CCSD 46 Board of Education Meeting: April 7, 2021

001mr whitney we're ready to go live okay we are live okay uh good evening everybody this is the community consolidated school district 46 board of education meeting for wednesday april 7 2021 at 6 30 pm uh we are in a hybrid format with a couple of members on site at frederick's school at 595 frederick road the governor of illinois has declared a coven 19 disaster declaration currently means remains in full first in effect an in-person meeting is not practical or prudent this evening because of the kova 19 pandemic i have confirmed that all board members are participating in the meeting via participate in this meeting can hear one another and can hear all discussions we have arranged for members of the public to be uh contemporarily here all discussions during tonight's meeting and um dr

002stephen mack and christy braden are on site at 595 frederick road um for our regular meeting all votes will be taken by roll call tonight and as required by open meetings act a verbatim recording of tonight's open session meeting will be kept and made available to public on the district website uh we do have a google doc on the on the website for public comment for them to uh for members of the public to be able to write a public comment to us but that being said uh can i get a call to order please and a roll call weedman here mack and strack here okay that establishes a quorum next would be the pledge of allegiance dr mike when you guys are ready you want to start it off over there okay next we

003need approval for the agenda second miller lacroix hi okay uh next is uh public comments i'll first see if there's anybody on site for any public comments i see some shaking heads no okay next will be the summer school presentation we're getting the document up ready to get presented this is paul lewis assistant superintendent i'm going to be talking about summer school tonight and we're off we're ready to get going here i'm ready to get ready to go um you might see that there that we have my colleague's name up there miss woodruff she was scheduled to be here tonight but due to some family issues tonight with a sick child she's not able to be here so i'm going to be doing this by myself but we um i'm ready to share all this

004information so thank you for giving us the op me the opportunity to talk about our summer school program and here we go our summer school program on the next slide um our summer school prom program is going to involve four separate entities that we're going to go into much more detail as the presentation goes on but just wanted to share a little bit our focus this year for summer school is really based on the state's recommendation about addressing unfinished learning so we're looking for an opportunity to be able to provide time and support for our students who may need some additional time for unfinished learning based on our school year that we've had so our four programs the first one is a title one program we have historically had a summer school program for title

005one students in the past for our students at avon this year we have made a decision to expand our title one summer school program to also include our other title 1 school prairie view so we'll be expanding our title 1 summer school program and that's for our k-4 students at avon and prairie view we also will be continuing our program called adelante our summer school program for our ec early childhoods kids all the way through eighth grade who are identified as el or bilingual students the third program which is a new one for us to share is we're calling it the summer bridge program and that's for our kindergarten through seventh grade students this is really our program to help identify a time and a space for identified students for unfinished learning so we'll be

006talking a little bit more about the summer bridge program and then our last program certainly not the lease program though is a continuation we offer an extended school year program for identified students across our whole district that would benefit from more time over the summer based on their individual educational plan and the team decision so again all four of these programs are for identified students and for invited students to participate in summer school i wanted to share a little bit more though that we are going to be using either grant funds or esser funds to be able to afford and to pay for these programs so the title one will of course be from title one grants the adelante will be from title three generally the summer bridge program would strictly be coming out of

007esser funds us are two funds and the extended school year is part of the idea special education grants so the next slide is going to share a little bit about the identification process i shared that this is an invitation only program and so we're looking to identify students for the summer program based on a few of the recommendations from the state these include engagement or attendance concerns so we are hoping to engage pardon the pun there but our students a little bit more over the summer who may have struggled during the school year for attendance or engagement we also want to look at our report card grades how are the students how they've been doing are there areas that need additional focus we also want to look at assessment data a little bit later i'm

008going to be sharing as part of the superintendent's report i'm going to be sharing our plan to have a spring map assessment so many of you know nwea map so we want to use that data that we'll be collecting to help us identify students who would benefit and then of course we want to have our teachers involved too so teachers will be looking for recommendations for inviting students for some of the programs we'll be also looking at additional criteria this additional criteria will include the identification process for el and bilingual students enrolled at a title 1 school and then information from an iep team one of the things that we wanted to look very closely at though is about potential resources we wanted to make sure that our students and staff had appropriate resources for

009our summer school program sometimes in the past our summer school program has been more of focus on enrichment and so we are looking this year to be definitely more focused on academics so we've had some new materials that you'll see later on the agenda that we're hoping for consideration and some continuing resources so we're going to speak first about i'm going to speak first about the k-8 literacy so we have found a program from scholastic called lit camp and so it's going to provide a slew of reading materials for each grade level for our students and teachers to be able to use um and the good thing is that they are meant to be used in small group whole group um all kinds of different ways for instruction and independent reading so we think that

010these will be very very worthwhile this lit camp materials are also available in spanish so that our bilingual students will be able to have some resources for this as well these resources will be used for title 1 adelante and summer bridges we'll make them available to our esy teachers as well if that would be beneficial to them we also would like our students to continue to use a program that avon and prairie view already have as part of title 1 funding it's called lexia we're finding good success and would like to continue to use that and amplify reading is available to all the other schools in the district and raz kids is something that we use for our k-4 students so you may realize that the lit camp is all going to be paper-based and

011we also want to be able to have an opportunity to use some of our technology as well but the focus of instruction will be not on the computer it will be a paper-based experience for many of the programs so we're excited about the possibility of some new resources for literacy these will be a um greatly appreciated resource for our teachers to help them with their planning and so that they can focus specifically on the common core standards or the areas of need for each of the students the other resource that we want to look at is some math resources our summer school programs are going to greatly focus on literacy and numeracy so reading and math so we have identified a program for k-8 students called sadlier and the program is called math progress materials

012we're very excited about it because it is very much common core aligned it has all of the main areas of each grade level so grade level specific it also will be paper-based so it won't be digital we think that will be a positive change for students for the summer the materials provide as it says guided instruction materials guided practice and independent practice as well it does have some digital assessment tools that will be taken care of the good thing is that this is not a program that's meant to be used page by page it's meant to identify where the kids need the support and then use the resources appropriately as always we have other district resources that we want to continue to use so our sixth through eighth grade students may be used continuing to

013use mathia we also will want to continue to use some of our digital math resources we also are going to be looking for i'm not looking for we are going to be using a program called go math for our early childhood through second grade students go math is our program that's in spanish our math choice that we made for sadler math does not come in spanish so working with the el director it was decided that that would be a continuation from prior years to use go math in spanish and then as part of the title 1 schools they also have a program called success maker it's an individualized math support system and we'll be encouraging the title 1 school summer school to use those as well so more specific information about the four programs so

014the first one again is title one summer school again this is for identified students at avon and prairie view school while we're really going to be pushing and encouraging an on-site experience we will be evaluating the number of students who request a remote to determine if we're able to make that happen so we are really pushing and encouraging because we know having the students in front of us can be helpful to some of the kids especially due to engagement issues so this program this year will be housed at avon school it will be june 7th to july first we're summer school program we typically run monday through thursday for title program it's 8 to 11 a.m there are no tuition costs and we will make transportation available for all students again all of the funding

015for this would be based on our title 1 and esser funds in the corner i also added all of the identification processes again so i met with all the principals today we'll be working on teachers collecting data about students and creating a list to invite our students based on those asses those identification processes the next program is our adelante summer school program again we're looking at identifying students so dr diaz and her team are already working on identifying students who would benefit from the summer school program similar but there are a few differences this program will be at frederick school same weeks june 7th to july 1st monday through thursday this one is from 9 a.m to noon again no tuition costs and will provide transportation you may notice that those times are different between

016those two programs this will allow us to have paired buses so that we can be very cost effective of running some buses for the title one program then have them pick up students for the adelante program and then reverse it on the way home so that we can get the most out of our bus transportation costs so i'm excited about that again students will be identified by the el and bilingual status a most recent access score and of course teacher recommendations this one again funded through title iii and if the title 3 funds run out we'll be able to supplement from the assert to funds the next program again is about the summer bridge program we're making this available to identified students from meadowview woodview frederick gms and park you'll notice that those are not

017the title two schools and so again this these will go on the same time frame as the adelante program frederick school june 7th to july 1st monday to thursday nine to noon we combined the adelante and the summers bridge program in the same building same times because the buses will become generally from the same regions across our district so we were trying to be as efficient with our busing and our groupings of students as possible and again no tuition costs free transportation and paid through for from astr ii funding and again we have an identification process that we were working through this this even today one of the things i wanted to point out about the differences too in our title one program our students are going to be able to take home a slew

018of books to be kept in their home for a home library so title one programming is something usually above and beyond what other programming is and so to go above and beyond for our k-4 students will be sending home approximately 20 new books for the summer school program that they may read during summer school or just will be able to have extra books available at home the upper grades are less because they're longer so it won't be 20 books for the upper grades but it'll still be a good number i think it's 10 or 12. so that will be a nice addition for our title students to have books being sent home for them to be able to use the again just in order not of importance the last program is about our extended school

019year my colleague heather lorenzo is fully in charge of this with her amazing team this one is a little bit different because it's going to be at prairie view school mostly because a lot of the equipment that will be easier to be not have to be moved out of prairie view school for some of our early childhood programming that we'll be doing this one is june 7th to july 1st as well but you'll notice that it's monday through friday for this program we have to follow some state guidelines and we have to have a certain number of days and actually a certain number of minutes and so you'll see that their timing is actually a little bit different too so eight in the morning till 11 15. there are still again no tuition costs free

020transportation the identification process is all about the iep team meeting with parents for discussion and then data representing regression or recoupment concerns over long breaks i apologize for that so you can see that we are going to have a wide range of summer school options for students again the focus should be about unfinished learning and the whole concept of our esser funds and our title funds will be really useful in being able to pay for this at this time we are not expecting any district funds to be used for any of our summer school programs we have a few more things still to be determined we haven't send out the invitations to students to students and their families yet so we have had a number of staff apply for the positions but we haven't made

021any final decisions about staffing um and so we're still that'll be a work in progress and then one of the things we want to provide is nursing support in each of our buildings that we have a program for and so we still have to make some decisions about nursing and how to staff that nurses as you know at this moment are very difficult to secure and to maintain so we're making sure that we're looking ahead for that so we may be hiring with within or looking at some contractual services to support nursing we wanted to share again about funding sources because it's always important for us to consider so the funds for our summer school programs as i've emphasized a couple of times for staffing busing materials are as followed so title one will secure

022it will be surely from title one grant and esther two funds if needed if we go over our allotment adelante would be title three and our sr2 funds the summer bridge program would be ass or tube funds and then extended school year would be ida funds and i also am sure if they go over we would be using sr2 funds to support that as well so it's not on the slide but i don't want to leave them out if there's a need for how to cover all of these things so whew i was talking fast or to the last slide it's all about questions i'm certainly glad to respond to any questions about our summer school program but we've been hard at work trying to find best ways to meet our students needs for the

023summer you will have noticed i'm going to address it that we are not planning on any enrichment opportunities partly because we need a lot of staff to help us with unfinished learning and that needs to be our focus that also doesn't really qualify in all aspects from s or two funds for unfinished learning to deal with that this is no way to indicate that we don't want to return to an enrichment option in the future but this year it was determined that we really do need to focus on our students who have some learning opportunities to fill i'm ready for any questions though paul thank you so much for this this is christy i don't know if you can see me in your screen i have a question about you talked about enrichment it sounded

024like there was a desire for more but just not possible with the capacity that we have right now i wonder if there's opportunity at the library like are there certain books or or materials that if the library made available that that could be a resource that families could reach out to if they want to pursue enrichment on their own is that something that would be useful i was getting an echo sorry i'm glad to reach out to the library we have been um i've been personally very connected with courtney doninger at the library she's the outreach specialist so i'm very confident that we can talk that through we for enrichment we will also make available all of the summer work that we made last year for opportunities for kids to do additional operational things with

025summer school over the summer so we did have a pretty extensive website page for every grade level band so we can make those things we will continue to make those things available for summer as well okay thank you anybody else have any questions for dr lewis okay i don't have a question for mr lewis but just a comment i really want to thank you mr lewis and um mrs woodruff and really all of our administrators who have been a part of planning summer programming that's also dr diaz mrs lorenzo and all members of the support staff involved in that as well as our principals because this was a pretty heavy lift and a short period of time [Music] i'm pretty sure and tell me if i'm right about this paul this was a lot more

026information than our board has received in the past about summer before it happens right yes and the purpose for that was we wanted to there's some need and there's some funds that are associated and we wanted to make sure that our board and our public was aware that we are rightfully spending the money to plan things for our students who would benefit from them not saying that all the other years we didn't do those things but it is a different year this is a very different summer with a much different emphasis many questions all year long about what can we do for our students in the summer so we wanted to give you as much information as possible so thank you for doing that yeah dr clickman go ahead you're done go ahead go ahead

027you're good okay i had a question for mr lewis um and the presentation may have cut out on me a little bit but can you just speak to um you touched on a little bit about doing math testing or having the teachers kind of do some type of summer assess assessment excuse me as it pertains to matt can you expand on that or clarify that a little bit more i know that you know with this atypical year we've had the students didn't have those standardized state tests like they normally would have and i feel like i heard you touch on it a little bit but i may have missed the full breadth of what you were sharing you're previewing a little bit dr glickman is giving me the go ahead to talk about some of

028the other assessments that were going to be part of the superintendent's report so i'll start with map i wasn't going to start with matt but because the question is about map as an administrative team we decided since the majority a lot of our students the majority of our students will be returning and we've also learned greatly from other school districts who've done map testing with remote students we feel comfortable and think it's an important step for us to take have all of our students in first through seventh grade take a map assessment and we're targeting april 26th and 27th for students to take a map test in grades one through seven we're purposely saying one because we feel like our kindergarten students we would just like them to keep working and not spending the time

029for an assessment and next year we'll have them assessed as first graders we think that's a better use of their time and our seventh graders is the max except that we're going to be inviting any of our eighth grade students who feel like they would like that data to help support any petitions they have to modify their high school placement you may not be aware of that but we have historically not tested our 8th grade students with map because they already have received their high school placement it's not the most rigorous experience and so we have always invited our eighth grade students who would like more data to support their requests for an additional level class at the high school and our high school values that ability so we are going to um going to

030offer it as part of our eighth grade students as well and so um mrs nash some of the reasons that we thought we wanted to think about a map assessment was we don't have any official data as you shared for this school year we'd like to have that it will certainly help us again be another data point for summer school so we'll be looking for certain percentiles of kids that for each of the tests reading or math to invite kids we also know that the map test is very very helpful for us placing our fourth grade students into the different levels of math available at fifth grade so we think that that would be a helpful thing we also know that starting the year with the data immediately will help us identify kids who may

031need immediate intervention and support and not have to wait for our data to come in a little bit later and also our principals are excited to have that data because it is a data piece that they look at when they build class lists for next year to have a balanced classroom of abilities in each of their sections so mrs nash did i answer your question about map testing yes that was excellent mr lewis thank you um i didn't share with map we will be providing a map experience for our remote only students and so we have learned from other school districts which i think is really important to figure out the tips and tricks of how to administer a remote test with map to our remote students so when the students on site are taking

032the map test the remote students will be taking it at the same time remotely so we we've already worked with our info specialists um all of our tech staff to come up with a plan on how to make that work so we're very confident about all of that and the question also was about our state assessments and so we have four generally generally four state assessments that we're going to need to be working on we had been waiting and hoping that the state was going to provide us a waiver as they did last year i think it's all of our intention that we would like to see students working on instructional purposes now that we have them back in the classroom and not assessment purposes but at the moment it's not an option for us

033not to participate and so the illinois science assessment is one of the assessments we typically do in the spring the state has offered us all the way through next school year to test this group of students we have chosen to test our students this year instead of doing it over the summer or into fall of next year illinois science assessment is scheduled for may 17th through the 21st and that is for our students in fifth and eighth grade and then our illinois assessment of readiness is a test that we typically also do in the spring but spread out a little bit more we'll be shooting for may 20th through the 26th you'll see a little bit of an overlap in that overlap is really about makeups but illinois assessment of writing is from may 20th

034to 26th and that is for our third through eighth graders there are multiple sessions in reading and math that are included we'll be doing one assessment a day for though during those times and we'll likely be running similar to what we do on a late start so a late start schedule where we'll delay the beginning of the school year until a little bit later in the morning but then have a regular full day with shortened periods the rest of those days i'm going to be clear and share that the state has not provided us any remote option for testing students so we are in the process of working on communication for our parents who are fully remote students to invite them into our schools for the assessment part of our challenge we're working on the

035details of all of that finding locations in our busy schools we're identifying spaces like the one we're in right now that will be able to assess our fully remote kids we may be able to you put them in in their regular classrooms but it'll all ben depend on room capacity and social distancing space one of the things that i think it's important to publicly share that the illinois science assessments and the illinois assessment of readiness the state has shared with us that these results cannot be compared to any previous administration of this assessment and they will not be comparable to any future administrations of these assessments so this will be stand-alone assessment data for us to look at but there will be no value in a long-range comparison of results the good news is also

036that the state has acknowledged that there will be no change in our district ratings remembering that two of our schools are listed as commendable and five of our schools are listed at no two of our schools are exemplary and five of our schools are listed as commendable our ratings will not be changing again just like they didn't this year they won't be changing again for next year and so that's a good thing that no matter what the results of the assessments it's not changing it and also the state up until just recently has been holding us to a 95 percent participation rate so we historically have blown that number out we typically have been close to 100 percent of our students participating but they have said that no longer for this one testing session window

037that we won't be held to the 95 percent participation rate because in the past if you didn't meet the 95 participation you were automatically dropped one rating level and so that's a significant issue for us and also i'm just being truthful the science assessment in the past had been one session for an hour um and this year this science assessment for students in five through eight is three sessions of an hour and they did not reduce that or go back to the one one hour session so in my personal opinion this was not the year to make more days of assessment or to make it more rigorous but those are all the ideas and information that i have about state assessments so there's going to be a communication going out to families early next week

038about all of this information our administrative team have been working all together to create this plan to create the best assessment system that we can do to manage the state requirements so that was part of the superintendent's report but it certainly did fit into all of this i'm glad to welcome questions about that now paul thanks again this is christy i have just a question about assessments in general will there be an opportunity for students to have some sort of alternate assessment if you will like a portfolio or something for kids who have learned something that wouldn't be reflected in a standardized test generally our teachers work on those kind of things and generally at the end of the year we've had things like portfolio day or portfolio sharing due to all of the other

039things we've chosen we're not going to be having those but the teachers are planning to share information about their students and their progress by the end of the school year it will not look the same as we've done in the past and again that's not a change in our overall philosophy we do value that and think that's important just this year we're not able to bring in parents in mass to our buildings to have that experience make sense thank you just wanted to just thank you and mrs woodruff for um all the due diligence you put into this plan you certainly um were very forward thinking and anticipated my third fourth and fifth questions as well so um thank you so much for the due diligence and just the readiness for anticipating what it's going

040to mean for assessments going forward and getting through you know this unique period of time thank you so much for that are there any other questions from other board members mr weedman has stepped away for a call so any other questions or comments from board members all right we can move on to board reports does any board member have a board report they would like to share all right i have a board report steven you want me to jump in just an fyi um the insurance advisory committee which i think we're going to hear more about in a little bit i wanted to just say thank you to our broker catherine loney i think catherine's on the call too but i can't see you catherine um just very patient teacher she and mary did an

041amazing job breaking down a pretty complex set of issues into digestible chunks so thank you to catherine and thank you to mary and then um yeah i'm just gonna stop there so thank you i have a quick report that might steal dr glickman thunder a little bit because if you're going to update on strategic planning and is all right we're switching to a different microphone here one second okay sorry about that uh i just wanted to express my appreciation to everyone who participated in strategic planning um just being a part of that process and seeing so many parents involved seeing so many teachers giving up their evenings and district leaders was phenomenal the small group discussions were so productive and so forward thinking and it just makes me incredibly excited about what we can do

042when we can pick our heads up above the pandemic and really look out and think about the future so for everyone who sat on those three hour calls thank you so much i know it's above and beyond but i think it's going to make a huge difference for the district so thank you mrs braden any other board reports from any other member all right then dr glickman i'll hand it over to you for the superintendent's report thank you well as you know on monday april 12th which is the upcoming monday we are beginning our full in-person learning program we are very excited in all the families for 71 percent of our students have selected full in-person learning and the other 29 of our students will continue with remote learning through the end of the school

043year we were able to include all of the students whose families requested in personal learning for them you may remember that we were hopeful that we'd be able to do that we we knew that we would be able to to include all of the students who were in hybrid and we hoped we could include the rest of the remote family students who requested it and we were able to do so so we're thrilled about that as you know we had a remote planning day a planning day for our staff this past monday i can assure you that it was well used i was able to get around to quite a few of the buildings saw you know rooms being organized things happening that you often see at the very beginning of a school year tags

044being made for desks you know for the new students that were coming in many planning and procedures conversations happening as our staff continues to prepare for monday so it was a great day i wanted to tag on to some of the information that mr lewis gave regarding funding and this is specific to esser 3 funding although it's no longer being called sr-3 it's being called esser a-r-p for the american rescue plan so just i'm just going to go backwards for a moment and remind you that this is the third group of esser funding that we've received the first was the esser cares act that funding we actually have until um september 30th 2022 to expend those funds although they're pretty much expended most of that funding went towards our first installment for our chromebooks then

045there was the sr2 which is what mr lewis was talking about we'll be using that for a variety of purposes but definitely including funding some of our summer programs and those funds need to be expended by september 30th 2023 and now we have the esser arp american rescue plan you've all heard a bit about that that's the largest amount of funding so i wanted you to hear from me about it now that is just over two million dollars to the to a number it's two million one hundred forty one thousand four hundred eighteen dollars that needs to be expended by september 30th 2024 and um the grant is not even open yet we can't apply for that money yet we can't or we can't apply to you know let the the grant the grant-givers let

046them know what we'd be doing with it until july first they do require that 20 percent of that funding at least go toward learning loss we do not yet have specific information as to what that will actually mean we have certainly gotten the recommendation though that we should not spend the money on items that will generate ongoing costs past 2024 because this is not an ongoing grant this will be money that we receive that has to be expended by a certain amount of time and that's the end of it so we can't create new programs and things that we'd be looking at continuing on past 2024 because then the funding would dry up so we just wanted to give you that information and definitely more to come regarding that board i wanted just to bring

047up to you this wonderful equity learning opportunity we have this summer i know i sent you some information about this i think early in the week this is from dr yvette dubielle she is the professional who will be working with our school district in the next year regarding our equity audit and she is offering that our board members can attend a series called equity anti-bias anti-racism personal development series it's three saturday mornings in the summer and at the moment um there are four of us signed up for you may remember i told you there are kind of two cohorts so christy and christy and tamika and i are all signed up for june 5th june 19th and july 10th there is another cohort on june 12th june 26 and july 17th and so any board

048members who are not yet signed up if you are intending to do so please do let me know in the next week or so and finally i just wanted to comment that this is ap dean week and we are really celebrating those folks who help our students make it through the day and really support the children helping them make good decisions and helping them with all of their academic needs as well so thank you to mr gross the assistant principal at gms mr dinsmore the assistant principal at park mr goshi the assistant principal at frederick and ms basinger the dean at gms and that is it for the superintendent's report thank you very much dr glickman that moves us to committee reports on the agenda and tonight i have the community engagement committee listed mrs

049miller would you like to start off with that and we can do that together sure yeah um you're going to talk about the food pantry right then i'll start then either way i just what i just didn't want to repeat yeah you start you go ahead okay all right so just wanted to let everyone know that the seed distribution will start up there's a soft opening if you will on friday so seeds will be available at gms and then that concise with the grab and go meal delivery and as context the community engagement committee started distributing seeds last march to improve or provide an opportunity for any family that wanted to improve nutrition to be able to grow their own food and then that extended to offering seedlings and then produce and then native seeds

050in the fall so we're back to spring we've had one year and that will open up again and let's see um so that's available then so thanks again to the many many many volunteers who traded seeds and seedlings and and produce all throughout last year but what's exciting about this one is that many of the seeds that will be in the seed library starting friday were actually harvested from the plants that were grown last spring so there's sunflower seeds from prairie view there are lettuce seeds from wood view as an example and there's some others so it's a closed loop system so this time we're hoping to decrease our dependence on donation so that's again available at the little seed library in gms for any family but it also coincides with the grab and go

051delivery and then um let's see oh and dare to lead i think i i know i mentioned a few times that our community engagement committee decided to pursue dare to lead training it was 18 hours of emotional literacy as it relates to leadership and six of our team members finished that um just last week so um just hats off to them because again it's over and above what they signed up for uh it included evening sessions and a saturday session and thanks to katie brandt who was our facilitator she was amazing and if you haven't read dare to lead by brene brown and you're interested in emotional literacy it was it was really a good experience no and then stephen you're going to talk about the food drive right right the food drive we had

052the avon cares food drive that the community engagement committee worked on back march 27th march 28th we had we had a food drive back in november as well but these were the ones for the spring and this serves the avon township food pantry that serves over 250 families in the community and we want to have a special thanks to everybody who contributed to you know collecting the food to delivering it to the schools drop-off points or to homes where then it was delivered to the schools for them and especially uh thanks to patricia baking who's a member of the community engagement committee and she's affiliated with park school for her leadership on this and to allison koch for her communications work for the food drive we extended drop-off points from one to six schools for

053this food drive and to increase you know accessibility and convenience for families and then we had an increase of donations that filled seven vans full of food instead of five vans full of food that were then delivered to the avon township food pantry so thank you from us to to everybody involved for that that's a huge impact for our communities and continues to support food security at this time so i think i got it all right all right any other uh comments for anything else for committee reports mr wiedman you're back would you like me to hand it back over to you sure we're up to the consent agenda right now at the consent agenda i yield back to mr weidman all right sorry has it been on the job uh all right so next

054is the consent agenda i need your approval for the consent agenda hi lacroix i strack miller i mack i and weedman hi uh next is a motion to or run out up to action items sorry uh so next is a motion to approve the student activity fees for the 2021-2022 school year um these are flat we kept them flat with the exception of adding the technology fee for those grades um that we had to add chromebooks for this year correct dr glichman well actually those were the regular school fees so you are remembering that but um these are actually this the uh activity fees these are extracurricular fees we have particulars that we didn't have next year correct uh hopefully we get to have them this year we're looking forward to it there are a

055few things going on but yes we're looking forward to a robust uh slate of activities next year okay i'll make the motion to approve those student activity fees second weedman i miller i mac hi nash i braden i lacroix okay next we need a motion to approve the major impact form for summer school reading materials would you like something okay a second okay any discussion we need on that paul these are all just the summer readings for the for the kids for right for the summer bridge program and that correct so as i mentioned in the presentation we're looking for new materials the these um go over our threshold so we needed a major impact form for that but we're excited that we'll have these great resources for our summer school program the title one

056and the el students will take home the books the for summer bridge will be able to continue to use those in the future okay lacroix hi brayden hi strack miller hi mac hi weedman okay um it's the second one that we need the table right mr wolck yeah that's correct um this this next one is the one that needs to be tabled i know i don't sound like mr wolk no um hold on the last the last item and action items needs to be tabled right okay all right so uh next we have a motion to approve a resolution for an honorable dismissal due to reduction in force hi brayden hi lacroix i miller i nash and weedman hi all right so as you heard briefly there um we need to table the last motion

057the last action item um so i'll make a motion to table the resolution for non-renewal of a first second and third year probationary teaching all second max all right brayden i strap miller i lacroix i weedman i and nash all right okay that concludes our action items uh next is unfinished business and we have one item on there and that's a legislative discussion follow-up and uh christy braden will be talking about that thanks mr weedman um i wanted to follow up on our initial discussion where we just talked about you know what we what action we could take regarding uh legislative priorities um and i have three things that i just wanted to update first i sent out a google sheets template for just collecting you know we started to brainstorm some of the issues

058last at the last meeting and i thought it would be great to just have a place where you could put them i went through an asb iasb in ed red and kind of pulled particularly some active legislation that i think we should pay attention to but there's also just some bigger picture stuff that may not be a specific bill right now that i think we should capture um to keep an eye on so just wanted to invite the board members and then dr glickman whoever else you think would you know like to contribute um would love to have it all in one place not that we advocate on everything but that just gives us the lay of the land in terms of what the scope is and then maybe we can do some prioritization to

059think about what are the most important things for our district and then you know what is the stance that we want to take to advocate for with our legislators so if you don't have that let me know i can reassend it but looking forward to seeing people's thoughts there and then i did highlight in that document there's two hot items that i wanted to just encourage action on by the board as well as you know other district staff members of the community the first one is that edred is going to be encouraging all its members to advocate for a full funding of public education in the 2022 state budget the governor doesn't has held ebf level in his recommendation um edward is going to advocate for 350 50 million additional for ebf um to continue

060to you know fully fund that model and then also prioritize prioritizing funding for mandated categorical so they're going to come out with a toolkit for us very soon but it's something that i think we should all be in touch with our legislators on um to basically say look we've got to continue to make education a priority in this budget even in a tough budget year and then there's another there's another bill that's going through the general assembly right now which basically says to districts you've got to you've you've got to figure out some sort of consolidation and it's like a mandated you know cons act of you know evaluating consolidation and so the stance from ed red and from iasb is that those decisions should be in the hands of individual individual districts it's very

061complicated especially with district maps not necessarily lining up etc so the um the recommendation is that we let our legislators know that we oppose hb7 because it takes that control out of our hands so that's two things that if you feel that that's important to please contact your legislators on and then finally i just i had the opportunity to speak informally to melinda bush our state senator and just let her know that where we were headed with this kind of work and she was really excited about it she's looking forward to the dialogue she's excited to hear more about how she can advocate for us and really be fully informed so that when she's in springfield she can speak for the schools in her constituency so if everyone could just take a little bit of

062time to add your thoughts to the inventory you know once we feel like we've got that then i'll try to think about like what's a prioritization exercise we can do to kind of get it down to the things we really care about so that's it any questions thank you christy christie this looks fantastic thank you so much for putting this together you're very welcome i'm excited about it too okay uh next we have is new business uh the first part of new business is the pre-k tuition and transportation yes thank you uh the board as mentioned has already approved two sets of fees in february the regular registration and technology fees and then earlier tonight the extracurricular and activity fees what we're presenting to you here tonight is a third set of fees i have

063worked with heather lorenzo and her team to aggregate this recommendation for you this is a recommendation for the tuition and transportation fees for the tuition-based preschool program that the district hosts annually for students i'd like to ask heather if she has anything to add as far as description about this tuition in this program um just as a reminder our ec program early childhood center program offers programming to three groups of students one including the tuition base that we are asking for discussion on the tuition fees this evening the other two are the early childhood special education programming for students who are identified through evaluations for special education services and then the last of that group are preschool for all students who are identified as at risk through screening monthly screenings that we conduct when we

064have opportunity and our enrollment numbers are feasible we certainly want to broaden that to a tuition-based program for our community are there any questions at this time are the i don't remember having fees for this is this a new program with fees or are we raising them this is not this is not a new program however my understanding is these tuition rates have not been presented to the board in the past um and i would suggest that it should be routine annually that these boards are these fees are presented to the board and considered by the board the tuition rate suggested here is consistent with what we've charged in the past i will uh also highlight that the option for transportation is new so we'd like to offer that to parents for children if in

065fact we can accommodate space space on the bus to accommodate these little kiddos then we will we will collect fee for that transportation service should we be able to accommodate their individual need so that element of the program is new okay so we didn't we're not raising or changing the fees we're just adding the business they want the busing that's correct okay i thank you for that this is the first time i've seen this that's why i asked anybody else have any other questions no okay uh next is new business is the employee benefit plan yes thank you i'm i've just shared my screen for the presentation can everyone see it yes great before we get started i'd like to introduce a guest who's with us here tonight catherine loney who is vice president benefits

066consulting with gcg and she is the lead on our account and serves as our broker consultant for our employee benefit plan catherine are you there yes i'm here thank you as you know the district provides an employee benefit plan including medical dental life and disability insurance the district benefit plan year runs from july 1 through june 30th and open enrollment takes place generally in the month of may each year prior to the benefit plan year beginning the premium equivalent and premium renewal rates are presented to the board of education prior to open enrollment for the board's review and consideration i'd like to highlight that the this is the second year of the district's insurance committee and the committee met five times this year and with input from the committee the administration is recommending five plan

067enhancements these plan enhancements are recommended because they are perceived to to be cost-effective and to be a health benefit to plan participants and i've outlined the first three on this slide and the next two will be on the next slide if we take a look at these three the oncology navigator is a program that provides assistance from members who are navigating cancer care there is an administrative fee associated with this particular plan enhancement and that is 65 cents per employee per month and this the cost of this ontology navigator program will be paid out of the self-insurance reserve fund we have sufficient funds to cover this additional cost the next two plan enhancements the omada pre-diabetic and the yamada hypertension plan provide remote monitoring tools educational and curriculum tools for individuals it reduce the risk

068of diabetes or in turn reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease for both of these programs there no is no additional administrative fee the next two plan enhancements plan enhancements foreign that we are recommending is the blue cross blue shield extended supply network and the blue cross blue shield coupon maximizer the extended supply network creates through the on the ppo plan allows for a 90-day supply option uh members can refill their prescription secure a 90-day supply at their local in-network pharmacy and again there's no administrative fee associated with this no additional cost added to the plan the blue cross blue shield coupon maximizer is a coupon program for specialty medications there's a coupon discount that's applied it reduces the employees out of pocket expense as well as the expense to the plan and again there's no

069administrative fee associated with this particular plan enhancement in working with gcg and blue cross blue shield based on claims trend discounts administrative fees and contracted rates the following premiums and premium equivalents are recommended and presented to the board for consideration tonight for the upcoming benefit plan year based on proposed rates program cost and self-insured reserve levels the ppo and the high deductible plan will not see any increase in premium rates we however the hmo plan will see a 2.9 uh premium rate that is a fully insured program the life insurance and disability insurance premiums will remain the same there'll be no increase for those lines of coverage and here's a snapshot of the the dental premium cost structure again we have two two options for employees the self-funded and the dhmo and again there's no

070increase in these premium rates for the upcoming school year for the dental program are there any questions from the board tonight regarding these suggested premium rates and premium equivalent rates for next year so i don't have a question but i just thought i'd share with the board the philosophy at least as we talked about it in the committee is that if we invest in employee health and wellness and make some of these enhancements available to them it will actually the net there'll be a cost reduction to the district and to the employees so it benefits all of us because they won't be sick as much um and catherine i think could you correct me or make sure i'm giving the accurate numbers um if there's been estimates on how much money the district could save

071and if a couple assumptions ring true two of which are important and i think one is that we have a continuity of provider that means we don't change um as we're monitoring cost savings we don't change the insurance provider and we keep catherine as long as we can because she's fabulous and then also we assume that employee engagement main is consistent the omada pre-diabetic could save the district 10 and a half thousand dollars the hypertension is about almost it's nine thousand nine hundred dollars and then the coupon maximizer is twenty nine thousand five hundred ten dollars are those correct catherine is that the savings that we're anticipating and estimating students as we went through the company we did see where we could have some estimated savings but really the overall savings is going to be

072based on the number of people who participate in the program last year when we offered naturally slim we had anticipated maybe 20 people would jump on board to that program and we were overwhelmed by the fact that 90 59 people chose to sign up for the program so we know that we have an interest from the staff and so we look forward to offering these programs as well additional enhancements so that they have the tools to make sure they're addressing any of their medical attention their medical needs so i did a little reading about wellness programs and the efficacy of them and whether they do result in cost savings and one of the things that i thought might be worth our consideration is how we monitor whether the cost savings come through and from what

073i'm reading it looks like it needs to be we should see weight and exercise improvements within 18 months but in order to look at the other metrics we might want to wait three years so run kind of a three-year pilot and then look and see is the district in fact meeting these uh these savings so might be worth thinking about how we're going to monitor it and who which committee or how that will happen um and how we keep track of it given that some of us will be rolling off the board or could be rolling off the board in three years so just just for your radar that's that was the philosophy behind adding these enhancements and then the reason that we thought it would save the district and the employee money but of

074course more most importantly making sure that our employees are working in an environment that they're not getting sick okay anybody else have any questions for either mary or catherine just um what's the comparison of the of the increase to kind of what's happening in the overall market um just to give us a little bit of a context for that 2.9 where does it where does it stack up from what you're seeing you know outside our district yeah foreign i will on the hmo we have to remember that we have fully that is a fully insured program we're on the ppo products that's self-funded and for a number of years we've been from the time we began doing self-funded the importance was making sure that as mary referenced the reserves are to a point that we

075then can make that decision as to whether or not we're in a healthy plan or not the blue cross plan did come back with initially a 5 rate increase and through discussions with them we were able to lower it to 2.9 as i've shared with all my clients for the plans who had individuals who were seeking treatment which the hmo product did kova did not diminish their utilization of the plan so when we have claimants that are running through the plan that did not stop but we did in the committee level take a look at the months where we saw people who either had elective procedures or who had preventive care both of those seemed to drop off so we didn't have as many claims running through the self-funded plan during that time so those

076are those are components that differ between the two plans but most importantly there were claimants within the high deductible plan and we have ongoing claimants within or within the hmo and we have ongoing claimants in the hmo and that's where that 2.9 percent came in thank you and and thanks to the committee as well okay any other follow-up questions okay um next would be uh topics for future agenda items i have a few to share um next board meeting will bring you a draft of the 21 22 board of ed calendar to look at something that you're going to want to think about is location as you know this year when we came back on site we brought ourselves here at frederick um so that we could do so we could more easily socially distance

077for um any members of the community who chose to come in so we can continue here or we can go back to gms so that's something you want you to be thinking about we will bring back the employee benefit plan recommendation as an action item next time as well along with pre-k tuition and transportation as an action item um we're also going to have a full day k resolution so let me explain what that one's about excuse me you've excuse me you've heard me share and certainly seen in our new plan our on-site plan that it is our intention to return to full-day kindergarten next year that is absolutely the intention we and we've learned from the state that they require us to put forth a full day k resolution and mr lewis can you

078just add another i think because you're the one who sent that to me that is in order to to it's for ebf reimbursement and so they need to know if they're counting our students as 0.5 student or a 1.0 student and we need to have that sent to the state board of education for documentation along with the resolution and the minutes and such so there's a few things we need to do but we certainly want to take advantage of that requirement and be ready for next school year absolutely and this is a resolution that you actually passed a few years ago when you went to full day kindergarten the first time and frankly i'm pretty sure that our community will be glad to see an in writing board stamped and approved and signed resolution for

079full day k so i think it's a benefit either way and then finally not sure yet whether this will be at the next board meeting or the may 5th board meeting would be the board seating i think there are just some timing questions that we have to work out as to whether or not we'll be able to do that at the next meeting or if it has to wait until may 5th so that's all i have does anyone have anything to add just i wanted to jump back we had at the last meeting talked about mental health support for families to assess where their kids are um we had put postponed that for a future meeting but didn't designate which meeting do we have any idea when that might be able to be on the

080agenda or do we need to wait so actually i'm so glad you asked that question and i i think i meant to talk about it in the superintendent report and it fell off my report um so i interpreted the conversation we had at the last meeting as a request less for the board and more about um a way for our parents to be able to assess how their children are doing emotionally that was that was our interpretation of what that request was and so i know that mrs lorenzo is going to be working with some members of her staff to put some materials together to be shared with our parents it's not an assessment of the district district-wide assessment of our students but rather a way for parents to assess how their own children are

081doing so is that what their board is requesting or is the board requesting something else i guess that's a question for all of our board members yeah i guess i took it as we were being able to put together and have a place for them to go for resources and for the assessment of their own child that correct christie it was just yes that was it and by putting it on the agenda i it can even just be in the superintendent's report just where are those and i i got some feedback that that would be useful to parents so if we just know where or in that communication or whatever just didn't know if we wanted to talk about it at the meeting or if it was just a resource that would be available to

082our families through other communications so i think um between now and the end of the school year we'll be putting some information together we'll share it out with our families um and share it with the board either prior to sharing it with families in general or um or afterwards one way or the other yeah that makes sense okay and then the other thing was do we need to talk about or when should we talk about the arp funding and prioritizing that and is there a is that a board conversation or is that not i think it's yeah i think it's a district-wide conversation for sure um you know right now you know we're actually working our way through thinking about our various pockets of funding that we've received but yes we will need to talk

083about all of that funding and what are the best ways to go about making decisions about what we'll do with those funds but again um we aren't able to even begin accessing those funds until july 1st and then we have until um 2024 right september 2024 to expend all of it sure okay yeah thank you that's what i was mentioning earlier um that we're waiting for more information from the state the guidance that we've received so far is that at least 20 percent needs to be spent on learning loss but not that much information yet provided as to what that really means and that they continue to recommend that we not spend it on projects and situations that wouldn't be sustainable past 2024. so you know we don't want to go too far down the

084road really until we have more information from the state great thank you anybody else have anything for a future okay um next we're up to public comments did we have any public comments from the google document we have we have one i'll go ahead and read it this is from samantha larson [Music] who wrote just a moment let me just reconfigure it so i can okay there we go regarding esy why was the decision made for the extended school year to be fully remote given that we are currently moving to full-time in-person learning in the middle of the spring this program serves one of the most vulnerable populations in the district switching them back to fully remote would be a difficult transition for many and a logistical hurdle for most regarding pre-k given that the

085board is going to submit a resolution for full day k will there be a similar commitment from the district board to ensure that the pre-k students are back in school full-time in the fall and those were the only public comments okay um i just have one public comment since i missed being able to give the board report at the beginning um what uh just like to congratulate those that reran for the school board and welcome our new member when she does join us michelle anderson appears to be the fourth elected official for our new board but i'd like to congratulate everybody who ran and was elected and look forward to continuing working with y'all next we have is a uh we need a closed session so i need a motion to move into closed section

086second lacroix i miller i mac i strap okay thank you everybody for coming and we'll see the rest of the board in closed session