001oh good evening the february 22nd 2021 board of education regular workshop regular meeting will now come to order mrs mo please call the roll here here here mr curry here here mr guzman notified the superintendent that he would not be able to be in attendance at tonight's meeting may i have a motion to allow mr guzman to participate by phone for tonight's meeting motion second any discussion hearing none roll call mr curry yes yes yes [Music] yes yes mr lobeck will you lead us in the pledge of allegiance please 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 all right well we've got a special recognition and dr kasikowski would you please introduce
002our new student board members gladly um after many many months of talking about exactly when and how to roll out our student board members for this year i'm very pleased to welcome and introduce our student board members um asea ahmed who is joining us via zoom and blake noble who is here in person um assaiya and blake will take the oath at the march 8th board of education meeting tonight they're just here to say a quick hello and let the board say hello to them come on let the board see you later would you like to stand and let them recognize soap hello my name is blake and i've been student at district 41 since kindergarten where i went to lincoln franklin from fifth grade and i'm finishing off at hadley i would just like
003to say how great of an honor this is that i am able to represent all the students here and their interests i really enjoy mathematics and science i would like to use the knowledge fantastic thanks welcome blake you came in with a special guest would you like to introduce the person oh there we go all right we look forward to having you join us and asia is on the zoom so um is there anything that you would like to say or anyone you'd like to introduce [Music] check your audio oh well let me try it well cia is also a very cool person she says she's going to type it she's very capable she just said i will type it she's adaptable right there she's a poor thing now her typing and english and also
004going to be right in front of everybody well then we'll give it a second can we unmute her well she was unmuted i'm happy to be here and pleased to meet you all can you hear us yes well we're all pleased to meet you um no i want to see if she's typing anything not in the else no maybe not okay okay well we're really excited about i see you too we are excited we're super excited we're looking forward to welcoming cm blake to the board table on march 8th so let's see if you can hear us we're looking forward to you joining us as well bruce isn't on here either thank you all right now blake this is where you have to stay now for three or four hours just sitting there you know
005super boredom they get to leave at like a given time that's up to dad here when he walks out i guess she goes all right let's then uh move on to our superintendent report melissa would you please facilitate this discussion third thing um hold on i mean oh you need your slides okay let's give that a good chance to where he's getting bruce on yeah everywhere i think i use the wrong zoom connection there we go thank you mike oops well we have been in those words man so there we go here we go he's coming all right see what come up and turn him down i've got some slides just because everything's behind me so thank you yeah are you trying to bring up your lap here no i've got one but then he
006should be able to pull it mike can you pull up my yeah melissa's presentation here we go okay there we go alrighty this is a little hard with it being behind me so i'm gonna try to mike i'll let you know when to move forward in the slides you seem to be popping in and out okay there we go there we go all righty so just wanted to based on some questions that were asked last time in requests for info want to do a quick review and walk through some of the facts um what we know and what we're planning for moving forward so a quick update from today's meeting with the dupage county health department we had dr chu on the line today she shared that the county remains insubstantial because of the number
007of new cases per 100 000 she said that we are definitely moving in the right direction in all areas of the metric but because of that one part of the metric we still remain insubstantial she shared that there's confusion because the cdc has created new categories and those are different from the categories that the dupage county health department uses in addition the last idph the way idph computes their numbers versus dupage county she shared that idph includes probables and confirmed positives in their case numbers whereas dupage county only includes confirmed positives moving forward dupage county will be changing and including probables in their accounts so that there is consistent information shared okay mike you can go on to the next one i wanted to walk through um just the history of what we know on
008space and and really talk through some of the challenges so as we've said in the past space is definitely a major impediment for district 41 in a different slide we're going to talk through some studies that were done in the past and compare it to now but i really wanted to give i thought a very good close comparison is using comparing us to district 89 and glen ellen they have the same number of schools yet approximately fourteen hundred fewer students they also have full-day kindergarten so all of their kindergartens already have a devoted classroom whereas in district 41 we have to make space for all of our half-day sections in order for them to attend five days a week so this takes our larger spaces out of use because of kindergarten just to clarify our
009furniture our extra furniture that was not needed has been put in storage and our classrooms have been really set up to optimize both safety and quality instruction that was a process that dr mccluskey and mr scarmato did prior to opening this year and really walked every classroom and took the measurements and set up the furniture folks may remember back to our opening plan where we shared a very clear directive with staff about not moving furniture because everything was measured and set up the way it needed to be as of last week with the guidance that came out and then reaffirmed today the science does support six feet social distancing during substantial and to the greatest extent possible when the county moves into moderate and mild however current conditions do not support putting 24 to 30
010students in a classroom with one and a half to two feet of social distancing i'll talk about that a little bit more um you know well talked about it today on our county health department conversation and really asked is there an operational definition for to the greatest extent possible and what does that mean is it four is it one and a half is it two um after my presentation we're going to be hearing from dr campbell will be joining another physician who's going to talk to us about an opportunity through luries but when i did talk to dr campbell today one of the pieces of guidance that he had shared was just four and a quarter feet and i'm going to let him explain the measurements around that and how it pertains to the number
011of students who would have to be quarantined if a student did test positive so we'll revisit that when when dr campbell hops back onto the line also the conversation about adding in-person time for students means that we can only run one daily session so whereas now we have an am and a pm we don't have the space to absorb all pm students into the am session so the reality of this suggestion is that some students actually would have to go full remote who are attending now in our half-day person um it also means that students would stay longer to receive specials so you know we can't adjust that two-hour block um for a variety of reasons um as you know 11 to one is really what it takes to deep clean the entire school um
012and do the sanitizing between bringing that next group in but also it's the time when we push in the teachers duty-free lunch their plan period and then the plc time so it really would yield 15 minutes that typically teachers are pulled into duty anyway with kids either going home or kids arriving so that two hours is really not a time that we have the capability to touch um and then in speaking with districts around us who are planning to go full day or add to their length of their day in many cases they are able to provide six feet six feet in spaces and then range from four and a half to five and others while some may do three feet we don't really have that option as i said we can they either have
013more space fewer students or both again the reality of three feet means that we can push more kids into an am session classroom but not all of the pm students so um then without having a pm session we have nowhere for those kids to attend before we move on to the slide let's uh could you just explain more what the plc time is about sure so um teachers have a 30 minute duty free lunch they also have a personal plan time which is really their time to get ready for kids if they need to do copying if they're you know writing their last minute changes to their lessons um it's their their planning time to be ready for that next session of kids plc is a very different it's not planning time it's when the
014teams get together and this year with having that common time pushed into the 11 to 1 o'clock it can be a plc with your grade level at your school it can be a plc between grade levels the same grade level across the whole district just because we have that common time this year but it's really when they look at data and talk about kids and how our kids doing um they discuss kids who may need interventions kids who are getting interventions and and what's happening with that so that is a very different um meeting time than personal plan time and melissa one other question does this this also includes coaches does this include coaches in this period and the interventionist with teachers so instructional coaches do participate in the plc time and then principals and
015assistant principals also pop into those times as well all righty so um just a little bit different way of explaining um the space issue so you know an example would be an am session with 12 to 15 students in it a pm session with 12 to 15 students in it plus our half day kindergarten classes you know roughly 22 students to try and push that into an extent extended am session really what it means is we'd be carving out additional time in person time for am students that time would be for specials um using three feet of social distancing would create larger classes in the am but can't accommodate all of the pm students so you know even if we said we were going to do three feet um or in the ballpark of three
016feet maybe 18 to 20 could fit you know which means then which 10 can't come should we be on the next slide excuse me should we be on the next slide on the presentation yeah mike can you sorry um and then the kindergarten sections also as you know as i had said would need to go back into their smaller spaces by extending the day we would need to put pe back into pe and art into art so it would push kindergarten back into their smaller spaces um mike go ahead and go to the next one one of the things that was brought up and this goes back to i'll talk about a study that was done in the district a few years back in 2018 an update was done to various facility studies that have
017been conducted to identify additional instructional spaces in the community in this update in 2018 the following options were considered not viable due to either lack of adequate space cost prohibitive or both so some of the things that were looked at that time at that time was to construct a new facility on the spalding property in partnership with the ymca um to use the spring avenue the park district property and do a um kind of a swap between um cso you know our building and the park district moving into that space and then um taking over spring avenue um that was not adequate space and also was extremely cost prohibitive because of the the amount of restoration and um modification that would have to be made to that space purchasing property adjacent to cso for ec
018classrooms that was another option that was investigated at that time and it was determined that would not yield nearly enough space for those early childhood classrooms so at the time in 2018 they did try to look and find identify spaces in the community and there were none in 2020 and then also again recently i reached out to the village of glen ellen and also to choose dupage to determine whether any vacant properties exist that could be leased and modified for additional instructional space no such facility exists in glen island nor in the surrounding communities i had reached out to the regional office of education to see if on the chance that we were able to find a facility that was um you know available for lease and large enough for approximately eighteen hundred students would
019they allow us to you to lease a property that was not in glen ellen and they said they would unfortunately there is no such space to date but choose dupage said that they would keep us in the loop if something did become available um the largest space that they thought they could possibly come up with was a sufficient for about a thousand people but it was not set up it would need significant modifications to make classrooms and eating spaces and pe spaces and just office spaces so um they will get back to me if they if something becomes available another option is to reach out to um a realtor and have them do an even you know a thorough search again if the board wanted to go that route um mike would you go to
020the next one um this is portable so this was something that was brought up and we did do investigation into this when we look at doubling our space by bringing on portables some of the information that needs to be taken into consideration we would need approximately 122 to 150 portables depending on the size and that would be to double our instructional spaces based on what we have now so in order to do that lincoln would need 22 portables they can currently fit zero on their campus there are issues with dave do you want to weigh in and explain why lincoln cannot hold any portable units on their campus sure um the majority of the property that's left at lincoln the green space in the back is all within flood plain so there's no place to
021actually put the portables because you can't build or construct anything in a flood plain and the new addition on the west end is where the portables used to sit there's there's no room left there between the road and then the new addition okay sorry about that thank you dave all right mike you can hop back all right we're on portables um ben franklin would need 23 um and they can currently fit two to four depending on the size of the portables on their campus which would leave us at needing to find space um to drop another 19 portables for ben franklin churchill would need 28 they can fit 2 to 4 on their campus so we would need to find space for 24 forest glen would need 26 portables they can fit two to four
022on their campus um hadley needs approximately 51 portables and they can fit about 20 on their campus so the grand total we would need to find space for 87 portables that would serve you know the various buildings spalding would not be an option to place 87 portables as you're aware we need to be able to access all of the utilities we would need to you know also provide for permanent coverage in the event of bad weather where we had to go inside to take shelter and shelter in place and that does not currently exist at spalding so um we even investigated creating kind of a portable village you know for lack of better words using property that the district already owns melissa in those spaces where the portables would go off campus does it also
023require some administrator or nurse or other all of it all of it so basically doubling the footprint of the district space wise also means doubling your your staffing so um you know whatever fee we use for social distancing if we were doubling or needed to find space for a fourth of the students we would need to ramp up our staff by that many too because we'd have to obviously staff those portable units we have to have an administrator on site we'd have to have a nurse on site we'd have to have custodians on site so some of the staff we could probably have them serve in an itinerant capacity depending on their caseload and size they may have to travel but we would have to you know if we were looking to double our footprint
024we'd also be doubling our staffing um so facts again to talk about impact on students and learning um you know i think it's important to really just come out and admit why our model is so rigid um which it is um our current model um you know is very rigid in terms of we don't have room to move pieces of it around because one thing impacts the other so our model has all of the programs that we offer in a typical school year that the community has said are of high value to them so flus dual language aec band and orchestra we have intervention time that's outside of core instruction and kids can receive their supports outside of core instruction teacher specialization so it's a very robust role model but it's also a very rigid
025model because of everything that we've pushed into it greater flexibility could absolutely be achieved but it comes at the expense of the pieces of what we have pushed into it so if anybody has questions i know dr mccluskey can weigh in on the different ways that we've tried to make all of these pieces fit together but absolutely it is a rigid model because of everything that's been plugged into to the time for students who have been impacted more significantly than others those discussions will happen with parents and teams because that's where that type of collaboration takes place um you know it's very hard social media will never be the place where we can find solutions um you know nora is public comment we we can't talk about student specific situations um in those kind of
026modes so what i can say to people is please reach out that's what your teams are there for that's what your building principles are there for we just can't ever solve student-specific issues in the context of a public forum again we've been asked about summer planning and that has been actively taking place for months once the program options have been finalized for district 541 case or the county-wide programs those will be announced and we'll get that information into parents hands the county-wide program as i've talked about really will have a criteria that gets determined by that program and so as soon as all of that is finalized we'll we'll share what we know and and case also plans their program um and as soon as we have that information in hand um those meetings start
027to take place because decisions about whether kids um are going to be invited to esy happen at that team level listen can i ask a question about the planning and the oversight of this um is i understand that and i know katie is on the zoom um and her role is rather prominent yes in this yes so um i don't want to speak on katie's behalf i'm just going to share what she has shared with me um when this group was pulled together and and katie correct me if i'm wrong i thought you said it at at this point or most recent check-in there are about 26 districts across the county that have committed to participating in this county-wide initiative for learning loss the goal is to really solve it as a county and not
028district by district and bring together and invite our our best teachers um who have a proven track record of um high level of growth with their students but to invite you know our best teachers and our best curriculum developers and just pull together resources that each individual district couldn't do on their own but to do this as a county and so while some districts are challenged with space other districts are not some districts may be challenged with staff who are able and want to work over the summer others are not the thought is why should everybody try to be solving the same problem let's work together and and put together a stronger and a more robust model katie anything about any updates on that program since your last meeting yeah so we've just finalized the
029essential skills that will be focused on at each of the grade levels and we're beginning now to recruit um staff to begin writing the lessons for the program as of right now it looks like the program will be three weeks in length um we're still working through the dates of the programs and the time of the program and then um like dr k said also the criteria um so it's moving along i have another meeting this thursday um and then early march we have a meeting with all of the districts last we checked there were roughly 35 districts that were involved in this work so it's been a really great collaboration across the county to really meet the needs of students who are going to need something more before entering the next grade level okay
030ask a question sure a little premature but as we look ahead to the fall every district is also going to need to provide some sort of remote option and i'm wondering if we could solve that as a county as well instead of district by district because we've we've had to add staff so that we can provide that remote option for this year and i would like to see us be able to pull that back a little bit and leverage the fact that remote is remote and we could have if we could solve this as a county i think that would be best for all districts so just that is something that has been part of the conversations i think what's difficult about that is every district offers different programming throughout their district and so there
031aren't many districts that have the same programs that we have such as fless and dual language accelerated programs um and so that's when it becomes difficult to offer those remote options because our students wouldn't be afforded the same opportunities as the students that are in person so it's definitely something that we you know that we've talked about as a county but we're just not sure how we would be able to make that work with the different programming that every district has right i guess that sounds like something to overcome and not something that would stop that process is that correct um i mean i guess it's it's how we look at it as a district from an equity standpoint i'm not sure that it's equitable to have our students joining a different program that wouldn't
032afford them the same opportunities that they would if they were in person and so that's something i think we have to you know continue to talk about none of us would want our students to miss the opportunities of flasks in some of the other programs but that's not something that's offered in most districts within our county right right i would hope that there could be some kind of solution where there's like core responsibilities that are shared but where those special things could be added on by each district if they need wanted to but i'm not i'm just that's how i'm getting two in the weeds here but right and i think also every district uses different curriculum so you'd have to decide what was going to be used and then how would you handle that
033for the following year um or whenever full remote wasn't offered anymore um in the event that we were participating in you know a countywide remote opportunity if it was not our curriculum um how would we then trans transition kids back so um something that i think katie can take back to that group and talk more about um and see where that goes we'd be happy if to do it if they offered our programs and used our curriculum but i don't know that we could make that decision for everybody dr k is i'm sorry bob did you want to say oh please go ahead um is that is that a fair assessment what just just said about next year they'll we'll likely or maybe definitely need to offer remote classes for our students he hasn't been
034said yet um i think you know everybody's anticipating that we will but it hasn't been officially you know there hasn't been an official directive yet by the state saying that districts will have to offer a full remote okay is that a directive now like do you have to offer remote right now okay yes so you'll know at some point in the future between now and then but it is in the cdc guidelines that were just released sorry jess it is in the cdc guidelines that were just released that it is the guideline to oh just for the remote okay yeah it just hasn't come out from the state of illinois yeah okay thanks lisa can i ask one question just going back to the to this question of if you gave up something on the
035robust side to gain something on the flexibility side um what's the implications for what you're doing with staffing well and and that's why when i say you know that everything that we offer makes for an extremely rigid schedule because it also impacts teacher schedules so we have to actually put that down on paper and start to move the pieces around and say okay if we wanted to add time to this what does it do to this part or if we take this part out all together what does it do with teachers you know so it's not like you can move one piece and it doesn't impact something else um you know so it would really be once you say well we're willing to do without this then we try to move that all around and
036say well okay we can do this but here's what he has to come out and then here's is there any implications for then teachers being out of their area of expertise but then freed up to be pushed into other areas where their certification might permit but they've not had much experience teaching in that topic absolutely it depends on what we would choose to do more of or less ever take out altogether it could free up teachers to to push in and do things like that and so you might have 28 kids physically in a room at a certain point but you can break those groups up if we had more available space obviously we would do what other people are doing and bring those class sizes down many places have used have taken teachers out
037of their typical assignment and are using them as you know in a classroom teacher role um you know we would need to you know if that became something that we wanted to investigate there'd be a level of training that would need to happen not retraining starting from scratch but if you haven't taught something in several years and the curriculum has changed in the meantime people would need some brushing up on that um kitty anything else i mean nothing jumps out until you start to say well if we move this piece what does it give us in terms of greater flexibility um you know and how does it impact the day okay i think something to keep in mind is the requirements from the state have not been relaxed and so when you think about music
038rpe those aren't things that we can make the decision that we're no longer going to provide because the requirements and those haven't been waived by the state so there really isn't much moving around that can actually occur because we still have to fulfill the five-hour clock day and we still have to fulfill the state's requirements for content can you ask for an exemption from those not at this because i remember when i was i remember when i was teaching uh where i was teaching we did not have enough budget for music and art teachers and so um we actually only had gym we were required to have it five days a week but we didn't have the physical space to house it so we also got a state exemption asked for a state exemption to
039be relieved from that because we didn't have the budget or the space is that a possibility no to to my knowledge they're not giving waivers on mandated instruction um you know just like right now there's conversation about waiving um the state assessment for this year but there's been no movement or no answer you know back on that um but katie anything that you've heard about being able to waive required content no um nothing to my knowledge at this time they're not waving anything and in regards to the state assessments a notice just came out this evening that it does not look like the assessments will be waived they may waive the accountability to the assessments but districts are still going to be required to administer the assessments to all students um is there flexibility added
040if the instruction is recorded versus live for some of those specials not that we want to do that but does that add flexibility if that's an option no i mean you can offer it synchronous or you know asynchronous but it doesn't it doesn't change anything because it has to be able to fit within the school day for it to be the requirement and for us to have that flexibility kids would then have to be doing that work outside of the school day so it sounds like one of the problems we're having is is flexibility um would getting rid of specialization and having one teacher teach the core subjects free up our schedule and allow more flexibility and maybe less interchanging of kids mixing of kids right it would give some flexibility moving forward but it
041would also require training and materials obviously we'd have to double the materials that we have on hand versus now but it wouldn't solve you know it would ease up a little bit but it wouldn't ease the schedule significantly you know so we'd have to look at how much we were trying to extend that in person time and then how much the you know what are we taking it from yeah i suggested that back in the fall because i thought it would really help liberate and free up and this board decided not to do that which is is fine bruce that is something that we did seriously consider and something that we did talk about so i don't i don't want you to think that that's not something that was discussed i think you know when
042when we were thinking about that again this was in the fall so it was very short notice and we did not have the materials to provide to teachers to be able to teach and teachers would have not taught that other content area for over four years so when we were stepping into this at the very beginning of the year we really had to think about how to provide students the most support that we possibly could within instruction and limit the impact of changes and so knowing that we were not going to be able to get the materials and knowing that our teachers would not have the training necessary that's why we moved forward with the model that we did that's not to say that it's not something that we wouldn't continue to talk about you
043know as we move into next year and if that's something that we needed to do but our ability to do that at the beginning of this year was near impossible and wouldn't have provided the best experience instructionally for our kids what you're saying it would provide more flexibility in if we were to do this for next year it would provide more flexibility but what it would provide is the possibility of us being able to offer math and literacy in three through five every day it would allow us to break up that time a little bit more um but outside of that i mean we're really embedding all of our core content in the in-person time of the day and that's something that we did intentionally so that kids would get core instruction every day in
044person five days a week so the things that you're adding into the school day when we talk about extending the school day what we're adding is specials into the school day you're not gaining additional core content time are are our flesh teachers uh qualified to teach core subjects core elementary school subjects that depends on their own certification so that would be dependent teacher by teacher do you know what percentage would be able to do that i don't we'd have to look into that yeah marcy would have to check their licensure okay um and then so portable sounds like they would help it wouldn't be a solution a catch-all solution but it would at least free up some space um are the the coaches are also they all have their teaching certifications too correct yes okay
045um what if uh what percentage of the kids could go back into into school if we decided to make it a three foot recommendation and not a six foot right so it depends classroom by classroom because you know you have to so you're not measuring wall to wall so when we looked at you know if we could get 18 to 20 kids in that's 18 to 20 kids but it still leaves 10 who wouldn't be you know and that's not a hard rule for every space because our classrooms are different shapes and different sizes you know as is the furniture so you know you you have to walk room by room and see really what the implication of that three feet would be and set up the furniture and then plan out your walkway so
046that kids can move without you know crisscrossing in front of each other and so you literally have to unless our rooms were all carbon copies of each other and they're not um you have to walk every room and kind of set that room up and plan it but do you think on average it would be if there's 25 kids in a classroom on in a normal setting and you took the average would it be 10 kids would it be 15 kids or would it be 20 kids that could fit in that classroom if we went down to 3 feet i'm not i mean just approximately well you know i think you have to look at how many are in am and pm now so if we have 12 and a.m and 12 and p.m and
047then a couple that are full remote you know we'd have to start the process to ask who still wants full remote you know and basically start the process fresh again so you know could we get 18 kids and could we get 20 kids in if we used three feet um not in every place but that was what we could do if we were looking at three feet so if we did a community survey of of that we might have a better idea of where we would land of who wants three feet yeah who would be okay with three feet who would feel comfortable with it it would you know because i know other districts are doing three feet that's how they're getting their kids back in school so um you know and anyway but so
048what so dr kazi you're saying so if you just take your 24 kids or you say and so if you took 12 000 a.m 12 and a pm um and reduce whatever the social disaster is you can get 18 to 20 kids in a classroom that would take four kids that are in person and have to push them into full remote so you'd be increasing the in-person learning time for some kids and eliminating the in-person learning time for other kids right and some buildings have more so like forest glen we'd be pushing kids into full remote um you know scott could talk to you better than i could about his class sizes but they're very full in person so you know we'd have to look at it as i said building by building in grade
049level by grade level we'd be changing spaces again as i said because we we would have to push kindergarten back into their small rooms so we'd have to reset the building as it was before you know we we did this model get them back in their initial spaces and then look at it grade by grade level by grade level and we'd have to give parents a new opportunity to say you know i want in person or i want full remote okay melissa we have like twenty percent of our kids remote we'd have to on twitch yeah 26 percent 22 23 23 of our kids are remote for the do we happen to know for the school districts that have been full time what their percentage remote is well i know one that's opening up um
050is that 53 percent of their kids are on full remote which is why they're able to have the space to do it i don't know elmhurst numbers but again as i said even just looking at increasing our space the closest comparison i could find was district 89 and the reason they can give additional in person time is because they have 1400 fewer kids than we do in the same number of buildings that we have and they also have full day kindergarten so they don't have to find spaces for all of their half-day sections um so really if we wanted to look at kind of the closest comparison of apples to apples it would be district 89 in terms of numbers and number of buildings that they have um you know to be able to work
051with so our model has created a situation where like 77 of our student population is getting in-person instruction every day but we would expect that that number would wrap if we went to full day um i don't know i mean i know that i don't know that we can say that i think we'd have to ask again there may be some families who would be less comfortable sending their kids for in person and there may be families that are comfortable and they could make it work with daycare and whatever else they need so i i don't know that we could say um with any level of certainty that you know we'd have fewer but i choice is a choice aside but it's based on space what you're talking about not being able to fit right
052kids in the room right we're we're either fully open or in the model that we're in now um to try and do three feet means that we have to you know turn the model upside down and some kids who are here in person now for am and pm would have to be full remote thank you melissa um let's see might go ahead onto planning so um in terms of where we're at we have been and continue to act continue to actively plan for next what next year could look like um you know for people who think we're not working on this um there's not a day that goes by that we're not having conversations as an administrative team including our principals and assistant principals so you know they've been a part of the planning and
053will continue to be part of the planning because we can't leave them out of the equation they know best what can actually work in their buildings we are working we've sent it off to somebody to actually build the survey a survey will be coming out to present a variety of scenarios for parents to respond to and give feedback on you know as i had shared there's a reality around portables and so you know what we didn't talk about is the expense of doing 122 or 150 portables and all the staff and the furniture and the materials and the land work that has to be done but i think if you're going to ask for people for input you need to build the scenario so they know what they're giving input on so we are having
054that developed so that people can give you their feedback and say you know yes if needed this is an option that we would like to see investigated so that they know what that means that some portables will be on campus some would have to be somewhere else we know we can't put kindergarten or first graders into portables you know it's restricted by age in terms of what kids could actually be in a portable um and then when you know they see the price tag is that something that people would want to see the board um you know commit that that kind of funding too can i ask a question about that yes um so your scenario about portables is for doubling space but then we also talked about situations where we could reduce the number
055of feet between um close to three so if we're doing scenarios can there be one that is reducing the space to get most but two-thirds of the kids in and then it's just a third of kids that it would be in portables i mean i think we could take an educated guess is it going to be exact no right you know um but we want to give people something to respond to i guess we wouldn't need to double if we did both things so right i don't want to look at i just don't think it's at all practical to double our space with portables i can't imagine that number is going to be palatable to anyone but but if if you do both things does that bring us to a more palatable number i don't
056know so you're saying that if you take a look at the what was it two at ben franklin or churchill or whatever that number was it was 22 but could they how much that was available like for to place them there like you could put but the footprint of the property made it possible to put x amount of could you utilize um portable strategically within the district footprint in a way that could help from uh ease um the spacers concerns right so if you figure you know just to give an example if we were using sorry if we were using 22 as a number to have six feet um then obviously we would anticipate we'd be in the ballpark of 11 if we were somehow pushing more kids into in person and using three feet
057you know but we could you're giving so many numbers i'm not following what you're saying sorry like are we talking portables kids or classrooms well that's that's the best i can give you when you bring it up here um you know so yes we would take a look and have dave and eric sit down um with those numbers and and say okay if we pushed um you know if we went with three feet um and then push the rest into a portable what would that number look like i just think if we're serving and we're asking people to give feedback on that kind of a thing there's probably a more realistic option as far as portables go that combines the elements that i don't know ever before i don't i i don't need you to
058figure out at the table now but that like if we're going to do the survey that that be part of it because we're we're going to people are going to hear this and start creating their own frankenstein solutions anyway so to answer the question yes thank you um but we don't have a draft yet so once we get a draft then we would sit there and go through it and say okay what is what are we really want you know asked and what does the format of the survey look like um so um you know again we've delivered content to somebody who could build the survey and then we'll receive a draft back of what that could look like and decide are we satisfied with the scenarios do we want to add anything in um
059and then that will be for district parents and so they'll be taking it it'll be a secure survey so they'll have um to put in their student identification number um so feedback and engagement you know um i think for those of us who take the calls and respond to the emails and meet on zoom um you know there's many forms i think the survey is important but i also think that um there's not a day goes by that we're not engaging or directly talking with somebody so um i think those conversations are where we can really problem solve for kids um you know but for people to say that there is no parent engagement i i would say that i know myself and dr mccluskey and building principals are engaging with many people all the
060time every day um i think the key to this and and moving our way through this is different types of parent engagement and it's what kind of conversations need to happen where and what kind of decisions get made where so we know individual student decisions that will never be made in a survey you know the survey is to get some big high-level guiding input and feedback so that when the board does have to sit down and take action and allocate resources that that it has commun you know parent input to draw from on that um so i think you know moving forward with with all of those things um and then also something new is we have organized a small small medical advisory team as one of our subcommittees that does include parents and community
061members and staff that represent both medical and mental health so this team can also provide advisory input collaborate with our consultants such as dr dworkin so as of today the confirmed people that we have um are katie aduchi our nurse practitioners is staying as part of this group but we have a parent who is a physician's assistant joe merriweather who is joining in our our advisory team we have dr laura tegel who is a glen ellen internal medicine specialist as i said nurse practitioner katie aduchi and then we have our in-house mental health representative jessica johnston from hadley has agreed to bring that voice to the table when we talk through the remainder of the year and specifically the opening plan for next year and also whatever supports and programs are in place for the
062summer so i know people have asked about kind of a reintroduction or reacclamation plan um jessica will be invaluable um bringing that voice to the table and if there's a mental health professional in our community who would like to step up um we will gladly keep that group up and running and you will hear from them i have no doubt um at meetings melissa can i circle back to the feedback and parent engagement because i think i think our board would have liked to do more parent engagement in a typical year but the pandemic has made it just technically more difficult uh along with just there's been an epic amount of work that's gone into making this year happen as it is um so so it hasn't happened as much as i think our board
063would like but is there an i i would like to see our board have some sort of virtual listening session like we talked about when erica did her presentation about engagement that as issues bubble up that we can do a listening session perhaps one that's one that's virtual one that utilizes breakout rooms so we can meet the requirements of the oma um to have board members just two by two something that's progressive that allows the groups to be mixed up you know you you kind of switch and all the groups that go into the board members rooms are different and that there's kind of some maybe presentation at the front about maybe the survey results um and some guided questions for the breakout rooms something like that i would say if the board has interest
064well that's this is a good time to see if there's board interest in having the district work through the logistics of doing a listening session that would probably come on the heels of the survey results which i think would then structure conversations really well so why don't i get to see if if the board is in agreement in doing that uh guillermo ah yes yeah yeah yeah thank you very much and i'll just kind of go down the board bruce what would we be doing exactly the idea is to and you recall in past years we've done sessions we called them listening sessions with the community they were in person uh the board did not participate in discussion we could all be present but we couldn't join in discussion there would be a particular topic
065it would be guided questions would be asked and then some kind of composite report so um if i'm understanding okay yeah in the in-person ones the board members would just be at separate tables with different correct uh stakeholders so we weren't talking ever collectively as a board but you're good bruce ted sounds good to me for the record jess i'm in okay julie yes and jason yeah that's a good idea yeah i am also i think so too so we'll just work with the district and figure out a timing on the basis of this survey hopefully this would come up uh in a few weeks okay thank you okay any questions about um our mental health and medical people are you on the next slide and we're still on that yeah that's the bottom one
066sorry i'm sorry i couldn't sorry back to back here i'm regarding the medical advisory team i wondered if we can have them um come in and talk to the board or somehow interface with the community um have some like q a time just get some information who are these people like what else do you know what you know what more can you tell us we talked to um our epidemiologist several months ago i know you guys are working with an epidemiologist we haven't the board hasn't met him um i think that would be helpful and maybe um just help us understand what you know what we've learned since we last learned things right yeah and it's sort of part of our monitoring is it boarding i don't know his availability at night we can certainly
067ask but i have no every confidence that this group participating in those consultation calls they did last week can bring that information back as well so we could certainly ask dr twerkin but i don't know that his schedule would allow us him to join us at for this um but we can ask you know and then this team would um function like our other advisory you know other pieces of pratt so if they are available and willing i we could certainly invite them i would i would like that i don't know what the rest of the boards we've literally had one meeting at one virtual meeting right so um i don't want to commit on their behalf more than what they were hoping to do but um let us get our feet under us and
068then i have no doubt that they would sure be willing to to join even if it's virtually yeah good thank you okay next slide yep mike you can go on to the next one please alrighty so um in talking about next year i know many come you know questions statements comments have come up about um why then why not now you know how do we know for sure i had somebody say you're just saying that to quiet us down um you know so i think to answer the how you know it it's about how do we fully reopen it's not if we fully reopen um but what makes fall different than now um by fall we know a much higher percentage of the adults in the community will be vaccinated by fall the medical and
069scientific community will have a much better understanding of the variance and the impact on infection rates the need for a vaccine booster which they're saying could be likely by summer and the degree of mitigation efforts needed still needed in schools at that time if needed scaling up our testing program can be planned for staffed and implemented the board will have the survey results to consider and factor into their decision making we will also have students join us you know our student board members as well as last year student board members will be stepping back up they had said they want to come back and return to work on strategic planning this summer so we will have our new student board members and last year student member board members rejoin us again one of the things
070that we're waiting for confirmation on i do anticipate they will but you know we haven't been told for sure about um the status of having to offer a fully remote option or not um you know as we know this is like running a whole nother model so it does make a difference of whether we have to do it we're waiting to hear um and then also individualized mitigation plans that's something that we've talked about with this medical advisory team is how do we make it safe for more medically fragile at-risk kids that doesn't mean that we don't come back until it's safe it means that we go into the planning for what makes it safe for all kids to come back so to give an idea things like a dis additional social distancing around kids
071who are more medically fragile it may mean that one or two more kids have to be in one room versus another so that we can provide more space around somebody it may be putting an air purification um system into particular classrooms it may mean it's some use of plexiglas desktop dividers but those would be individualized decisions made that our medical team could work with us and with families and and really say you know what is the students need and then how do we create a safe learning environment so it's not that everybody can't come back and you know it isn't that at all it's that how do we put those things in place so that we can do it all at the same time next slide mike and then really just what can you expect
072from us um you know we'll continue to do our very best work for kids we have challenges no doubt that impact our ability to provide quantity in person time but are not in our ability to provide quality in person time we are offering five hours i know it's only two and a half hours a day of in person but we are offering a five-hour day um and that we will focus on the work of the district with respect courtesy and empathy i think um you know it it's clear that we're in the middle of an election and i think any you know i'm just going to name the elephant in the room on this our work and our priorities are very clear that it's about um doing the work of the district for kids um
073so many of you have probably already heard me say and i'll continue to say what happens with elections is outside of us our work needs to be on this we are a resource for every single person who is running in this election um but other than that we don't play a role in this you know our job is to do what we need to do for kids and so um you know i i can tell you that i'm hoping that people will respect the need for us to do the work of the district and the work for kids and and keep that outside of here so um you know it's just we we can't let ourselves get distracted from the work that we need to do um we know that this is really difficult um
074as i've met with the different candidates who are running i haven't finished all of my one-to-one meetings but um you know i hope people understand that we've made a commitment to be a resource for people to answer questions and at the end of the day there will be seven people sitting in chairs um at a certain point in time and the work comes fast and furious here and it will then um and and my job is to walk in and get us all to resume normal behavior because we don't have time to not do that so um you know again this was really just to go over some facts and reaffirm what our commitment is um and assure people that we we have spent countless hours on this um and none of it is simple
075and changing one piece definitely impacts 10 others and we will continue to do it but when we ask for input we want to give people the information that they need to actually give us good input back you know which means we have to build scenarios and put all of the information in it that people want and should have to give us the give us that feedback so i think as we wrap up this part any questions before we move into the second and then i want to make sure that our guests are actually on the zoom before so yeah sorry what's the second part we're going to talk about an opportunity that we have um we've got some visitors that will be joining us on the zoom i just want to just make make sure
076i understand what you're talking about survey wise so you're talking about putting together some detailed breakdowns of potential options that would include price points across the district to fully open up in the fall and all the options that are going to be presented are to fully open in the fall yes there's not an option to not fully open it in the fall okay no and as we've said unless something goes sideways with the pandemic and if that it is what happens it's not going to only happen to district 41. we can't control something that happens like the state comes in and shuts schools down right our plan moving forward is fully open in the fall yes um do we see the dupage county health department upgrading their recommendations as a result of the new cdc
077guidelines at all has that been discussed because i think what was new about the report was that six feet is a requirement when you're in the top two worst categories and we're still in a severe category but then expect to move into but that when you're in the bottom two it's as it's it's a loser it's not a requirement it's it's as as best you can will anybody define what that means no you know so you know that's where again then the board would have to go back and have conversation with legal counsel um and say okay if we're on if this is where we're at fully open what does that mean and where does that place us in the as best as possible you know um i think in fairness as they have with
078other things like what level of risk does the board assume by saying we're okay with a foot and a half you know because it's it's not just looked at from one angle it's um you know as dr chu today from the dupage county health department said six feet is considered the standard of care so that's medical language um you know that's the standard of care so how far can we deviate from the standard of care um and and where's the board's comfort level in that well and i mean we've talked six feet three feet one and a half feet but ultimately the this the space what the impact of the space is that how many kids are going to need to be quarantined right so we're at six and typically if there's a case in
079your classroom you're not a close contact so you don't have to quarantine as we move into this tighter model if it's three feet then all those kids touching that kid they're quarantined so we're going to like probably go from zero to four right so we have four and a quarter and this is something that i can ask dr campbell to explain how he came up with this but at four and a quarter if you would have four kids who would be considered a close contact for any positive case in the room as you start to go beyond that it goes to eight kids and you know so but i will let him talk about that but um as he said today four and a quarter would be where you know any positive would have four
080other students that were considered close contact that would have to quarantine um and is he also going to talk about the idea of pods within classroom like let's say you got four desks put together but it's six feet to the next set of desks pushed together no no i mean those would be decisions that we made so we do have cohort groups at our grade levels we have cohort of am kids and pm kids so it's really just how you define your cohort you know but when your desks are set up you really shouldn't have kids there's nothing in it that says desks should be in pods where they're facing each other they're still not supposed to be doing that um so when they define a cohort group it's you know how to keep groups
081together to the greatest extent possible i guess when i read the cdc report it referred to pods within classrooms so i guess i don't know what that actually means i assumed it meant you've got you've got a group of kids that are pretty close and they're all going to be quarantined if any of them gets it so however big that little table mass is kind of blows that up but if they're six feet away from the next pod within the class right and i get where you're going i'm just saying if we were to set the rooms up like that we wouldn't have six feet between pods so you know um but maybe dave we can do some just not live furniture or maybe we can set it up and take some pictures um to
082show but there's no way doing like pods of four that you'd have six feet in between those pods you know and try to get more kids in and then in addition to that you've now put them facing each other which is also you know not best for keeping which if you remember um back to the beginning of the year we did do that work and the pic and we do still have those pictures so we can refer back to those of why we couldn't do pods and what that looked like right and those were based on six feet so even you know um if we were trying to get more kids into the classroom that definitely wouldn't i mean you triple the number of kids that are gonna be quarantined probably if you had pods
083within three feet yeah because it would be for sure the kids that you were facing you know each other but then it would depend on how far the other pods are whether they'd be considered close contacts as well so why don't we try to get dr campbell can i just quickly does our 21st century uh furniture um which was mainly built for collaboration does that limit our ability to distance the children and do we know how much it would be or just i don't know does it i mean it's different room configurations um that we have to work with you know definitely whether it limits you know it depends on the classroom because you know when you walk through the rooms not everybody has the same thing so you'd have to look some of it
084is harder to place with everybody facing frontwards um you know but we when we had the architect rendering done they didn't do um you know they did pretty traditional desk um and we actually by walking the rooms and laying it out got more kids in than what the architects rendering said um using your traditional squares so back when we bought that 21st century uh furniture which i don't even know what 21st century furniture means but it was supposed to be more collaborative um if we bought different furniture and you know more traditional furniture kind of the kind i have in my classroom um minus the banging top that i could get rid of but the you know the ones that would that help us to fit more children get them closer at a huge expense
085um you know and how many more would it would it double the number of kids you could get into a room no um you know and i'm sure dave could tell us more about how that lays out um you know but but it would incrementally improve it i don't want to say that until we would lay out a room and we didn't lay out a room of things that we don't have um i mean i remember that furniture being about 200 thousand dollars i could be wrong and that might have been only one tranche of the furniture um but you know i said back in the i said back in the in the spring and the in the fall that i didn't think there should be any sacred cows here and uh and you know
086i mean i mean you know back in i said i said maybe we should get rid of uh specialization and and that was met with by no response from anybody else on the board and i said what about portables and was told that portables were not an option and now right well i found that find out now you know six months later that that portables are actually indeed an option well i think when you see the facts around them bruce they're not you know but people have asked and we want to give them the information well i mean i don't think they're an absolute massive solution but i think they alleviate part of the problem and that problem is you know that gets more kids in the classroom in person for in-person learning and that's
087that's my objective if we have to take out flesh to do that i'm i'm okay with doing that if we need to get rid of specialization to get more kids in the classroom like i said back in the fall and the spring i'm okay with doing that now you know i didn't get much response from my fellow board members but i'm trying to find ways to get kids into the classroom um and i know we've all been working hard i just feel like this 200's back elmhurst is back a lot of places around us are back and and we're partially back but i in my opinion it's not enough right well i think the space issues you know and we might as well just tackle that now um district 200 doesn't have the same programming
088that we have they also have much more room many more classrooms and this came directly from dr schuler um you know they have the space to do it we don't um district 89 has the space to do it we don't um you know so our portables a solution if we could only get four then really no it isn't a solution it's not gonna get what you want um even part of the way you know and so i think going off of surveys and things that have been done in the past people won't send their kids somewhere else you know but we need to ask because if the board's in the position to make that kind of a big decision we need to know what people's input is you know because portables might sound like a
089solution until it's your kids in them and then it really isn't a solution if people aren't willing to do that it's kind of the same thing with full day kindergarten everybody wanted it but when it was going to be at a location you know across town nobody was really willing to send their kids there so the only way to know what the threshold is or what the comfort level is is to put the price tags to it and and put the information out there of if we can only hold four on a campus where do the other ones go and you know is that palatable to people you know um and so that's what those scenarios are about and you know what are the pros of it it can do this what are the cons
090of it well does a seven million dollar price tag which takes future construction projects off the table you know people need to weigh in so that the board has the information that they need in front of them to make decisions when the time comes um but based on the path that we're going um you know i think it's important to have that information and in case things change and don't continue moving in that direction but i i think there's a way to get us fully open without having to do something drastic like that but i think you know people deserve to see the reality of what that would mean um because they've asked for it so let's give them the information and let people decide you know am i comfortable with that would i take
091a pass on that am i okay with it if it's somebody else's kid but if it's mine would i really want that and the only way to get that is to just ask i don't think i ever heard that flesh would limited would allow more kids into a classroom right right here no i i think the point is is we have a model that's very rigid and it's rigid because of everything that's plugged into it so if we want to do more of this it's got to come from somewhere you know but we haven't built a model based on those things yet because people have told us that those things are very important so let's get the feedback and see what still is important to people because you know we built a model that offered
092everything that we were offering before if that's not of high value to people then we need to know that you know for planning purposes moving forward so it's not that flesh caused this or this caused this it's understanding that when you have a model that has all of these separate pieces built into it you can't move those things around when churchill i'll use them as an example because they probably have the toughest schedule to make all of this work when you see their master schedule laid out on a piece of paper it fills this desk and you touch something over here and it impacts something over here you know so that's what this comes down to is what can you manipulate without without breaking something else and so we need to know what the value
093the high value things are for people it's my hope that none of it needs to come off the table and if things continue down the path that they're on that is absolutely a reality for the first time today people were talking about if you add something in can you ease up on something we've been asking that question um for months and so finally today on the health department conversation they were saying well yes that makes sense so you know what does that mean does that mean a much higher level of participation and testing i will tell you of the districts that are opening in this county that's absolutely what it means for them so you know what does it take to get us there um because then we can ease up on some things um
094but you know we have to put it all out there and see what people think and then we can build accordingly this again we move to we have two guests i believe one from lori's hospital and i don't know if they're both here yet yep they should be cc participants did they get a time they did but we went a little over well i don't know that i ever saw them that's why i was yeah um do we have a contact from because it is an important it's a very important topic because it it does address safety and there's a real opportunity here to talk to uh particularly the folk from flores hospital mike do you see anybody in the waiting room no there's nobody in there right now okay i let me see if
095i have any emails that they're trying to get in okay 7 15 wallace let's see they were in the waiting room at 7 15 so can you join um [Music] all right well we were supposed to have um i'm going to see if i could still i don't have a number to call him he arranged this by email well then maybe just summarize who they are and what they were here for and i asked dr campbell to jump back and hold on well that would be good um i didn't think we would take this long um righty so we were supposed to have with us tonight and maybe one of them will jump back on um dr judd holtquist from the division of infectious diseases at northwestern university and dr ed campbell from safeguard surveillance
096dr haldquist is working with a team from lurie's children hospital on a sequencing and surveillance project that is completely funded through the waller walder foundation i was going to turn it over to judd to talk about the importance of this opportunity to learn more about how participation in this project might benefit district 41. i'm going to see if mike just let me know if you notice any of them jump on and if not we'll invite them back what judd was going to talk about was the work that they're doing where with different permission slips it would be only if parents were interested but once the saliva sample is run um at safeguard it goes over to um lurie's and northwestern team and they're actually doing strain analysis to look for new variants this became an
097issue when we saw all of the positives bubble up at lincoln and that's exactly what this children's covid research team is studying right now is how are we finding these new variants how does that impact um the infectious rate and transmission in schools and outside of schools you're right you apologize i don't know if i don't see judd on here okay um all right okay um so i was just sharing that we had an opportunity to participate in this research study and it would require um a new consent to participate but basically what it is is after the samples are run before lab then they go to luries to this team and they are investigating and looking closer at um the variants right so yeah so so yeah so judd holdquist and a collaborator at
098northwestern they are real sequencing gurus and they have the they have some funding from the walder foundation to look for the specific variants of interest and they do whole genome sequencing of the samples so they're outstandingly qualified to do it and i think the way they want to do it it will provide you populational information but not relate any specific variant back to any specific participant and what we would need to do uh to get you like you'd still want to have that information because of that if there's a variant of interest or concern in your district that might you know you might have different feelings about how to respond to such a cluster of positive cases of a variant compared to kind of the the reference strain right so what we would need to
099do is get consent from the individuals or the guardians of people that had been positive on our test and it would probably be a different consent and the consent would be to allow me to hand that sample to judd and we could work out the details of that but right now obviously the consent that everyone that's a participant has signed is that we throw away the sample after three or four days i forget what the details are but you know at this point now we we stare a cycle the company that deals with our waste comes every two days and so in these cases if you got consent we could not throw them away and give them to judd but that would require individual people to consent to that process okay so are we talking
100about just that just from procedurally so you're talking that everybody who does some other screening i'm a could part could say sign a second release say hey yep i'm good with this straight analysis and there'd just be like a little dot on the sample that you get um well so potentially um but the the other way to do it would be just to have you reach out and like when you're informing people that they have they should be referred to a diagnostic test there might be a chance to consent that much smaller number of people you know and you know when that happens and i could see it working either way i would say what you know which one do you think would work better okay ed would this be would this be something recommended
101for the samples that you find some clinical significance that would be a referral to a diagnostic test or would it be broader than that to try to look at some sort of deviation or variation between those clinically significant that should get a diagnosis diagnostic test and those that otherwise are negative well right now i think it would only be for the positives and even frankly it might be for a subset of the positives so i know that judd needs for example for every referral that we send you we run a non-diagnostic pcr to confirm the rt lamp result and judd to get a full genome sequence from these samples needs you know not to get too down into the weeds he needs something that's cycle 32 or better so it might be that a subset
102of the positives are amenable to that and some of them might have lower viral loads that you know wouldn't really be as useful to him and was there something in the lincoln samples that generated some heightened interest in working with judd and lori in northwestern well i think judd reached out to me and he was looking for participants and you're certainly not the only district that i referred him to and i think he's talking to another a number of other districts that would be interested in this um but i think since you were a k through eight setting and in lincoln it seemed like there was a bit of a larger cluster than we've seen in some of the k through eight or most of the k through eight schools we're working with there was
103at least you know in my mind like well hey why is that and it sounds like you know you've done your homework and maybe it was due to out-of-school activities or other things but anytime you see things kind of percolating at a higher baseline level than what you're used to those would be the first people that i would refer to judd right can i ask and would this be looking would this be looking also for then new variants of kovitzar's is it looking for new variants or is is this sequencing just an attempt with this better understand the origin of the um of the of the positive case or is it both well yeah well so my understanding is in terms of the origin of the positive case that's really not what they're looking to
104do in terms of track spread through a population and that obviously would have more caveats associated with it in your interest right my understanding of what they want to do is they just want to screen for sequences now they might see that some sequences you'd expect that some sequences circulating in your community would be very consistent right um and they would notice that but when they just sequence it in a very unbiased way right so our test we will pick up these variants but we won't be able to differentiate them from the reference strain or other normal strains right they just do full sequencing and they get all of the information and if that reveals something like this south african variant or the uk variant is present in your community i would say that would
105be useful and actionable intelligence for you certainly okay so our response to that would change should change um particularly if we were to find out that we were likely dealing with something that's more infectious oh absolutely and we would hope that that doesn't occur but just say that say the events of a few weeks ago come up again and then judd's telling you that you have one of these strains of concern you might reasonably want to deal with that a little bit differently than you would deal with you know your average out of school activity that was just a bad choice well then i will circle back with judd um i realize his i know he had a couple things that he needed to do tonight and maybe we can figure out how to um
106gather the information so that we can um give our family something in writing and explain the benefits of doing this that it costs it comes at no cost to the district and it's still in keeping like what goes to you is only bar coded there is no student information or staff information um and that would be the same when they go from you to luries there are no names involved um you know and so we can get all the same information that we got from you and um work up an information sheet and then go from there so exactly we'll try to get judd back and um if you talk to him please let him know i apologize we ran over but um we were we will circle back with him and then we can
107take that to um our parents and and probably have a discussion with them you know with everybody who participates or is thinking about participating but then let them know that we'd be asking that question um if they were somebody being referred to a clia lab for diagnostic testing exactly all righty thank you ed you know what i'm not going to put you on i am going to put you on the spot just because i shared your four and a quarter measurement for um you know social distancing and that you know with that measurement you're talking about four close contacts and then as you expand um well as you shrink your social distancing number um you're expanding your close contacts and so four and a quarter was your number to keep that at four for a
108positive case yeah so probably like you know your discussions we're discussing as a district can we use surveillance screening and other things to get kids closer to full-time or even full-time um and you know obviously that's an admirable goal and a lot of people in our community probably like your community feel the same way and what we're emphasizing to our community is if someone now in a saliva screen is a positive and you reduce that six foot distance between students all of those students that would be below six feet would now be close contact and have to be quarantined right and so where the the difference is is right now if you say you went to three feet right and some people are thinking about that number then you'd have the people on the left
109and right front and back and on the diagonals would all be quarantined that would be eight people but if you can get to four and a quarter it's basically the pythagorean theorem in practice the people on the corners would now be further than six feet away so you'd only quarantine the people front back into the left and right which you know that's half as much and for our student board members that's where you use a pythagorean right so four and a quarter is the magic number to achieve that okay okay all righty thank you ed okay thank you i'll get back with you and judd um and we'll continue talking about this on our end all right sounds good have a good night thank you good night bye melissa is that it or do you
110uh that is that all right very good thank you all right members of the public who wish to address the board should check in with mrs mo the board recording secretary secretary speakers are asked to maintain respectful decorum and limit their comments to three minutes or less when you get to about 30 seconds i'll politely remind you to start wrapping it up so mrs milk is there anyone who would like to make public comment please hello uh thank you for hearing our public comments today um i appreciate everything you just went through and i still stand by my comments that i wrote before i came as you said my name is jackie adams i have two kids in district 41 one in third grade and one in fourth for those listening that aren't aware before
111the start of this school year district 41 administration created and the school board approved on a six to one vote a schedule whereby our third fourth and fifth graders have math and literacy on alternating days never on the same day as a result as of today six months into the school year third through fifth graders in district 41 have only had 51 total days of math instruction last year at this time they had 104 days of math instruction of those 51 days only 22 have been in person almost a full year into this pandemic and these kids have had 22 days of in-person math instruction total math instruction is down 51 in person and in person math instruction is down 79 percent as compared to last year the hybrid schedule is new to everyone and
112math and literacy on alternating days is also new it's never been done but neither the board nor the district has reached out to parents to get our feedback of this experimental schedule meanwhile neighboring districts are not only providing math and literacy for their students every day they also have sent numerous community surveys since the start of the pandemic and have made changes to their schedule to reflect the desires of the community that is a collaborative and open-minded approach the school board is elected to represent the community and decision-making in a vacuum is not representing your community establishing a plan and sticking to it as one of you recently said is not the approach to take in an ever-evolving pandemic despite the 51 reduction in math time many of you have said our kids won't be
113left behind as compared to peers in other communities my good friend in ohio is a third grade teacher she's been in person full day every day since august with three feet of spacing do you know how many school transmissions they've had zero those students are safely getting a full curriculum every single day while students in d41 have gotten 51 days of math instruction instead of the 104 that they deserve i ask all of you on the school board what is the district's plan to make up for the lost learning that has undoubtedly occurred i'm not asking for something unreasonable i'm asking for a basic educational requirement of daily math and literacy for our third fourth and fifth graders we've been asked by many in the community to have patience and show a little grace for
114the position you as elected officials are in i was patient for months but at the last board meeting you all agreed this year's schedule cannot change you agreed the schedule is best for our students until hopefully somehow we can get back to a full day next year six months from now however i expect more for our kids now i expect more than 22 days of in-person math instructure over instruction over the course of an entire year while students and other communities are safely getting a full curriculum every day i ask again where is the detailed measurable plan to address the learning loss why are we waiting to provide a full daily curriculum until next year what are we going to do for these kids now thank you thank you hmm hello dr bruno you recently
115had a conversation with a parent regarding the current schedule especially when it comes to third through fifth grade math and literacy and how this is working it's not it's not you didn't ask you said there were results you said there was feedback showing this was a success that parents were accepting and and happy with this you didn't ask me you didn't ask the person you had the conversation with you didn't ask any of my friends colleagues neighbors so i'm asking you where did this feedback come from make it public if it exists hearsay isn't evidence i'm here to tell you first-hand experience this is not working as jackie alluded to our in-person instruction is a fraction of what it was i can't ask for better experience from our teachers but the position they've been put
116in and the position our kids have been put in is unacceptable i'm sure there are plenty of other parents that will flood your inbox if you want feedback we're living the experience dr bruno you're not map scores are dropping my son's dropped again i'm living it the emotional toll that this schedule has taken is noticeable chalk us up as another family that's going to have to reach outside of d41 for additional support when it comes to math literacy and steam i'm glad it's working for the select people that you've received feedback from adam 30 seconds please but i don't see that being indicative of it being successful throughout the district where's your success data for kids that are struggling for kids that don't have support structures in place at home to make this successful where
117is the data for special needs kids are they failing we need actual data not anecdotal evidence that supports the narrative you've put out so i'll ask again please make the feedback public thank you adam hi um my name is justin golia um you know everyone on this board with the exception of bruce curry who has been a true advocate of our children getting back into school should be utterly disgusted with your performance jess who wants to hold book club on boards time we have bob bruno who at a restaurant wants to hand out valentine's day boxes but yet our kids can't even celebrate valentine's day in school because they'll catch coven but he'll pass out boxes for the d41 foundation in a restaurant wasting the board's time instead of getting our kids back into school
118longer than two and a half hours yet when so many other neighboring districts are figuring it out every district has a can-do attitude and everyone on this board up here including tonight i've heard what they cannot do we have what a robust curriculum we have well robust curriculum you have failed our children we have seven months of lost learning yet we are worried about the curriculum for the county we don't care about the county we care about our children we as taxpayers move to this town and pay the property taxes that we do for the schools and as investors you are failing us and you are ultimately failing our children elmhurst has come up with a wonderful plan to figure out how they're going to make up the learning loss there is no mention of
119how you're going to make up the learning loss all we hear about is the wonderful programs that you say you have the flesh program we don't care about that but you wouldn't know because you haven't surveyed us but yet you're so good about looking good for the community for your d41 foundation for the isbee for what you know katie mccluskey's doing for this time that she's spending you know creating a curriculum for the county no one cares about that we need to figure it out now instead of wasting your time figuring out things for others because you're failing our children today and that's not the priority to you people and that's what's disgusting we have given up something and as a community we've given up a lot but as a school board and in his
120administration you have not given up one sentence please stop worrying about the time and in fact sir you have taken so much you have continued to take and take and take to the point where you're taking pay raises yet you're asking for our patients we're done with patients how many more kids are you going to let commit suicide to live their learning loss you have kids that are falling through the cracks that blood is on your hands thank you jeff and we're done thank you thanks mrs milk thank you good evening my name is kelly hayne i have two kids at hadley and one at churchill i'm going to start in a similar way as i did maybe 2013 or 2012 in a very crowded d41 think tank room please don't throw tomatoes at me
121because i'm about to express a different perspective anyone remember that night i do it was when i really started paying attention to the district and school board i have seen the good the bad and the ugly i have loved and hated some of the changes in the district but i've always firmly believed that our teachers our administrators and staff truly want what is best for all students were all the changes or decisions that i or were all the changes or decisions what i would have chosen for my child no but i always took the time to step back and reflect on the bigger picture and recognize that my family was not at the heart of all decisions but that all students in the district were at the heart of those decisions tonight i want to
122say thank you thank you to dr k her cabinet all seven of the school board members the teachers the staff who have all been going above and beyond since earlier mid march when quite frankly everyone's world came crashing down and we never gavin started navigating something i'm confident no in this room ever has a global deadly pandemic and while every family has been able to decide what is and not it is not important to them regarding mitigations our school leaders have had to make decisions for how to protect and meet the needs of all students and staff from all levels comfor of comfort risk etc frankly i would not want to trade positions with any of you for any amount of money regardless of what decisions you make or didn't make it would be wrong
123for some set of families and staff it's a tough spot to be in but i also have no doubt that every decision that has been made has been done with the expert advice lots of data and analysis and a genuine concern for how it impacts kids and families i was a gymnastics meet this doc this weekend for my daughter socially distance and mast and had the opportunity to talk to moms about their district's experiences they were from several districts that keep being referred to with comments like why can't we be like them elmhurst wheaton etc guess what no one loves the model that their district has chosen and for some they even mentioned that they preferred that our kids get to see their teachers every day and guess what everyone is concerned about lower than
124normal achievement i'm not saying all this to claim that my informal conversations trump or override other people's experiences but i'm saying it to point out that everyone in every district is having the same time types of conversations and concerns i also won't stand up here and pretend that i love howard i don't but not because it i think it's because other districts are doing it better but because i am so ready for my pre-covered life back for my family my kids my community i am ready for a normal school day i want to travel again i want to see my family in texas by flying instead of driving i want to see my husband's family in indiana i want to just roam home goods for no darn good reason but as i say this i
125also don't want i don't think we are ready for normal just yet i don't think that it is in the best interest for my kids to adjust to a new schedule at this point or new teachers or both and it is not because i'm scared of covid it's because i believe our district has ensured they can provide the best learning environment possible given the constraints and what we know and don't know in a safe manner while taking every into consideration every student and staff member please frankly i want the district to finish the year strong and focus on getting kids back every day every full day every day next fall so i was happy to see the messaging tonight that it's not if but how we get all students back in the building safely in
126the fall don't we all want that thank you very much thank you good evening over the last week i've provided my thoughts and details of the board and administration regarding the need for increased in-person instruction and the urgency of doing so now as i outline in my communications given all that we know today actual school data actual data on schools not being a significant source of community spread real experience of schools that have been operating fully in person throughout this school year sharply dropping case counts multiple effective vaccines ramping and distribution to our communities including our teachers and the negative effects that limited in-person instruction is having on our children now is the time to shift the district's focus to maximizing in-person learning with target of full-day instruction for most or all students during this
127school year while employing all feasible mitigation strategies uh honestly the rest of my comments were premised on an understanding that the board would not consider distancing scenarios anything other than six feet tonight at what i was hearing tonight is that there's some willingness to consider that especially if we move into these lower tiers of of cases and and i think each of you owe it to us to be very clear on are you willing to consider that and consider it now now not not next year not not don't tell us to wait because you guys all swore an oath and you said uh you swore to ensure a continuous assessment of all conditions affecting the education our children and continuous is not when it's convenient it means now when it's critical like this and the
128value of two months of full day in-person instruction if we could make it work would be huge and so it needs to be now and you guys need to be very clear and transparent about are you willing to do this or are you not um i'm also hearing um that you know from from melissa that you're not quite sure what parents would do or what they think why not survey them how why not do that ask them what do they want explain to them that hey if we were to go down this path there could be quarantining issues are you willing to go down that path to try to get a full day or most of a full day back for most students lastly regarding the space requirements you know honestly maybe i gotta take
129you up on on the offer to talk to the guys because it doesn't make any sense to me we could come in here and take all these seats move them to three feet instead and we would fit double easily okay i know that's not all the variables that go into that but the math doesn't work and your your general explanations oh well 30 seconds please and and the size of death should not matter that should have no bearing on what this is and neither should trying to make traffic move in and out let's get to first things first first priorities getting kids in school you guys owe it to us to do the work on this three feet or whatever it is four and a quarter and to really come back with that um so
130i i'm just calling on you guys to do the work be transparent ask you know ask and survey parents about what this is do a town hall do something thank you okay thank you very much thanks to everyone who participated okay we will now move into the uh loan discussion item that we have on the agenda um and melissa we have the discussion on the abatement process right um just following up from the last meeting when there was a request for some additional information from mr deporter regarding an abatement and other pieces of data so i'm going to turn it over to eric to walk through the information that was requested and answer everybody's questions okay all the way in the back oh there you are looking for you sorry um if you look in
131the board packet tonight you can see that i did come back with what the board had asked for um you'll see some end of year fund reserve balances uh and again let me step back this is in relation to the request to talk about an abatement and just to clarify what an abatement is is when the board directs uh the district to not collect all of the extended uh taxes that were part of the levy that was filed in december so that decision comes in march um so tonight there was a request to have a conversation [Music] about what what would that look like and what's some of the data that's specific to this district yeah jess can you get on a mic all right is it on so it's on yeah all right um
132so again if you look at the board report tonight you'll see that the first part of that illustrates the existing fund balances at the end of the prior five years those are taken straight off of our afr um something to note there is the two years in the middle fy 18 and fy 19 that include the referendum dollars so that does skew that number but i think it's pretty easy to see the linear path of of where the district is if you look at the beginning from fy16 to fy20 the second item i bulleted on there was just a brief summary of some of the construction conversation that the board has had i guess for the last two and a half years as a refresher there was a conversation connected to building some type of
133early childhood center with a 10 classroom construction that that that cost was roughly 14 and a half million dollars to build that back in 2018 so if you look at the board report i moved that number forward by applying an escalator to that to look at what that cost would be uh were we to do it in the summer of 22 the next item was a question related to what type of what volume of federal cares act funding the district has received to date we received one payment for 282 thousand dollars uh that was in what is kind of referred to as round one round two is ongoing right now and in fact next week is b is going to give us some of the specifics on the application process and what that would look
134like uh but generally you know what everybody's talking about is it might be up to four times as high so that would mean you know a little over a million dollars for district 41. um the last item i think that was brought up was you know what impact the pandemic is going to have on state funding um as everybody knows you know we do receive quite a bit of money from the state 2.6 million dollars is budgeted for this year that's part of the evidence-based funding formula there's no clear direction yet what will come from springfield but there has been talk that that number could be cut in half again these were just some of the financial concerns i thought that would be relevant to this abatement conversation so that's kind of a a primer
135for this conversation happy to address any specific questions okay thank you eric well let me then open up the board to questions and guillermo i'm going to reach out to you you're joining us virtually did you have any questions for eric uh not for this first round right now bob thanks all right thank you very much julie any questions for for eric no i don't thanks ted um eric i don't know if you've been paying attention but regarding the evidence-based funding i i think it was last year the um state decided not to increase the the funding that's that's mandated and they're they're planning on doing the same thing this year that's correct okay what you mentioned about possibly even cutting our numbers i hadn't heard before but i i knew that the last year
136and this year they weren't going to be allocating any additional money for that fund correct that that the evidence what you're referring to just to kind of elaborate is the evidence-based funding formula called for an additional 350 million dollars per year in funding the state did not add that additional money last year they held it flat they called that the hold harmless level meaning that districts would not go down but they would not increase the funding in the state level and nothing has been decided yet but i know that governor pritzker's proposed budget does not include that additional 350 million dollar allocation thanks you explained that better than i did bruce i know after the 2008 financial crisis uh the district had an abatement i can't exactly remember what year that was do you know
137how much that was for i have no idea you do yeah it was 2.7 million dollars okay and 2011 appeared on the 2012 tax bill okay yeah i remember the board did that um a while ago was there a suggestion for our price for a six classroom early childhood center or was it just a or did it go up from there i can't remember you mean as far as getting a quote for the construction costs yeah i don't think we did because we had at that point six classrooms in ec and we were looking to have the capacity to expand that program so i think the bear the base project we had estimated was 10 classrooms higher than that uh we didn't remember there were two scenarios i just can't remember we talked about getting
138an additional one but then we started to get into what that would look like you know if you go beyond early childhood now you're going early childhood plus kindergarten right and we determined it was close to 30 classrooms it'll be necessary to go full day kindergarten so we didn't actually seek a formal you know cost estimate from our architect right um well yeah i was you know just looking at the round numbers we're at 31 million in surplus what as a percentage of our of our uh revenue what what is that well i don't have that in front of me but i know our budget is right at 61 million dollars in expenditures this year so it's right around the 50 mark and the fec sort of said 25 is kind of what we should
139try to go for unless we have plans for that money correct okay so we're way above that i mean by that um i mean should i go second round or should i just no let me go to jason hold on yeah we'll come back to you for sure jason yeah i i thought it was 10 and 16 but i could be around the the scenarios that we were talking about since ec contains more than just classrooms there's also therapy rooms and what have you um but before getting to well i'll get that um so when you're talking a 50 surplus but as you say you're in your second paragraph there the plans are an early childhood center correct that's been the conversation yeah and just to clarify we're not talking surplus we're talking at the
140end of the year when all our bills are paid what's left in the bank right that's what we're talking about the fund balance fund balance that sort i apologize um and so that's what we've been trying to keep in there and that's what the fac had recommended to if you have potential use for that money yeah you could keep your fund by higher higher so you could use those monies as as they've been dedicated um [Music] what impact are these coveted expenses having on on the district budgets and in expenditures what have you the area says 1.1 million may not be coming it looks like you know we have 800 000 of unbudgeted expenses this year yeah so if you look back to the budget that was filed for this year i believe we had
141a little over two million dollars earmarked for covet expenditures um now we're not going to spend all of those two million dollars because that counted on our hybrid model operating 100 during the year um because we're we're basically paying for twice the busing costs right in our current model um so roughly it was a two million dollar hit to the district and that was before we added some additional staff to accommodate some of our remote learning needs of that you know some of the quarantine requirements had us bring in additional staff as well okay now besides um funding levels for early base about evidence-based learning um have you heard of any conversations regarding funding for early childhood programming is that something that that's been talked a lot a lot at the inclusion subcommittee meetings where
142is that funny getting going what have you i've not heard anything i can i can just to clarify we are in year three of a five-year preschool for all grant right you know so that's a five-year commitment we're in the third year of that and that's a little over five hundred and ten thousand i think per year right well you haven't heard anything going florida you're in okay nope did this well yeah i think we're fighting okay yes my standard question the abatement is is generally thought of as a way to do relief is there a way to do targeted relief to people who really need it because this is the the pandemic has disproportionately impacted some people and not others yeah no the abatement does not have a targeted impact that is a you
143take our entire levy ask and you just reduce it by the amount of the abatement and that spread evenly across all the taxing parcels jess are you framing another oh okay i couldn't tell uh eric i it may you may not be ready to do this yet but we talked about when we looked at the options for returning all kids to school in the fall correlated to what the conditions we found at the time the discussions around leasing and some mixed some mix of portables if it w if it wasn't all of the ones to split the student population or something like jess was suggesting some smaller combinations do you have some some rough estimates and i think those maybe those are numbers that yes i do yeah we haven't done that yet no i
144have them you do yeah dave gave me numbers you guys for the entire if we're going to double our capacity correct right yeah right yeah if we were going to go six feet and and double our footprint using portables um that's what we have we don't have it for going three feet correct you know or even four and a quarter and then putting overflow we didn't we didn't break it down to that which we can give you for the full amount what was the full amount um so to do 122 portable classrooms was 7 million 1100 171 and then that's not including the staffing cost and were you able to do any estimating and probably not if if the real estate organizations that you're looking at for leasing some off-campus facility did you have any
145rough numbers on that or is that you know we we don't have a a dollar amount for you know per square foot but if we comp it out for 1800 students and did something comparable the size of hadley dave gave a square footage of approximately 160 000 square feet and with a price tag of about 1.5 million in furniture and instructional materials um you know but we would have to get a cost for square foot for industrial property like that and then um you know also whatever the cost would be to modify um you know to modify that to turn it into instructional spaces and then the last scenario you talked about was returning all students to our campus footprint with less social a distancing but an upgrade in other layering so i'm assuming that
146could be testing all that could that would be increasing testing and that could be requiring every one test or it could be some other sort of combination plus the ventilators where they're targeted in the plexigen and i don't know have you we do have a sense of what the testing costs we could probably rough that out because we know what it is right but i don't have you no i mean if you would have we could have come with that yes but i can't whip that up right now i didn't i didn't um but the desktop i know just the desktop um plexiglas can range anywhere from 35 to 85 dollars depending on how tall um you wanted to get and and we would not be looking to outfit the entire classroom but it might
147be necessary for particular kids um you know as they've explained six feet is as a as a as a physical barrier as well and so if you lessen that you know what will you put in place of that physical barrier um you know so that would be one opportunity and i know we have different prices um for air purification systems for classrooms so you know those we can cost out okay let's um see if any of this conversation has triggered additional thoughts or questions julie i have thoughts but i don't have questions what do you want well if you've got a thought i don't know do you think it would be helpful share it time for thoughts share a thought okay i have thoughts i have a few thoughts um and this sort of came
148up for a second but i'm going to bring it up again last summer we voted to adopt a resolution on diversity equity and inclusion and enacting policies that promote equity is central and acting in compliance with that abatement returns tax dollars as eric i think just said indiscriminately whether people need the money or not um that's not equity many of the families who may be experiencing problems right now hardships um might not even get a tax break because they might not own property secondly our policy stating the terms and limits of our fund balance i think inherently assumes that our district has everything it needs and i think this as this pandemic has shown us quite clearly our schools are crowded our classes are large we do not have the space that we need um
149we know that to expand our early childhood opportunities as we've just talked about to meet the needs of our 25 of our students who are low income plus the ones who have special needs plus their typically developing peers um we need a space for them too um thirdly i have four i'll try to go fast um we know from the comments in the school perception survey that programs like full day kindergarten um well florida kindergarten is um wanted around here and we do not have the space to offer it we voted to pursue land acquisition to fulfill this early learning center but we need to ensure that we have the funds to build it and to operate it and to staff it etc finally our oath of office states and i quote i shall respect
150taxpayer interest by serving as a faithful protector of the school district's assets end quote ensuring that we have a balanced budget and plan responsibly for future needs to educate the children in our district as our fiscal responsibility so i think to abate funds at this time is irresponsible to the district budget and it is not future focused thank you for your thoughts julian bruce on the other side of the table uh yeah i would suggest that uh we abate three million dollars um out of 31 million uh sort of looked at that and we would still have uh even if you counted 20 million for the early childhood center and new acquisition we're still throwing off three three and a half million maybe even more with new construction in uh surplus so we would have
151at least 13 million dollars left over in our piggy bank after we got done abating three million dollars building a new early childhood center and uh and you know doing whatever else we need would need to do for the pandemic so i would propose that we abate three million dollars thank you bruce thank you ted all right so i didn't follow all all your numbers there and um i'm not sure why you started with the 31 million versus the 29.5 um which is the um projected at the end of this year that reflects the 1.4 million dollar excess in budget that we're going to need to spend i'd like to correct a couple other statements that you made board policy is that we maintain 25 percent balance that's only when it gets above 35 percent
152is it supposed are we supposed to be taking action in terms of what are we going to do with it either we ear market for something or if we if there's something that we don't need as ms hill pointed out then then that's when we start triggering that a couple other things i'd like to point out that the district has already provided tax relief three times in the last three years there was no levy increase in 2017 quarter levy increase in 2018. we retired bonds in 2017 all right i guess it was 2018 right eric those bonds right and so the new bonds for the um hadley construction is um a savings of 1.3 million dollars a year i'm not mistaken so that that total adds up to about three point two million dollars if
153i'm not mistaken it was 1.9 million dollar impact on the levy vote so we've already done that and that's that's every year we've we're already providing tax tax and um as ms hill hopefully quoted because i was going to quote the oath of office as well i think i think depleting reserves in the absence of revenue surplus and in the face of additional needed expenditures is counter to our oath of office thanks ed uh jessica comments thoughts uh i would just say i didn't follow bruce's math there were some things that i didn't think sounded correct in there um but i agree with julie's comments wholeheartedly about equity and the fact that we have totally realized i think we've all felt the space issues are um are felt by everyone right now uh in terms
154of the early childhood center uh we know that to build 10 classrooms it would be 16 million dollars at least just to build it that's a that's a best guesstimate at this point because our projections are a couple years old but that 10 classrooms probably wouldn't be enough i mean it definitely wouldn't be enough it wouldn't give us what our community wants which is full day kindergarten and we would need closer to 20 to 30 classrooms for that so you're looking at double or triple the cost of 16 million so um we definitely have things that we need and want in our community that we need to be able to pay for and we have a lot of expenses that have are anticipated this year and maybe for next year especially depending on what the
155survey comes up with in terms of our solution for the fall so i think we need to be prepared to do that um you know i think when i when i think about equity and how we can help with relief in it you know i think about the d41 kids foundation i don't feel like one second of my time that i put towards the students of this district is ever wasted whether it's preparing for a meeting or reading a book or serving on the d41 kids foundation and i tell you that it's not wasted because d41 kids has raised over seventy thousand dollars since we started and that includes a twenty thousand dollar grant from dupage foundation we have provided over sixteen thousand dollars in grocery gift cards to hundreds of families in our district
156that's in addition to the meal pickups that we do every week 25 000 has gone for rental assistance for over 22 families facing eviction we need our students ready to learn not losing their homes we've provided six thousand dollars for support to gecrc summer program fifteen hundred dollars to support our sister organization supplies for success so our kids could have coats and five thousand dollars in a literacy program to get books into the hands of kids zero to five so when they get to school they are ready to learn i think those are the kinds of things that we should be focused on when we talk about relief to our community we have a host of organizations that serve our family and serve our community and if we're looking to provide relief then our community
157provides when asked i just watched our community raise money to buy a car for a family that lost their caregiver and had to be taken in by a family member i just watched our community raise ten thousand dollars to pay for funeral expenses for caregiver that lost their life to covid i believe in relief i do not believe it comes with a tax abatement thank you jess jason yeah i guess what gets you about abatement is is twofold um a you know the need for early childhood centers important i mean prequel that there is concerns about whether or not there's going to be uh you know space available for therapies and what have you i mean that's an important need and and that money has to be that that being said we also have to
158look forward and and we've heard a lot tonight and we it and there is real there is some lost learning hunt that that kids are experiencing that we are going to have to address going forward and we don't know what that all is going to entail what those needs are going to be um are we going to have to see a need for additional resource teachers to come into providing eventual services targeted for kids but what you want to be able to do as a district is to allow for flexibility so when you know that you are going to have issues that need to be dealt with and needs to be addressed you have the financial ability and flexibility to do so and and right now in the face of what we're going into going
159forward for the next and it's not next year it's going to be for the next few years with our kids we need to maintain that financial flexibility so we can provide those services to make up for any learning loss that has been occurring um for our kids and and and those are the reasons you know besides you know the board policy part that i i would not be in favor of the abatement thank you both thank you i also don't think it's a prudent investment in the district's finances to be abating it isn't a targeted surgical approach to those who need it most as jessica pointed out extensively there are better tools it's in fact to do that and in fact the work is is being done and it's noble and generous work and i
160think we do need to take a long-term perspective we are going to be at a point where we will be past the covid dynamics and the needs of the district are are going to be just as great as they were prior and it's important it's important to govern in a way that keeps the investment where you could actually address some of these really pressing structural problems that tie so indelibly to the options that the district has to do education putting aside what the dollar figures may or may not be around options that the community speaks to around the fall there is the increased working time and investment in the summer learning loss that jason speaks about the investment that's here with these dollars that eric talks about from 218 they're from 218 so one can
161certainly expect some inflation on those prices and that doesn't allow for full day kindergarten and this board was the first board despite lots of boards that talked about it that actually took action to purchase property to move in the direction of solving a long a problem that's existed for a long time and if in fact we had fixed it and imagine we had that center this year it's a completely different dynamic and the hard feelings that are expressed in the community that are generally shared from you towards us likely never emerge so the decisions we made years ago impacted what happened this year decisions we make now are going to impact what happens as we go forward so for all those reasons i am not in favor of an abatement motion and therefore the board
162has not reached consensus to ask for one so i don't know if the gear was anything oh okay i thought i started did i miss you and i was starting with you gary i'm so sorry please no i i i passed away first comments but i don't know if there's much more that i can add to the comments that are already made i'm torn with this decision obviously um there is need out there to make sure that we're financially secure moving forward there's a lot of unknowns that we're gonna have to face um there's a lot of things that we're able to do this year just because we were securely financed to help the community um i think the comment that just met is the one that impacts more that makes my decision kind of
163like on defense it's like it is not going to be equitably distributed um i don't know um if you can take it three million and figure out what it is that everybody's gonna get i figure you know the average house thing in glendale is going to be about 700 000 but then we don't have to account those people that don't own a house that really could benefit for this but they're not going to get anything so nothing that was already said but that would be my feedback thanks thank you gamma my apologies for losing you okay all right let's move into our action items i i just wanted to i brought this up because i wanted because i know in naperville you know they were able to abate some money there and i thought i
164know a lot of families here suffering financially so uh that's why i brought it up and i appreciate that i believe your intent was was good bruce and i think it's it brings up equality i mean it's equal as far as how much people would get back um if i may add one more because i did look into that since bruce brought up the naperville thing um and i didn't dig into it a whole lot but um it they tend to abate a million here a million there they've done it several several times part of the reason that they're able to do that is that they have always taken the full levy extension okay which has been the recommendation of the fac had we done that as i pointed out we would have had another
1651.9 million dollars for this last year not not and then going back there'd be even some more um the other interesting thing is they had a 14 million dollar surplus and i didn't dig into what what their total budget is but they're giving back 10 million dollars of that um and they're keeping four million dollars to spend on putting their students giving them the boost the what what's the terminology over the summer the the summer summer extended learning yeah what are you know our catch-up stuff right so um i would much rather spend you know if we had a million dollars or two million dollars floating around that that was extra i would much rather put it into um something that's going to directly help the students okay all right thank you let's then move
166on to the action items the consent agenda are there any items board members would like to be removed from the consent agenda to be considered separately hearing none may i have a motion to approve the consent agenda which includes the personnel report with employment recommendations resignations leave requests and resignation retirements the january financial reports in the open and closed meeting minutes of january 25th 2021 and february 8 2021 as presented motion second thank you roll call mrs milk mrs hill yes mr mobile yes mr curry yes guillermo yes yes yes then we'll move to our superintendent recommendations we have a few the first is the board policy revision second reading and adoption may i have a motion to approve and adopt the board policy revision as presented to the board i need a motion motion
167sorry we have a second uh any discussion yeah these are pressed correct these are press recommendations yes yeah i'm glad we added the ap in there in the isolated timeout and the physical restraint um this is tough i'll just tell you straight out this is tough just because these kind i will say in d41 we haven't seen any of this in the last however many years so this is just more across the board and and just something that you know i've had conversation the state level about these that they're really used more for the minority kids and kids with with with disabilities um the ap is written well it is and it's just the first thing that's a question i had what this came up with what's the ap going to look like anything else
168no i'm just trying to talk myself through it for the last little bit all right you got a few more seconds here roll call mrs vogue yes thank you and the second atom is the 20 21 2022 student fees may have a motion to approve the 2021 2022 student fees as presented to the board motion you need a second motion second sorry okay great any discussion we'll call mr smoke yes yes yes no yes yes and then a third item is the 2021-2022 school year calendar may have a motion to approve the school calendar for 2021 2022 school year as presented to the board we have a motion here you need a second yeah we need a second okay we got a second any discussion all right this is mo roll call [Music] yes yes
169yes yes yes and then finally we have an action item which is the approval of the 2021 to 2023 support staff agreement between district and ask me the american federation of state county and municipal employees may i have a motion to approve the 2021 to 2023 support staff agreement between the board of education and the american federation of state county municipal employees local 1334 substantially in the form presented and recommended by the board's negotiating team and as ratified by the association on february 10 2021 and to authorize the board president and secretary to sign the agreement on behalf of the board motion second any discussion oh i said association you're right i'm sorry nancy you're right i was following orders and reading what you type out here did you need to reread it now do
170you want me to reread that yeah okay may have a motion to approve the 2021 to 2023 support staff agreement between the board of education and the american federation of state county municipal employees local 1334 substantially in the form presented and recommended by the board's negotiating team and as ratified by afscme on february 10 2021 and to authorize the board president and secretary to sign the agreement on behalf of the board now we need a motion motion and we need a second house we have a second uh any discussion i think this is great you know when we look too forward to reopening in the fall we need our staff on board and and getting this done now you know just that stop the process get it done by it definitely demonstrate the collaborative working
171relationship that the district has with our associations who are so critical to the work that we do and kudos to i think marcy conlon who is on the zoom for her uh her work i think it's a testament to the the degree in which you work collaboratively with our employees so marcy thank you okay we'll call nancy mr curry no yes this is phil yes mr rusty yes yes yes thank you and um under the board governance learning together are there any items board members wish to discuss yeah i see the book yeah um so thank you everyone everyone picked up the book i appreciate that um if we could read the first 50 pages by the next board workshop we might have some time on the agenda to talk about the first 50 and
172there's three 50-ish page sections so we could get it discussed in three meetings time agreement to read 50 pages yes i've already got to intend to read the first 50 pages but i don't mean that jokingly i just mean that honestly but i'm sorry agreeing to intend to read them yeah i do that in all sincerity i appreciate that and um yeah and i will read that at some point i'm not sure we're committed to having it on the agenda for the next meeting but if we know that we've no i don't think that's a bad thing we're going to try we're going to try the workshop man just do you want to just really real briefly again summarize why this author's work is essential why it aligns with the district's equity uh uh commitments
173uh that we've made that julie spoke about and also through this particularly when the strategic plan begins to roll out again well i will say that i read this one because glenbard's parent series is going to feature the author as a speaker and so i this is one of the ones that i started with and he's going to be uh at glenbard parent series um thursday february 25th at 7 pm so i encourage all board members to try to make that as well it will be about a different book but i have a feeling that the themes are going to be consistent and really it talks it gives a really good history of examining the achievement gap um the terminologies we use and the second chapter is about the demographics and how basically they've they're
174changing and they're going to continue to change and we're going to be those changing demographics mean different things in our schools then and and the demographics of our teachers are still basically mostly white and so the white experience is very different from the experience that our students are having and so they need to have an education about those experiences because they don't live it themselves and so um it's really talking about how that conversation applies to the role of the board in schools um and what kinds of things we should be talking about and thinking about so that we can address the changes that are occurring and it's worth noting that it's tough it's really timely because the state board of education did approve the culturally responsive teaching standards that will impact the way teachers
175are trained so the people that we will be recruiting going down the road will have that will have that education and the board actually should be aligned with what the skills they will be bringing into the into the district right and and that and it's less about how that impacts curriculum and more about how our our teachers are limited in their range of experience and so you need to be able to teach them about all the different kinds of experiences so that when they're engaging students in a classroom they can be sensitive to those differences as well as use those differences as a way to engage the students so that they're not zoned out because this doesn't apply to me or it doesn't resonate in any way so it's about i think we talk a
176lot about the relationships that teachers have with their kids and it gives our teachers skills to build those relationships because when you want your kids to to learn they have to feel like they belong and they feel like they belong when they can connect with the adult in the room thank you jess well we have upcoming meetings on march 8th which will be our workshop meeting and then monday the 25th will be a regular board meeting and we will again reside here any item board members wish to present for considerations to a future agenda hearing none then the board does have a need to adjourn the closed session to confidentially discuss section 2c1 the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee to
177determine its validity and section 2 c2 collective negotiating matters between the school board and its employees or their representatives or deliberations concerning salary schedules for one or more classes of employees uh as uh presented emotions so i need a motion motion i'll second to go into i got a motion to go into closed session second any discussion vote call mrs milk oh yes yes mr yes yes yes yes yes the board will not be taking action