001All right. Good evening. Thank you all for for coming out. All right. We're going to then get started. Yes. I'm turning to my Yeah. Okay. We're good. So, the February 9th, 2026 committee, the whole meeting will now come to order. Mr. Lobach, will you please lead in the pledge over here to our right? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. >> Thank you, >> Mrs. Mo. Roll call, please. >> Mr. Malay, Miss King, Miss Ligman, Mrs. Leav, >> here >> Mrs. Miss Becker >> here. >> Mr. Lobach >> here. >> Dr. Marelli >> here. >> Dr. Bruno >> here. Thank you all. Uh before we get started, just a reminder on
002the table you will find a signin sheet. Please make sure you sign in for us. Thank you. All right. So, with that, I'm going to turn to our superintendent, Dr. McHugh and various others who will get us started on what we hope will be a very provocative, evocative conversation about a book. Thank you, Jeff. >> Thank you, Dr. Bruno. For those of you who I haven't met, my name is Jeff McHugh. I'm the proud superintendent of District 41. Thank you so much for coming this evening to talk about what school could be. To start us off though, I'm gonna kick this back to our board president who's going to start us off with a with a little tale. A tale. Oh, all right. I've been known to tell one or two occasionally. So, thank you,
003Dr. McHugh. Um just to set a context for what I hope we will do this evening u I wanted to share a famous Buddhist proverb about a teacup uh that encourages us all to have what the Buddhists call a beginner's mind. Yeah. So once upon a time there was a wise zen Buddhism teacher and people traveled from all over the world to seek his help and in return he would talk with them and show them the way to enlightenment. On this particular day a young student came to visit the teacher for advice. I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen. the student said. The teacher invited the student to sit down and they began the lesson. But quickly it became obvious that the student was full of his own ideas, opinions, and
004knowledge. He interrupted the teacher repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to anything the wise teacher had to say. After this went on for a while, the teacher grew rather confused and frustrated. Calmly then suggested that they have some tea. The teacher slowly poured his guest a cup while the student continued talking. The teacup was soon filled. Yet the teacher kept pouring until the cup overflowed, onto the table, onto the floor, onto the students robes. The student cried, "Stop! Can't you see? My cup is already filled." The teacher stopped pouring the tea and replied, "Exactly. You are like this cup." so full of knowledge and everything that nothing more can get in. Come back to me when you empty your cup and then we can learn together. I'd like to see if we
005can kind of empty the cup. That's the context. So, thank you for indulging that context, Dr. Mcu. >> All right. Thank you. Tried to find a an image of a cup overflowing. That was my best shot. So, we have three purposes of tonight. The first purpose is we want to strengthen our community connection through dialogue. Community engagement is one of the four metrics on our strategic plan, one of the four goal areas, and tonight's a great night to do that. Secondly, we want to prepare for next year's strategic planning. So, we are in year four of a five-year strategic plan. Next year, we're going to start developing a new strategic plan to figure out what school will be for the next 5 years. Tonight's the appetizer to that main course. And lastly, we want to
006reflect on what do we want for the students in district 41. And fortunately, we have one of them here right now, one of our student board members. I'm looking to see we don't have any others. So, Joseph, you're going to be you're going to be carrying the student mantle for us for tonight. We have three norms for tonight. Number one, share the air. Please make sure that you are allowing others at your table to talk, but also contribute your thoughts as well. Number two, listen to understand. We had a committee of the whole last year about student personal devices. We were trying to solve a problem. Tonight, we're not trying to solve a problem. This is not a debate. This is a sharing of ideas. You don't have to convince anybody. We really want to
007have just a nice robust conversation about what could be. And lastly, No punching physically, no punching verbally, respectfully. Engage in dialogue. And I think it's especially fun when somebody doesn't agree with you. It doesn't mean they're wrong, but let's just make sure that we're not doing any punching tonight. So far, we haven't had a single punch at a committee of the hole. I attribute it to that third norm. So, sometimes we start off with a meeting with we need to do some preloading of information. None of that tonight. You've read the book, I hope. And really, we want to hear what you think. So, we're going to have two discussions. The first of them we're calling book talk. This is conversation strictly about the book itself, not necessarily connected to district 41 yet. That is
008going to be part two. So for this first part, we really want your reactions about the book itself. And we're going to put up some sentence prompts to get you to get your juices flowing. The second discussion on connections to D41, we're going to start talking about what it could look like in district 41. And at the very end, we are going to share out. Now, we do have some paper in front of you for taking notes. We have more paper if you need it. And from a um I'm just looking at the sizes of the tables. We'll let you decide at your tables if you want to have, for example, we have five people here. That makes a nice discussion versus here we have six. Do you want to have a sixperson discussion? Do
009you want to break it into two halves? Whatever you want to do to make the conversation robust, feel free to do that. And we will finish by doing a whole group share out. Each table is going to share out so that everyone can hear the main takeaways. Any questions? Bathrooms, if you go out those doors, I believe if you go to the right, Bob, I know boys are to the right >> and girls are to the right out there if you need to use the restroom. Okay, we should be wrapped with this at approximately 7:30. We were looking for about an hour or so. So here we go for the book talk portion here. There are five questions here. You can answer one, two, or all of them. You at your table decide. What resonated
010most with you in the book. What challenged or unsettled you? Which story or example from the book stuck with you most and why? Where did you see students most engaged, alive, or empowered? and what felt most different from your own school experience. You don't need to work through this in order. We're trying to empower you to have some agency to go where you want to with these questions. And if you wind up talking about something that's not up here, that's okay, too. But we'll take about 15 20 minutes to talk about the book itself. Feel free to open it up. And some of you have colorful tabs in there showing that you did your homework and others if you just want to flip through. Um, and we'll probably wrap this at about 7:00. We're going
011to move on to the next discussion prompt, which is what does this mean for district 41. All right, enjoy. All right. Please, please wrap up your last statement here. >> All right. I saw some documenting at some tables, others were going more free form. That's okay if you didn't write anything down for this last one. For this next part, I would like everybody to write your ideas down because now we're going to shift to what could school be in district 41. So, we have four different stems here that you can work off of. You can go in whatever order you want. What examples from the book are happening now in D41? Some of you were already talking about this. So whether you want to maybe document those during this time and what elements of the
012book could we incorporate in the future? I heard a little bit of that at at tables too. What feels most important to protect or preserve about today's schools. And what questions should we keep asking as a community? If you want to go off this script, feel free to do that, too. But this is taking the book and applying it to here in district 41. We're gonna take about 20 minutes to talk about You did a good job. All right, please wrap up and come on back to me. You know, it's a good book when you can't get people to stop talking. I love it. >> Using proximity. Okay, we want to hear what you I had the luxury of walking around and hearing what every group said, but if we could have one person at
013each table share out, I'd really like to report out about the D41 connection because there were some similarities across some tables and some differences. So, if we could have one person at each table share out, what did you talk about that the whole group would benefit from hearing from? microphone >> and please use the microphone so that we can have the green button going. Thank you, Carol. >> Be your instructional coach. >> We had a really great discussion. Everyone just kind of answered as um what was important to them. So, we didn't really stay on one topic and drill down. We kind of just all shared out. But some of the things that we want to continue to do is make sure that our kids are ready to learn. um whether it's SEAL, executive functioning,
014food, um the question of what will AI be like for the future. So what do we need to take forward? Um the question came up um that schools really do broaden our lives to the world and that should be the emphasis bringing that forward. What will students really need to learn? And then incorporating a problem-solving attitude with collaboration and intentionality was something we all felt we need to bring intentionally forward. So thank you everyone. They all had great thoughts. So >> that's us. >> Thanks Carol. Who's next? All right, we discussed kind of similar things. Um, we were talking about getting um, we talked about the social emotional and problem solving and your soft skills and >> back. >> Okay. Um, and that those are the kind of things that in the workplace you use
015them a whole lot. you know, your your problem solving and we talked about how um let's see, you were talking about specials and how the specials could kind of bring in all those different thoughts since they don't necessarily have as said of a curriculum as, you know, literacy being this many minutes or or that kind of thing. and some of the things we thought we could bring to the district that we don't necessarily have yet. Um, I know some teachers do student collaboration in conferences and some don't, but the book talked about how kids felt a sense of ownership over that when they were involved in their conferences and, you know, kind of seeing more of that. And you brought up the point that um, many more people take advantage of the conferences than Um
016and then we also talked about consistency in the different buildings. Um, some buildings have international nights, science fairs, but not all of them necessarily get to do all these things and um maybe doing like an expo night or afternoon for the kids to show this is what I'm learning in class and have the parents see the school building and that kind of thing. >> Thank you, David. Yeah, I >> before you volunte. >> I was volunte. So, I'll do my best. Um, we had an amazing conversation at this group. Um, we talked about taking the courage to look at education differently, right? And taking those risks to do something different than just the text that we learn about and the curriculum that we learn about and that everything goes back to a data point. So,
017we had a lot of conversation about that and and we talked about kind of what could learning look like if it wasn't just from a textbook, if it wasn't just from a standard. Could it be real world application, real life experiences? Uh could we do different things where we we we look at all these different avenues like college, career, we talked about military, being ready for any of those so that our kids are set up for success. We also talked about where we've been in the last 15 20 years of a school district and the different kind of cycles that we've gone through with PBL and inquiry and different things that have occurred here as a district. Um, and kind of brought it all back here that I think the big question is is what
018does our community want? Are we asking the right question to know what we want and what do we want our students to be like when they leave us? kind of like the student profile or you know portrait of a graduate as a lot of high school districts have. Um so we captured all of that in a really rich conversation. Um I hope I did captured it well. Yes. >> Okay. Thanks. Passing it on to the next group. >> Thank you David. >> Bob. >> Okay. Yeah. We talked similar themes that we already heard from the other tables tonight. So we talked about the importance of students having agency in their learning to help make it more meaningful to them, more relatable to them because we we had the notion that if students are interested, invested,
019they're going to have higher engagement. Um we talked about the notion of how we used to have uh PBL's problem based learning and the importance of bringing maybe the project based learning back because it allows students to develop teamwork um work collaboratively solve real world problems. Um, we also talked about leveraging the uh the local businesses to help students become more marketable when they enter the job force and any kinds of maybe internships or apprenticeships that they can offer or just having guest speakers come in to talk to the students about qualities, characteristics that they look for um in prospective employees. We even talked about on a board level what resources can be provided to help create opportunities um for students to be innovative. Um we also talked about the notion of having the ability
020uh to trust teachers rather than just kind of sticking very very closely to a prescribed script just giving them the autonomy to be creative um with their lessons to create meaningful learning opportunities for students. So that was kind of and just again just what questions could we ask the community? How are we um how are we able to um develop students that are very strong scholastically but then also from a citizenship standpoint. Um and we tried to relate that back to like our report cards where it seems like it's very heavily focused on the academics but we don't see a lot about like the citizenship component. And yet we talked about how at graduation every year we also we we have like a citizenship award, a leadership award. So we like to see maybe some
021of those virtues embedded more within our day-to-day learning and on our report cards. >> Thank you, Bob. Last but not least, Tim. >> All right. Um we we had a lot of similar themes. It was a great conversation with this group. So I I thank you guys for the conversation. But we talked about uh again things that we really think we need to protect here uh in district 41 is the trust in our teachers. They do amazing things in those classrooms on a daily basis. Um that we need to continue to empower them. Um and we talked about just how District 41 has been historically a very successful place and we think that's obviously something we want to hold near and dear to our hearts and continue with that success. Uh we also talked about
022the relationships we have um that our that our staff have with our students and families. Um some of these students will run through walls for us, you know, because they know that we truly care about them. Um and then we talked about things in the future. So, um, giving our teachers that permission, I think Bob talked about it, permission to slow down, um, and and and kind of veer away from some things and and take time, dig deeper into some, uh, categories or some topics that the kids are interested in. Um, and then I guess part of that, we talked about the training needed for staff. Uh, if we're going to take that direction, um, staff would need some some PD. Um, and looking at just additional measures of success. Um I think it sounded
023pretty common theme throughout the other groups that our kids are not just a test score. Uh and that was evident in the book obviously. Um we'd like to raise our level of value uh being valuing uh creativity in our students. I think that's something we could work on getting kids excited about coming to school. Um I think that gets back to the relationships we have and the positivity we have. Uh and then we talked about content experts. We we have so many staff. They have so many things that are uh beyond reading math teachers. Uh you know, we have we have authors, we have artists, we have, you know, tech tech uh gurus. Um if I if I took a group of kids that sit in the lunchroom, I could have an awesome debate on
024who's better, Ronaldo or Messi, and they could probably do a lot of awesome research and have like a Socratic seminar on that and talk about it. Um, but I think there's a lot of things that this book provoked uh as far as conversation and I think there's a lot of things we can learn from it and move forward with. So, thank you. >> Well said. Thank you, Tim. Dr. Bruno, how did we do with emptying our cup? >> Well, I'm I'm just one voice. Um, uh, I I did recommend that we read the book. I thought it was a good time to do it. Uh so first of all let me say thank you to all those folks because we didn't just ask you to come to a committee the whole meeting and talk to
025us. We gave you a reading assignment an old-fashioned read a book uh and and you did so and you brought your your open hearts and minds to the conversation. I certainly felt like people engaged the book and engaged the the discussion so that we can we can unlock ourselves from the parameters and sort of the chains that we're in. And we're in the bubble and we need to see what it might look like outside the bubble. And it would maybe it wouldn't it's a little scary but maybe uh we would love what we what we found out there. And I'm very optimistic uh about the the future and about the willingness to engage in doing this. And uh I did a lot of listening uh and I want to thank everybody. So, you know, if
026you got some time, you know, I'm all for going out for a cup of tea uh afterwards on me. I mean, how bad can that be? So, >> Oh, that's right. Never mind. We got close session. Is there a better way to do close session? I don't know. David is Yeah. All right. Uh so thank you all for taking the time uh to read the book and you obviously are deeply invested uh in the children in in this district because your willingness to because you were willing to come out here and talk about how school could be uh as opposed to you know what it what it currently is. So yeah, I have a good feeling hopefully it's shared. >> I'm going to ask that everybody Oh yes question. Yeah. >> Don't pay $4. >>
027If you will please leave the posters before you go. We're going to take those posters. We're going to try to pull some themes together. And again, this was the first of, I think, many conversations about what we want for our students in District 41 moving forward. and I'm excited to continue the conversation. So, thank you. >> Thank you, Dr. McCub. Well, well done. Well facilitated. Okay. So, we do have uh public participation. Um members of the public who wish to address the board should complete a green form and submit it to Mrs. Moch, the board recording secretary. Speakers are asked to maintain respectful decorum and limit their comments to three minutes or less. Please note that all meetings including public comment are livereamed and recorded and become part of the official record. Mrs. Mo, do
028we have anyone wishing to make public comment? Okay, thank you very much. Uh upcoming meetings, our regular business meeting is February 23rd, uh 6:30 right here and then March 16, we have a regular board meeting again here at 6:30 and then April 20th, a regular board meeting. So with that, may I have a motion to adjourn to close session under section 2C1, the appointment, employment, compensation, discipline, performance, or dismissal of specific employees, including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee to determine its validity and section 2C11 for discussion of pending and probable or imminent litigation against affecting or on behalf of the district. >> Second. >> There we go. Any discussion? Roll call. Mrs. Mo. >> Mrs. Lau. Yes, Mr. >> Yes, >> Mctor. >> Yes, >> Martelli. >> Yes, >> Mr. Lach.
029>> Yes, >> Bruno. >> Yes. Thank you very much. The board will not be taking action uh when we come out of close session. So, I want to thank all of you. Have a wonderful evening and thank you. Thank you so much for coming out tonight.