001Okay, good evening everybody. We're going to go ahead and get the meeting started. I'm going to call to order the board of education meeting this evening, Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026 at 6 pm here at Frederick School. We'll do a roll call. Mac >> here. >> Braden here. >> Nash. Halverson >> here. >> Hun >> here. >> Miller >> here. Weedman >> here. >> Hollenstein >> here. >> Capner >> here. >> And Verma >> here. >> Wonderful. We're welcoming our student board representatives tonight. Genevieve, Olivia, and Soni. Welcome to the board table. We're looking forward to your board reports. We do have a quorum. Please join me for the pledge. Okay, thank you. Need a vote to a motion, sorry, to approve the agenda for this evening. >> I'll move >> second. >> Okay, >> Miller.
002>> I >> Halverson. >> I Weedman. >> Hi, >> Braden. I and Hume >> I >> Okay, thank you. Agenda's approved. Do we have any public comments signed up on the bottom there? >> None. Okay. Okay. Then we get to the good stuff here. We are welcoming Frederick and GMS and Park Campus wrestlers this evening for recognition. So, welcome. We're excited to have you here. And I'll hand it over to Mr. Smith. >> Thank you very much for the invite tonight. Yes, we do have our wrestling team. And as kind of expected when it's the middle of April and wrestling season, it's been over for a while. Our kiddos are all off and doing some other things tonight. But we do have about four or five of our wrestlers here to be celebrated with us
003tonight. And I did bring some of their hardware, the the light kind because I left the heavy one that's almost as tall as I am at the building. So I did not bring that tonight. Uh but you're going to see in just a minute on how successful our team was. I have coach Hines with us and coach Welter come on over too. We want to celebrate our coaches. Our coach Welter come on over. >> Good good evening everyone. I just want to share some of the highlights we have from the season. To start off um this year we did not lose a duel. We went 14-0. Um, we won conference as a team. We had five champs and 24 places at conference. We won the regionals as a team. We had seven champs and 14
004placesers. We also won sectionals as a team. We had seven state qualifiers. And then we took six at state. And then at state, we had three in the finals. We had one win state one and two take second. >> Thank you. It was a great season and a team effort all year. The kids work very hard all year to achieve their goals and this led to all of our success in our tournaments. They're a very good group of kids, very eager to learn and get better. We could not have done it all without the help of all our wonderful coaches and volunteers. We had five volunteers throughout the year who dedicate their time to help these kids grow as wrestlers. Excited to see what the eighth graders leaving can do as they go into high
005school and to see what our returning wrestlers can accomplish next season. >> Thank Thank you. the wrestlers that saved time to come here. Could I have you stand up, please? >> Lincoln, don't sit down. Lincoln, don't sit down. >> The one that just sat down and stood back up, he took second this year. >> Congratulations, Congratulations everybody. We've got some ribbons up here for you. So, would the wrestlers come forward for a little little ribbon? >> Congratulations. Nice job. Great job. >> Great job. >> Outstanding. Congratulations. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. We celebrate you and that's a great achievement for the season. We're very proud of you. Uh that will bring us to the Graves Lake Middle School way of the Panther presentation. Absolutely. >> You don't need to go, but you we
006understand if you if you >> you don't want to stay for the whole thing. >> BRAVO. And Mr. Smith, I'll hand it back over to you again. Yep. >> Yep. Speaking of busy kids, you'll notice that I only have four friends with me tonight, and that is not usual. We have five or six of our teammates at Avon currently tonight working with the Avon reading and math night that they have going on. So, they were excited to do that. And we have a trackmate at GMS, not at GMS, but at Lakes High School. And quite a few of our teammates are in track as well. So, they're off running and jumping and throwing and things tonight, too. So, we have our four very dedicated teammates are going to be part of that presentation here tonight.
007So, again, thank you for inviting us. Um, I am, as I always am, I'm super excited to bring all of the updates, but this is at towards the end of the year where we have done some really heavy lifting and the group that we have had this year has done some amazing work. So, I'm excited for them to be able to show that off tonight. So, here we go. What have I really done so far? But to be honest, what haven't we done so far? Since late September, we have met at least weekly in full group or small group meetings to continue to fulfill the goals we set to achieve in order in the areas we update you on tonight. Our team members continue to be are eager to find ways to make our school
008a better place for for our students, staff, and families to ensure that everyone at Grey Lake Middle School feels safe and welcome to visit and learn with us. As you already know, we had many ideas to work on this year, but we narrowed our focus to put our time and energy into just a few of those big ideas that we felt were most important to us. The ideas were No Place for Hate, career exploration for our eighth graders, JMS community garden, and seventh grade orientation. our first big idea that we we worked on this year was our focus on GMS being a no place for hate. We have been working with Mrs. Dillian and Mrs. Palmer to expand our no place for hate building level expectations and get the message to all our students that
009GMS at GMS that bullying and unkind language and and actions are not okay. We have we helped to spread awareness around the school and community. We have we helped plan five lessons from the Anti-Defamation League. Identify trees, words that hurt, human health, identify and bias, impact, rumors and gossip. We helped facil facilitate the 2025 to 26 climate survey to October 2025 and May 2026. Our May 4th survey will be our last end or will be our end of the year survey and advisory and we will compare our October and May results posters that include kindness, positiv positivity and mental health awareness. We have been reviewing the data and as you can see that we still have work to do. As we continue to lead this initiative with Miss Julian and Miss Palmer this year, we
010will look to brainstorm more ideas to try help our students use kind language and actions around our building at all times. We worked on providing bulletin boards positivity around our school. Quotes, music, m movie quotes, story quotes, and famous people. Example, as we updated you last time, Mr. Brian Williams came to GMS to encourage us to be more kind and grateful and do anything slash everything we can do to make a difference. His presentation was amazingly engaging and left a positive impact in all of us at GMS. Here are some of the no place for hate posters that were posted around the school. The next big project we had was career exploration. We have been working with Miss Blackburn to create a plan and implement career exploration lunch and learn opportunities for our fellow GMS
011eighth grade students. We've had six se six sessions so far from an attorney, firefighter, teacher, an athletic coach, engineer, and two nurses. These are fun and engagement and some ways they are is fun and educational sessions exploring several career options and pathways. They're highly engaging students and students ask insightful questions. We have positive feedback on learning what professional life is is actually like. We're proud that we've been able to get this opportunity started. We first heard from a lawyer and attorney where we not only got to see what a lawyer and attorney did from day to day, but also the education that went in to becoming an attorney. We also had a firefighter and we learned that um what firefighters do on a daily basis. And I've learned that um sorry that the firefight gear
012is very heavy. We also got to hear from a high school teacher and coach. This was really cool because we were able to see what an actual teaching job was like and he really gave us a run through on what we would have to be able to do to be able to become a teacher and coach. Another one would be engineering. We learned how to read a blueprint and what different types of engineering there is. Our most recent career that was able to come was nursing. I went to this one and it was very interesting to learn about all the different nurses you can be. And it's not just one flat nurse. We got to see different types. There has been a huge p this there has been a huge impact on our students through
013this process. There's been an increased awareness of career options, better understanding of different pathways and opportunities available at the tech campus in high school and CLC. Student engagement, ownership, and leadership. We have a few more sessions still scheduled for this year. If the Way of the Panther group continues career exploration, lunch and learns next year, we suggest using what we've done so they can start earlier. Try to host lunch and learns during a period where there are more time that students can ask more questions. Consider including seventh graders and consider a career fair type of experience in the evening. Kind of like navigate 8 but at our school and just for us. Expand the variety of career fields represented. Thank you so much to our community volunteers and staff support. Another one of our main
014focuses was the GMS community garden. Our continued planning has led us to many discussions about our community garden and what will look like from now and in the future. If you remember us talking about the field trip to the existing Grace Lake community garden earlier last fall. We learned from the gardener who helped us be there that during our trip many of the current gardeners were many years retired. Each of the gardeners were expected to bring their own tools and maintain their own space. The water source is an important part of the garden and it needs to be very carefully located because some of them were a little bit far away. Um the compost pile was very full and becomes very large and sometimes hard to add to. Maintaining your own space means different things
015and different gardeners and some spaces become a little bit overgrown while others are a bit nicer. Gardens have the gardeners have the opportunity to plant what they'd like. Some stick solely to vegetables while others add flowers to them. We we have a section of land at the north end of our of our school parking lot that is currently only been been used for a long jump pit. We think this section of land can be used more productively. We heard that there are Grace Lake community members who are on the wait list for the garden plot every spring. We think our students can learn more by digging in. We have the means and the space and we decided that we can do something better with this space. What we've been working on so far this spring
016and with the help of Mr. Zach Smith and Mr. Dave New from the village of Grace Lake. We have planned for 12 garden plots that are 20 by 20. GMS will utilize four of these plots. These 12 plots will get cut and tilt for a new gardener soon. We will soon purchase a water tank that will be stationed at the GMS community gardener for gardeners to use. We will design and order signage and fencing for the garden. You guys also have a little picture of the plots how we're expecting to have them. Okay, this spring we will continue to work with our food service representatives and our teaching staff to determine what is needed to be planted the most in our school plots so we can harvest this fall and utilize the food right here
017at GMS for our students. We've already purchased the seeds to start our classroom windows. We will also continue working with our GMS staff more to determine how else our GMS gardens can be utilized within the lesson plans our staff teaches at GMS. One of the things Olivia did not say because she's been very instrumental throughout this process this year in the mockup of the gardens that we have. She has been very purposeful in making sure that they are in a place where the water source is centrally located as she spoke of earlier and making sure that as we talked about earlier thinking about who our gardeners are and what they need while they're there of making sure that they are very accessible and the opportunities to be able to move is is easy as well.
018So, one of the things that she has really been purposeful on is making sure that all of that is part of our plan because we've gone back and forth with the village about four times on what the design of this is going to look like. And what you have in front of you tonight is what our final plan is, which is not where it started and it looks much better as it does today than what it did at the beginning. So again, Olivia is not taking credit for some credit that she is due on that. Going forward into the future, we have really big ideas. We would like to have a tool shed and start a share a tool program where um people have access access to different tools that they might not be not
019able to have by themselves. Uh we would like raised bread and more landscaping ideas. Uh beautifification projects as we called it. But basically just making the water tank look better because it's going to be big and white kind of ugly. So maybe just painting it and making it pretty. So that can be a project and also working with Mr. Week, our art teacher, and having students make signs for each of the different beds. Uh improved water system hopefully um seed saving program and many other ideas that we're leaving to next year's team. Our final big project is the seventh grade orientation. We've planned our seventh grade GMS orientation event a bit differently this year. Our current Frederick School sixth graders will come over to GMS on Monday, May 11th during the school day for a
020tour of GMS with our Way of the Panther leadership team members. On Tuesday, May 12th from 6:30 to 8, the Way of the Panther team is inviting all current sixth grader, sixth grade students and families to join us for a GMS openhouse night. During this time, we will have a short meeting with our GMS admin slash deans and way of the Panther students. And then from 7 to 8, our building will be open for families to walk around and visit our athletic and activity fair to learn more about how they can get involved at GMS next year. As you can see, we've been incredibly busy this school year. Thank you for continuing to invite us to your meetings so we can share all of the things we've done. We appreciate your willingness to help us
021pursue our passions and give back to those in our school and community. Working on our projects this year have enabled us to put our leadership skills into action to impact others around us. >> I usually don't speak this much during this time, but with the last one, I'd also have a few people that I'd like to thank for their extra hard work as well. Um, so it's been a pleasure as it is every year to work with our leadership team and as you can see they have really put their ideas into action this year and that's been incredibly wonderful to see. But it's also with some direction from others around our building. So Mrs. Dulian if you could stand up and Miss Blackburn if you could stand up and Mrs. Murphy, Mr. Jagger, if you
022could stand up as well and also Mrs. Palmer who is unable to be here tonight, but when our team gets together, all five of us adults get together with them and we're part of that team as well cuz we're way of the panther, too. So, thank you for your extra help. Thank you. >> Thank you very much. That is incredibly rewarding and positive to listen to these presentations. It's one of the things that I enjoy the most and you are having an enormous impact on our district and our community. So, thank you for sharing that. Um, board members, anybody have comments or or additional questions you'd like to share? Yeah, Mrs. Miller. >> So, I is this on? Um, I'm so excited to hear about all the work that you're doing. Thank you so much
023for the continued um faithful contributions that you've made. And I have a question about the gardens. So, maybe Olivia, you can help me understand a little bit. Yeah. So, you've been really focused on making sure that our gardeners have access to water and I'm curious, is it a tank that we fill from the building or is it does it catch rain water? Can you tell us just about that? How it works? >> Um, it is a tank that we fill really big. So, hold a lot of water for a long amount of time so we don't have to constantly come back and forth filling it. You got to start somewhere, right? Yeah, absolutely. And then my last question was about is there any Did you talk about compost at all? Is that part of what
024you were because you're doing that in the cafeterias? Am I catching you off guard? It's okay. >> Um, we did talk about that a little bit. We were talking about in the beginning of the year at least a lot of like kind of making organic soil that we can kind of put in there from the compost so that it doesn't get crazy big like the existing community garden because it's really really big like overflowing. And that's kind of end up doing. Sorry, I should get the mic as well. So, we're going to take four of those plots and we are going to be very purposeful after meeting with our food service um staff. We're being very purposeful on what we're planting in our plots this year for the first time through. So that we are
025hoping to be able to uh this fall be able to take and harvest what we grew and put it right back into our students with their lunch programming. And then yes, we are talking about our indoor program, our compost program and seeing what we can do about making that something that we do outside as well. Taking that right outside and be able to do that right on campus. >> So it sounds like you've started something that's going to continue long after you leave. So, thank you so much, >> Miss Hume. >> I just wanted to commend you all because you know this you with all of these initiatives, you know, you kept referring to them as big ideas and they are, but they also have a lot of small details and it seems like you
026take the big ideas and and then you make sure that the all of the details come together really nicely. And the garden is such a nice metaphor because not only is it awesome for the community, but it takes the whole community to do it. Um, and you're planting seeds for the future with all of these projects, which is so impressive. Um, and I just kind of, you know, wanted to to point out that like the thoughtfulness of being inclusive of all groups, you know, that's within the school and outside of this the school into the community as well. Um, and also that you reflect on how to improve for the future. And that is so helpful for the new students who will be coming in to be able to build on what you've started and
027what you continue to do. And just all of those steps helps to just kind of help the whole community to bloom. So, thank you so much for all that work. >> Other comments. >> Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you very very much. Bravo. Okay, that brings us to uh the board report section of this evening and we will um I think we'll begin with our student board representatives this evening. I understand that each of you have a board report to share. This is the time which we all get a chance to share a little bit if we have anything. Um, I'll just go kind of from furthest to closest. So, Sanvi, I'll let you begin. >> Activities around GMS. We have a lot going on in the last five weeks of the school year.
028First, many of our fellow Way of the Panther teammates are at Avon tonight helping out with their math and reading night. We know they are going to help our future Panthers learn more about these important academics tonight. Also, the Way of the Panther team will take a field trip to work with the residents of Matias Academy on May 12th. We're going bowling, eating lunch, and hopefully bringing a little sunshine into their lives. In addition to that, we are planning for our 7th grade orientation event that will take place on Monday, May 11th, and Tuesday, May 12th. On May 11th, our future seventh graders from Frederick School will come over and take a tour of GMS during the day. Then at then starting at 6:30 on Tuesday, May 12th, all future GMS families are invited to
029our GMS open house which will include an activity fair in the large gym, an open house of the building and a question and answer session from with our way of the panther team and GMS administration and deans of student. Finally, not to overlook the most important event of the remainder of the school year, our eighth grade celebration and graduation ceremony are coming up too. Our eighth grade celebration will take place on a Friday, May 15th from 6:30 to 9:30. And our graduation ceremony will take place on Wednesday, May 20th at 7:30 in the fieldhouse on campus of the College of Lake County. My board my board report is activities around our GMS school. Um, I'm very pleased to say that I testing is finally done, but we do have MAP testing. It's right around the
030corner and we will be taking the map test on May 4th and 5th. Last week, the Way of the Panther team with met with our district architects and district office staff, including Dr. Carmona, to look at the plans for the future Woodview, Avon, and GMS media centers. We worked together to give our district architects some ideas on what those three media centers could look like from the students point of view. Thank you for giving us that opportunity. We had fun thinking about the redesigns of those new spaces. Mr. Thomas, can you please stand up? The GMS Jazz Band took the long trip downtown last Wednesday night to play on the stage of the jazz showcase. The GMS Jazz Band has been taking this trip for many years, and it's an amazing experience to play on
031the same stage as so many past and current professional jazz musicians. Thank you, Mr. Promise, for continuing to look for so many great opportunities for your GMS musicians every year. Your dedication to our school is amazing. Thank you. Last Thursday night was the Frederick and GMS middle school talent show. It was two hours of showing off the best talents from our students across our district. Thank you to Becky Foster and Natalie Warden for hosting triyouts in the show. Congratulations to all of our D46 students who performed wonderfully. And finally, please stand up, Miss Corey. We know you've been updated about our GMS community St. balls event that GMS hosts every spring. But we'd like to celebrate Miss Amy Cormy Amy Corey for her hard work and dedication to this event year after year. Over the
03211 years that we've hosted our event, we've raised more than $175,000 to give back to the St. Baldick's Foundation. That's almost $16,000 donated on average each year. Thank you, Miss Corey. As you can see, we've had so much going on GMS lately. Thank you for the time to share tonight. Okay. Um, and then last update is on GMS athletics. Obviously, our wrestlers had an amazing season. They had lots of success and brought GMS awards for their dominating season. Congratulations to our two state bowlers as well, Austin Barrows and Angel Kovazos. They both participated in the ESA state bowling tournament last weekend and showed off their amazing skills. Also, our Frederick School and GMS track team is off to a great start this season. Our meets have been super cold so far, but the talent of
033our team is amazing. Our spring season goes quick, so there's only a few weeks before our conference meet and then onto sectionals and maybe even state meet for some of our track members. We'll see. GMS is also bringing a new sport to our lineup. We will introduce golf as a summertime inter mural activity. We have been working with Renwood Golf Course in Grace Lake to get some tea times for our interested Panthers and those of on the team will be able to participate in the IASA sectionals and state tournaments next fall. Looking even further out, GMS will be researching this school year the possibility of adding a girls flag football team to our conference play lineup as well. Three schools started this activity in the spring and they are looking for more teams in our
034conference to join. Both our high schools in D127 offer this activity to their students. So, we're excited to look in to this for our future Panthers as well. I'd like Miss Sandy Tangler to stand up. For those of you who don't know, Miss Tangler has been our GMS athletic and activities director for the past many years, and she is retiring at the end of this school year. All students and families, both past and present, have benefited from her dedication to our school and after school activities. Thank you, Miss Tangler, for your time and dedication to GMS. We appreciate you. >> That's all we have. Thank you. >> Thank you very very much, Sanvi and Genevie and Olivia for your board reports. I'll just continue in this direction. Miss Alverson, >> I have no board report
035this evening. >> Thank you, Miss Hun. >> I do not have a board report. >> Mrs. Braden, >> uh, no board reports. >> Okay. Thank you. >> I just want to welcome everybody to the board meeting this evening. our staff, our teachers, our representatives, the athletes earlier. We have, I believe, Grace Lake Central students here as well for their uh government class, I believe, or one of them. Uh we'll take a picture with you at the end if you need proof um that you were here. Dr. Carmona is here this evening, our incoming superintendent. So, welcome and glad to have you here again this evening. And that's all I have. So, I'll pass it along to Mrs. Miller. >> Thank you, Dr. Mack. Um, first of all, happy Earth to everyone. And, uh, the other
036two, three, uh, announcements I have are about the CC, the community engagement committee. If you're not familiar with that, we meet once a month to talk about, bring PTO leaders together to so they can exchange ideas. And they've been super busy all year, but especially this month. So, we have a food drive this week. So, if anyone has food, you can drop it off at Avon, Meadow View, or Woodview. And there's also a QR code for Amazon. So, if you don't have food that's that you want to donate, you can just scan a QR code. They're on the flyers that have gone out with students. And that's a great way to support Avon Township Food Pantries. Thank you also to our PTO letter leaders and staff who have been um organizing discovery days and adventure
037days and imagination days and really community together. Um, so they're hard at work doing that as well. And then the last thing is for the policy committee. Um, just a reminder that the press plus update is out and there's also a webinar that IB has and I can send I'll send you the link to it, but it gives an overview. It's an hour, but it gives an overview of this press update. So, >> thank you, Mr. Weedman. Um so last Wednesday uh a portion of our board was able to go to the spring meeting for the ISB and they were talking about the big topic was AI. Um it was interesting because the one main speaker was talking about allowing the use of AI in class and um but he said it's AI is advancing
038keep up with it and we need to be very careful how we implement it into our schools and allowing our students to use it to do their work. Interesting enough, there was a college professor in my audience who actually stood up and pushed back quite a bit regarding the use of AI in the classroom. Um, as a professor, she said that she saw many times where the papers were questions or the answers to the questions were nearly identical to each other in the classroom. So, the students all the students in her classroom were having the same identical answer all the same parameters into AI. They have to write the answer just So there was a little bit of push back from the college professor used to be used. So I um I think as we
039look forward as a board and policies and school policies that we probably should keep AI in the forefront of how it's going to be used and how allow in the future because it could have a detrimental impact on students. They're not using their critical Thank you, Mr. Weedman. >> Okay, that concludes the board report section of this evening's meeting. I will hand it over to Dr. Glickman for the superintendent report. >> Thank you, Dr. Mack. Um, thank you so much, GMS students. Um, what an amazing job and we're so excited about everything that is still to come, including eighth grade graduation. And I did want to mention that um Park Campus eighth graders are also graduating on May 20th at CLC in the fieldhouse. They'll be at 5:30. So 5:30 forward for um Park Campus
040and then 7:30 for GMS. Um yes, today is Earth Day. Happy Earth Day. And there have been lots of events around the school district. Here is just a sampling of what we've been doing. There's been planting and cleaning up of gardening areas. Right now, oh no, not right now. Friday night, there's a math and reading night at one of our schools connected to Earth Day activities. One of our schools has a full spirit week. We had Earth Day scavenger hunts today, an Earth Day escape room. It just went on and on. So, big day today. Also, today was administrative uh administrator professionals day. Um, and we are so glad to thank our hardworking souls who take care of our officer, our offices and our our staff and our people and the families that come in
041and the students that come in. Um, you are often the first people that anybody sees with a concern and comforts people with support. So, we are so very um grateful to our administrative professionals. Um this morning I had the pleasure to attend the IPA student recognition breakfast. IPA is the Illinois uh principles association and we had 10 wonderful students from our school district who are being honored at this breakfast. They were selected by staff at their schools as people who um are leaders in their schools. And I was going to name them all, but better yet, we're going to invite them all to come to our May 13th board meeting. So, we'll get a chance to honor those students and their families on May 13th. Um, I too wanted to welcome our high school students
042who are here tonight for your government class. Um, high school students, if you took a look at the agenda, I'm just going to do a quick little agenda review for you. I'll be done soon. We have a very quick consent agenda. Then we have some action items and some new business. The last new business um topic is our strategic planning proposals. We have four uh consultants who are coming to speak to the board to share their ideas about how to do strategic planning next year and then the board will be ultimately selecting who they're going to be working with. I mention that because that is about two hours worth of presentation. So, I know you got to take a picture. I don't know what you're required to do, but we can pause before that happens
043for you to take your picture is all I'm going to say about that. And uh Dr. Mack, that's the end of the superintendent's report tonight. >> Two hours. >> You invited >> I might sneak out with the >> All right. Thank you, Dr. Glickman. Okay. Uh, I need a motion, please, to approve this evening's consent agenda, which includes the personnel addendum sent to us earlier. >> I'll move. I'll second. >> Okay. >> Braden, >> I Hume >> I >> Halverson >> I >> Miller >> I >> Mac >> I >> and Weedman. >> Okay, thank you. We do have two action items today. I need a motion to approve the exterior masonry work as it was presented. >> I'll move. >> I'll second. >> Dr. M. I just miss Miller. Yeah. >> Quick comment. >>
044Um I just want to remind the board there's a lot of concrete that we're purchasing and spending money on. Concrete is one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet and it's something that um is going to be less might be less and less durable given extreme weather. The freeze and thaw and and the water that comes from from precipitation. So, I'm wondering just marking it that we may want to take a look at Woodb just installed some permeable pavers in their outdoor classroom. It might be interesting to compare the durability of both options for future construction. So, just um just an idea as we go into strategic planning about the sustainability targets that we have agreed to set. So, something we might want to pay attention to. >> Okay. Thank you. Okay. >>
045Weedman. >> Hi. >> Miller. >> Hi. >> Mac. >> I >> Braden. >> Hi. >> Hun. >> I. >> And Halverson. >> I. >> Okay. Thank you. Motion carries. I need a motion to approve the door replacement project as it has was presented to us. >> I'll move. I'll second. >> Okay. >> Weedman. >> Hi. >> Miller. I >> Mac >> I >> Braden >> I >> Hume >> I >> and Halverson >> I >> Okay, motion carries. Uh we do not have any unfinished business to discuss this evening. We do have a couple of items for the new business and this will lead us to the strategic planning proposals in a minute. First up is the extension for auditing services with Baker Tilly US LLP and handing that over to Mr. Goldstein. We are
046in the last uh audit uh of our last contract with Baker Tilly. We moved to them I believe three years ago uh from Miller Cooper. Uh it was a staffing and cost issue. Um we ended up uh bringing in Baker Baker Tilly and have been very happy with their services. They do uh however report directly to the board. Uh they are auditing uh at Jerby Hest. Um we've had a good relationship with them. We find them to be very very thorough and produce a good product. Um the you do have an option when you have a professional service like this to extend uh without going out to bid. Uh we did reach out to um the new superintendent and Mr. Wald the new uh business manager um and uh discuss this with them and how
047they'd like to proceed in conjunction with Dr. Glickman and myself. Uh I did speak to our team as well who supplies the information to them and have said they are a good team to work with. A lot of is done remotely. Uh we upload things into their drive and they uh do come out and do look at personnel files. Um we decided together as a group to uh bring forth to the uh board that information that we were looking to renew uh do a two-year renewal. We were I had them structured as a one, two, and threeear options. um that will give um the new uh administrative team time to work with the uh the group. The actual audit work this summer will start before they come and then finish uh after they have started
048and and Dr. Glickman and myself are gone. Um so there would be some overlap uh of that and it'd be good to have um that running into next year as well next summer. Uh so we felt it best to bring forth a two-year extension. Um the increases are five and 4% which are in line with what we've been seeing o over the years. There are a limited number of firms that do do audit work in schools. Um so there's not a whole lot of them out there and and the prices in the range that you're seeing. I'm happy to answer any questions regarding the extension. >> Any questions from the board? >> I do not. Thank you, Mr. >> Goldstein. And moving into the vendor quote for assembly, disassembly, and storage of media center furniture.
049Uh as this goes over the slightly over the 20,000 threshold for uh board consideration. Uh this is uh a contract we've negotiated with Frank uh with education um educational environmental uh educational environments. Uh they're also known as Frank Cooney. We've done many many projects with them over the years u and have uh worked well with them. um they know our schools well. They will be coming in to uh take apart, disassemble. Uh we will be storing the furniture on site that will be uh put back into the media centers uh during the projects this year. And uh the contract is for $25,640 and they will be looking to start um in uh uh as right as we finish school. Happy to answer any questions regarding that. questions from the board? No. >> Thank you, Mr.
050Goldstein. >> Okay, that brings us to the strategic planning proposal. So, if you would like a picture with the board for Grace Lake Central before we go into the riveting two hours of strategic planning, we can do that. We can pause the board meeting for a moment. Darl, we Let's just ask questions. >> Is that okay? >> Yeah, we've got questions. So, Jim, you start us off. We'll go down. questions. Read the question. >> Okay, that brings us to to strategic planning proposals this evening. >> And Dr. Glickman, I will >> certainly. Um, sorry. >> No, no, no, no. >> Okay. Um, so we would like to welcome first Elise Brene from CEC. Am I saying your name correctly? I'm >> Crystal. I'm sorry we haven't seen each other in person. Oh, you know what?
051I Yes, Elise is who we were speaking with. Welcome. >> Thank you for being here tonight. Yeah. Thank you. >> Yeah. Now I can hear myself so much better and I don't have to use my teacher voice. This is awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Well, good evening. My name is Crystal Connley. I am field director at CEC or Catalyst for Educational Change and we are a nonprofit organization who works with school districts all over the country with all things continuous improvement. Um strategic planning is one of the things that is near and dear to our hearts. We are a um over 40-year organization that is grounded in labor management collaboration is how we started. So strategic planning and the continuous improvement efforts of school districts is part of our mission. Um the work that we
052do is data focused, collaborative focused, and really about building capacity in districts, making sure that there's ownership so as a nonprofit, we can slowly work our way out of a job. That's our goal. Um when it comes to strategic planning, you'll hear a few things that we do tonight um that set us apart. Um we definitely come with clear goals, strategies, priorities. Um, but there's a few really special things that we do as well. Um, and I want to talk to you a little bit about those um, in a little bit of detail in the 15 minutes that I have. So, this is our process. Um, our process has three very clear phases. Uh, that first phase is preparation. This is our work with district leaders. Um, also gathering stakeholder input. And I'll go into
053each of these a little bit. Um but that's really preparing the system for the work we're going to be doing. The second part is the development phase and that is where we actually start looking at information, looking at data, perspective data, um the um your district reports, all of those things. We start looking at those. We start listening to stakeholders and then we actually start doing the work and developing the plan. When we get into phase three, this is where the launch happens. This is where we're testing language with your step your stakeholders and now we're saying awesome we have this amazing plan that's been approved now how are we going to live it and that's where the sweet spot comes in it's that living the plan so I want to go really quickly through
054our process so number one um that prepare process you'll see we start off with our leaders looking at your current plan what does your sun setting plan tell you how does Does it still apply to where you are right now? We always want to start with the great things that are happening. We do that. This is a current district uh where we're finalizing a plan right now in Manuka. Um we do that with leaders coming around looking really wrestling with their current plan, thinking about what is their vision for the district, where do you want the district to go? How does that align with where you are right now? So again, this is a pretty standard process that we go through. Um, part of this process also at this phase is collecting stakeholder information. How
055do your stakeholders feel about your current plan and the direction of the district? And so part of that is gathering all of that data in that preparation phase. When we move into phase two, now we're developing. So now we're looking at what is what does our data show? What is our current reality? So this is when we pull a full steering committee we like to call them together. Um that can be your district cabinet team. Many districts will expand it to building leaders, union leaders. This is really the team that does the major work of strategic planning. So we have that data workshop where we're really digging into the data and we're analyzing and figuring out what is it telling us? What does our current reality picture show? In that session, we also do some
056visioning. If this is what it's showing is where do we want to go? Where are we now and where do we want to go? That's our focus. This the wonderful part about that session is then we take that information and plan our stakeholder sessions. So you'll see right below that the stakeholder sessions are really the heartbeat of what we do. I'm going to talk a lot about engaging stakeholders in this process because it's one of those foundational pieces to us. So we take that information and we say what information do we need to hear back from stakeholders based on the data that we just reviewed. Is this their lived reality? Is this a surprise to them? Is this confirming for them? How are they feeling about those things? Getting some feedback. Really deepening our understanding
057around what the priorities really are from your stakeholders. And one of the things that's really important is in our process is this full engagement of your stakeholder groups. You'll see we do surveys, we can do focus groups, we have stakeholder sessions, we also do draft testing. There are intentional feedback loops throughout our entire process. So your stakeholders from the very beginning are involved all along the way because we want to keep asking them the question, are we getting it right? We don't want to wait until the end for them to say, "We don't even know your direction. We don't even know where you're going and we don't agree." No, they know right from the beginning. We start getting their feedback. This is again our Manuka team. But what I want you to recognize is the
058power of this process. There are students in all of our stakeholder sessions and they are the loudest voice at the table. We have stakeholder teams in these sessions. Every table has at least one student. We like to have two or three. You'll see from the pictures here, students are at charts. They're looking at district data. They're talking about, "Well, I hear what you're saying about data, but that's not my lived experience. Here's what I see." It changes the entire conversation that the adults are having. When you have kids at the table who can speak up and who can talk about their lived experience and what they really want from their district, it is super powerful. So our stakeholders, we're it's really important to us that we hear these things from them. Then we take those
059perspectives and those perspectives are what we use along with your district reports, your district data and that is what guides our strategic planning process. So stakeholder voice is huge in this um process that we use. So then finally we take all of that and we have our roadmap retreat. Now the fun starts because now we get to build the road map. We decided where we are. What is our current reality? Our data showed us that. Then we built this vision. We got feedback from your stakeholders to say yes, we agree with that vision. We love it. We're right on board. Or maybe you're a little there, but we need to tweak some things. So all we take all of that in and now we build the plan. The wonderful part about this is coming out
060of this you have a draft plan but we're not done because there's another feedback loop. So again you'll see here you'll see leaders coming together taking all of that information and doing the drafting of their plan. But after that we still send out more information to get stakeholder stakeholder input. So we do some testing. This is our draft plan. How does this feel to you? Does it feel like this is the district that you describe to us that you envision for your students? Students, do you see yourselves in this plan? Teachers, do you see yourself in this plan? So, we go and we ask stakeholders again. And then we get to finalization, we take that feedback, we make some tweaks, and then we get plan approval. One of the other key pieces though in our
061support is living the plan. because we have two half days after your plan has been approved simply for helping you jumpst start making sure that you can live it and I'll talk about that in just a moment. So at the end of this process, what can you expect from us? A of course strategic planning documents that has your your mission, your vision, your goals, your strategies, all of those pieces. We give you an executive summary that is the board version or stakeholder facing version of your plan. We also provide the team with a board presentation or community presentation. um how are you sharing the story of your new plan with your stakeholders? Then this is where that living the plan support comes in. You will leave this process with a year one implementation framework. That's
062a gamecher for many of our systems. So I want to just talk just for a couple minutes about these two pieces. This is what makes our process different. The first piece is the preferred future statement. Of course, every plan you need a mission and a vision. Lots of systems are now doing portrait of a student, portrait of a graduate, which is amazing. One of the things that we found though is that many of our systems, they had these wonderful portrait of a graduate, but it stayed on a beautiful poster on a wall somewhere. It never got to being becoming implementable, right? It never became a part of the fabric of who they were. So, we said, what was that gap? And we started working with our districts, talking with them. What is that gap? The
063gap is students don't make the changes for themselves. The adults have to make the changes. So then we started really examining what is it? What does it mean to have adult competencies, family community competencies, the full school district system competencies? If we say this is who we want our students to become, who will the adults commit to be? Well, who will the families what will the families commit to do to support that? What will the system ensure takes place so that we can make sure that our students can rise to this portrait of a graduate or portrait of a student that you've developed. That really is the heart of our strategic plan. We call that full document that preferred future statement because what you're doing is you're making a commitment to the students in your
064system that this is who we are committing to you that by the time you leave our system you will be able to do these things and here are all the things that the adults around you are going to do to help you do that. This is an example um from Lraange 105 of what that looks like. So you'll see on the left is the preferred future statement, their mission, vision, core values at the top and along the bottom it talks about their different portraits. These are the competencies they want for their students. These are the commitments of the adults, the families and the system. And then of course their goals and strategies. Now the second part I want to talk about really quickly is the living the plan piece that comes along with um working
065with us around strategic planning. Many times strategic plans are beautiful documents that sit on a shelf somewhere or they live with the district team. We've been doing this for 40 years. About 20 years ago, we realized a lot of our plans were sitting on the shelf and we had to figure out why, what was happening. This was the missing piece. People didn't know how to take it and implement it. Even if they knew how to get it started, when you get in the tornado of school, it fell by the wayside, right? because it sat with just a few people. So part of what we help you do in those two half day sessions after the plan is approved is start thinking through what is what do we need to do for the first 30 days?
066What does that first year look like? What are we implementing? What do we need to monitor? How are we communicating? And we help you build those tools and those systems so that your strategic plan actually comes to life. We have a wonderful toolkit that uh we share with you that has lots of tools to help you be able to live your plan and be sustainable beyond year 1, beyond CEC support. Now, I'm not sure where I am on my time, but I would like to end with student voice. This is a video um that our Manuka team made um just a few weeks ago about uh the work we've been doing together. So as part of the elevate 2011 strategic planning process, we've hosted two engagement sessions for our stakeholder groups. One really important aspect
067of this process has been the inclusion of students in this process. We have all of these great ideas in our head, but when it comes together, that collective experience throughout the school day. How do the kids feel about that? How are they experiencing that? It's always very humbling and it's a great reality check to hear students share what exactly that feels like. I thought it would be really fun to be able to have my voice be heard and collaborate some ideas. I know some people here could make an impact on the school and some of my ideas could be heard and possibly be used at the school. When they were valuing what me and Abram were saying, it like made me feel included and like made me feel like I like had a good idea
068and that I was important in the school district. Um I feel passionate about the um ML mult programs like talk about that cuz I was in that program. So I want to like give more feedback about those programs and also about engagement and um behavior and math scores and data everything. So pretty complicated those things. It was in my piece. SO THEY MADE ME FEEL LIKE I WAS INCLUDED CUZ I THOUGHT like because I'm younger I'd be more like excluded with them, but they actually made me feel like my ideas were very valuable and important for the conversation. I was surprised about how many like parents would be here. I didn't expect as many parents to be here and I like that they're there cuz they're trying to get involved in their kids school. I
069think continue to grow with family engagement and I think that's really like that's what family engagement should be. Our students have really been um the stars of the show in the strategic planning process and giving us such great insight and perspective that we will truly integrate into this planning effort. And I think this is such a critical aspect of these stakeholder sessions. I'm actually pretty happy that I got invited to do this and I'm just grateful to do this. I think it was a really cool opportunity to have. >> So, the last thing I'll say is why is CEC a good partner for you? Um, our process is amazing. Um, we are very stakeholder driven and student centered in everything that we do. Um, and also we have some pretty cool uh standout pieces that
070are really what other organizations are doing. Um, and it is a we look at everything from a systemic coherent lens and so our strategic plan is different. Thank you. >> Thank you. Yeah, I'll open up for questions. >> Okay. Um, sorry, I gotta take my glasses off to read. That doesn't make any sense to me either. Um, how will you move beyond traditional survey and focus group methods to gather and interpret observable behavior evidence of what our community values from our from as many stakeholder groups as possible? Um, for example, sustained volunteer activity, local businesses or um other behavior indicators. >> Uh, great question. Um, so as you can see, we have a lot of stakeholder input. Um, we definitely use surveys um and focus groups if districts want that. Um, we're really flexible to
071the way that districts um typically engage their stakeholders. So, we have some systems who say we want nighttime open forum where people can just give their opinions. There are other systems that prefer more of the the uh stakeholder team idea where they're coming together, sitting, collaborating, talking with various stakeholders that they don't know of various um roles, if you will. Um we always encourage our districts to invite any community partners or other district partners you may have. So, feeder systems, your park district, library systems. Um there was one um when I did um the Belvadier uh strategic plan, we had the fire chief and the police chief. They just they were partners with the district and wanted to be a part of it. So, we encourage as many partnerships as possible because it's really important
072for the partnership um value ad, if you will, for them to be very knowledgeable about the direction and vision for the district because it's easier for them in those spaces to see how they may be able to fit in to be able to support the district even deeper than they currently do. >> Great. Thank you. I have the next question. Um once the plan is approved by the board, what is your can you speak to your specific role in supporting implementation and what types of support will the district have to ensure accountability within the scope of the proposal? So I know you talked about some of the followup. Could you just dive a little bit deeper into those and tell us about >> Absolutely. Yes. So, um, being an organization that is grounded in continuous
073improvement and doing that work from the classroom all the way through the school board in other areas as well, um, part of what we do in living the plan is helping you think about all the tendrils that come out of your strategic plan and all of the different places that need to be aligned and coherent with this new vision. And so our tools will help you identify um how does your new strategic plan align to your um um your professional learning um bucket? How does it help? How does it align to your um your teacher evaluation? How does it align to your um instructional coaching um uh bucket? How does it align to the climate and culture of your schools? Is there some reframing that's needed because of your news? So, we look at all
074the aspects of your strategic plan, not just what's happening in the classroom, which is typically what happens, right? We look at, okay, well, what do we need teachers to change so math and reading scores can go up? That's usually the extent, but that's a small part of it because we are looking at the larger system, if that makes sense. >> Thank you. >> Sure. All right. I have one for you. Um, we're, you know, we've got your, uh, quick bio as well as your partner, uh, >> and great, >> um, clearly strong experience, curriculum, and instruction backgrounds. Um, but but, uh, we don't have any former superintendent on the correct staff. So we're wondering how you ensure the process and deliverables account for sort of those broad dimensions of strategic planning that we have a
075new superintendent coming in. You know, making sure that um >> the superintendent and and the cabinet sort of have what they need from where they sit um to make the plan a reality. >> Correct. Great question. Um, so we've been doing this for many years with lots of systems and outside of strategic planning, a lot of our work, like I said, is a is continuous improvement at the district level. So I can just talk about personally, I right now am coaching for superintendent around continuous improvement. So it is it's the fabric of what we do. Um, so it has never been an issue that a superintendent wasn't leading. If anything, there's a refreshing quality to not having a superintendent because um, we have had superintendent sitting in the seat where I am doing this same
076work. Um, we started partnering our superintendent with a non-s superintendent intentionally because what we found was sometimes the superintendent was too focused on just the superintendent owning the plan where broader perspectives are able to speak to the broader perspectives that are also in the room. especially because we are so so ingrained in the belief that your strategic plan should not just live in your district office. And so part of that shared leadership, that collective responsibility piece is part of it. So um we do not have a superintendent right now who is doing strategic planning, but we feel that that's okay. You're welcome. Um, we had student leaders at the board table tonight and that is something that we, you know, that fairly recently within the past, you know, couple few years now >> have had
077and I love the, you know, the the stories that you shared with um, with the student involvement in the strategic planning, which I think is critical >> and it seems to me and I I'm asking just because I would love for you to share another example of how that works in your feedback loops and your monitoring. ing. It seems to me also that having student board members at the table is a logical space for that to also occur as a monitoring tool for us. Are there examples also too where you have seen where the students are sharing with each other as a feedback loop within the buildings and it kind of spreads a little bit like wildfire as part of their conversations as potential future leaders because at some point I mean I mean I
078might be on the board until I'm 100 but they they they're going to be occupying these seats >> and making these decisions in the future too. And I'd love to hear another example where you might have observed that as a monitoring tool, but also as something that's giving growth to the to the students that you're inviting into these sessions. >> Absolutely. What is so powerful about this process is many systems, this is the first time students are ever having conversations with adults about school business. And you heard from the video, they are floored and so excited to be in that position to have that type of voice. what has happened in every single plan in the last six years since we've included this this student um immersion is the only way I can think to
079say it um in our process is every single district has left strategic planning and now has an entire arm of student leaders and so through our process um so with the feedback loops so we always send out did are we getting it right kind of feedback that we want from stakeholders students take their own. So, we have students hosting their own focus groups with their own students to say, "Hey, I was at strategic planning. Here's what we've been talking about. Here's what they've been saying. Here's the feedback I gave. Do you guys have any new feedback or different feedback?" And so, it's so cool because once they have that first experience, they're on fire and they cannot wait to go and do that. So, we have teachers doing it with teachers, but including students doing
080it with students is super powerful. So that's one aspect. Again, another um example is the student leadership um structures that come out of strategic planning. So for example, Manuka, these students have already they came to the second stakeholder session with a proposal for a new student leadership structure. They did not even think to sit on the board like you just had students doing, but it was we would love to have monthly meetings with the superintendent because we would like to be a continue this conversation. It was amazing. They had a slide deck. It was so cool. So things like that really do, like you said, get the fire going because you want the plan to be for everyone. You want everyone to feel themselves in it and be on fire for it and our process
081helps you do that. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, you're welcome. Other questions? >> I have a question. Yep. >> Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. >> My question is um thank you for the presentation first of all. Um what role do you see the board playing in this process? >> Great question. So typically my recommendation is the board is an active part in this process. Um typically boards are not on the steering committee. Um but one of the first things in during that um our uh prepare phase is having an intentional meeting with the board. Two hours. Let's talk about your current plan. Getting this board's feedback on current perspectives on your current reality. How do you feel about the current goals, strategies, your mission, your vision? All the things. And then we shift to this is
082where you are now, but what's your vision? What does that vision look like? So we do that with the board. Um, we also do that with the district leaders during that prepare phase. But then after each of our sessions, there's always the communication to the board. Sometimes I will come. Typically, I don't come. The superintendent gives the report, but at the end of each session, there's always a board report out. Here's what we did. Here's some wonderful video. We love taking pictures and video. Here's some pictures and some video. Here's some feedback. Um, another thing we encourage is our team members. So, for example, those stakeholder sessions you saw, those stakeholders going to board meetings to talk about what they experienced. Here's what we experienced because again, yes, the superintendent can share. Yes, um other
083board members who might participate can share. But if you have students here, if you have parents here who are saying, "No, here's what we talked about and here's the vision." It's just so much more powerful. So, to answer your question about the board, um, every time we meet, you get an update and you also not just get an update, but you there's a the feedback loop. Here's where we are. What do you think? Are we getting it right? Do we need to pivot so you have that along that you do not have to wait until the end? You're welcome, >> Dr. Ku. >> Thank you. Hello. Okay. Sorry, I have to get used to it. U my question is along the same lines as you mentioned this feedback loop to the board. >> How are
084we communicating to the community once a stakeholder meeting happens? >> Yes. >> I'm assuming you collect a lot of data. How do you communiate communicate that data to other members of the community who did not participate in the stakeholder session? So, we have the survey that is the the definite one place everyone every single stakeholder in your system can provide feedback. Um, and we very intentionally work on um making sure that there's access to the survey beyond just an email. So, for example, many districts will say, "We have a band concert. Get all the Chromebooks out." And we have them all lined up. Hey, did you take the survey? Come on over. So we like do a lot of creative things to make sure we can capture as much feedback as possible. When it comes
085to the board, if board if there are one or two board members who are on the steering committee, usually those board members will communicate back. If not, usually the superintendent will. Um sometimes, like I said, I will come and collect feedback and provide updates to the board. So it just depends on what the board's preference is. Other questions? Okay. All right. Thank you. Thank you for being here tonight. Thank you very much. >> Thank you very much. Just think. All right. >> Hello. >> Hi. Good evening. >> Welcome. Welcome. >> I will let him get settled, but on board, I'd like to introduce you to Kain Osborne from HYA. >> Good evening. Welcome. Oh, it's red on this one. Okay. Uh, my goal is to, uh, get to the point as much as possible and
086to be really leave time for dialogue. Um, so I won't use the whole 15 minutes on the presentation. Um, you know, you I I'll I'll be kind of blunt. I, uh, am a lifetime educator. I'm not a lifetime salesman. What I love is the work that I get to do with communities. I'm not always excited about selling the work to communities. And if you talk with the people I've worked with, I think what they'll tell you is that the processes and the experiences we have together are really engaging and produce something of of great value for them. Um, and we I have relationships with everybody I've worked with and continue to this day. And I just say that as a front piece because it's hard to convey that through this, but I'll try. Okay, there
087we go. So, you already have my bio in the pres in the packet and I am not going to go into the detail that's in the packet. I've watched your board meetings. I know that you are prepared board members. Um, you have great conversations on difficult topics. I'm sure you'll have a great conversation on this topic and this isn't even that difficult compared to what you often have to confront. So, you can read about my bio, but I have been a superintendent in Lake County down the road at Lake Zurich, a K12 district. Uh, I finished my career at AOKA as a K8 superintendent and I started my career as a high school English teacher. And I always have to break the news to my uh high school friends that they have missed out and
088what they do is actually not the most important work. And the most important work happens at our youngest grades where they grow get the chance to grow the most. Um you can just see an outline of the of what work I'm going to talk about tonight uh pretty quickly because I do want to leave time for dialogue and it mirrors what's in the pres in the packet that you have. Um, but I'm only going to highlight and emphasize certain aspects of that that I think are most relevant. Um, and maybe we'll facilitate a conversation a little bit. So about HYA, again, you can read that in the packet. Uh, this is a preeminent educational consulting firm in the country. We have associates all over the country. Um, and we're rooted in the region. We started
089uh in the north suburbs and most of our associates are still from the northern Illinois region. Uh but I think our greatest strengths that we work on and that I personally work on are networking with those professionals in HYA. I can pick up the phone anytime or go meet with somebody anytime uh who has more experience in a certain area that I might need some guidance on. and every associate that I work with is happy to help me. So whether it's about um communication, facilitation, working with the community, data, all of those are at my disposal through the network that HYA has and that's one of the reasons they're so successful. That middle bullet on relationship building is frankly more about me. Um, I consider one of my strengths in this process that I want
090to spend a lot of time building a relationship with you as a board and with the superintendent as we go forward and then with the strategic planning team members themselves. So, um, it really comes down to asking a lot of questions and I spend the time to do that and a lot some of that time is outside the purview of what's even in the contract. I don't worry about that because in order to be fully prepared to support you and what you need in the process and to deliver the outcome that you want, I have to spend that time on the front end getting to know not only what's important, but what is a concern? Where do you want me to navigate things? How do you want me to navigate things? Um, and what's most
091important to you at any given moment? So that takes a lot of time, but I value that time because I learn a lot and then I can deliver something that's um truly tailored to you. And that's where this last bullet point comes in. When you look at the proposal packet, which is pretty extensive and even tonight, what we emphasize is that everything in there is customizable once we've gone through really needing or identifying what you want from this process and how you want it to go. And uh it's that's the hard thing to convey to people in a proposal because we try to be comprehensive and then you walk away thinking we're going to do all this but maybe you don't need to do all that and maybe we actually miss something because you know
092something about your community that we haven't yet learned. So that customization is really important at every given step and I'll emphasize that in the following slides. The first one on the left you can see kind of the basic components of the planning process that we work on that are identified in the packet. Um but the overarching thing that's most important is that each one of these steps serves your community. So in other words, we have a process. We have a triedand-true process. But the goal is not for me to come in and implement my process in your community. The goal is for me to come in, share what we think is best practice, and then listen to what you tell us is the best way to do it in your community. And so none of
093these steps can be successful until we know that second part. So, for instance, when we talk about the engagement process in a planning meeting, which I'll talk about in a sec, we would sit down and go through what we would recommend, but we would then ask a lot of questions about how will this work best here in the Gra Lake District 46 community. Um, if we don't ask that question, we're going to make a mistake right out of the gate, and we want to make sure that we don't miss anything early on. But that same set of questions comes up at every step that you see here. we have to ask you and Dr. Carmona and the leadership team who's been here, how is this particular step going to be most effective here in the
094community. Um, so I want to emphasize that because all these steps and everything you've seen there, if we don't do that part that I just described, we'll set ourselves up for failure and be less effective. So the first major step is that planning, that organizational meeting. Um, and I'm not going to go through everything that's on this slide, but this is where I will emphasize that when you look at all the steps of engagement, uh, all the steps in strategy development, all the steps that are in implementation, that's where with you as a board and leadership, we would sit down and say, "This is how we typically do it or what we think is best." And we would make sure, is that the way you want it done? Is there an additional step we need
095to put in or do we not need so many steps here? Once we walk away from that meeting, then we'll have the true outline of what we're going to do and that could result in a revised proposal. Um, it would un be very unlikely that it would add anything, but it could take things away and that would then revise both what you see and also the price because that's based on those things are related. And then the next step after that planning meeting is working with the community for it for the community to tell their story. Sharing your district story in multiple ways. So you can see the top bullet point is really where we'll conduct interviews, focus groups, and I say possibly community forums because in some cases what we would do uh after
096discussing this with you is suggest it might be a good opportunity for community forum where you do a brief state of the district and then we do focus groups right there that night afterwards where people can respond to that state of the district. Sometimes with a new superintendent, that can often be a good way for the superintendent to get exposure with the community and to be present as they're then sharing back their reflections on what they've learned. Um, so I put that up there because sometimes that's a that's a good step to put in CA in place. Otherwise, we more typically will do individual interviews with each board member. Um we sometimes do indivi individual interviews with like civic leaders uh the superintendents from the cabinet level and then we do focus groups with parents,
097staff, upper level students. Um we also might do focus groups with uh parent groups themselves like in in addition to inviting parents in for a focus group, we might meet with the PTO. We might meet if you have for instance uh BPAC, we might meet with BPAC separately too. and facilitate that way. Um, all of those aspects there do include uh we where we would work with you and identify the best and most appropriate time to have translators present um to make sure that everybody could access those interactions. Um, and that could work any number of ways. As I mentioned in my proposal, I'm the lead associate, but I will identify after meeting with you, if I get the the contract, I will identify another associate at HYA who would be a good fit to
098come in and partner with me on some of these things. Uh the other part of telling the story is data. And we're a wash in data. There's a lot of data available. Um we can do one of two things or both. We can ask for the administration to give us access to all that data that's appropriately accessible and then we can produce an overview report of the district based on that. We could work with our partner ECRA which is a data analytics firm I think you probably are aware of. Um and they can produce a district data brief. You have a sample in your packet that I submitted. Um or we can do both if you want if that's useful. Um and then the final thing is surveys. And this is another option that the
099board has. We typically recommend this option but um there can be other ways to do it and that would be a survey to uh community members with uh researchbased questions and we can give you some norm referenced uh feedback in the reports uh once we get those back and that is what you see described there. And then finally, when we're done with this phase, we give you a series of reports, qualitative and quantitative, that collectively tell the story of the district as it's being told to us through these pieces. And then we go to strategy because what happens is with a strategic planning team, and this is another choice the board has. Sometimes the board of education serves as a strategic planning team. Um, that is a that is an option. It's not one I
100typically recommend because strategic planning is such an opportunity for community engagement, interaction, and collaboration that I usually don't recommend we miss that opportunity. But only through dialogue with the board would we know. Um and we take all those reports I discussed and bring them to the strategic planning team and then together identify the strengths and areas for growth and as a result of that develop new vision, mission portrait, goals and objectives. Now again through the customization process you might look at the mission that you have and the vision statement and the portrait that you have and say you know we want to do it a little differently. What we want to do is go ask the community for feedback on these to determine if we do need to revisit them. So, we would work with
101you on that. But ultimately, when the strategic planning team is finished, they will either have reaffirmed or revised the vision, mission, portrait, and portrait, they will have developed new goals and objectives for review by the board and the administration. And ultimately only the board can or should be approving those goals and objectives. But what happens typically is we bring a near finished draft. The board gives us feedback. Depending on the level of feedback, we might reconvene the strategic planning team to review that and then revise. Or we might say, well, we're really close. We feel like we can do these final revisions before the board formally approves it. And then the final step which I think is the most important actually is action planning with leadership. So um I'm doing this right now with another
102educational organization and what we do is we take everything that's been done to that point and we literally lay out timelines, governance, okay, um deliverables and metrics for each of those objectives that have been agreed to in the plan. And that's key because I will tell you most strategic plans die on the bookshelf in the binder or on the website because they lack detailed action plans for the leadership and for the staff and for community members to follow along and to mutually hold each other accountable with because that's one of the roles of a good action plan. In our proposal, you have an option because the leadership team might feel very comfortable with a lot of this and so we just often then will offer templates and some guidance. Um that's in the standard issue.
103I also right now am facilitating two whole days of work with the district's leadership team where I'm partnering. Um and that's another option that is available and that can also be decided later in the process if that's appropriate. Ultimately, this journey is designed for you. Um, and our goal is to remain responsive along the way. It's not to get locked in to something and keep the blinders on from beginning to end and say, "Okay, we're going to get to the fin the finish and we're done." If it requires us to pause and slow things down at some point, we will do that. If it requires us to based on feedback to then say, you know what, we need to go back and revisit something, we will do that because we're not really done until you're
104satisfied that you have what you need to have that picture of your community and to have a plan for your community that you can hold up and communicate publicly over time and hold yourselves accountable to. Um, and that's what we really want to aim for. Uh, and that is the pretty short version of my presentation and I'm happy to answer any questions you have. >> Okay. Thank you. We do have a few questions. Yeah. >> Yeah. >> It's your turn. >> Whose turn? >> Me. It's coming to me. >> Okay. um how will you move beyond some of the traditional survey and focus group methods to help us gather and interpret the observable and the behavioral evidence in our community and from the stakeholder groups that we have and including as many stakeholder groups. You've
105mentioned that a couple times in the presentation. What does that process look like for our >> uh well that would come from a discussion with you in that planning meeting. But some things that we would put on the table would be um making sure we identify um maybe non-parent community member groups, right? That would have relevant input into their vision for the schools. Okay, those could be civic organizations, those could be faith-based organizations, that could be some group that hasn't yet been convened that we have to do some leg work with them on convening. Um, so that's kind of the in-person piece of it. Um, I will tell you, you know, within the school-based community, uh, we do have to do extra work to make sure that the voices of people who aren't typically heard
106get heard. And so if that means two people show up one night and we have to do it three more times, we do it three more times. Um the other part that we would work with you on uh we mentioned BPAC, but it could be any group is do we know that parts of our community have places that they convene that and would those places be willing to have us come to them? We don't have to do everything here at the school or any one of the schools although we will. It's perfectly appropriate for us to go to where the community members feel safe and feel w most welcome. I don't suggest they're not welcome in your schools, but sometimes perceptions get in the way of certain things. And if we can break through it,
107that's what we would do. Um the only other thing I would suggest and I just want to say I'll suggest that I have to do a lot of thinking um is we could work on certain levels of protocol where we visit classrooms and collects observational data. I do this work with a whole different set of districts right now um very intensely and we could do that. I I don't want to lie to you. That would include an extra cost and we would want to be very deliberate and intentional about what is it we want to come out with. Um but there is a lot of value there. And so we could for instance work with a staff group or a staff board group or the superintendent. That is another way we could start to get
108some things. Um but I would suggest we're very strategic about that and understanding what are we asking when we go into that because otherwise we're just collect there's it's overwhelming environment you go into a classroom and start collecting data without focus but that would be something I've done in other contexts that I could build with you if you wanted. Hi. Um once the plan is approved by the board, what's your specific role in supporting um the implementation and what types of supports will the district have available to ensure accountability within the scope of the proposal? >> Sure. So there are some options there. One that's built into the proposal as a standard level is I do meet with the superintendent quarterly for the first year to go over progress on that implementation. Where are their
109issues? Um there are other options that are not standard but which I do for instance the the organization I'm working with right now. I'm doing we're doing action planning and then I'm going to come back quarterly and meet with leadership uh about not only how the plan is going but how their role in the plan is going as leaders and we use a little bit of leadership coaching in that context. Um because implementing an action plan effectively often requires our leaders to uh employ skills that they might not have been employing consciously um and to get better at things that they hadn't been asked to get better at before. And so I'm working with my partner right now to figure out how we're going to do that. And so that that's one just personally I'm
110a fan of. Um and then you know the last thing that's in the proposal that you can see is the dashboard. So we can give you access to that tool and then we can uh do the basic training and you can go run with it or we can do ongoing training and upkeep about how to use that and how to communicate it. Um sometimes what happens is those dashboards get put up on the website and then you know that's it and we could work with you on regular updating, revising and communicating around that. Um, and we would just do that at a cadence that kind of was agreed upon that was the most effective. >> Thank you. Could you talk to us a little bit more about that standard quarterly meeting? Um, like what's the
111scope of that? >> So, the scope is usually um, it's kind of a combination of a status update and a coaching meeting. >> Status update is, hey, here's what we worked on that said your plan was going to be doing these things at in this time frame. Um, how's that going? Where's it? where's it not going? Well, then the deeper question is, you know, what do you need as the leader to help move that along? Um, something when I do that optional work with action planning, there's there's a couple schools of thought on this. Some people like to just build one year at a time. I'm not a fan of that because I think very few meaningful things in schools happen in one year. So, I like to build multi-year arcs, but then update it
112and revise it on a yearly basis to look like where it actually is, because you might not get everything done in that plan in a year that you thought you were going to. But that's another thing I've done with my own teams that I would do in that kind of near the last quarter meeting where I'd say, "Okay, might be good to convene your team in the summer and really find out where are you and then revise accordingly for the next year." because really that plan is supposed to drive all your work. So if you don't do that, you're either wandering off your own plan. Okay? Um or you're basically not holding yourself accountable to what you said. And so I'm I'm a big believer in the discipline of that. So that's part of what
113I would work on with the superintendent. Hi. >> Hi. >> Busy taking notes here. Um, >> yes, I got it. Thank you. My question for you is, how does the community story approach ensure the narrative stays authentic to D46? And how do you prevent the final plan from feeling too generic? um or template driven. >> That's a good question. Um you know the the last part can be a little challenging because organizationally just how you physically organize things can be very similar. Um I do think uh how you make sure it's authentic is you have a through line from the themes that your community was telling you about all the way through the goals, objectives. if we choose to do a new portrait vision mission that actually we have to identify the actual language that's
114being used. Okay. Um and do our best to make that a through line. My belief is if I'm a community member who went to a focus group or particularly a focus group I'd say could be filled out a survey um and my response was pretty prevalent one. I should be able to point to that plan and see like this is where Um, and so I that to me is the biggest test. If it comes across and somebody could go to a community down the street and see an action plan and not tell the difference of how theirs got there that way and this one got this way, then I have failed. Um, and so that's why we want to make sure when we produce those reports at the end of the engagement phase and talk
115about themes, we want to make sure that if there's a prevalent, I'll just say discourse coming up again and again, that that's highlighted as a thing in itself because even though the content of it might be similar across communities, the way people talk about things is important. it's related to who they are and what and what's they want to see happen next. So, we would look to see that come through uh your your proposal reaches uh between 34 and 40,000 uh with your recommended options. uh which are the essential uh which are essential for district like CCD and 46 uh and what does the district lose if it opts out of the dashboard specifically? >> Um so let me just start at the end. You know what do you lose when you opt out of
116the dashboard? You know I I think it it really depends on where you think you are with your capacity to report on the goals, objectives, and your progress on them. What's your internal capacity? The dashboard is not a magical thing. Um, it's just a very effective tool to use quickly, but you can build your own dashboard. You can visualize things uh, you know, technologically right now. And I haven't done it with AI, but I'm pretty sure you can get AI to do some things. My boss should not hear me say that probably. Um, so, you know, do you lose a lot? I don't think you lose a lot. Um, I think you really need to have a conversation about what is going to be an effective communication tool to your community and internally about where
117you are because that's what that dashboard's supposed to do. So, for instance, some I'll be honest, some districts do it and then they don't update it regularly. Well, that's a wasted opportunity. So there is a capacity question to ask and if the capacity question says I don't know that we're really going to keep this up regularly. Maybe we have a better tool that we can do that's actually simpler I I would recommend you do that. Um it's really about you know your own analysis of your your perspect you know where you are with that. Um for essential or non-essential I'm I'm biased. Um, so the survey tool we use, which by the way, you know, you will get in English and Spanish automatically and then it's $400 if we translate into additional languages. Um, it
118is researchbased. It comes out of work with ECRA. So, it's got some um norming with it that we can use that can be useful, but I don't know that that is elevates it to a difference maker. And so you could also some districts uh develop uh you know more of a simple Google survey about about certain things. Kind of depends what questions you want to ask. So when we have that planning meeting we can show you a sample of of the survey we use and have a conversation about that. The one thing I feel very strongly about and I would talk a lot with Dr. Carmona about this is the action planning. Um I do feel that a lot of great work gets wasted if that's not done at the end. um like truly wasted
119and so my ego tells me I really want to be there to make sure this all work I did with you doesn't get wasted but so to me that's an essential piece now again that's an internal capacity piece if Dr. Carmona feels he's very comfortable facilitating all that and setting it up, great, not a problem. If it if you if he feels it's better to have a partner, you know, my current partner where I'm working at at Deos and Depage County, they feel good about me coming in and doing that. It really just depends. Um, but I do think that action planning is key because otherwise drift h can happen relatively quickly. Did I answer your question? That was the question. Okay. >> All right. If if there's something else that comes up, definitely throw
120it my way. >> Other questions from the board? >> Yeah, Miss Mill. >> Um, I have two. The first one is our board work is to make sure there's alignment with policy. So, how does policy play into strategic planning hya? >> Uh, that's a good question. Um, I would say probably when I go back to that slide about being responsive to your community, we would have to make sure we included that in our questioning with you in the planning meeting, but frankly along the way. So for instance, when we issued um that initial like uh SWAT analysis that the uh strategic planning does, team does and maybe draft goals and objectives, we might ask a very blunt question like does this look like we're misaligned? Are you seeing potential bumps because we're going to run
121up against something? Now, we feel confident that we wouldn't put you in that position related to standard mission, vision, goals, cultural pieces as a district culture. Um, but I don't know, I can't promise you I will have read every policy perfectly to know. So, we might take an extra step to sit down and do a side by side either before we come to you with a draft to review or after after getting feedback from you. That would be the I think the cleanest way to do that. Um we would not want of course you to approve anything that was going to run up against the hard work you had done in that regard. >> Thank you. And then my second question is can you tell us more about ECRA and baseline data gathering? Not only
122the gathering of it but the do you also help us visualize that so that it's easier. Can you talk about how >> so for the data brief or for the So uh there's two things. The data brief is a standard data set they create out of existing data. Okay? And they'll visualize it. It'll look a lot like the sample that you see. If we work with your data, um I'll basically be doing that myself and then I confer with an HYA and ECRA person to just say, can you take a look at this and make sure you know I'm not misrepresenting anything, you know, etc., etc. Um we can for a fee actually send it to them for a full like uh statistically rigorous analysis of the data if you want we can do that
123they're a data analytics firm it does have a cost attached to it but they partner with us where I can produce the standard draft so for instance I might take all of your map data above individual student level of course any all of that data and start to is you know produce reports for you based on that. But I would go to them first and say, "Please take a look at this and make sure I'm not missing anything um before I present it and before we go to the strategic planning team or basically as we go to the strategic planning team, all that does come to you um and would go to the administration even before that for another look to make sure." >> Thank you. I got one more. Um, so and I may
124have missed it when I looked through your proposal and I maybe I misread it. How do you see the different stakeholders working together? You know, we have a whole bunch of different groups. Business business businessmen, business officials, >> uh, union officials, staff, admin, >> the board, the students, >> parents, grandparents. you know, we have a ton of different people >> through your conversations tonight. It's it almost sounds to me that they're working in silos and not necessarily working together, >> right? >> Can you sure >> clear that up for me a little bit so I can understand how they're working together? >> Yeah. So the the one place depending on how we set up engagement, we would do some focus groups that would be siloed a little bit, but we would also do public forum
125focus groups where cross stakeholder groups can come together. Um or we can set it up that way, but really it's in the strategic planning team. Okay. Um and so so when we collect data, it's it is a little bit siloed. it is a little bit broken out by group depending on how we structure the intake, right? So the survey we ask identify what group you're part of so and so. Um but when we do the strategic planning team, we try to have anywhere between two and four people from each of the relevant groups. So we can have a strategic planning team of 15 to 30 people depending on how we want to settle it. And then we do try to have then they're all together responding together. They're building goals and objectives. Um and depending
126on where we go with portrait of a graduate, mission, vision, they're all doing that together. Um they're also doing it together when they actually do the analysis of what they think the district is doing well at and what they think its needs are. That's together also. So in that respect, um that's where we see the most collaboration. um in the engagement phase for various reasons we don't typically see as much but we can structure engagement sessions that are more cross stakeholder group if you want to do that >> I have another um so we recently went through a referendum >> I know >> yes and congratulations thank you um >> we have quite a bit of data from that so is that data >> a source that you would >> how how old is that
127data now? Uh that the collection >> about four years ago. >> Okay. So, what we would do before we sit down with you for a planning meeting is we'd ask for that data and then we'd probably come to that planning meeting with kind of our take. >> Could be maybe none of it is new enough to use or some of it is because it's very specific to something. Um, but we would come to the meeting with an opinion for you about what we think is the best use of that or not. Four years old is kind of a little bit old. Three is a little bit old, but it depends on what you've actually collected because some things don't change and some things do, but certainly your your parent guardian group, right, is yeah, different.
128So, we want to be very cognizant of that. >> Okay. Thank you very much. >> Okay. >> We appreciate you being here tonight. >> All right. Thank you so much. Uh, >> yeah, the board starts in that empty chair right there. Yeah. Nice to meet you. >> Nice to meet you. >> Few Thank you for being with us tonight, Dr. Porto. Yes. >> All right. Ready to roll? Okay. I I brought a hard copy because I'm kind of old school and I like to write notes on things. So, um but this is the same uh what you have there is the same PowerPoint you're going to see. So, let me start by uh telling you a little bit about myself. Is there >> Oh, sorry about that. Kane did this, right? Is there a way
129you could just Okay, let me introduce myself. I'm Joe Porto and um I'm a retired superintendent. I had a 33-year career in education and the last 17 of those years I was a superintendent. My last superintendent job was in a district up in Winnette in Wilt called Aoka and I was there for nine years. After being a superintendent and and retiring, I did a couple of things. I started this business JMP consulting and um I do lots of different work, but strategic planning is my specialty. I'm also a um a partner in BWP and Associates. we know you work with them very carefully and you made a great decision when you brought Alonso on. Uh really think that was a good choice and so I do searches for them and I was a professor at
130um Northern Illinois University in their doctoral program. Most importantly for tonight I have conducted over 40 um strategic plans over my career. I started uh back when I was a superintendent in Aoka and have been doing it ever since. I have a very strong client base here in Lake County. And I think that's important when you make your decision because I think um a strategic plan is only going to be as effective as it is a match for your community. If you just bring a strategic plan and you use the same ideas and the same approach in every community, it's not going to be a match. I know Lake County very well and I've done so many um uh strategic plans with your uh colleagues. I've been in um right now I'm in the middle
131of a strategic plan in district 128 up in or down in uh um Libertyville and Vernon Hills High School. I work with your friends in district 117 Lakes Community High School and Antioch. I've been in Round Lake. I've been in Fox Lake. I've been in Grass Lake, Oak Grove. Um, so I really have a good feel for you and your community. Next slide if you could. Next one. These are some of my clients. And what I would like to point out, you don't have to read them all, but take a look at the bold face. Those are all my clients who hired me back. When you're a consultant, the very best evaluation you could have of your abilities is when they hire you back. I did in some of those districts, they hired me back
132three times. What happens is they do their first strategic plan, which is normally three years. They liked the process. They were successful with the plan. Their plan is about to run out and they usually hire me back in the third year to come in and do another one so that they don't skip a beat. I'm really proud of that. I don't know if any of the other consultants that came in, talked about that, but that's one difference um when when you're making your decision that I'd like you to think about uh have had really good success. Next slide. This is the strategic plan basic classical model. There's mission, there's beliefs, there's themes, there's goals, there's action plans. I started out having training in this model and I did it for years. But I found it
133lacking in two areas that always bothered me. One was an inordinate amount of time used to be spent on words smmithing the mission and beliefs. And you would spend days and meetings trying to wordsmith in groups of 30 and 40 people. And by the time you got that done and everybody was happy, you kind of lost your momentum. And by the time you got into the important things like the goals and the accountability, nobody was really up for that. So I I didn't like that. The second thing I didn't like about the classical model is we were taught to c go into a district and consider it a blank slate. Um in old philosophy courses they call that tabularasa blank slate. and you're supposed to go in and dream and you could go anywhere. And
134while it sounds really good, what I learned and what I struggled with is that no district is a blank slate. Every district has a history that's unique to the district. Every district has a unique culture and climate. And so you can't come, you have to start where they are, not some crazy blank slate. So on the next slide, uh if you can move to the next, I had kind of a transformative um event in my career. I had a school board member who kind of turned me on to a book by Jim Collins called Good to Great. Don't know if you've uh anybody has heard of it. It's been around a long time. That book was transformative in my career and I certainly don't have enough time to go through all the cool things about
135it. Um up there on this uh screen is the seven tenants of good to great the things that all great companies had in common. So what I decided to do is what if we put together a strategic plan based on the tenants of good to great. we can get past that nonsense that I didn't like about the other models and really get into moving toward greatness. So, the next slide is the model. Uh, no, this is what every great company looks like. They start out kind of above average. They go three or four years, right? A little bit above that average line, but then they hit a point, they call it the flywheel, when goes off the charts. Not just growth, exponential growth. And I'm going to show you a slide later. Keep this one
136in mind. Okay. So, what does a good to great model look like when you're strategic planning? Here's what we would do. We do a couple weeks in advance of when we started the process, we'd do some pre-planning, data collection. I would want to schedule with Alonso a day where I could come in the district and um just like you did for the superintendent search. I'd like to meet with key stakeholder groups, teachers, parents, um students, uh community members, leaders in the community, board members, anyone we could talk to. And what we're going to try to find out there is what your current reality is. That's a one of the tenants in good to great. You have to look at your current reality and be willing to play off your strengths and prop up any areas
137of concern. So, I would do focus groups and give you a focus group uh update and basically I would ask the positive things about Grace Lake, the things you want to keep and anything you'd want to work on. One thing I also would like to tell you that I think is different from other um companies If we write your strategic plan properly, 50% of the goals will not be improvement goals. They will be continue to do goals. In other words, if you don't put heavy focus and energy into the positive things you do, they won't stay strengths. So, I don't like, no offense to any special ed people, but I don't like the strategic plan to feel like it's an IEP for your district and we're going to find all of the things, you know,
138that are wrong and try to fix them. We know that that model doesn't work in special ed anymore. What do we do? We look for their strengths and we build off their strengths. Now, it's not a deficit model. So that's something that um we'll bring to this. That's why I ask in the focus groups about positive. I'll also work with Alonso and we'll craft a survey together and it could be as comprehensive as we want it and it will basically get at those same things. What are we doing well? Where could we do better? What are some of your ideas for important goals? So we'll have all this good fresh data that was everyone in your district contributed to. So we've got that. Then I'll ask you to form a representative committee. This would be
139all seven board members, your superintendent and whoever he wants uh to represent the cabinet, several of your principles, a good number of your teachers, parent leaders, and non-parent community members. There's no magic number. I like 35 to 40 for a goodsiz working group. I'm working up in high school district 128 and I told that he's a new superintendent too, Mark Schaefer and I mentioned 35 to 40. He calls me a week before we start. I think it's going to be 60 to 70. Is that going to be okay? And you know, we may we're making it work, but um so I'll I'm flexible. I'll work with you. Um he didn't want to say no and he had a tremendous number of people who wanted to be involved. So I was able to live with that.
140So we'll have this working community working uh representative group. Then yet another thing that I think is very different from the other firms you heard from today. My process is really lean and mean. We get it done in four sessions with this group. Some of these companies go months and you lose all your momentum, all your energy. We'll pick a night. I'll ask your board president, "What's a good night?" Thursdays, for example. We would pick a Thursday to start and then we would go every Thursday for four Thursdays and we'd be done. And when we're done, we don't get a big binder, three- ring binder with a million things that you'll never look at again, and it'll end up on a shelf that you'll never reach for it again. My model ends with three pieces
141of paper. Mission, powerful mission and beliefs, set of goals, and what I call greatness indicators. That's the way you're going to evaluate your success moving from good to great. So efficiency, this is why districts hire me back because the process is smooth and clean and the implementation is smooth and clean. We actually get finished. So now I'll take you quickly through the four sessions. The first session we work on mission and beliefs. I show you some good ones. I show you some bad ones and then we work in small groups. We'll take that. Let's say you have 40 people. We might create uh six groups and have um you know seven six or seven people in each. We go from small group to big group as far as consensus building. So there's a lot of
142small group work and then we share big group and we work toward big group consensus. There's no voting in my model. I've done over 40 of these. I've never taken a vote. When there's voting, there's winners and losers. And that's not really consensus. I also don't do compromises because compromise instead of being win-win is usually lose lose. Everybody feels like it wasn't what we wanted. What we work for in the JMP model is winwin winin. And we keep working and working and working till we get everyone to be able to say, "I can live with that." That's the consensus words. Second, the next meeting is all about the current reality. Then that's the meeting we'll take a look at your survey results. We'll take a look at the focus group results. I'll ask Alfonso to
143give us some reports from the the district. things you've already got. Nothing new you'd have to create, but we'll look at your state report card. We'll look at your achievement data. Um, whatever you've got, we'll look at your current reality and we'll analyze it. And again, we're looking for strengths, areas of concern, big goal ideas. From that work, um, themes will emerge. teaching and learning, meeting the unique needs of learners, partnership with the community, business, finance, and facilities. Those are the usual kind of themes that emerge. That leads us to number three, session three, and that's when we're going to sit down and write some goals. We have our mission, we have our beliefs, we have our current reality. Let's write some goals. We'll do themes. I bring in a big matrix and on one
144side are the themes that I just mentioned and on the other side are three years and we're going to literally pop be popping goals into those. When you are finished you'll have one piece of paper with your goals for three years nicely written and easy to follow. Then comes the fourth session which I think is the most important and this is a sess a session that I have to admit I didn't do very well when I first started doing strategic planning. When I used to do strategic planning in the early days and my board president said Joe we want you to give an update on the strategic plan. I'd get up at a meeting like this and I'd have my tech guy create some really flashy stuff and I'd put the goals up there and
145I'd say, "We said we were going to build a blended preschool and we did." And I'd have my tech guy black that one out, you know, and then we're go I'd just take it through. We did this. We said we were going to uh put a new reading program in. We did that one. And one night I was driving home from one of these and I realized, my gosh, that was a that's really a whole lot of nothing. If my board president or any board member had said, Joe, you you did 30 goals, but what's the evidence that we moved from here to here? You can do a lot of things. You can be really busy. You can check goals off of your list, but does that mean you moved from good to great? No.
146I didn't have any accountability program mixed in with my plan. So, what do we do on the fourth session? I take you through some good to great stuff that Jim Collins created and we realized that you can create greatness indicators in a non-b businessiness setting. They're harder to do, harder to measure, but you can do it. And only one of the six greatness indicators is going to be student achievement. So, we'll have student achievement, but then we might have connections with the community. We might have being great in the area of social emotional wellness, being great in the area of how our kids do in high school, whatever it is, you're going to create your own evaluation of this plan. So when Alonso gets asked by your board president to present after the first year,
147he doesn't have to get up there and say, "I did this, this, this, and this." He's going to say, "Here were the six greatness indicators. Here were the was the way we were going to evaluate those and here's the data we got." The first year would be your bench your your bottom line and then each year you can show greatness. So after three years, you have data to show your community the movement from good to great. Next slide. I'm gonna skip these. I gave you a couple examples you can look in there. These are the three pieces of paper you would get and I gave you um an example from district 117. Next page, please remember this. This was what it looked like for the great companies. I want to show you the next slide.
148This is my school district of Oka. Don't worry about what the numbers say. What this is is where we ranked in the state of Illinois on at the time it was ISAT tests. We started out when I got there in 2002, we were 20th in the state. Pretty good, right? There's 700 districts. We were 20th. I walked into a really good situation. But here's the problem. Our kids feed into Nutrier. Wetka was fifth in the state. Glenn uh Gleno was 10th in the state. Wet, you know, each of them was higher. So, did our did my board say, "Way to go, Joe. We're 20th." What did they think we were? They viewed us as last. Okay, so we had some work to do, right? We were last in the township. Look at this chart. Just
149like the good to great companies, we we hovered around 20. And then look at the year where we launched. We went from 20 to 14 to 12 to 8 to four. And the year I left, we were second in the state. The darn um Lincolnshshire was always our nemesis. I couldn't get past Lincolnshshire. But guess what? We were first in the township. We went from last to first. Why did I give you this slide? Not to pat me on the back, but to tell you, as it says at the top, this stuff works. This Jim Collins stuff really works. And that's how we moved on. I'm going to wrap it up. I'm probably going too long. Um, let's see what I had on the next one. Um, I just went through that so we don't
150have to do that again. Let's go through these, though. Why should you pick me over the other fine groups? By the way, I know all of the the people you're seeing tonight. They're good folks. But I have knowledge and experience of Lake County. I've successfully facilitated like 40 plans. My process is lean and mean. One month to get it done and we have a way to assure accountability. Questions that you guys might have. I think I put my price on the next page. Go ahead, Miss Miller. I think you're starting us off on this one. >> Thank you so much for your presentation. Sure. >> How will you move beyond traditional survey and focus group methods to gather and interpret observable behavioral evidence of what our community values beyond focus groups um but including many
151stakeholder groups. >> I not to punt on this but I would um I'm very my model is very flexible. So, the first thing I would say to you guys is what do you have in mind? Um, come in and observe baby would be one thing that we could do. Come in and observe. I learn a lot about the district um by analyzing those documents that we're going to use for the current reality study. So, I would ask Alfonso to put all those documents together so we could do a nice analysis of that. I think that's all I got for right now. Going to be honest. >> Thank you for the presentation. Um you had mentioned too as well just the the uh lean and mean process that you've developed. So once once a plan would
152be approved by the board then within that lean and mean framework, what is your specific role then in >> continuing to help us support that implementation? >> Sure. and the types of processes that we're, you know, we're we're leaning towards towards that accountability piece that you mentioned as part of your >> Sure. your product. >> Well, um, when I leave after the fourth session, you have a mission, beliefs, very specific chart, uh, of of goals for three years and the accountability plan. Sometimes districts like to just take it take off from there and they'll do their own. The next step is to write action plans for the goals. Um I have models and templates of action plans. Sometimes I just give those to the superintendent. Other times the superintendent says, "We got this, Joe. Me
153and my uh my team, we're going to do the action plan." So, I have it available to do um to to help them create the action plans. The other thing that uh two other things that districts like to keep me on if they want um some extra guidance, sometimes it's difficult to find um specific concrete ways to measure some of those tough uh concepts from education that are sometimes mushy. um I've got lots of experience with that. So rather than a district, you know, really struggling trying to come up with that, they'll invite me to come in and I'll give them at least lots of ideas. I don't ever tell them what to do, but I'll give them lots of ideas and examples. And then the third thing that um I often come back for
154is the annual reviews. um when you want your superintendent to let you know how year one went. Um superintendent will often ask me to come and give my perception as the outside facilitator and a good strategic plan is a living breathing document. It probably will be um adjusted every year and board you should be okay with that. if Alonso comes back and says, um, we got a really good start on this one, but we opened up something and it's gonna take more than one year to get this one done, so we're going to move this one into both years. So, that's what the annual review should do and I can be a help there. >> Thank you so much for the proposal. Um, I love the lean and me. >> Good. Um, one question about
155that. Um, how do you ensure that the compressed timeline doesn't overlook or exclude important stakeholder voices? Well, we do that on the front end. The the I will work with the superintendent and any board members who want to work with me to make sure that that is the right group and that everybody has access. Um, some boards will pick the people and invite them. Other boards will open it to everyone and have almost like a little application form. The most effective, in my opinion, although I'll support you whichever way you want to go, is usually a combination where you'll invite a few like you want to make sure your union leadership comes. Um the one I'm doing right now up in Libertyville, Vernon Hills, they have um the mayors of each of their three main
156communities are on the group. They invited them and the mayors were thrilled, you know, and every one of them said, "Yes, we have a police chief up there." So they invited some people and then they had an open invitation to apply and they did not say no to anybody. That's why I have 60. But I I don't mind. You're welcome. >> Thank you. Um, so the final product, you know, as it with it being three pages, um, is it then reliant on those follow-up documents that you talked about for action plans for people to be able to do that kind of the building level plans? >> Yes. Um, if you want to see how this model really works and how a district is re uh that's really good at keeping the community informed with where
157you're at, go uh look on the district 117 website. When Jim was up there, Jim McCay, I did two strategic plans for him and he has the best um what do they call that? dashboard for the strategic plan. And so the three documents are the starting point. For every one of the goals, there'll be a specific action plan written for each goal. You like to let the community and everybody see what those action plans are. Each action plan will have some measurable to make sure that it got um done. You put the greatness indicators up there and whatever measurements you'll tell your community how to how you're measuring and you'll have that data. So the three documents are only the starting point. Um if you take a look at 117, you'll see what you could
158do with the whole plan. Their community loves it. They know exactly what's going on throughout the whole thing. >> I have a question for you. >> Sure. Um you outlined a fairly robust a very robust representative committee. >> Is that what you called it? Yeah. >> Um and then you also mentioned non-parent members as a part of that. Would you rely on the board to invite those individuals or would you give guidance and if so what um sorts of groups and members would you include? >> Wow. That could be anything. Um, and usually the board knows best because you know your community. Um, the reason that you have to have non-parent members on this is that if you're like every other district in the state, 70% of your residents don't have kids in your school
159yet they pay taxes. That's a very big group that you want to recognize, you want to respect, and you want to hear their voice. So that's the rationale. Um usually there's natural groups in communities. I was up in Rockford for uh doing uh work for them and they had have some community groups working on on issues uh community- based issues. There's like there were like maybe 10 groups. So we had a little focus group of all of those folks. So, it it would be and your leadership, whether it be the city manager or your mayor's, you know, whatever. Um, but I could give you lots of examples and then you could decide which works best for Grace Lake. >> I have a question about policy alignment. So, in your process, we're responsible for making sure
160there's alignment between policy and outcomes. and how how would policy fit into this process? >> Sometimes the goals will lend themselves to a direct connection to policy. So for instance um when I work in elementary districts um one of the concerns that often comes up especially since COVID is um student attendance and student behavior. So, every district has policies on student behavior. We might write a goal that says, "Review the current student behavior policy, review the district board policy, and make recommendations to improve both." So, if any goals come up that are connected to board policy, that would be um totally in consideration when you're creating the action plans. >> Thank you. >> You asked tough questions. Is she the tough question board member? >> Always a tough question board member. >> I like it
161though. >> What else do you have? Any other questions from board members? Okay. Thank you for being here tonight. >> Thanks. I would love to do this uh I would love to do this strategic plan for you. So, >> thank you for being with us tonight. Thank you so much. >> Okay. Bye. should be to me. It should be enduring. It should be I feel like we miss it to be Yeah. >> Hello. Good evening. Yes. Yes. Yes. >> Thanks for waiting. >> Hi there. >> Yeah. >> Good to see you. Nice to meet you. all are welcome. >> Got it. Can they want us to use the mic >> so so people can hear us over the the interwebs? streaming. >> Yep. Yep. >> Gotcha. >> Okay. Well, I know that we are the
162only thing standing between you and getting to bed tonight, so we are going to be brief and get right to the point. Um, I'm Ken Wallace. I am a founding partner uh for student centered services. Uh, this is Dan Whisman who is one of our associates. Uh, we founded Student Ser centered services a couple years ago. I retired two years ago from Main Township High School District 207. I was a superintendent there for 15 years. Uh while I was there, we were Google's first K12 partner. We had individual coaching plans for all of our teachers, individual career plans for all of our students. We were one of America's most innovative districts. >> Twice. Thank you, Dan. He's my He's my agent. Um and so when we were um you know, when I was getting ready
163to retire, I had a lot of friends and we were talking about things that we wanted to do. I was recruited actually by some of the firms that you've already heard tonight. Um, but I didn't want to just churn in the same path that other people were were churning in. And I had spent my life really trying to make a difference with students. And that was my ethos. That was my why. I was looking for a group of people like Dan that really had a proven track record for doing that. That's how we came to be. So, and and strategic planning has been our bread and butter. uh when I was as a superintendent, the strategic planning goals that we set actually became district goals. Not just my goals, not just somebody else's goals, but
164they were really the goals that I set with the board and they cascaded throughout the district. So that literally at the classroom level, they touched what happens with our what happened with our students and at the end of the day that is the most effective strategic planning that you can do. So we are here tonight with the proposal. So we'll get started. Aha. You told me the See, I always bring my own clo for this very reason. >> Okay, there we go. Okay, so for this project, I'm sorry, I got to stay there. I'm not used to having a microphone. Okay, for this project, we will have three facilitators. I'll be one of the facilitators. Dan will be one of the facilitators. He's a Lake County superintendent. And then John Berkkey uh was actually going
165to be here to present tonight. John is the Luda uh director and he is in Springfield trying to make bad things not happen and so he had tied up a little bit today. So John will also be on this. So we'll have three folks assigned to this project. Uh we think this will be a really cool project and and we're looking forward to doing it. Um again, current and recent superintendents. We've got a lot of extensive work. We're doing a lot of work right now in AI in particular. That's one of the reasons again for starting the company that we did was because we really wanted to be nimble and be able to move into spaces uh as districts really have needs needs for that. Um and so that allowed us the freedom to really
166do those kind of things. Um one of the things that's really really important about how we do our strategic planning, student centered services isn't just a name. We really really have that at our core of our ethos. And so one of the things that we do in our planning and we'll talk a little bit more about this is we actually include students in the decision-making process in the authorship of the process and finally in this video we'll demonstrate this the the at the at the culmination of this work when we prepare um the strategic plan students will actually help us present it to the board of education and any other uh audiences that are appropriate. So that's what this is what that will look like >> on the actual strategic plan team uh in their
167work itself. And to kick us off to talk about uh how their meetings went and their process and then he's going to actually do the first uh the first thing is uh Brady. >> Thank you Dr. Berky. Uh my name is Brady Seabourg. I'm a senior at Kerry Grove. And uh we met six times from uh September through January. And this was a group of about 50 people, teachers, administrators, students, parents, uh community leaders, uh just a lot of different stakeholders. Uh Mrs. macro was at my table a couple of times and I got to we got to discuss a lot of stuff about um the five different goals which uh we are going to cover in these next few slides. So, one of the first of those would be um the vision statement for
168the district. And this vision statement was the result of the strategic planning team breaking off into several smaller groups and trying to picture how we saw our district and what we saw it becoming over the course of the next 5 years and beyond that. And then we took this picture from all these different groups and tried to sum it back down into a single sentence which became to be a destination district that provides each student a world-class education within an engaged and supportive community. So again, that just gives you a just a just a brief snippet, but we don't just talk that. We really do walk that. Uh we um are actually engaged in a in a in a project right now where we've got uh third graders, fourth graders, fifth graders, ele, you know,
169middle school students that are helping author a plan in in another district. And so it's it's actually turned out to be one of the really really cool features of this because um as they say from the from the mouths of children and some of the things that we that we learn from our students, we get insights, we get um advice, we get uh experiences that just uh need to be an important part of the strategic planning process. So we're going to talk about the process inputs. >> All right. So I'm uh my name is Danny. I'm the superintendent at Warren Township High School. Here just next door to you. I'm really excited to be here tonight. Um hopefully one of the things that I am able to bring if uh you choose to use us
170as a partner is um just some insight into the community that can uh be closely connected to the community. I know some of your team um see your superintendents on a regular basis and um I know we just uh we just first semester this year uh did a project for John'sburg school district uh which I sit on a couple boards here in uh Northern Illinois on for example uh the tech campus board I'm on with the superintendent in Johnsburg. So to be able to see him on a regular basis and um we went out to coffee a couple weeks ago and I was just we're just doing that because we're colleagues and I'm able to say hey how are things going? What do you need? Um perhaps that might be uh helpful to you as
171a school district. So uh some of the things that are really important for our process are the inputs that we bring in. This is your school district is a part of your community. You have a lot of things going on in your community and neighboring communities right now. and uh when there's a lot of things going on, it's really important to try to understand what the community needs and then as a school district and through this process hopefully you're able to help focus your attention. Uh but to know what to focus on, you got to get a lot of input. So we do at the beginning of our process do interviews with every schoolboard member to understand their hopes and their priorities for the strategic planning process and for the school district. We do a
172round of stakeholder surveys. We uh most we incorporated in a plan team that the school leaders your school leadership district leadership helps identify that team will come together a handful of times. Uh depending on what your timeline is and your cadence uh they might meet between three and six times uh for varying lengths. Uh we it's really important to us like Ken said that we're involving students. And then I think that's something that's really uh really nice about being a small firm that's connected to schools and as a superintendent I understand how important it is to make sure that we're uh flexible. So, as we go through the process, as school board members, you might the school board members might tell us during the interviews, hey, I think this would be a really good thing
173to consider uh that maybe you haven't done in other school districts or uh if your incoming superintendent has wanted been thinking about wanting to do something or as he gets to know the community, he starts thinking about different ways that he would like to incorporate some input and feedback from your different stakeholders, whether they're internal stakeholders or community stakeholders. That's something that we can definitely talk about and figure out how to incorporate. We really think it's important to uh be flexible for that. And as a superintendent, it's really important to me if I'm ever bringing a firm in to help me with something, I need them to listen to the needs that I have. What we're trying to give you is a five-year roadmap. Um, and we do really try to focus on students future.
174I've worked with Ken on a number of projects now, and Ken really is focused on what students need. If you look up CTE education and career education Illinois, people that have been paving the way for the last 25 to 30 years, Ken's on that list. Um, and he makes sure that we do it right. The other thing I really appreciate about Ken, not only is the expertise that he brings in uh around career education, he is always trying to talk to people about what students need when they leave high school. Like what do they actually need? Not hypothetically, but what is it that we need? And as I've watched Ken work uh with schools in this process, if we've got imagine a uh imagine 50 people in the room, they're all kind of around eight
175or nine tables working in groups trying to brainstorm different ideas that they have to help the school district come up with a strategic plan. Ken's willing to sit down with them as a facilitator and just say, "Okay, let's put a little cocoon around ourselves. Let's talk." and he'll sit there and guide that group, talk with the group, listen to them, but also say, "Okay, here here's what I think you need to be considering. Here's what's going out. Here's what's going on out in the world uh when these kids get out of high school." Very future focused uh for our students. Um let's see. I I forget if I'm supposed to do this slide or if you're do am I on slide two or this three? This is okay. Um thank you. Um, so some things
176that you might want to be considering that aren't necessarily part of the contract, but as you're thinking about um your current state as a school district, your current state as a community, uh the newness that you have and the opportunity to do some uh fresh thinking with a new superintendent. Um, although you might not see a community or staff or stakeholder engagement opportunity in the plan proposal that we gave you, we're very willing, like I said, to uh pivot. So, if you're considering something like that, happy to uh speak with your incoming superintendent about that. Also, um sometimes school districts and school boards often are asking us what what what happens when we're done? And probably every firm that came to tonight is willing to help you. Um, after the strategic planning process is over,
177whatever firm you decide to go with, I think that's something to start talking about right away. Okay, we got we've got this process starting out. What are we going to do when it's done? Whoever you choose, it it might be a good idea to think about what uh is that a good partner to uh hook up with uh after the process is done. >> Okay. So, following up on on what Danny just introduced, um, one of the, uh, exercises that we will include as a part of this proposal is to do a portrait of a graduate. And I want to dig just a little bit deeper into what this means because a lot of districts have done portrait of a graduates. They say we want kids who are nimble, kids who are creative, kids who
178are resilient, kids who are problem solvers. And and if you look at a 100 uh portrait of a graduates, you'll see more similarities than not. Uh we know those 21st century skills learners. We want every student to leave us being a learner. Well, nine out of 10 districts do a port of their graduate and it turns out to be a really nice poster on a wall. The trick is how do you create habits, daily habits in not just one classroom, but in really if you can every classroom to create learning experiences that support what it is you say you want to do with a portrait of a graduate. I'll give you an example. So, we all want our students to be kind, okay? We want them to be respectful. But what are moves tier one?
179Tier one just means everybody does it. What are tier one moves that we can do in a classroom to engender our students being kind? Well, things like making sure that teachers when they greet our students, they're saying good morning and they're saying it by name and they're using teachable moments in the classroom when that doesn't happen perhaps within students to emphasize that. Now, that seems like a really, really simple thing, but the research is that if teachers stand outside of a classroom door and greet students, every student by name every day, guess what happens? Your attendance goes up, your dropout rate goes down, and that only happens because you leverage every teacher every day doing these simple acts and habits. So, that portrait of a graduate, we'll build a good portrait of a graduate. The
180deeper work that Danny's talking about is how do you build systems that create daily habits that end up at the end of a graduating student's career that they have practiced this often and they go out and do this. And I'll give you one silly example. I had a son that was a really good cross country runner at Maine South. He was on the first team that went to state and his coach had this habit. Every day after practice, the kids would come together and they would all shake hands. Now that seems like a silly thing, but that was a habit that then engendered really good sportsmanship, camaraderie among the kids. And so the portrait of a graduate, the trick is not to build it. The trick is to actually make it matter. And so we
181really will do the deep work with a portrait of a graduate, not just to build a really good portrait, but to also help you design learning conditions, habitual learning conditions that actually create the type of students that we say we want to have. Uh when we go through our strategic planning process, there's basically four steps to this. We can do this in a varying amount of meetings, but you're bringing in typically a group of stakeholders. It includes staff members uh from different staff groups, um a handful of parents, a handful of students, and then some community members. So we try to bring that group together. We try to put them through some data to better understand the district. that includes surveys and some presentations uh by your team. We spend some time revisiting the values,
182the mission, the vision and then we use that group to identify priorities moving forward and then create consensus around which priorities are we going to actually put on the plan. Not all the priorities get on the plan um but we try to build some consensus around that and involve multiple stakeholder groups for that. It's probably a pretty typical process. Um this part I think where we get really excited is uh bringing students in to that group and making sure that we have good community members on the team. >> Okay. Is it who is it me? I can't remember now. Thank you for the presentation. We're going to figure out where we're asking the questions. Okay. >> Is it me? Who did you start the last one? You did. Okay. So, it's me. It's coming to
183me. It's coming to me. Here we go. >> No judgment. No judgment. >> That's right. Right. You were on slide two. I'm on slide three, so we're good. >> No judgment. >> Okay. Thank you for that presentation. Uh it helps us continue visualize this process. How within the context of what you presented, maybe elaborate a little bit or take me through the process of moving beyond some of those traditional surveys and focus group methods that we've all become used to. Where where is your niche in that to interpret and observe and collect that evidence for us as we move into this next phase with our incoming superintendent? and what what where would your story lie within that that piece? >> So, it's a combination of qualitative and quantitative. So, obviously um our most recent um
184engagement, I think we collected somewhere in the order of 1,600 survey responses. Now, that that those surveys that we designed um had not just you know the objective answer questions, we had a lot of narrative included in that. And then we often in some of our engagements, we actually have follow-up triggering questions in there so that if there's something that needs to go a little bit deeper, we can do that. The other thing, and Danny mentioned it, we actually begin our process. The very first thing that we will do is we will actually conduct one-on-one interviews with the board. We actually start there. And the findings from that often are things I can tell you because we're finishing up a project now. I was going over this afternoon over some of our gold drafts and
185and we we make comments before we turn it back over to the district and several of them, you know, we've got green and yellow and green is we're absolutely going to use that because the the the group's really authored that. There's some that's kind of like, well, they they they may want this or they may may not because you've got to cut down a little bit. And I'm looking at that and I'm remembering conversations that I had with specific board members. There's a couple of board members in this group that we're doing right now that have a really, really strong instructional background. So, they know tier one instruction and the value of tier one instruction. So, so we're listening very carefully. Beyond that, though, because I know that that there are some districts, they want
186to go beyond that. So, so you have to craft who is your audience. Your your your team is going to be a representative group of of your community. Okay? So, you're going to start there. And there's a limit to how many you can have there. We can customize beyond that. Everything I just said, that's sort of the the the the canned version of that. But let's just say that you've got multiple groups. You know, I'll give you a four example. Uh in many communities, and this isn't this isn't new, this is just the business we're in. Um special ed parents, for example, often feel they're not maybe getting the attention that they need. Well, that becomes a that's a that's a focus group in and of itself. So depending on the needs of an individual
187district, we will customize deeper dives, interviews with other folks to get to the heart of the matter because we don't want to leave anybody out. The it's really that's one of the tricks with strategic planning, uh, is trying to, you know, do too much, but it's about doing the right things and, um, you know, it's getting between the signal and the noise. Real quick, Ken and I have talked about and haven't been able to find a district that was willing to do this other than my district. We tried this uh tactic. In the last newsletter that Warren sent out, we sent out a mailer every six months to all of the mailboxes uh in our in our taxing uh body. And whether you got a school in the district or not, you get one if
188you got a mailbox. And we put a phone number in there. We we've talked about trying to see if we there's a district that would be willing to do that. Is it an open phone number you can call in? um an agent is asking you phone numbers. It's um it's an AI agent is ask or sorry is asking you questions. You can talk to it. It'll talk back to you. Um and it was just an open phone number that people could call in. They different people talk differently. They'll they'll say things that they wouldn't have typed. They'll spend time differently uh on the phone than they would have if they were asked to fill out like a Google form. So I would love to find another school district that was is willing to do that.
189We just did that at Warren a couple weeks ago. It was kind of fun to do. >> Um, thanks for being here. Thanks for the proposal. Um, can you talk a little bit more about implementation? So, maybe um, what's the scope of implementation support that's included in the proposal scope that you shared? you know what kinds of um supports will we have available to ensure accountability and then maybe a little bit about um the opt that you know the option that you described just so we can understand what's included and what might we might want to add on. So where we typically end our service is with a written plan that comes before the board and that plan will include goals and then you know the district's job will be to to really have action
190plans with that what we are available to do and it's a it's a you know that's a negotiated engagement beyond that but it's the stuff that like I love because it's taking it to the next step and taking those action plans and helping build discrete uh activities, learning objectives and an accountability system, you know, because that's a part of it. If this is done well, I I I know Lynn after serving this district wonderfully is retiring and the new superintendent's coming in. If this is done well, what it will what what will happen with the strategic plan is that the goals that you guys set will become your roadmap for the next five years and if you really do it well, for the next 10 or 15 years. I'll give you for example. I had
191a um a plan because each of my students had an individual career plan. So we had goals, annual goals, build more business partners. That goal will never go away because the analytics told us not only do we need more business partners, we need them in these specific areas. We always need more medical partners, for example. So you're building goals that the board it's visible and they cascade throughout the district. So, we'll work with you to set good goals, but then also strategies that you can put into place to actually build it. If you do this well, it won't be the new superintendent's plan. It won't be the board's plan. It'll be our plan and it'll be visible. And that's a really important aspect of this. >> Um, so in the video it showed very nicely
192how students were participating in the presentation of the plan. Um, and I'm just curious, how are they actually involved um, in the process before the final presentation? >> They're on the team from day one. So, so the groups, you'll have community members, you'll have staff from the district. Uh, we have a couple of board members and a current engagement. And then we have so let's say we've got seven or eight tables broken up. At every one of those tables, there's one or more students at the table. They are embedded from day one intentionally. and and it's been really really inspiring actually. Um there's one board member in particular that has a couple of students at his table in the engagement we're in right now and he often will stop the conversation and and make sure
193that he turns to the students there and incorporate you what do you think what do you think about this and prompt them and that's sort of happening at all these tables. So, it's just a it's just a it's a very very cool aspect of this, but they'll be there from day one, including surveys. >> And if you put kids at the table, the adults at the table typically will recognize, they'll remember, and it helps them focus. One thing that uh we try to do at the beginning of the meeting while pe a lot of times we'll do a little bit of food at the beginning of a meeting as people come in and we will try to get an update from a handful of students on hey what have you done last since we were
194here to focus and frame people on why we're here. adults just act differently in a good way uh when they're sitting around kids, especially if they're designing a system that's meant uh to support kids. So, we put them on, they're there, they get just as much of a say as anyone else, and sometimes the adults will encourage them to vote twice. >> Thank you for the presentation. Um my question is about the the team that you're bringing um and if you have different roles that you play or different strengths that you bring or if you all um work as one unit. >> Both I would definitely say we have strengths. I I thank you. I I forget to use a microphone because I never think I need one. Um, and so, um, John, who's not
195here, uh, does a lot of the back-end analytics, but he also does a lot of the leadership teams. And we we take turns. So, it's we we feel like we want to sort of crossrain and each of us know every aspect of the process so that you're not getting one person like if you ask Danny a question, he he's not able to answer it. So, we spend a lot of time together outside of the process. We're meeting regularly. We're going over the information. We're doing planning before we come in. And um we do have different strengths. There's no doubt about that. I just because we've got different experiences. Danny is a sitting current superintendent. Uh probably a little newer in his career. Uh John and I are both retired superintendents. John is still active as
196the director of Ludas. So he's, you know, u active with a lot of superintendents and a lot of schools and also brings the Springfield spring Springfield aspect into that. But we we'll try to keep that out for now. But but I would say we all know the process really well. Um so once the plan is approved by a board, what role will your group have in helping support our implementation? Um what type of what type of supports will the district have for you guys to ensure our accountability? >> That really depends on what the district asks of us. Our engagement is to go through and complete the strategic plan. In a perfect world, it's one of those it's a gradual release thing. At the end of the day, you know, I'm a certified change agent
197coach. So, there's a process to go through changing and and if you do a good strategic plan, by definition, you're going to change some things. And so, I love the year engagement perhaps after that helping in this case would be a new superintendent. Um, you know, work through the all of the aspects. It's legal, it's technical, it's political aspects that go into creating the change. That's a separate engagement, but that's the one that actually to me is the most interesting piece of this because again, as I said, nine out of 10 districts build a portrait of a graduate. It's a really nice poster on a wall. The great districts take that portrait of a graduate and they actually put it into motion and they build the things that it takes to make sure that their
198graduates have those attributes that they say they value. And and that's the enga that's an engagement beyond this. And that's a discussion. And should the board want to do that, you know, we'd be more than happy to to help with that. >> You can. >> So, I um as a just a Lake County superintendent, Lynn and I see each other on a regular basis, probably two times a month at minimum. Um so I just as a fellow superintendent, I'm interacting with all superintendents regularly. We have a great superintendent group. I think your uh incoming superintendent, he's already he's he came to a couple of our meetings. We've met him. Um so he's going to have a good network there. I think that he's going to want to rely on. And while Lynen Lynn might call
199me or I might call her and ask for some advice or she's ever done something like a a random problem that I might have, maybe I have questions about um a data center that might be being built uh close by. Um, we're talking to each other just as colleagues and if if your incoming superintendent has questions um happy I'm happy to feel that call and just talk through that just as a a colleague that's in the county. Um, and then that situation maybe the involvement uh on the front end helped some of that conversation because I've got some of that context. >> Follow up on something you said earlier as well. Um, so you have a gentleman that's down in Springfield obviously pretty busy, right? You're a city superintendent. I can't imagine your plate is
200not full as well. >> Who fills in the gaps? Is it support staff that comes out to see us to deal with all this or are we buying you guys? Yeah, I mean I so as a city and superintendent I do have to I'm taking vacation days uh to do the work uh with your school district. Um generally we haven't had issues uh with that. It's just the three of us. There's nobody else. >> So in our proposal um there was a commitment that at least two of us are present at everything and I think in the current engagement um we've had three at every one but one meeting. So we will have two two of the three at every meeting and most meetings will have all three um at at most meetings if not
201all meetings. It just sometimes it depends on scheduling um and and so uh and and in addition to that we have other associates and other other partners but we expect we've looked at our calendars ahead of time so we expect three of us uh to be able to do this engagement and and with a minimum of two of us here uh every time we come to meet. >> Thank you. I have a question over here. I have a question about policy's role in your process. So, our job is to make sure policy is aligned with whatever the plan ends up being. So, how does that work in your process? >> It it really depends on the on the types of goals that we end up with. Um, and I'll give you a perfect a timely
202for example because we're working through this right now. uh and it's around AI and it's with a district that doesn't have an AI policy. So what we can do in our goal setting really is to cue that up for the board to consider adopting a model policy on how to adopt AI. That's the that's the role of the board. But there is a role to be played um in in the strategic planning if it leads itself there. We what we won't do is come in and start, you know, telling you you need to change your policy manual. If it comes up organically through the through the will of the of the strategic planning and if you've got the right folks, it it will uh and that comes out as a part of the goal, then
203it it'll end up coming to you as you know, you've got a goal to try to implement a model policy. >> Thank you. Um, >> so I know that strategic planning often involves creating a mission statement, vision statement. Um, >> we have one that we've lived with for since we did the last strategic planning that we think is pretty good. It's pretty we were just saying that's pretty road tested, so to speak. Um, and Dr. Glickman's done a great job of keeping it act like as a living uh active part of how we talk about the work of the district. So, um, when a district has done some strong work in the past, um, you know, not that we're not open to new, uh, you know, and revisiting and it's a foundation, but how do
204you use that existing, uh, pieces? How do you use the existing pieces as a foundation for the for the work versus turning over? >> So, we're actually going through this right now. Uh, the the district that we're working with, they like their mission and vision statement. Well, first of all, I think it's a cool homage to to Lynn that that if that mission statement would go on and as as a legacy. Um, that really is not something that we're going to tussle over. If that's the will of of the group coming in, then then we can live with that. The most important thing are really the goals that come out of it and ultimately the action plans that come from that. But if you like your mission statement and and especially if it's sticky, I
205mean I mean if it's a brand it's a branding issue, if it's a really cool sticky mission, stay with it. There's no no big need to change that. Other questions? No, >> thank you for being here tonight. We appreciate your time. >> Okay. All right. Thank you very much. >> Thanks for being last. I'm going continue on with the meeting. Here we go. All right, that brings us now finally to topics for future agenda items, which I >> bet you want me to go through these quickly, board. All right. Uh, one moment. Okay. Uh, May 13th, we'll be starting with that five o'clock policy committee meeting that Christie was talking about earlier. Then we have some wonderful opportunities with students. Um, we'll be bringing in our students that were recognized at today's IPA um, breakfast,
206which was so fantastic. We've got um Park Campus seventh and eighth grade girls basketball team players coming in and then the Park Campus Wolves will be um presenting to the board that evening. Then we have some approvals um the renewal of audit services approval we'll be bringing to you and that furniture moving assembly u that rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Um that we talked about tonight. We'll bring that to you as well. We also um are hopeful that we'll be ready to bring approvals for new assistant principles um as that process is beginning um our administrator contracts which we do every year. So we'll be bringing those to you and then um hoping that we'll be able to bring a strategic planning facilitator approval to you that night as well. Um maybe we should
207just pause for a quick moment on that um for me to ask Chrissy, are people giving information to you, their rubrics to you? What what's happening next? >> That's a great question. >> Yeah, isn't it though? >> Uh yeah, why don't you if you are done tonight, you can just give the physical copies to me and if not, if you want some time to look back through, I would say what's the deadline? Well, I think >> we want to >> I mean, we're going to want to get started working with So, let me I'll tell you what. Before answering that question, let's just review with everyone what we were thinking about that since our next board meeting is not until May 13th, and you probably don't want to wait all the way until June to
208actually >> get a contract together. This is what we were thinking we would do. um you're weighing in, you're each weighing in, right, on um on who you want to bring forward. So that information can go from Christie to me. Um I can put that together. I can start working with whoever has risen to the top working together with um that that consultant to get a contract going with the idea being that on May 13th we'll bring you that contract but you won't just vote on it like then you'll discuss it right so it kind of right so it'll be kind of like discussion and voting all at the same time and certainly if that meeting for whatever reason you you are not ready to vote then you won't vote, but we'll bring it to
209you as approval that night as well. So, with that in mind, I mean, so that we can get started with um talking to the consultants. I mean, I would say about a week. >> Yeah. >> Does that sound good? >> That sounds fair. >> How do you want to uh collect the information? I'm not sure you can read my um my notes. Is it is it good to just do it maybe in an email format or a Google form or anything that would be easily collectible >> um >> from all of us or just just just let us send it to you? >> Yeah. I mean what I'm really looking for is you know who's your what's your use rank choice voting. Okay. >> Um so if you want to just keep it to that
210and if you just literally just mark one two three four on the sheets and give it to me that's fine. Or if you want to put it in an email to me that's fine too. and just maybe by the end of this week would be helpful. And if it's tonight, perfect. And if you need more time, that's fine, too. >> Yeah. >> Since this is the first time I'm doing this, um I'm just curious like if I have questions because some of them were so different. Some of them had similarities, some of them were very different. Um, and I'm thinking about kind of the impact it might have on the cabinet specifically, like different types of and just like if I've got questions about that impact, >> call me. >> Thank you. >> Okay, good
211plan. >> But but I would request that we hear those questions in the discussion so that we all have certainly access to the answers. Yeah, I'm just I don't know what those questions are. I'm just as I go through and think about these things. >> I'm be looking for just practical things, but yeah, I can share them with everyone >> and I can also just share that that information out with the rest of the board >> as I always do. >> Okay. >> I have a question as well also newbie question here. Um, is there it would it be appropriate for h us to have a discussion during close session this evening just kind of bouncing ideas off or >> I don't think we I don't think it's topic topic. Yeah. >> Oh. Oh, I
212see. Okay. Um, and then also is it a board decision or does the cabinet also weigh in? >> Um, it's the board and Dr. Carmona. >> Okay. >> Submitting their their thoughts. Anything else? Okay. All right. Um I realized I paused right in the middle, but it felt Okay. So, I think I talked about that. All right. And the last thing on the um May 13th board meeting is we'd like to bring you the Lake County 1% sales tax resolution board. We've been talking about that for a while. Um, as a reminder, we discussed this first at the November 19th finance committee meeting and board meeting. And at that time, the consensus amongst the board is that you were in favor of bringing that resolution um well of of you were in favor of um
213this being on a ballot for the community to decide. So, just as a reminder for you, voting yes on the resolution isn't voting yes for the Lake County 1% sales tax. It is voting yes for putting it on a ballot. So, I think that's just important for everyone to remember. It's just saying yes, we want to let the voters decide. But this is a long way me saying you have discussed it. It's just been a while. It was back in November. Are you comfortable with us bringing it in um in May as a resolution for you to vote on? Okay, great. All right. And then June 10th, here's the big thing I want you to remember about June 10th. We won't be here. We'll be at Avon. And that's where the board and administration will
214be and public members will members of the public will be all summer long for board meetings because um this building will be under construction. So be at Avon. Um if we need another policy committee meeting that night, we'll do that at five o'clock. We won't know that until May. Um and strategic plan update will happen. So we will as we do every year talk about our existing strategic plan goals and the work that was accomplished this year and the work that will move into next year into the fall as you get ready for strategic planning. Um the resource conservation committee will be here to share an update. Um and then that will be a finance committee night and um Mr. Goldstein will be presenting the preliminary budget. And that brings us to the end of
215the school year. All right. >> Already >> it >> goes fast. >> June 10th. Yeah. >> Okay. Thank you, Dr. Glickman. Uh, do we have any public comments? >> Okay. We do have a close session this evening. A brief close session this evening. Uh, I need a motion to go into close session in accordance with public act 5, Illinois CS20/2, paragraph C one, the appointment, employment, compensation, discipline, performance, or dismissal of specific employees of the public body or legal counsel for the public body, including hearing testimony on a complaint lodged against an employee of the public body or against legal counsel for the public body to determine its validity. Okay. I need a motion. >> I'll move. >> I'll second. >> And we do not anticipate any additional business coming out of that close session.
216So we will adjourn from there and not come back into open session. >> Okay. >> Hun >> I >> Miller >> I Mac >> I >> Halverson >> I >> Weedman >> I >> and Braden >> I >> wonderful. Okay.