001And Dr. Steinberg, we are ready. Uh, good evening. Welcome to the board of education meeting for Glen Brook High District 225. I'm sorry you have space here. You don't have space there, but it is what it is. This is a special evening. So, let's start a meeting with Madame Secretary. Can you take a roll call? Mr. Downing. Mr. Kowaki, present. Mrs. Hope here. Miss Mullenbeck. Mr. O'Hara here. Mr. Shine. Dr. Steinberg here. Board members present. Great. Thank you. Board and superintendent reports. Mr. Gra, Dr. Gravel. Uh, first I'm sorry, Dr. Samberg, we have the approval of the agenda. Yes, I would be better if I follow. I feel intimidated with so many here. We go with the approval of the agenda. Thain a motion to approve the agenda. So moved. Second. All in favor? I.
002Any opposed? Motion carries. All right. Now it's your turn. Right. Well, good evening everyone. For our friends who are at home who cannot see the room right now, we are officially, I think, at capacity. Today, we are so fortunate to welcome students from Glumbre North and Glumbre South who have achieved a monumental accomplishment of a of earning a 36 under ACT. to talk more about this. I'm gonna uh first ask uh Miss Selenas, would you mind just flipping the camera to the podium so everyone at home can see our friends here and Dr. Georgees and Mrs. Hughes if you would mind introducing our students here? Sure. Good evening. Good evening. So, as Dr. Grall said, we are here for such an extraordinary evening to celebrate the remarkable achievement of all of these Spartans and Titans
003who've earned this perfect 36 on their composite score for the ACT. This level of achievement is only obtained by less than 1% of students nationwide. And look how many district 225 students have accomplished this. And with more I have Miss Fuse. Yes. So this accomplishment not only highlights individual dedication and intellect, but it also reflects the support of teachers, families, and peers who have helped along the way. We are very, very proud of our Spartans and Titans who've earned this distinction. that reflects exceptional ability, determination, and perseverance. So, we're going to honor each student by saying their name. And when I say your name, if you would just wave, we're going to hold applause until the end. And it's going to go north all we'll say all the north names first and then Dr. Georgees
004will say all the south names. Then we'll have a rousing big applause and we're going to take a big group picture in the middle. So, it's going to be uh very exciting. All right. So from Glenrook North, we have Mason Cho, Allison Chong, Matthew Chunkinelli, Aiden Dye, who is absent, Ethan Frink, who is absent, Jaden Han, Stafford Klene, Stanley Klene, Jaden Lee, Lyanna Malishkovich, Susant Metacansa, who's absent. Lauren Rachelson, who's Oh, you are. I'm so sorry you got here. Okay. I'm so glad. I'm so sorry. Okay, Susant's here. and uh Lauren Rachelson who's absent, Benjamin Sabin who's absent, Nate Smolitz who's here, a Adrew Yim and Hanning Zoo. And from Glen Brook South, uh we are just going to mention our first names here. We had some conversations coming into this room that that's probably
005the safest bet. Um, so we have Sha and Harrison, Ian, Ohan and Vahan, Nathaniel, Pamran, David, Jaden, Sanjana is not with us this evening, Saurin, uh, Roshin, Jimmy, and Miles. Congratulations. And at this point, if we could give them a big round of applause. So students, if you could do us a favor, we take like to take one large picture here in the middle of the horseshoe. So why don't you come on in and stand in the center and do us a favor. Tall in the back, shorter like me in the front. They're all tall. Come on up, friends. Come around. We all got to come through this direction. All right. Wait, wait, wait. All right. Ready? Get out of the way. Right. Let's give her a round of applause. At this point, for any
006of our families that desire not to stay for the remainder of the meeting, you are welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Giving us all the exciting stuff. Congratulations. Nice work, guys. Thank you. Alrighty. And as our friends are still heading on out, we'll go ahead and get started with the second part of the superintendent's report, as we begin this evening, I just want to take an opportunity and celebrate the amazing accomplishments of our communications department. Over the past uh few months here, we've really been digging into our climate and culture feedback and information from the different surveys that we offer each spring to our staff and our students. And one of the areas that we identified we had room for growth is respect to our two therapeutic day schools, Glenrook Off-Campus and Glenbrook
007Transition Services, our newest facility uh located in Northbrook for our students aged 18 to 22. The feedback that we heard was that while they are North and South students at Harts uh Spartans and Titans, they're also actively working and attending school in a different site. and there was no home for them uh to be found on the internet. So, we worked with our communications team, very grateful for Miss Salanas and Mrs. Smith as well as our assistant directors of special education, Mrs. Stacy Wolf at Transition Services and Mr. Doug Schiller over at Glenberrook Offcampus to create online homes for them. So, as you travel to our website, I encourage you to select the schools menu in the upper right hand corner and be sure to check out all the beautiful images that we were able
008to capture of our students and staff at both schools throughout the first two weeks of school. And then as we move forward, we'll be adding more and more information that's specific to off-campus and transition services. So, very grateful for that and um looking forward to continuing to feature our students in different ways. The next area I wanted to talk about was this tool that you've heard me mention a few times called Parent Square. Uh Parent Square is our new communications tool that we officially launched right around the 1st of July. And since that time, we have sent out over 340 posts directly to our families. Some of those posts are specific to freshmen or to uh students in a particular club or organization. But as part of our rollout process, we've been introducing our staff
009members to this tool, including our coaches, our teachers, case managers, school counselors, administrators, and and so many more. Um in fact, even our board of education is using Parent Square for our communication. Um, and just really excited to see how many families are interacting with those posts that we make. Just to give some very practical examples, uh, just last week we were fortunate to have our first GBN parents association meeting and Mrs. Hughes when she sent out the invitation also used the RSVP feature. It gave us a really good indicator that we were going to have over 50 parents attend a parent association meeting. So, not only do we know who's coming, we're able to plan for refreshments and make sure, especially as we're conducting a building tour, we know how uh to navigate that
010large of a group, to make sure everyone can hear uh the tour that's going on. Um, we also are very fortunate to have used that same feature to determine how many of our students and how many family members were going to be able to join them for recognition of our perfect uh ACT 36 scores. So, just kind of highlighting some very practical uses of the tool. Since um launching the tool, we also have had over 500 parents uh now engage with a post. So by engagement, we mean it's not that they're just receiving it and perhaps reading it. They're actually utilizing that RSVP feature. they voted in a poll in which we were looking for information about an ideal time to meet uh for a club or organization or they simply appreciated, hearted, liked, depending
011on the term you prefer to use uh content that's on that post. It's really important that we we recognize the use of parent square is more than just sending out notifications in the way families prefer to receive them. It's also about increasing engagement. And the best way to increase engagement and to engage in that content is to download the Parent Square app. So far, out of our approximately 7,600 parents and guardians, 2,000 have downloaded the app. For those who might have missed out on the opportunity or didn't realize there was an app, we actually will be sending out a mailing to all of those families later on this week. And I just want to highlight in our mailing uh one of the real important features of parent square is it allows all of the content
012to be translated in the language that is preferred by each individual parent and guardian. And so our flyer is written in all of our um primary languages. So it's translated multiple ways. When they download the app, then they'll see all of their content in their preferred language as well. And then just as a kind of an added note, we recognize that some parents prefer not to have another app downloaded and some parents for whatever reason don't always like a longer style email to read. Um, and 300 of six 306 of our parents um have chosen to receive all of their messages by text message. So that is just another option. If you prefer not to look at email or not to look at an app, you can also elect to receive all those notifications by
013text. Sometimes it's a shortened message that's provided. Other times it's a link to the larger message, but it just comes right uh to you based on your preferences. So very excited about how Parent Square is continuing to grow and looking forward to working with our families to meet them where they are so that we can engage and improve that uh family and school connection. The last added bonus uh this evening is a real thank you to Northfield Township Highway Commissioner um Mike Corman. Um Mr. Corman um had met with the Glen Brook South team as part of his initial effort to improve the connection between the township road district and local communities beyond just unincorporated areas. And utilizing the resources he had available to him, um he offered to have the township road district sponsor
014the repainting of lines in on campuses throughout Glen View with the goal of expanding that. also to Northbrook. Um it kind of came very quickly uh which is why you're hearing about it really for the first time this evening. Uh but just last week they repainted the striping on all of the very busy uh portion of Glenberrook South High School. And so we have a few uh pictures here highlighting that. So just very grateful to the township road district to um Mr. Corman for his commitment to schools and focusing uh on safety of students first and foremost in his responsibilities and we look forward to partnering him for years to come. RJ, quick question. Was Mr. Corman able to assist us with some of the issues we have on Lake? I know it's more the
015village, but with that blind curves in terms of you're talking about signage and everything, would he be able to help support our discussions there? It's a great question. So during our conversation I uh it was Mr. Wright, myself uh and a few other staff members. We identified not only our challenges that we've had on the curve on Westlake, we also talked about the very um large amount of traffic that flows uh in and out of a very truncated area. Uh and we also discussed on land where um the reality that Glenoff campus is not part of a school zone right now. um he has been really helpful in connecting us with other parties. Um so he won't be directly involved in some of that but he is helping us make the connection. I figured if
016it was a joint effort with multiple voices the right resources might uh be able to help us in these areas. Yeah. One other area that we're working on with Dr. Patak in operations right now and also our grants manager uh Mrs. Galis is there is a um it's I believe it's referred to as safe route to school grant program that provides additional funding not only for municipalities, township governance and and school districts um for uh uh striping and for other safety programs, but it also provides abilities to improve the number of students walking and traversing with their bikes by addressing some significant safety hazards. So, we are pursuing that as another opportunity um not only uh as a school district alone but also with our governmental partners. And I'd be remissed if I didn't also
017bring up I guess the backside of Columb North as well too that traffic has increased and I some folks in the community have raised concerns about that issue as well too with signage and everything as well. Yeah. So, one of the uh trials that we've been working on and a true credit to Mrs. Hughes and Mrs. Bonner over at Glenrook North is that with the construction on Sherr, right, everybody's focused on that. We've seen a lot more um commuting happening around Sher Men uh and all throughout that neighborhood. So, we have partnered with the Village of North Brooks Police Department to provide additional uh police supervised traffic flow um which is allowing um allowing the police to roll uh traffic through without having to stop at a stop sign since uh there's an officer present
018um on that portion as well as closer by Shermer. So, we're continuing to evaluate what works best. I think everyone knows that at the current time uh traffic is just a challenge but we are optimistic in the next two months it will be much better. Yeah. No, just appreciate Mr. Corbin's assistance and any way he can provide on all fronts. Thank you. Absolutely. And Dr. Cyberg that concludes my report. Thank you Dr. Gravel. Anything else from the school principles? No. All right. So now we're going to move to the next section which is recognition of community visitors. It's my understanding that we have one visitor signed in. As a reminder, visitors get two minutes and we recommend that visitors state their name and address so we can answer back in case there are some questions
019or comments. So we welcome visitors. I believe it's Mr. Seth or Scythe Sites. Sites. Yes. William Sykes. Thank you very much, doctor. Members of the board. So, I'm uh I've spoken on this topic before and I wanted to update you on the school resource officer program. Um first of all, I just uh this is all about Glenberrook South High School. So, I don't really have any issue about Glenberrook North. Um and and the other thing I wanted to say is I certainly have no issue with doing everything possible to secure your school. The whole issue is securing your school where you control the school and you and you fund the school uh your own security. Um last uh spring I was involved in legislation on the school resource officer program and uh just uh last
020uh month the governor signed more legislation to um uh to make more changes to it and they're never going to make that program uh work. So you know you have a a school resource officer in Glenberg South High School. um you have a very diverse program there. I do think that u you need to take a very close look at that program and continuing the program you've got it set up. Um for those members of the board that are new um that that that's a village of Glen View municipal police officer. Um you know he doesn't work for you, he works for them and you really ought to have if you uh if you have insecurity you really ought to have security that works for you. uh that the other pro problem that I that
021I see with this the whole relationship is you're not paying the entire cost. And if you really think that a municipal police officer is something that you want to have, you ought to pay 100% of the cost because you don't the village of Glen View is not the entire Glennberg South community. you have a very diverse um uh school population there and not everybody's going to view a a police officer, particularly one carrying a firearm, as a as a positive uh enforcement. The other thing is um my time is almost up is the village of Glendry changed the contract terms in December. So, you don't really even have a contract. And I asked uh the the new the superintendent uh superintendent John and the new superintendent to look at the contract because they change it
022so that it would autorenew. Um and so that's a for those who those of you who are are lawyers uh when you change that's a counter that's a counter term on a contract. So I'd ask you to check your lawyers. Um but you take a close look at it. I'm all for securing your making everybody safe but but take a very close look at what you're doing. Thank you very much. appreciate it. Thank you so much. And because we have so many sick students, I'm going to explain something that we say sometimes at the meetings. The way the meetings are said, we don't respond when somebody comes, but it's not because we don't take seriously what the comments are. It's just that's the way the open meetings act is being said. We take our comments,
023we take notes, we take also comments from people that email us or or make calls to a superintendent and then we figure out ways to bring this issues either to the agenda or to the information item or to one of our committees. So it I know if it's is your first time it feels kind of strange somebody says something and nobody says anything about that. It's not that we are dismissing the comments, it's just the way the open meetings act works and then we follow up down the road. So if down the road we become parents or something you want to come to a board meeting be encouraged to come and share your comments because they are important. It's not just simply somebody just expressing an opinion. All right that being said um we're going
024to move into our consent agenda. So um I will have to are there any modifications? No. No there are no modifications. Right. So I'll entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda. So moved. Second, right, Mr. Glowaki? Yes. Mrs. Hope? Yes. Mr. O'Hara? Yes. Dr. Steinberg? Yes. Motion carries. Thank you. Next on our meeting, it's our first discussion action agenda item 6.1, review of the districtwide safety and security measures. So, Dr. available. So, as we mentioned last meeting, um the board of education has been working to develop a list of topics that um we wanted to address over the coming months. Some of these topics um might be a a topic that we would address once every few years, while other topics were looking to create more of an annual cycle. And this is one
025of those very important topics. One of the statements that we often will say when we're meeting with students, staff, parents, or community members is that the first priority of all educators is to ensure that our students are safe and secure. And the reality is that there are many different ways that we keep our students safe. Today we're going to be focusing on the physical security and safety enhancements that we have been implementing over the past several years, some of which are even new for this school year. I always think it's important when we start this conversation to highlight that in order to keep our students, staff, and community secure in our schools is that we don't go into all of the detail related to our physical security measures, our procedures, or things of that nature.
026And unfortunately, that's because if we were to share exactly how we'd respond to any incident, it would potentially compromise the safety of students in an unfortunate situation. Today, the information that we're sharing has already been shared with students, with staff, and with parents. We have provided it through our weekly principal newsletters. We've shared it as part of our dean's office presentations and some um have involved direct board of education approval. This evening, I'm very excited to welcome Mr. Joel Reyes, our senior manager of safety and security, who will be supported also by our associate principles of student support, Miss RSL Canola from Glenrook South High School and Miss Jen Corber from Glen Brook North High School. And together, not only will you hopefully have a great opportunity to learn a little more about our approaches
027this year, but this will be a participation activity where you will have an opportunity to test what you're about to learn. Are we ready? I'm ready. Mr. Reyes, it's all you. Uh, good evening. Thank you for having us here. I can tell you that this is very exciting for me in the sense that uh I take this very seriously. Safety and security of these students are uh paramount, right? And with the staff as well. So everything I do every day always puts them in mind. How can we keep them safe? How can we keep them secure? How can we make sure that they're protected? uh how we prepare, how we mitigate, how we respond, how we recover, everything is really important in how we approach safety and security in our district. Uh so with that
028said, I can say in the last seven years that I've been here and uh more recently, we've done a lot of things to ensure that our students are safe so they could be successful. Um, as you see with the uh the PowerPoint here, these are the topics that we're going to talk about related to physical safety and security enhancements. Who's got the clicker? There we go. Okay. So, first we're going to talk about our lockdowns. Um, believe it or not, when I first started here, we had a a door system that electronically held doors open. Uh, the benefit of having somebody like me is I immediately identified that we had no way to lock those doors in a crisis. So the fir one of the first things that we did was I walked around the
029building and I ensured that we had a a method of locking down our door systems in case we had to go into a lockdown. So what you'll see is throughout the building you'll see these lockown readers. Uh they're also located in the library. They're located by athletics. They're located in the main office and in the uh the dean's office. And what that does is it allows us in a moment's notice to swipe a card and lock every single door in the building. In fact, we change the access of every door in the building because some building uh doors we actually have to just reset. Some doors we have to lock. Some doors we have to actually unlock because there might be some doors like for instance in the courtyard where we don't want people sitting
030out there. We want them to be able to get in and get to a safe place. So we methodically go through the buildings and say okay this is what we need to do with this door. Um with this uh we were able to set up a system where not only our staff and administrators are notified but law enforcement is notified. So they'll get uh notifications from the chief down to the sergeants on the street. So they lets them know that we're in a lockdown um if we swipe the card. Um okay video surveillance and monitoring. So, in this new day of technology, AI is it. And I can tell you in the past, I've spent literally weeks doing investigations, trying to find things. With the new technology we have now through our Motorola Vigilon system,
031we can literally take those weeks and make it into an hour. Now, why is that important? What if we have a missing student, which we've had before? It's much easier to find that student if I if I know the description of that student. So, by putting uh having some inputs into the system, what used to take hours can now take seconds. And it could be a suspicious person around the building. It could be a missing student, it could be uh something that was stolen or something that was left that is suspicious in nature. This allows us really to find that quickly and address it uh quickly. So, I love this and I love this because I always say to our staff, two things that drive every single crisis, information and communication, right? Information, knowing what's
032going on. It's just like driving to work. You look at Google to see what what roads are blocked. That's sharing information. It helps you respond better. What we did was by putting repeaters at each school, now we have crossd district communication. I can be on a radio here at Glenberg administration building and communicate with any district building um with a radio and they have dedicated channels. We have a lot of channels, dedicated channels uh specifically four departments and then we have talkaround channels that anyone with that frequency which is every single radio can use. So that really improves our ability to respond to any crisis um because we can share information uh quickly and in on top of that with our Motorola ion system which has a Google platform we can share it discreetly when
033dealing with students and trying to provide information to our security team. So instead of announcing a student's name on the radio or a situation, we can send a photo, a name, and that's the only thing that's ever sent. So that really helps us protect our students. Lanyards. Uh I'm a big fan of these. Uh I talk about it all the time. It is very uh easy for somebody to walk past a security staff member if we don't have these and these are not the policy. And it allows us to identify somebody who has who has been vetted. Every single person who has a staff ID has been fingerprinted and background checked. By having this ID, I'm sorry, this lanyard and this ID, we know when somebody's walking through the building that they're safe to be
034there. And the visitor lanyard just as well. Obviously, we can't fingerprint visitors, but what we can do is run them through our sister and system and check their information against every sex offender registry database in the country because being within 500 ft of a school as a registered sex offender is a crime. So, by doing that and having these individuals walking around with these lanyards, it allows our security team to say, "Okay, this individual has been vetted, allowed to be here, and when we see someone without one, we immediately address it." I will also say that um if we don't replace these on a a regular basis as staff leaves, we don't always get them back. And so when we don't get them back, if we don't um get new ones, then anyone can show
035up with an old ID or lanyard and walk around the building. In addition to this, these these get kind of grimy and so and they kind of fall apart. They can. So, it's always good to have uh a renewed uh uh lanyard to make sure that our our people are safe. Okay, with that, I'm going to pass it to our other team members here for the standard response protocol. Good evening. I'm Mariselli and my friend here, Jen Corver from GBN. But before I start, I'd like to know because we do have students here, conversations like that we're having right now could evoke feelings and a lot of questions. So, I do want to make sure that our students know that if you have any questions or feelings that you talk to your parents or you
036talk to a trusted adult tomorrow. Okay? Do want to make sure we we share that. Um, so this year our and I'm sorry, who has a clicker? Thank you. Okay. So, if you want to go to the next slide. Thank you. Thank you. So, um, this year our school district, um, we adopted the I love you guys, uh, standard response protocol. Last year, we adopted the standard reunification method. And to make sure that we were in alignment, we went ahead and adopted the standard response protocol. What does this all mean? And what is uh, the standard response protocol? I love you guys. Um, the foundation was founded by the Keys family. Um they after their daughter Emily Keys was um held hostage and ultimately killed at her high school at Black Canyon High School in
037Colorado in 2006. She along with uh five other girls were held hostage and during that time and that event she texted her parents I love you guys. um dur so her kindness and spirit and fierce joys fierce joy and dignity and grace that followed that tragedy tragic event define the core of the foundation. Next slide. Thank you. Um these protocols are widely recognized and used nationally to support consistent and clear communication uh and action during emergency situations. We it provides common language for emergency responders uh response in schools. Um our past uh standard response protocol create had four actions and we went from four to now five clear actions which are hold secure, lockdown, evacuate and shelter. They're designed to improve safety through simple and easy to follow directions. Every action is followed by a
038directive and every um action has a specific instruction. What? Thank you. Prior to school starting, um, all the former emergency evacuation response signs that we had all over both of our buildings were replaced with new signs featuring our new protocols. We asked staff to familiarize themselves to locate the um, new evacuation maps in their classrooms and in their spaces. Um, at the beginning of our during uh, school Glenn Brook days, we reviewed it with our staff and we shared a seven minute video for that that's produced by the foundation. Additionally, we shared all this information with our families in our weekly newsletter as well as sharing the seven minute video that's also in English and in Spanish. Um, and students and our staff in both buildings will be able are going to be practicing all
039of our five protocols during our drill day next week. Um, again, the new protocol improves clarity and reduces this response time by connecting terms with simple actions, enabling that faster response. And again, it just aligns with our local and statewide efforts to adopt a more consistent approach to communicating during an emergency. Um, it will enhance our coordination with our first responders by using that consistent uh terminology for which fire, police, and medical personnel have been trained. Um, I had the opportunity to go through some of this training with our first responders, and it was just great that we're all now going to be speaking the same language. So, that that's very comforting. Um, we are going to be adop updating this annually just to make sure that we are always following best practices, but I'm
040going to turn it over to my partner. So, she's going to lead us in a short activity. Yeah. So, I think one of the major um one of the major things that we do when using the new standard response protocols is you really want to make sure you have situational awareness. So, whenever you're in a situation, what do I know? what is my location? What is happening around me? Because your environment is going to dictate your response. So, today I'm going to give some scenarios and Dr. Cummings um is going to pass out some popsicle sticks that are the colors of the the SRP actions. Um and I'm going to go through some different scenarios and you can work with a partner, you can work on your own. And this is something that we did
041um Dr. Cummings and Mr. Ray did it with all administration and then we did at our schools with our staff just to get them familiar with the terms knowing how to apply situational awareness what they would do in the unfortunate um time of a incident. All right. There are not no right or wrong answers. It's situational awareness. Um but I'm just going to do a few different scenarios. So when you after the scenario, you can hold up one, two, three popsicle sticks. They don't when we use the SRP, it doesn't have to be just one. Sometimes we use two together, sometimes we'll use three. It all depends on situational awareness. And I just want to add one note. One of the tools we provided for all of our staff is the card that I provided
042to the board at the beginning of the meeting that's now connected right to your lanyard. The card all corresponds to the colors you have on your popsicle sticks. And so we have the hold, secure, lock down, evacuate, and shelter. Now, Jen, not to put a a little wrinkle in here, could you just walk through what those five actions are? Yes. So, when we go into it, so a hold, a hold is a situation that we would do. Sometimes we think of it as a medical situation where we would hold students in their classrooms. Okay? So, if we went on a hold, it would be stay in your classroom with your teacher. If you're in one of the larger areas, you would stay in that larger area just so we know where our students are at
043in the building. Um, a secure would mean that we were going to lock the exterior of the building so nobody comes in and nobody goes out. So, anyone like our any PE class or anyone that's outside of the building would be directed to come inside to the building. At that time, visitors would not be allowed in the building. It would really be a way to secure the entire building. Um, a lockdown would be a situation where we would either barricade, evade, or defend. Right? That would be a situation where there's an incident in the school and we're advising our students to, you know, either barricade in the classroom, maybe evade, maybe evacuate depending on where they're at. Um, an evacuation would be when we there's a situation and we need to leave the building. So
044think if there's a fire in the building, a chemical spill, maybe something like that where we would leave the building. And then shelter is where you would go to a safe place in the building. So if there's extreme weather or a situation where like a tornado um something like that where we would shelter in the building in place in a safe area. All right. Does anyone have questions about the five before we go through the activity? You see my answers? Remember, there's no right or wrong answers. You don't have to hold them up very high. I'm not going to call you out. It's all gonna be good. Yes, you guys will be practicing during your drill day. So, pay attention. So, you have it. Um, all right. So, the first scenario during block one, there's
045a medical emergency in the nurse's office. 911 has been called and is in route. What do you think we would do? There's one Give me a second. The blue and the purple. Yeah. So, they give us words. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, we would hold. So, I think in order for us to be able to get the emergency personnel in the building to be able to get them out of the building. We would clear areas. We would hold. We would keep students in their classrooms. If it was before, right before a passing period, we would just hold off. We would tell them, you know, stay in your classroom in le of the bells. And then as soon as the um emergency professionals had left and it was clear, we would then release the hold. Good work.
046All right, so next one. There is a tornado warning and we got information from the National Weather Service that there's a tornado headed towards Glen View and Northbrook. The sirens have gone off. Starting easy. Good. Yeah, we would shelter, right? And so we would go into our procedures where we would move away. We would come from the second floor down to the first floor, right? We would move away from any windows. We would go to interior of the building. Pretty simple with the the shelter. Okay. I'm going to go into a more complicated one. All right. So, police have notified the SRO that there was an armed robbery at the jewel. Gunshots were heard. Police are on the scene, but they have not yet located the gunman. What do you think the schools would do?
047Yeah, good. We would secure the building, right? So, at that time, we would be on alert as administrators. We would secure, make sure no one's coming in or out of our building. If anyone was outside, we would bring them in, right? Um, but minutes later, the SRO just received information that the gunman on is running on Green I think it's Greenwood towards or Green View towards GBN. As he's coming across the building, he sees this the suspect is on the GBN baseball fields. What would we do? Oh, I need to say where you're at. Yeah. So if you're at GBS knowing what's happening. Yeah. So I think it depends as they're going towards Glumbre North. That's right. Glumbre South would still they'd be securing their building. We never know what else is happening and Glenberg
048North would go into a lockdown. Right. Anytime there's a situation on campus, whether that's inside or outside, we are going to go into a lockdown until we have more information. So at that time the school would go into a lockdown. Um, and I think it's important to note we would also be my my guess is the police would also be talking to Maple across the street from GBN and they would also go into a lockdown at that time. All right, you guys passed. So, good job. Yeah. For each of those scenarios, how quickly and how are parents notified? All right, kiddos. ready for next week. I think we had a good question though like how parents would be notified. So that's where I think it's really important in parent square. I think we would be
049sending out alerts as soon as we had them. So if it's happening at GBN, you know, we're going into lockdown. We're making sure. But our district office GBS, they would be, you know, sending information out, our communications team out through Parent Square to let everyone know of the situation. That's kind of a nice segue um into we have um Christine and I have been working on messages that are that we have in a file um for situations that may occur and we have put them right into Parent Square so that they're ready to go and all we have to do is change dates and times and some other information but right now they're in a place where they can they can go out. The other nice thing about parent square is even if someone has
050opt out of receiving messages, it will be overridden and they will get it in all the ways that we send it out in text, phone, um, email. And we try to do that as quickly as possible. I mean it it it depends of course on how quickly we receive the information but unfortunately we've had to do this a couple times over the last several years and we've been able to get parents um information as quickly as possible. The other thing that we do is we number our messages and we also try to give them an update. You will get another update at 1:30 in the afternoon and then when the last message occurs, we say this is the last communication that you will be hearing from the district so that people aren't waiting to get
051additional information when nothing else is coming. Remember when I said information and communication, right? That drives every crisis. And being able to communicate from one school to the other or even our partner schools u is essential to ensure that we all keep safe. uh if they know that they're going into a lockdown at North being having that information to be able to go to secure and hold at South at off-campus um is really important that keep our our staff and our students safe. Uh wonderful. Well, I will just say that when I recommended that we went to the standard reunification method and the standard response protocol, it was really because of the fine work that was being done at the foundation, I love you guys foundation, and how it's being adopted nationwide by so many
052different schools. Uh that's super important in in the sense that that common language that we need as part of the incident command system that everybody who shows up knows if we're in a shelter what we're doing. So, law enforcement, fire, um could be anybody that comes, social workers that are part of our group, if they know that process, they know how we're responding. So, that's why it's so important. Okay. So, uh I think we're back up one. There we go. Um so, this is something that we started and I actually have to give credit to our retiree, Lisa Sly, who started this. She said, "Hey, Joel, we should do a safety and security orientation." And ever since then, it's grown. So, it's about a 50inute uh orientation where we go over so many things that
053new employees need. Uh for instance, having lanyards, how to access doors, how to lock down a door, what tailgating is. Does anybody know what tailgating is? And I'm not talking about the bears game, following someone in. Exactly. So, knowing your surroundings, situational awareness. If somebody's following it behind you, that's tailgating. Um, knowing our emergency procedures, knowing where the evacuation maps are, which is back there. Um, knowing how uh our visitor management system works. Uh, another thing is, and it's it's really important, how to contact both the security team and the SRO team. Uh, I also tell them about the benefits of having an SRO. uh based on the uh DOJ average response time for a police officer not in the building is three to five minutes. Average response time for a police officer during a
054crisis in the building is 60 60 seconds or less. So having that resource is huge uh in terms of responding to crisis. So something else we started a few years ago and I and I I don't want to not mention our staff. Our security team does an amazing job. Um they're everywhere. They're always looking. They're monitoring. Uh our security leadership um uh Kristen Wick and Dan Gorski at uh Glenberg North and Glenberg South respectively uh also do an amazing job. We work closely together constantly. And what we've done over the years if is we created a training program for them. So during our late arrivals, and we've done this for years, this is what we go through. So there's not a dull moment on a late arrival for security. We do active asalent response and
055that's just not talking about it. We get into a classroom. We show what it's like if there's an emergency. If there's a lockdown, how you lock down? We talk about running. We talk about the proximity of the threat. How do you get out of there? You know, if you're close to the threat, you have to fight. If you're far away, you may have to run. So, we talk about all those things. Uh we talk about mass gathering areas. We talk about bomb threats and suspicious suspicious uh packages. You know, what to look for? How do you identify that something that's suspicious? Who do you notify? Um how do you help search and what where do you search first? Um the officers do a great job. They'll do a drug recognition um of course for our
056our team where they go over this is what how you can hide a vape. This is some of the ways you can hide other things. Um we do evacuation chair deployment. So, at at the top of every stair, we um identified, and I give credit to Dan Gorski for this one, we identified that we have chairs and nobody really knew how to use them. So, we have on our staff former firefighters who now teach other staff how to deploy these emergency chairs. Uh, and it's worked out really well. Medical emergency response. She talked about that little bit with the hold radio protocols. We go over radio protocols, when and when not to talk, because believe it or not, you can't talk and listen at the same time on a radio. So once you press that
057button, you got to let it go. Uh reunification training, we go through the the response part of that because there's different tiers to reunification. the tears. You have the administrative end, how we're setting everything up, but then you have the response part of it where the individuals are actually going to have to staff those lines, take people, enter their information, everything that's involved as part of reunification. So, we do that with our security staff. Uh we do something else I call observer and report. And to be honest, I've been struggling for years what to call this. And I say observe and report ultimately because it's not just observing when something happens. It's observing behavior before it happens. One of the biggest things we can do as a security team is prevention. Identify students in crisis
058before it becomes a problem. So, we train our uh students through uh also through our CPI, non-violent crisis intervention. We train them to identify some of the behaviors that are not typical. Every staff member, we talk about engaging with students to find a ba a baseline. if that student falls off that baseline. Now, we've identified a students who's who has changed in some way. And we don't handle it oursel, we report. So, Lara's team at each school, we make sure that they're aware of it, the deans, that they're aware of it because it's better to get intervention for a student as soon as possible versus just ignoring it. So, these are things that your securityities team is doing and you may not realize. So, we really pay a lot close attention. And finally, special events
059operation because when you're outside with a lot of people, security is a lot different when you're closed in in a secure location. So that it any questions? Before we take questions, I just want to answer a few questions that I had um come from different board members uh and even to some of our administrators. We attempted this evening to provide a little bit of an overview of some of our efforts to keep our facilities secure. At the end of the day, we know as educators, the best way to keep our facilities and our schools secure is to make sure that we are all operating, I think Joel often says, we're all reading the same sheet of music. When we are identifying challenges, we're calling them to the attention of individuals who can address them. Such
060as Mr. Reyes mentioned, if we see if a student or a staff member sees an adult that does not have an identification card on that's authorized, we all have a responsibility to stop them and to make sure that we get someone who can address it. We also have a variety of other activities that happen throughout the day that often times go unnoticed. For instance, uh we have one of the largest implementations of electronic lock readers and sensors um I would argue within the state if not the country. We have electronic lock sensors on our exterior doors, on our interior doors, on closets, everywhere. And one of the challenges that you experience with electronic locks is they can have issues. Um we have a variety of proactive reporting uh mechanisms that are in place for us
061to identify those issues and follow up with them. We've even um started to evaluate our buildings and ground staffing and hired an individual who spends about 50% of their time addressing door issues each and every day throughout the weekend into the evening to make sure that the physical envelope of our campus is secure. But as Mr. Ry has mentioned when you see something we need to say something and we need to make sure there's mechanisms for individuals to report um when they see a door that might be damaged when they might uh identify a process that has been missed that might need to be re-evaluated. And so there's a variety of different reporting mechanisms available to our staff and students. In fact, if you're not aware, uh, to our board members, on the back of
062your ID card is a phone number that says shift phone for both GBN and GBS. And that's because we know that issues can come up at 5 in the morning, at 11:00 p.m. when students are coming back from a trip, and throughout the day. And so, we wanted to make sure right at the fingertips of our staff is a phone number to contact if there's an issue. so that you're not just sending an email or filling out a ticket or what have you and we always have staff members that are available to take those calls. So, just wanted to offer a little bit of background on some other things that happen behind the scenes that you don't always see. And at this point, I know Miss Corber, Miss Kenchola, as well as Mr. Reyes and
063any of us are happy to take any questions from the board. So, first of all, thank you all for all your work and everything. I mean, we're fortunate to a few years ago create this position which was pretty unique I think at the time for many districts and a model um and we were even more fortunate to have someone like Joel with his experience and and everything to drop on and lead us through coming up with a formal program. Uh so thank you first for all of that to all of you. Uh and the world's changing. That's just un the unfortunate sad truth that every day we hear some tragic story unfortunately somewhere and we learn from that and and the team is learning from that using that to adapt whether it's something physical, something
064medical, something accidental. We've had that happen at some of the schools. Um and we learn from those situations. So this is like an exercise for going kind of to the comments you were making earlier for the students in the class. This is like an exercise. If you're prepping for that test or a game, you just don't ever want this game to happen. But it h happens. You know, with this this weekend, we had a patron who just didn't feel well, but seconds matter. And having the hold in place changes what their outcome was. They, you know, they fainted. Medical professionals could end up helping out. That was wonderful, but it was due to the training and everything. Anyway, now I'm off my kind of history and so about questions I had for you the team
065um with the recent some recent situations that have happened in our community or surrounding communities where there have been I know criminals or alleged criminals I guess in the area that one scenario that was just read about cutting through a school property and everything. What can we do in your opinion to enhance our relationship and the communication further with local authorities? Because those are situations where seconds matter. It changes from the person darting left instead of right and if he goes left or she goes left, it's into a crowd with unfortunately people versus out to a field where it's much more controllable as an example. Absolutely. So the first part of that is having an SRO in the building because an SRO has direct communication with their their the law enforcement partners immediately via the
066radio. Something else that I did not mention that um law enforcement has access to our radios. They can monitor it. Uh they also have access to our cameras, but uh anytime they access our cameras, we get alerted. So they can't just randomly watch our cameras. It's only when there's an emergency. But what we can do is exactly what we have been doing. And what do I mean by that? Over the last three years, and that was my goal to get this done uh in five, took me seven, but we did a functional exercise at Glen Brook North, a functional exercise at Glenberrook South. For those of you who don't know what that is, is we brought in our law enforcement, our fire partners to do an actual response. And so they walk, they go through
067the building as if there was a a a somebody trying to harm someone else. But then on top of that, this year, this summer, we did a tabletop exercise where we had 24 different organizations present. Anyone that could potentially be a partner in one of these things. So, to your point, how do we build those relationships? Exactly what we're doing. Another thing that we did is I partnered with other people and we started what I refer to as the Northern Illinois Safety and Security Leadership Group. And we meet on a monthly basis during the school year to talk about best practices, to bring in experts. In fact, we had Lara talking about behavioral threat assessment on a panel one time. We bring in uh partners from the FBI, from uh IMA, from Cook County Department
068of Emergency Management. We bring in anyone we can and it's building those relationships not only that gives us access to free training but also gives us a resource in a crisis. Now, would you say there's any benefits the flip side also with the SRO's helping local authorities also kind of understand the situation? seems like I don't know schools being large public places become a target more and more for whether it is a it's a target for something and give them a better understanding about the impact that sec safety and security has on the schools. So you're talking about how law enforcement views our Yeah. How do they learn from us? Do you see a benefit? They they they So we encourage them to be present. We encourage them to walk uh the area. Some of
069our um staff members are former law enforcement partners that in from this community, which I love because they know the schools, they know the community, they know our students, and so immediate you have an immediate connection there. Uh we have uh Glen View Fire represented. Um we have Glenview Police Department represented. We have North Brook Police Department represented. We have uh Gleno firefighter uh and police department representative. So we have all these people and maintaining those relationships is huge. Wonderful. Thank you. This may be more of a question for you R.J. in terms of um I know we've had some studies in the past from time to time on certain aspects of our safety and security and sometimes it's been also based on I guess governmental initiatives as well too. Do you foresee that there's
070going to be a need for any future studies because we're pretty good uh with I think our last study in terms of following that as our playbook but yeah what what's on the horizon? So we look to do a um exterior and interior security assessment uh which is performed by an outside provider. Uh most recently we used an organization West 40 out of the DuPage area. Uh we typically bring in a group every um two to five years. It depends. Um, for right now, uh, from a capital project standpoint, we already know our next round of, um, security cameras, exterior doors, other, uh, physical, uh, enhancements, including the evaluation of additional secured entrances, um, or staged entrances at both north and south. Um, so I would anticipate probably another year or two before we do
071an assessment, but likely capital projects um, for both the summer of 2026 and 2027. May I ask that uh, we also consider a cyber assessment as part of that given you were referencing the electronic locks. So much of our communication is now digital and everything else that these uh, threats and everything relies so much on the technology as well too. Absolutely. Well, that's it for me. Thank you. Thank you. I just I did want to add one thing though. Uh there was something mentioned earlier about um SRO's um where their loyalties are. The good thing about my position is I have almost 29 years of law enforcement experience. So, I bring that here and my loyalties are with the district, right? Which means my loyalties are with the students making sure that they're safe. So
072always remember that somebody like me with my background coming into this environment I am you know they talk about silos I am a different silo and bringing those together and having my viewpoint I think is essential in identifying issues and m maintaining that that confidentiality on our part to ensure that we're all safe. Thank you Mr. H. No thank you thank you for uh for the presentation. And um I I think I speak for just about everybody in our community when I say I I hate that we have to do this. I think that's a you know just put it out there. It's not something that you like to do. Um but being ready for when the problems happen is how you make sure the problems are less. And so thank you for the uh
073for the update. I guess my question is you mentioned I know we had uh all the departments in uh last year. You said is there a plan for how often should we do that because the knowledge kind of fades once you do it if you don't continually do it is there a plan for that? So the we should always do something. Now we can do it like this or we can do it like this. So it can be small or it can see be large. Um we always have new employees coming in. So even if we do do it they're going to have to be exposed to it at some point. So to your point, as I like to do something every year, the scale of what we do, it depends, but I think it's
074important that I could put a button here and that button I press and it makes everything happen. It's not the question of the button, it's the question of when do I push it. That's the training part of it. I need to know when to push or not to push this button based on what's going on. And that's why we have to continuously train because we have to build that toolkit, that crisis response toolkit with everybody from the top all the way to the first line so they know how to respond. Does that answer your question? I think so. So, so what you're saying is is the the key is getting the information up to the right people so that we can react to the issue whatever is occurring as in a quick and timely manner.
075Yeah. So, we have we have communications, right? We have to practice that. We have to practice response. We have to practice that prevention part of it. And then we have to look at the technology that's available that helps us. Technology should always supplement decision making. It should not be the decision maker and that's what we have to train to. No, thank you. Um I guess I I just um is there a best practices on the the amount of times and stuff we should be training with the police, you know, like how often should we be interacting and and having them in the building? Because if you the buildings you can get lost in Glen Brook North and you know if you're a new police officer and you come in you know how often is there
076a best practice on that? There isn't really a best practice other than um I encourage them to be there. So whether they're walking around during the day and I know that the both both principles can attest to this. They'll see officers. They'll even say officers will be walking around today or coming in after hours. And we've done that when I was on the police department before. We'd come in after hours and we'd do training in the building because it it allows the officers to understand the environment, right? Become proficient, but then they have a better idea of the layout of what it looks like because Glenberg South, right, it's kind of peacemeal here and there. Uh Glenberg North more boxy, but you still have to walk to understand, you know, where the seawing is on
077the second floor. And if you never go there, you're not going to be able to get there as quickly as you should. So that's what we encourage. M O'Hara, just one followup. Um Illinois school code as well as a few different other uh statutes do have requirements for uh law enforcement as well as public um safety fire departments to be part of different drills. Um and so there is a level of requirement for them to be in our facilities to see how we respond and then to provide feedback. um especially with respect to how our students are doing in different drill formats. Getting our drill dates. So after we have our drill days, we actually do a brief with our law enforcement and our first responders each. Thank you, Miss Hope. Yeah, you mentioned SRO's
078and then the security team. How many SRO's do we have? We have one at each school. At each school, including off campus. No, just one at North and one at South. And then who else is a part of a security team? So the security team, so it's myself. Uh at each school, we have an assistant safety and security manager. Uh at South, that's Dan Gorski. North, that's Kristen Wick. And then at East School, we have um 19 security staff members at South when we're full strength. Uh 15 because we added one at North when we when we're our full strength. We have one here for the visitor center and we have one uh two at off campus. And how well it's important. Yeah, I think how does that compare with other districts that are similar
079to ours in terms of the different, you know, physical plant measures that we have and the staffing? Well, it's it's interesting you ask. I get asked all the time by other school districts, what are you all doing? Um, and I I'd like to be innovative. I like to be ahead of that. I always say security, you know, when you look at a threat, it's it's like a river. It's going to take the path of least resistance. You have to find that path before we get there. you know, it's not a straight line. So, I'm always thinking of what can we do to improve our security. Um, so because of that, for instance, uh, we gave law enforcement access to our school with a fob. Now, we did that with the understanding that if they key
080in, we get an alarm. It says, "Hey, law enforcement showed up." We did that two, three years before the state mandated. So, the state required, right, the statute changed and said, "You have to do this." and we do it. Uh before they talked about trauma uh uh uh training, we were doing CPI and we do the trauma portion of it which qualifies too. So I'm always looking at getting ahead of things that are happening trying to be on um like you say in front of best practices and being innovative in in a in a traditional Glenick way where we identify problems before they become problems so we can find solutions. You mentioned like outdoor events and you brought up the sporting event. It's something I hadn't thought about very much to be honest. Like how
081do we handle, you know, the homecoming game is this weekend or the homecoming dance is this weekend? Like how how do we handle those types of things? So So it starts out with planning, right? When we look at what are what are our egress points, are those doors open? Who's responsible for communicating when there's a crisis? How are we responding as teams to that crisis? who is in command of that crisis because if somebody just starts talking, there has to be somebody in charge, right? And and then how we respond collectively. It's just like a crisis in a school. If you have something going on on let's say the gym at either school, not every administrator should respond because what happens if there's another crisis somewhere else in the building? You need to have an
082administrator to respond. So it's not just about getting everybody there. It's communicating how we're responding in advance. what channels are we responding in? Uh who's responsible for the egress part? Who's communicating? There's so much that gets in that is involved. What channel we're on on the radio? Uh so there's so much that's involved in the planning part of it to ensure that if something does happen, we can get them out because there's all kinds of things that could happen. Could be weather, could be structural failure, it could be, god forbid, somebody trying to hurt someone, right? It could just be a fight. There could be a lot going on. And remember that that that all the football games um police presence there which is important. Uh basketball games police presence. We try to have them
083there when we can. One last question. I know Miss Control you mentioned before you guys started talking that this can be a hard topic for people and to seek support. Do we do that, you know, for the drills that we have and or if there is, you know, if we have to call a shelter or something like that, how do we make sure that the kids who are struggling with even just a drill are getting that support? So, as Lara, Dr. Cummings will tell you, I'm I'm a big proponent of identifying students in advance. So, state law actually requires uh authorizes people to opt out of those drills if they if they feel like they can't take part. And I and I understand that part of it. Um, so we we also talk about anytime
084I do a presentation that's because I do some pretty gritty presentations. I talk to people say if you have issues you can walk out. I will not take offense to it. I'll get you back when we're when they're when they're when we're done talking about that. And especially when you consider that Highland Park is not that far from us, right? and it's not unlikely to have a staff member or somebody who was close to somebody that was involved. So, I'm very cognizant of that. I'm always trying to make um take that into consideration. In fact, during our exercise, it was up on the board that you know, we're going to be talking about some things if you need to to understand that that that that might be difficult. So, walk out if you have to.
085Well, thank you for the presentation. Um I have a couple of comments and a question. And I I really appreciate all of you really but putting an emphasis that we are dealing with human beings here and these human beings are teenagers and they are going to school. So you just mentioned it miss hope made the question not losing that side in terms of of seeing something saying something this has an impact on our lives how does impact I wonder connected to this how are we working together with our social workers with our mental health team because there there are two aspects here one is see something say something that's one thing but the other thing is like try to identify when you're not feeling Okay. And it's it's not I'm not seeing anybody. I'm seeing
086myself through the mirror. I seeing myself through waking up and I'm not feeling myself. And this has to do with safety as well. And and are we doing something on that? Dr. Cummings, would you mind taking this question? Yeah, I think um coming soon um in October, we are going to be presenting also on like the emotional safety of students and all the things that we do proactively to help students. Um but within our clinical teams, meaning our psychologists, our social workers, our school counselors, we've done several different trainings. Um one was called prepare, which several of our administrators have gone through as well. um which helps you identify and prepare for a crisis. So, we're really trying to look at the proactive side of those crises, which is why we do training so we're
087all on the same page with our behavior digital threat assessments, with our health and safety assessments, so that we are looking um and trying to identify any issues ahead of time, knowing we have the supports in the building to help students and staff after a situation occurs. Thank you. The other point is I think sorry I think Miss Corver said it earlier in sometimes you realize somebody is going to an odd time and it's identifying this and and if you look at literature of most of these tragedies that are happening most of them are local but don't happen while we are in school happen years earlier. So this kind of training behavior now you're training not how to react only right now but how to react down the road once you graduate from here you
088go to college once you come back and leave as part of neighborhood how many times we hear about yeah that person have withdrawn I haven't seen him or her coming to the usual places but people don't react to that only react to connect so maybe by talking about these things often often and often it stays within much as it as at as at some some gymnastic mental exercise that it doesn't stop the minute we graduate from school because at some point especially in our community we're going to come back here. So so I think it's not only a service that you are providing to the school but you're providing a service to the community. A question that I don't know if it's for you or for Dr. Grall it's I'm I'm glad to hear we're
089using more AI because of the time like you mentioned it makes it way faster. I'm assuming you know in terms of privacy especially facial recognition now and technology needs a lot of resources that sometimes we cannot afford to keep in house. So I'm assuming our contracts and everything are very strong in terms of keeping privacy not just of our name and information but now as physical features and faces. I know who has the answer for yeah I can take that one. um within uh even Illinois school code uh biometric and and different identification technologies are limited. Um we we started talking about this type of technology with respect to using fingerprints for um lunch accounts uh about 20 years ago. So all of our systems uh first and foremost are compliant with all state and
090federal regulations and guidelines. Uh we do have policies that address these systems as well. Um and from a uh overall storage standpoint um we have the without disclosing too much we have the proper uh configuration of software and hardware uh to ensure that it has capacity to function as needed is backed up and is secure uh both physically and uh from a a potential cyber risk or cyber attack. Thank you. Last question. We work with our community, right? So, not everybody comes to school, not everybody is a relative of somebody that comes to school. So, if somebody in the community has questions, where should those questions be directed? So, in um if we look at our website and we look at where you might have questions, so many questions would actually flow through um our
091uh deans office or associate principles at Glenberrook North or Glenberrook South. Um then they would escalate up uh through Joel. Uh ultimately um the way uh the structure is it might go to Dr. Cummings or it might come to myself. Uh but we typically tend to start at the dean's office followed through the associate principles at North and South. All right. Thank you. Thank you so much. I had a sorry a follow-up question going shifting back to the emergency crisis response for something physical happening. Um we're I think one of my colleagues referenced you know the parent notifications and everything but what do you envision we could do further to we're just sounds like we're doing a lot of practice with the staff with the students what can we do to do more practice with
092the parents you know back when I was growing up you had the emergency every you know now and then this is a test of the national broadcasting emergency so you knew okay I'm going to watch for this and they're going to come back and it's a test so I know that's the signal I hear if there's a tornado happening and everything. What can we do in your opinion to practice with parents and work on So what I'd like to see and and that's I love the question. What I'd like to see is the next step going into what a reunification would look like. So if we did a the standard reunification method through the I love you guys which we adopted a few years back. Uh a big component of that is the par are
093the parents. the parents show up have to go through a process and pick up their students. We really need to try to educate them to see what would that look like. So even if we took, you know, people that are part of the parents um uh association and get them there to go through this process, maybe bring um you know, some some players in terms of students and go through what that would look like in a reunification so they know what the expectation is and then they share that with others. So everyone knows what the expectation is. They know where to look it up online so they can become more educated about the process. So that's something that I'd like to see down the road that we do. Any other areas you I think part
094of it also is for parents. I think Paris if you want to come up to the microphone. I think it's I think it's very important for parents to talk to their students at home about in case of an emergency. I think that that starts at home to say if this were to happen as I think somebody mentioned unfortunately it's a part of our daily life now and we see so much in the news that's why we shared the video that the foundation because we wanted our parents to sit down with their children and say hey let's watch this video together in case what would you do I'm a parent so that's I talked to my daughters about like hey this happens this is follow but this some other additional information you can use so I
095think part of that is having that conver parents to have the conversation with their students. Yeah, I tried it with my son. Took me four years till my daughter made it through and then I learned what we do. So So yeah, that share that sharing of information is is is is a big part of it. Again, it's it's we can teach you something, but until you do it, that's really when you get it right. Um something I just wanted to talk about in terms of physical safety. We do not do physical safety without emotional and mental health safety. Um I have been through behavioral threat assessment training, advanced behavioral threat assessment training. I'm part of the um association of threat assessment professionals because I believe in that prevention part of it to identify individuals who
096are in crisis prior to it becoming a problem. And to your point, it is a culture thing. If we create a culture where people feel free that they can say things, right, that they know that they're supported and how we get them from here for that adult life, right? This is all preparation for adult life and that's how we look at it to get them through that to make sure that that not only physically but emotionally, mentally they're safe as well. Do we do anything with the nurs's office to coordinate with the nurs's office as well too on the medical side because we we have a number of phenomenal athletes and they're some really risky things I've seen them do and that's where injuries and they're helping each other out but if they don't know
097what they're doing uh that any practice or coordination there that happens with the nurs's office. Yeah, great question in terms of training. Yeah. Um there's definitely some education pieces that the nurses and now our health center is also going to be providing to athletics in different areas. Um so we're looking forward to that. We're definitely um planned at least two sports for this year. Um that the health center is going to be um meeting with the coaches and the students and and doing some training. Our nurses work very closely with the athletic trainers and um athletics in terms of identifying proactive and just I mean simple that they you know the hold in place gets one person goes and stays with this person while then someone gets the trainer who's at the other side of
098the room just simple things like that but yeah okay wonderful to hear. Yeah, I I will also say that um with the cardiac uh response plan uh with the requirement of within the first 30 days, people are trained in CPR. And I think we're going to train close to 80 people in CPR prior to that 30 days. So that's just another thing that we're doing. CPR, AED, first aid, and stop the bleed. Thank you. All right. So final comment. I'm sorry that I know we can be here all night, but um actually Mr. Lawaki reminded me of this. We had a change in terms of use of cell phone. So talking about communications and expectation and reunification. Are we working enough with our community outside of the school, our parents to understand that if something
099happens, the text may not get an answer not because something had happened but just because the student doesn't have the cell phone with him or with her on hand. I think there is one element of our school operations in which our parents and students are acutely aware and that is that they do need to place their phone in a phone caddy uh when they enter an instructional area. So I think that's clear. One of the areas I think that we're still all navigating and I think Mrs. Hughes and Dr. Georgees would agree is as we um progress through drills the question comes up. So let me understand this correctly when do you remember when a secure when a lock down when a hold when these different things happen what happens with the devices that are
100in the caddy and our current procedures are that it ultimately comes down to the adults in the room to make a decision. In many situations the devices are returned to students. in some situations, especially in an evacuation when you just need to get out, they may not be. Um, so we've kind of navigated through that. But one of the the big investments that we also worked on um to make sure that everyone's in the loop, and we learned this um at both of our schools in different emergencies, is making sure if students don't have a device in front of them, that we have a way to amplify and communicate largecale messaging to them so they know what to do in different situation. And oftentimes that message or those messages mimic what's also being shared with
101parents. So we've had a few different approaches to make sure communication on all sides are improved. Thank you. Well, thank you again. Thank you for the presentation. We're going to move to the next item on the agenda, which is the district policy manual modernization project status update. Well, long title. Thank you uh so much, Jen, RSLi, and Joel. Thank you. Um as we go to the next item um we talked about the importance um my friends from civics you are okay to go if you need you are welcome to take your pictures as well. Um one of the commitments we made when we started the policy modernization project um was to make sure that we are continuing to provide updates. And so as a as a regular standing item on our board of education agenda,
102we're going to be talking about this even if there's not a lot of stuff that's happened so far. But uh last week uh in the room right next door um Miss Mullenbeck, Mr. O'Hara and a variety of our cabinet members joined together to talk about policies and we had a wonderful experience going through some questions which Dr. Johns will just give a little uh background on. Thank you, Dr. Grall. The beauty of this subject or this topic is we can all let our heart rates go down a little bit. Doesn't cause as much anxiety uh as we work on a project that I think is really important. As you recall, the board approved the administration's recommendation on August 25th to participate in the IASB custom policy manual um customization process. Two days later, we held
103our first meeting. We met with two IASB representatives uh uh Angela Powell and Nicholas Bowman. Uh that's the assistant director and the director of the policy services for the IASB. This was an open meeting as as expected from the IASB. The uh early big stages of this process will be held in open meetings and we initiated the review. The review was pretty simple. We had pretty much all of the administrative cabinet in the room along with the two board members and they asked us questions related to the structure of the district uh pertinent job titles uh district specific terms and policies that are unique to the district that we would probably want to sustain and many of those will come back. uh what we have are approximately I lost track about 45 policies that are
104unique to district 225 and I would say 80% of those could be consolidated into existing IASB policies. So that's something that they're going to look uh into for us so that we can clean up some pieces of our policy manual. Um there was a a great session, a lot of participation. the representatives from the ISB were grateful for everyone's participation and our readiness to have the policy conversation that we had. So the next step now is to wait. So for the next approximate 30 days, the ISBE um team will look at the answers that we gave them to create the to take their template and customize it according to our needs. We're expecting to hear back in like I said 30 days. uh at which time we'll hold another public meeting to hear um the
105outcomes and the follow-up questions that the IASB has. Uh we'll provide another update in coming coming meetings. Thank you. Um I guess our next item is possible topics for future board meetings. any you always can reach out to RJ and Sandy but if anybody has any idea I would offer next meeting if I recall correctly we'll be focused on um mental health supports for our students so looking at safety from a different perspective um Dr. Cummings. Is that correct? Our second safety presentation is next meeting, October 14th. Oh, forgive me. October 14th. Um, I know we have another item scheduled for next week, but I'll follow up with that. I'm forgetting right now. All right. And you mentioned earlier actually our next meeting is not two weeks from now, but three weeks from now. That
106is correct. So just in recognition um of one of our religious observances, we will not meet at on the fourth uh Monday of the month. We'll proceed to the fifth Monday of the month. Um and then just another reminder, our meeting after that um is around the Columbus Day holiday. And because the Columbus Day holiday is on a Monday, even though we're in session, the board meeting will be on the Tuesday uh after Columbus Day. So, two meetings slightly off schedule. All right. Okay. I know you all want to continue, but I will entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. All in favor? I. Any opposed? Motion carries. Thank you everybody. And we're talking about communications next meeting. Oh, don't we have the communications committee? That's right.