i conference i believe the delegate assembly is meeting on november 20th and the way this works is that various districts can submit resolutions the iasb illinois association of school boards has a resolutions committee that reviews all the submissions and makes recommendations as to whether or not they think that these are resolutions that the organization should support and what that means is that the organization will put lobbying resources behind getting legislation adopted which would support these resolutions so basically what we're saying is you know what are the legislative priorities for the illinois associates association of school boards along the lines of issues that are important to um to districts and to the state as a whole so because it's getting pretty late there were two particular resolutions there are what 16 resolutions all

225together that are up for discussion at the delegate assembly i think that most of them are pretty uncontroversial there are two that that i think we should discuss in particular so let's talk about those and then if anybody else wants to talk about any other specific resolutions we can do that the idea of this discussion is to give me direction i'm going to be the voting delegate for the for our district at the assembly it's to give me direction as to whether or not um uh or how how i should vote on behalf of our district so since it's not just my feelings that should dictate that so the two resolutions that that we definitely need to discuss are resolution two which is student safety and protection plan and this resolution has actually come before

226the assembly this is the third time it's come before the assembly it's been voted down the last two times the only difference this time is that the resolutions committee is recommending that it that the resolution be adopted this time whereas the last two times i believe the resolutions committee did not recommend adoption and this resolution addresses the ability of individual districts to allow their staff to be armed it doesn't mandate the districts allow that it allows each district to um to make their own decision on that but it would allow staff members who are not school resource officers to to be armed and this is really driven in large part by rural counties who don't have quick access to first responders they feel very strongly that they are in a very vulnerable position if their

227first responders are you know 20 or 30 minutes away in the event of an emergency um that said uh uh you know there there's opposition to this as well um there are definitely other um districts in the state that feel differently so if anybody wants to start the discussion please jump in are you i'm just going to ask sarah are you i know mike had emailed are you coming to us with your or you don't want to say your position i think that it should be a discussion so i don't want to um i don't want it to be predetermined by my personal feelings on it so well i'll go first i would be appalled to have people walk around our school district with firearms but it doesn't require us to do that and i

228can't i don't feel like i'm qualified to tell other school districts who may be in a very different situation from us what they sh i should tell them they're not allowed to do it i would never want it in my school district uh and i can't fathom really in most cases why anybody else would want that although you just gave an example why someone might so i would not be opposed to proving that resolution the way i understand it and i'll add some context to this part of the concern with uh endorsing this is actually it's not dissimilar to the mask discussion because by having the governor come in and say everybody has to wear a mask that eliminates the the discussion at a local level very similarly on this issue it would bring one

229of the most explosive issues imaginable to local school boards across the entire state and then also all of the advocacy that goes along with that as it becomes a incredibly divisive who's running for school board issues that's an incredibly helpful commentary and it definitely gives me a different perspective thank you that was very helpful and just to make sure that i understand the proposal correctly if this were to pass in the state of illinois that then means any staff member has the no what does it mean yeah this this is an actual legislation it's just saying that the illinois association of school boards would advocate and lobby for this legislation to be passed so this is the step before the step correct i mean it's not up to the illinois association of school boards or

230us whether or not this gets enacted it's up to the legislators but it would be a lobbying effort they would put resources into lobbying our legislators to pass this legislation so if we as a district 109 said yes it would in theory represent our endorsement okay i want to be clear on that thank you so i would just say i would like to go along with mike's uh recommendation that he said he's our superintendent for a reason i mean my my view is you know this is a uh this association is just it's a special interest group right it's not it's just and we're members of it and they're asking for our input and i don't know that we need to be so deferential to other districts if we if this is our view um

231and you know i i don't have any real moral qualms about the idea that somehow we shouldn't state what our view is even if it's uh there's other districts that have that just saying that our lobbying group is not going to lobby for that doesn't mean that they can't lobby some other way when we're not a part of that group or to get passed through whatever other means just means that the group that we're a part of we're not saying we want our group to lobby in favor of that um i concur completely can with that point so i'm for on both of those points my view is to oppose the student safety protection plan number two and to um and to support the child let's get to that and we'll get to that one

232in a minute so let's finish the discussion about the i mean this one i made some comments i think last year on the same thing i just i mean having some experience with firearms in with the most trained individuals and the amount of accidental discharges that actually occur even with people that deal with it on a daily basis um i just have an issue with it in terms of having part-time individuals with whatever certifications that may be required per their recommendation is not enough if we if they really had a concern related to response rates and security within their schools there are other means in which they can address those to include lobbying for funding from the state related to sros specifically to their district that is a way to do it i do not

233believe that anybody within a school should have a firearm unless they are full-time that is their job that is their life that is what they're trained to do and even then i have some level of concern in terms of firearms in in schools so um so i'm opposed i want to just say that you wanted to say something but i remember a couple years ago and for those who don't know you know ryan has an extensive military background went to west point you're an officer and i don't know what rank but here and i found it very interesting a number of years ago when you told me that when the military goes to their bases um you have to check your guns like you can't bring your gun into your own i don't know living

234quarters or whatever it is it has to be checked and these are the best trained people who know about the and yet to have you know i i just that that i think i think speaks volumes to for me to see where people are i just i just like to make a comment um some of you who know me this is going to hold true things i've said in the past we've talked about security features at our schools and i've always said there's a fine balance and we just got done an extensive discussion on social emotional learning and to advocate that our teachers can have guns in the schools our kids are going to say mom dad where are you sending me okay this just isn't good just on that alone from the social emotional

235perspective forget about the physical dangers and all the things that ryan brings up which are extremely valid points it is not a message that reinforces social emotional stability in our children when they know their teachers have to carry a gun into the classroom it's just i mean i'm 100 opposed and i think my statement clearly i think ryan is sensing a theme right ryan made it abundantly clear to andy to answer what you initially raised was there are other avenues that schools can lobby in order to create the support that they might individually need that isn't this route and personally sorry that's why i opened the conversation because i wouldn't i if it were me i would just say my personal opinion i could never vote yes to that i could never so that's my

236answer you know i used to use my my uh my little comment is do you know why they have um vaults basically in banks it keeps the bad it keeps the good people honest it's not going to keep the bad people out and when we talked about all the security that we're going to do at our buildings if a bad person has bad intentions i don't care what your security is they're going to find out that doesn't mean we'd be stupid and don't do any security but at the same time we all we have to balance it and again going back to the social emotional side we we can't have our children thinking that this is not a safe place to go because you can't your mind you can't learn in that environment if you

237don't think you're safe you're not going to be focused on your education so this is yeah this is a bad idea i'm in full agreement that i just i wanted everybody to be heard because i know that this isn't i think this is an important issue and i know there are people in the community who are concerned about it as well and i think they should hear how we feel about it the other resolution that i think we want to talk about because i don't know that we want to go along with the recommendation is resolution 15. this is the second year that this resolution is being brought to before the assembly it was supported by the resolutions committee last year and this year i'm sorry it was opposed by the the resolutions committee last

238year and this year it was voted down last year and although our district did support it last year so this resolution relates to um safe gun storage in the home and um uh i'm sorry maureen's being attacked by a bug okay i guess i'm just i don't understand how this is even eligible to be on this has nothing to do with school well there so there are many um there's a lot of legislation that uh relates to what people do in their homes that can impact schools and the point of this resolution is that you know there's a lot of data out there that supports the idea that um that violence in gun violence in schools the vast majority of the guns that are used in gun incidents in schools come from unsecured guns that

239are in the child's home or or in the home that are brought brought to school it's also with suicides it's very there's a lot of data that shows that unsecured guns lead to vast majority of teen suicides so or or an accidental discharge as well so i think that and that what you said kelly is exactly why the association uh or the resolutions committee has recommended not to adopt it because they feel that it's beyond the purview of the association to try to dictate what happens in people's homes um you know that's that's the the position of the committee um you know the the like i said the alternate argument is that it's certainly there guns in the home certainly have a reach into schools so i did ironic that both are on the scene

240it's so bizarre from the standpoint of recommending the ability to have guns and schools to protect don't lock them up the potential of somebody coming in with a gun that they brought from home right um so i mean i i it's bec's practice it's also by the way nra supported in terms of how you are supposed to store guns at home which is lock them up right and secure them um so i don't see any reason why i don't know if i mean i don't know if the iasb would i don't know how many resources you actually have to put behind this so to speak to lobby it um other than to say that we support legislation to this effect um so i i don't see any reason why we wouldn't actually support this just

241from a principle standpoint because exactly the logic that you just laid out from a principle standpoint when i read it of course guns should be safer homes should be safer 100 i'm just confused still how this is really under the umbrella of but i'm learning they're not taking they're just not taking the same leap that we are in terms not leap there's they're not extending it to that causation effect of of somebody taking an unsecured weapon and bringing it to school i'm saying how do we mean how this got on here in the first it just feels like districts enough any district can can propose and to that point glen ellen district 41 which is the advocate for this notes in their comments on it that between 70 and 90 percent of guns used in

242school shootings perpetrated by shooters under the age of 18 were acquired from the home for the homes of relatives and friends that's and it goes on furthermore more than half of the gun owners store at least one gun unsafely without any locks or other storage measures in fact nearly a quarter of all gun owners report storing all of their guns in an unlocked location in the home and it goes on so there's a connection between the two so the idea that um you know what what is the school association doing you know concerned about it's the impact that that's having on school that's borne out by these statistics but it was not adopted on the basis of the rationale you've said it's not recommended totally great okay anybody not in support of this resolution okay

243excellent um so the other um uh school board cop i knew somebody was gonna say raise that um so compensation for school boards on here oh yeah no i did i had one that i had a question on that okay is that what you want right now yeah i mean otherwise i mean based on mike's recommendations um uh that we go along with the resolutions committee's recommendations on all of the other resolutions it didn't seem like there was anything that was controversial about any of the other recommendations so it's not good it's controversial i just genuinely have an informational question so there's number 11 is the clean energy infrastructure and number 13 is landscaping and basically the argument is we shouldn't be diverting federal funds to go towards clean energy because then that's mandating too

244much in a way that we don't you know the state doesn't have money to begin with and now you're forcing certain dollars to go to clean energy but at the same token they're supporting money being spent on landscaping which i know is not flowers and bushes it's actual like flood zone and issues with irrigation i guess i'm just genuinely confused why one was supported and one wasn't i have those exact same things and i took the exact opposite position but i also wonder ken if because from a landscaping perspective we don't live in a rural part of the state if we don't see potentially the problems that some of these other districts are seeing in terms of their their grounds no but it wasn't the landscaping idea was not based on aesthetic no no i

245know but i meant like actual like like flood zone issues and and you're like they're talking about the way that the landscaping is impacting their properties correct i don't think the foundation i thought that clean energy infrastructure federal funding i would yeah and i was in favor of that even though it's recommended against it and for the landscaping spending federal funds for that i i what i don't understand is why we as you know just iasb why they wouldn't be lobbying for more funding for schools in general on anything and so why not right why not ask the congress to add more money for clean energy why not ask them for more money related to landscape escaping well why not ask them for more money in general on anything right i mean the landscaping one

246oh sorry now i'm loud the landscaping one literally says things like rain gardens and trees perennial plants sidewalks bike paths i mean these are wonderful things and they're saying yes adopt this proposal but then when it comes to clean energy they're like now don't do that i'm just confused and it also more important what's more important than that yeah i guess bike paths and then and then also also in that same realm was the electric school uh uh buses that's also number 12. so uh my view on that was also to seek funding for that too which the the committee i don't know why we wouldn't support anything that asked for more money from the congress i do think the buses the one challenge was the rural districts that would have little to no infrastructure

247in place to support electric buses the whole point is to give them to get the funding that's the whole point is that to provide funding for it well i mean we certainly can um vote to um to adopt resolution 11 resolution 12 and 13 is already recommended to adopt so i mean that's i have no issue with any of that unless i had a personal opinion that i thought we should vote yes to 11. the rest i'm less caring about but with the buses or whatever i just don't understand the reality of the situation is that it's not going to succeed anyways in terms of the offering it's more of a principle standpoint of my point that saying listen if they're going to ask for more money from congress there's more important things but they

248should oh not more important things but there are other things they should also be asking for right but we should support any additional funding well it might be i mean number 11 is probably a pretty close call i i wouldn't be so certain that for sure at the meeting itself it won't be adopted the um bill back better plans to solve all this anyways oh the new bill is going to solve all of us anyways three trillion dollars gonna be pumped into the well okay so there was i was gonna recommend that we consider voting yes to eleven unless people are wildly is there a consensus to vote yes on 11. okay how about 12 the electric school buses yes 13. anybody yeah go ahead ken are you are you okay with thirteen yeah i

249mean that wasn't important to me one way that i just would personally would probably that's going along with the resolutions committed yeah that's fine and then i am so sorry i know we are like all wanting to go to bed but i have more and i feel like no ken like all of policy i'm all excited about this um just number nine really quick was nine on your list oh ken and i oh my gosh we got two kens on the committee oh getting excited everybody the health and sex education i just also need and maybe mike this might actually be a question for you um they're basically recommending to adopt that each school district should be allowed to determine and decide which curriculum best suits their community and the this is for the sex

250education one could you give me an understanding of the advantage of allowing each district to make those independent choices versus having more of a standardized curriculum yeah i mean look at danielle are you turning back i think danielle is going to have an opinion about that if not i am not sorry well can i jump in yeah yeah i see value in in having each district do something different right i can understand the notion that some school districts might be more conservative and but as a community and therefore they might not want to um uh have a curriculum that is um maybe more that might not be acceptable in a more liberal community so i understand that i don't have my personal issue is not the idea that each district can do something different my

251concern was if you actually read the resolution there is no standard at all it's one thing to say hey we will have certain say you know my question was are you know the resolution just says that shall support that the board that the illinois association of school boards should support and advocate for local school district control of content and curriculum for health and sex education courses offered in the district which means they could eliminate that which there's nothing in here that says what the current code requires and i don't know the answer that so i didn't actually say no mine had a question on my notes were are there no standards at all and without that having this resolution itself it's not it's not enough for me danielle is that a mandated topic to teach

252that's what i think i have not read the resolution um in particular however i would say that there is inherent risk in it being a values-based curriculum based on the local district you would want some normalization so that's the only i i'm not necessarily opposed to having local school district do something as long as there's like some whatever but this resolution says that we're advocating that and it's just not clear they didn't provide enough information in this resolution and what they have here for these rationales and all that for me to um say to go along with what to recommend to adopt it yeah so i'll uh jump in i i wasn't my favorite if she hadn't jumped up and down and waved her arms on on this one because uh there is uh as

253kenneth pointed out there's a lot of um this is a loaded topic to say the least and it is one that local school boards in varying communities really want to weigh in on but ken has pointed out exactly the problem here which is to support this absent clarity on yes you need to address these standards these standards in some way uh you can do that you know with some local discretion however this is the curriculum and danielle what you're saying is look uh that might not be the case right yeah we can put ourselves in a position where we could have a group in here advocating for a different standard of education related to it based off of their values and now we're in on you know there's oh there's it's the same thing it's

254the mask it's the mask issue it's it's it is not a dissimilar thing it can be so in this case we're all against the recommendation it seems like yes that's what it's sounding like does anybody have a an opposing view i don't like it the way it's written so i oppose the way it's written right that that's the consensus that people don't like that we don't like the resolution so we should vote against it thank you any any different position okay any other concerns my list is done i have one um so here's the deal it's number 17 it deals with the constitutional amendment on that and it added language okay so on its surface it sounds fantastic i don't know if you can see that there that's adding language that um the public education

255will equitably serve students and provides an equitable education all students without regard to all that and on the surface you wouldn't think that there's anything kind of controversial about that but i think that these are kind of charged words to be honest with you so as we talked a little bit earlier about critical race theory and i've read somewhat about it i'm not where i need to be and totally totally understanding it i don't know all the ins and outs of it but the gist of it is in in is that um the the the uh it's not fair to say the gist of it that wouldn't be what i want to say what i want to say is is that one of the concerns is the difference between equal opportunities and equitable opportunities so

256having equal access or equal opportunities is to say that everybody's equal under the law and to say that it's equitable is to say there might you can take race and these kinds of things into consideration so that the outcomes are uh of a particular that you're measuring things by the outcome and taking race into account and getting that i don't know my personal view on it i'm not saying that i'm in favor of it against it yet i don't know enough about it but i believe that that's what this is driving at that this is being used as as something in support of something along those lines that i'm not personally expert enough at to know but i don't think we should miss that my view was that we should abstain on this unless between

257now and the conference we become a little bit more familiar about what the impact is of the words equitably serves and equitable education because i think that's actually loaded any other thoughts that's a bit of a deep dive for me i'm gonna have the trouble it's a little it's a little late for that conversation go ahead what do you think what's your opinion on this uh i think that um i would either if if i were in your shoes i would either uh go along with the recommendation which was do not adopt no it's do adapt it's do adopt i thought it said oh i'm misreading that oh i went i jumped up there um i would have the same i totally misread that when i reviewed it uh i would have the same concern

258that ken has or abstained i don't know i i do i tried to get a little bit up to speed by tonight but i didn't have enough so for me i don't know enough about it to say but i probably would have enough time by the time of the vote but i don't know if everybody wants to go so so your point is that in order to provide an equitable education that sometimes you do have to take into consideration the race social and economic status gender all those things in order to be equitable is that what you're getting at i'm saying i'm saying that if this is part of the constitution the constitution then there's going to be an argument that in order to be equitable you have to adopt actually read it the opposite

259as i read it you could make the argument that it's you have to disregard without says without the uh without regard to their race and i know what they're trying to mean but you could argue that it means that you could disregard race gender ethnicity everything else as it's written if you look at the literature yeah that the this is part of the literature yeah i'm i'm okay with if we don't support this yeah i may either don't support it or just abstain until it could be more clearly defined yeah i don't really want it for me personally i don't really think that we should oppose it because i really don't know the answer but i don't know that any of us know enough right to say hey we do want us to amend the

260illinois state constitution um without a good thing that goes on to the voters the likelihood is pretty low even if they lobbied for it but at the same time if we were to i i'm with i'm okay with the abstaining mike since this falls under the um the positions regarding financing is this related to essa and the equalization like the equitable funding um act public act that's the way i would read this i mean the ebf i think it would i think that into the constitution is what it's attempting to do and i think it's also attempting to make the call the clause in here that says that the state has the preponderant financial responsibility for financing the system of public education also as part of the constitution and as it's worded i believe it's

261clumsy i think it's just clumsy i think so too i think the intention is correct but i don't think it's worded very well it could create more issues than it would solve potentially you cannot vote i mean they don't record you as abstaining you can just not vote okay anything else on these resolutions thank you for a good discussion okay the next item is 7.5 andy frain crossing guard services yeah it can be very brief the board will recall that we bid crossing guard services in the spring and approved a contract with a vendor that vendor failed to staff all seven of our posts and we terminated our agreement with them at the end of september subsequently we have entered into agreement with andy frain services at the same dollar amount and they have successfully

262staffed all seven posts without issues since the beginning of october we're asking the board to approve a multi-year agreement with andy frane services that is at the same dollar amount as the previous agreement uh with the previous vendor bring this for action at the november meeting this has nothing to do with board approval or anything i just have a quick question with the crossing guards from andy frain is the likelihood that there might be a consistent person like jane smith at this school will probably be james no we have no idea we don't know okay i would just if it ever comes to be that way i do think it's important to kind of introduce them through like a school principal email like we like to welcome jane smith she's our walden crossing guard say

263hi to her in the morning because you know that's a person that our students interact with every single day yeah out of curiosity yeah we're just happy to have guards just think about moving forward do they have a pulse and no criminal record though um i i'm in favor of it and all that but i do want to refresh my memory when what did we have prior to approving that prior vendor who didn't go and how much was that cost because they're 50 to 75 dollars an hour is a lot of money for a crossing it was the police car historically the police department uh staffed crossing guards they were unable to continue to reliably staff crossing guards and this is not a unique to deerfield thing all of the area municipalities are finding themselves

264in the same place and police departments are saying you know we don't want to support this anymore um so you know many districts in the area are finding themselves in the same spot um and fortunately as we've transitioned from the old model where the police were covering this in this first year of implementation we're sharing the cost equally with the village and then in next year it would go to 75 25 with the district paying for 75 percent and what about because the four-year contract what about the last two years those are not as part of the contract those are you know just side agreement with the village um so we'd have to have that conversation again wow okay thank you any other questions on this contract i know that's not the rate that the

265crossing guards are getting paid yeah and we had tried hiring on our own too and could not find anybody so um and we can um terminate with a 30 days notice too right correct 7.6 2021 tax levy afraid to push buttons on this i've gone for others tonight but i can be very brief i'm just going to touch very quickly on some key tax levy terms to make sure that we are all on the same page and as i typically do with these presentations take you through a timeline to help orient the decision that is in front of us we'll talk a little bit tonight about what the finance committee discussed with regard to projections and then the uh levy recommendation for the 2021 tax year that emerged from our conversation earlier this evening uh

266remember that the levy is the ask so when we talk about the numbers that are contained in the tax levy document in the board packet those are numbers that we're asking for but they're not the actual amount that will be uh received by the district the extension is that actual dollar amount that will be received we talk about key drivers of the levy the first is the equalized assessed value of properties within the district and then the consumer price index is also a large driver of what will be ultimately extended to the district as we are a tax cap district so we talk frequently of the property tax extension limitation law that means that our annual levy increase is the lower of the prior year's consumer price index or five percent and then we get

267to tack on any new property within uh our taxing boundaries um so without a referendum our extension is limited to that cpi plus any new growth due to new property uh or five percent as we look at our our timeline all the way on the left hand side you see that the cpi driver for the levy is the uh cpi at the 12 months ended december 2020 that number is known it's 1.4 percent we find ourselves in that second box which is talking about the different levy options uh even though we're in the uh year 2021 right now this is what will ultimately fund the 2022-23 school year we make a decision about our approach tonight that we would pass the levy in november and that would allow me to file the levy with the

268clerk at the end of december and then we find out those actual extension dollars in april um and then of course we collect taxes in june uh primarily in september to fund the 2022-23 school year finance committee met tonight we talked about five-year financial projections um in you know to keep it a very high level we may we remain well positioned for uh the future we talked generally about two options and this has been the conversation that the board has had the last three years whether we abate the debt service levy so for the past three years the board has elected to not uh collect all tax monies that were the board is entitled to collect uh by abating what we could collect to pay our bond principle and interest and so we had a

269conversation tonight about that strategy the consensus from the finance committee was that we would abate the debt service levy again this year but in doing so we have roughly 1.7 million dollars in fund balance in the debt service fund and we would use that fund balance next year to pay bond principle and interest and then we could consider abating again the following year but we're being mindful that we're anticipating that we're going to see some significant capital needs as we look forward to completing a new 10-year life safety plan and a new master facility plan anybody on the finance committee want to share any thoughts no i think he covered it pretty well um some of the discussion was surrounding obviously the visioning work and then the strategy work that will come from that which

270will then lead to the master facility planning and some of the life safety and so obviously next year i think is a bigger decision related to the tax levy than than so so much this year um especially since we have that remaining balance in the debt service one so next year i think is uh going to be a much more i would say in-depth conversation i think at the board level but that'll be foundationally based upon whatever it is that we determine within the vision and strategy work so next steps we don't technically need to hold the truth and taxation hearing but we've always done one for the sake of transparency so that will be at the november meeting and then the board can take action on the tax levy at our november 18th meeting

271and following board action uh i will follow up and make sure that we have filed all of the uh appropriate paperwork with the county clerk before the last tuesday in december and certainly available to answer any questions sorry the next item on the agenda is 7.7 the first draft of the proposed school calendar for the 2022 2023 school year do we have dr fisher dr fischer is calling in right now right i'm on the call i can hear you can you hear me we can't we can hear you you're up top calendar to us i i apologize i'm not there i was driving from the southern tip of illinois six hours all afternoon just got back recently so i apologize i'm not there but i am happy to share with you the proposed 2022-2023 draft

272school calendar first and foremost i think most of the board understands this but i do like to reiterate each year when i create this the draft calendar is always predicated on doing our best as a district to accommodate families who have students that are in both district 109 and township school district 113 so that lays the basis for how our calendars put together district 113 has created their 2022-2023 calendar last year so we are matching up with that at this point in time a couple things that the board needs to know um as we do our best to match 113 it will never actually match based off of how the current bargaining agreement is set up because our students in 109 actually attend two more days of school than 113 students and our teachers work

273one extra day beyond what the district 113 teachers work as well so that's why i present to you each year um three documents i hopefully have access to them you have the general clean proposal of what district 109 proposed calendar for next year looks like you have district 113 calendar and then i actually take our version and kind of color with red and green on the calendar denoting where we match up with 113 exactly in green and where in red we don't match up so this year the big difference is um i'm sorry for the proposal next year the big differences are um 113 is um actually not in uh in attendance on columbus day we are not in attendance on columbus day and the reason why is that is one of our defined holidays

274for our bargaining units paid holidays second november 22nd is highlighted in red our students are not here that's a parent-teacher conference day but at district 113 the students are in session and the final one in which our students don't match up is january 17th district 113 has that as one of their institute days um we only have the one institute day at the beginning of the year that we already matched with 113 on so our students would be in session that day and remember we still have to bring our kids in for those extra days that 113 doesn't have so that's the reason we actually push out our school year and our students will be here until the middle of the week of june 5th ending on june 7th so that's why that's highlighted in

275red because 113 proposes to end on june 2nd so those are the differences in the calendars highlighted in red the green is where everything is identical and you could highlight the whole calendar um pretty close to the whole calendar in green but those are holidays and winter and um winter break spring break days beginning end of the school year those are the greens in there that pop out as typical days off or days of instruction is there any questions for me um the only question i had was over winter break is it i can't think of the last time we've had two weeks and two days off is that pretty unusual it's very unusual okay and that's just to match 113. you got it um i think it would be frowned upon if uh the

276people who have hit this but i am 113 i'm just it's just a little bizarre and i hope that people are in attendance on the 19th 20th and 21st and don't take a three-week vacation okay thank you i just have one quick question how come the first day of school can never be a whole first full day of school versus a half day is there any way to adjust the calendar for that it we actually have time built in on that day to um work with our special needs teachers and articulate joanna can you reiterate that is still happening that was always my understanding and that's why that first day is built in like that joanna stepped out for just a minute oh sorry that over mine that's usually what was happening is the articulation

277of um special needs students on those days is why the first day is a half in service day and it's always been that way okay i would just propose it we make our full first day a whole day but i'm gonna find a way to work on that but that's up to me if we did here's the downside to that is if we if we did that we would have to adjust the date somewhere else because of how many half day in services we built into the calendar based off of our agreements with the bargaining units okay so anything we anything we switch here we can't necessarily just do away with it or restructure it without having to manage where it would come back in so if we wanted the kids to show up and

278do a full day here we would have to have them off at a different time because of how many contractual work days and what those days look like underneath our collective bargaining agreements our agreements dictate how many student contact days that the teachers have so yeah yep you got it joanna's back maybe she can answer the question now sorry [Laughter] okay all right never mind any other questions on the calendar all right thank you very much dr fisher get some sleep yep so it'll come back in november for approval but i appreciate your time and hope everyone has a good night thank you you too thanks for staying up bye everyone good night um the next item is 7.8 school resource officer agreement this is just a bit of housekeeping uh when we brought lauren

279on this was a something that we were working on and then it went on the back burner with the pandemic this is an agreement that the board's council and the villages council have worked on together covers reciprocal reporting digital image access and some topics related to the school resource officer village has already approved this we'll bring it to the board in november for action any questions great that brings us to our action items um the consent agenda and um that includes 8.1.1 personnel 8.1.1.1 resignations and retirements 8.1.1.2 leaves 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 8.1.2 bills for payment 8.1.3 september quarterly treasurer's report with student activities and 8.1.4 destruction of closed session audio and there's a typo here it should be from march

2809th of 2020 not 2021 we have to keep the recordings for 18 months so it should be march 9th of 2020 and becky will change the date once once it's published can i have a motion please second roll call please make sure you turn your mics on for the roll call mr begley aye ms jacomu aye mr cuo aye mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman hi and president montgomery aye mr caries item 8.2 policy final reading 1 colon 30 policy 2 colon 10 2 colon 20 2 colon 30 2 colon 130 2 colon 240 3 colon 30 4 colon 60 4 colon 160 5 colon 10 5 colon 30 5 colon 210 6 colon 160 6 colon 170 6 colon 235 7 colon 220 7 colon 230 7 colon 280 7 colon 340

2817 colon 345 8 colon 30 and 8 colon 90. these were brought for information at the last meeting and now up for um a vote uh can i have a motion please second roll call miss jack of you aye mr khloe aye mr morrison aye ms leonard aye mr ashman aye mr begley aye and president montgomery aye motion carries item 8.3 recognition of school board members day by iasb on november 15th of 2021. you don't really have to read the whole thing oh we're here and it's only once a year and you guys all deserve it so um and you do and it's uh 10 53 and i'm gonna read it anyway because i really appreciate having dedicated school board members whereas school board members are elected to sit and trust for their diverse communities

282in it and in that capacity are charged with meeting the community's expectations and aspirations for the public education of their children and whereas school board members are entrusted with the guardianship and wise expenditure of scarce tax dollars and they are responsible for maintaining and preserving the buildings grounds and other areas of the school district that the community has put in their trust and whereas the school board members are responsible for for providing leadership that insurance ensures a clear shared vision of public education for their schools that sets high standards for the education of all students and requires the effective and efficient operation of their districts and whereas school board members adopt public policy to give voice to that leadership and employ a superintendent to administer board policy and are also responsible for the regular monitoring

283of the district's performance in compliance with state policy as we did tonight and whereas school board members selflessly volunteer countless hours to public service with no compensation and whereas school districts have faced enormous challenges over the past two years and the strong dedicated leadership provided by the deerfield district 109 board of education has allowed student learning and success to continue and whereas employers are supportive of their employ whereas employers are supportive of their employees who serve as school board members generously lending support and time employers give their employees the opportunity to better serve the needs of the school districts and communities they represent through sometimes tremendous sacrifice to the the employer and whereas decisions made by school board members directly impact the quality of life and safety in their communities placing them as the front

284line of the american democracy therefore be it resolved now therefore be resolved in honor of the service of all board of education members the deerfield public school district 109 along with the illinois association of school boards recognizes november 15 2021 as school board members day as a way to honor those citizens who devote their time and energy for the successful education of our children and our future leaders and that wasn't too long in my opinion thank you for all of the work that you do thank you to all of my fellow board members for all your time and dedication and thank you to uh becky and whoever else helped becky put together eric is nodding uh whoever put together our little our little goody bag so thank you very much that was holly well thank

285you we did not want to go ask anyone sizes if anyone needs to shop at the 109 store please let us know i think the public who might be watching this ought to know what it is so that's enough it's a little it's a it's a little uh string backpack with a 109 t-shirt and mug so very very nice thank you no no watches or gold jewelry or anything like that item 8.4 approval of meeting minutes from september 23rd 2021 and ryan i think you were not there so you need to abstain from that don't move oh there's an opening [Laughter] roll call okay mr morrison aye ms winter aye mr ashman uh i'm sorry so this is from the august 26th no this is september 23rd you abstain from the next one okay yeah

286okay it wasn't clear on the agenda so aye thank you mr begley aye ms jacob you aye mr coe abstain and president montgomery aye mr caries and then also approval of the meeting minutes from august 26th of 2021 this is the one that you you miss ken second roll call ms leonard hi mr ashman abstain mr begley aye ms jacom you aye mr kwow aye mr morrison hi and president begley i'm sorry gosh i have done that so many times hi we know what you meant okay motion carries thank you thank you uh 8.5 consultant agreement for the interim director district coordinator for student services can i have a motion please roll call mr ashman aye mr begley aye ms jacomie aye mr cuo aye mr morrison aye ms wenner i am president montgomery aye

287motion carries thank you open community participation this is the second opportunity for any community participation is there any community participation hearing none the next item is committee reports are there any committee reports um i can jump in we had a true north board meeting on october 13th they are now fully and officially true north that's how they're being referenced i believe in our last district communication we had a little blurb about it thank you eric and uh just a couple things to point out one is and i believe joanna you probably got an email on this that they run a scholarship program for teaching assistants correct yeah so you have that information and yep communicating it out yep great love it um i think the only major thing that was discussed that might potentially impact

288our districts such as fyi they are going to be in talks and potentially tightening up the language a little bit when it comes to any of the contracts so there's the lea which is like how they contract out teaching assistants i don't believe our district has impacted this but i know 113 has a ton of those teacher assistants they are looking to tighten up the language to make these less of a handshake deal and more of a truly on paper contractual the big question that was raised is if we're going to start going down the rabbit hole of contracts are we ever going to get to a point where we say we're going to contract you for three of our learners so what if only two of our learners need their services are we on

289the hook for the third so we're just trying to work with them and making sure that whatever they do put forth um protects both sides so it protects true norse financial interest and also protects the district's financial interests um and then there was just an amazing student presentation and honoring two early childhood teachers who have done decades and decades of work with true north so that was a pretty cool moment and that's it when i went to my first ed red meeting it was interesting they're forming some committees i'd like to join one and they had a speaker who initiated the one of the mandates and his legislation so they kind of grilled him on that which was kind of interesting about why are you supporting mandates so but it was interesting and i continue

290to look forward to being more uh involved met and we're going to go into closed session and cover what we meant about so finance met but you guys heard that oh did you want to just uh give an update on the audit because it's usually that time here how about john give that sure i will um our audit is not complete there have been some struggles at the firm with whom we have worked for many many years and we've discussed that we are going to rfp for a new annual audit firm and we expect that do we expect the audit for the next time maybe we're still hopeful that we will meet i filed an extension we have through december 15th to have our annual audit in afr i know it's in process so i'm

291very hopeful that we're going to hit that mark great and i know fdc hasn't met recently i don't know if anything i was wondering if there's any update on the rfp for the auditorium yeah i've seen all the documents legal has reviewed them we expect to issue the rfp in a matter of days so is that fdc need to reconvene or that goes straight to the board i'll go straight to the board great thank you the next item is board superintendent other just real quickly um ryan maureen nick and i um attended the iasb fall lake division uh dinner meeting a couple weeks ago where we officially got our governance award and you should have all received your little pin for the governance award so that was a nice event i want to thank john

292for all your work in setting up the vaccine clinics and you and kelly for working on the levy and getting that all together especially all the alternatives that you had in there so that was helpful um danielle thanks again for just fantastic presentation tonight i know you worked really hard on that and it showed it was it was amazing and so thank be sure to thank everybody because i know some of them left and eric and holly thank you for all your work on define 109. and also if any of the board members have not yet signed up for building visits i know mike sent around a google doc to sign up for a couple of one or more dates to go towards some of the buildings so please sign up for that that's all

293i had um eric can you really quick clarify because i feel like we may have zoomed through it what should the parents expect in is it tomorrow they're going to get an email about this clinic but there's no sign ups tomorrow correct dr philby and i still need to chat about this okay so it's going to be at least presented to parents tomorrow it will be presented with i think we're just parsing how much information we don't give out any wrong information we just don't want to get ahead of passport health so correct yeah fair i think there was already a little bit of like oh my gosh our sign ups tomorrow no sign ups tomorrow information first the plan right now would be information tomorrow great sign ups monday morning we know that there's

294no perfect time for everyone right okay 7 p.m 7 a.m 2 p.m you know but i think there was some potential concern that it was signed up tomorrow it is not great thank you and thank you something that i'm sure it's something that's on my mind uh so the situation with uh district 113 that they're trying to decide what to do do they combine one school do they um it seems to me that invite at least some reflection as to whether we have too many school districts in our neighborhood um and whether you know we're doing a lot of work on 440 to get the districts to share information so that we can have a continuous k-12 experience and we can coordinate calendars and we can behave as if we were an integrated k-12 district

295even though we're not and it sort of seems to me that if district 113 is trying to reconsider how they're organized and what buildings i have i don't know why the question wouldn't at least be on the table does it make sense for at least airfield to become a k-12 district and possibly highland park be a k-12 district and other districts in the area can decide what role they want to have i don't i think from a theoretical perspective it seems logical um i'm sure it's a very heavy lift and i'm sure there's a lot of trade-offs i don't know exactly what the right answer is but it certainly seems like how do how do how does this community not at least have that conversation um i'll just say that those conversations are definitely going

296to be had they uh you know 113 is at the very very beginning stages of trying to figure out how to address their problems and so they put forward ideas that were you know what what they had come up with internally and i don't know that it was would have been timely to have had other conversations involving other districts at that stage but um you know you're certainly not the first person who has raised that as a potential option and those conversations will be forthcoming um absolutely and they're already sort of in the in the works so i think that it's a there's a lot that goes into those conversations and a lot of information that has to be gathered before we can have any meaningful discussion of those potential options thanks i would assume

297that this is a three four five six seven year uh process either way so i don't think it's anything that would be imminent and everyone would have plenty of time to plan and consider but i just want to make sure that at least people are intentional about the question all right thank you of course i think that every all of the constituents in all of the communities you know the boards owe it to all the constituents to consider all options so i'm sure that will be done anything else board superintendent other okay ryan's all ready i second well i have to say it first all right item 12 can i please have a motion to adjourn open session and move into closed session for the purpose of discussing the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or

298dismissal of specific employees of the public body or legal counsel for the public body including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee of the public body or against legal counsel for the public body to determine its validity however a meeting to consider an increase in compensation to a specific employee of a public body that is subject to the local government wage increase transparency act may not be closed and shall be opened to the public and posted and held in accordance with this act five ilcs 120-2 2c1 i have a motion please so moved second roll call please i need my mic sorry okay um mr begley aye ms jackman aye mr clown aye mr morrison aye ms wenner aye mr ashman aye and president montgomery aye okay motion carries at 1109 okay the

299sound and everything was amazing you