001okay we're good all right the meeting will come to order we have a roll call please aider here anna Reno here on here John here shoe pie here Taylor here long here the mission of school district 15 is to produce world-class Learners by building a connected learning community good evening everyone thanks for coming out and or tuning in this evening um there are a lot of people in the room but we know we always have a lot of online crowd also right now feels like the beginning of Spring although a couple days have been a little chilly um from my perspective it's a wonderful time of year um things start Greening up I'm all about a little bit of gardening but start popping out and the air is filled with the hope of things to
002come it's also the time the time of year when our school children get a little bit antsy and some would prefer to be outside as opposed to sitting inside in the classroom and I definitely share your angst because at this time of year sitting at my desk trying to do my work and be focused on being in my office is really really tough so that staying focused is difficult no matter how old you are or how young you are and as a result of that it is certainly the time of year when we really appreciate our teaching staff because they have that ability to overcome their own outside envy and keep things going keep students on track and keep them focused for the last 10 weeks of the school year as we wrap it all
003up and get ourselves to Summer spring is also a time when we hear the buzz and gab about upcoming local elections and uh in particular School Board elections and I certainly hope that you all are paying attention at this time and know that those are coming up as we all should know that our vote is certainly our voice and choosing who will represent you in District 50 and how your Board of Education here at D15 and sitting as a member of the board I feel very fortunate that we benefit here from A diversity of viewpoints as well as a diversity of backgrounds on our current Board of Education and just as diversity benefits the gene pool it also brings strength to a board of vet if you're interested in learning more about the five candidates
004that are running for a district 15 Board of Education please consider being in the audience for the League of Women Voters candidate Forum which is going to take place at Winston campus Junior High 7 to 8 30 p.m on March 14th it's a good way to get to know the candidates and have some of the questions answered that uh you all have most of the time they take questions in advance right now if you register on their site you can put in questions that you're curious about and they'll try to roll it into the candidate forum and finally whether you do a candidate for them or you don't whether you pay attention to who's running or you don't please don't forget to show up to vote on April 4th and if you aren't able to
005show up physically on that date you can get an ballot that will be mailed to you online by going to www.cookcountyclerkil.gov backslash elections backslash voter Dash registration really easy to do they're really quick about it you can also come out and vote early in all of the communities that district 15 covers early voting begins on March 20th it ends on April 3rd so you can take it right up to the last minute and most of the time if you're concerned about April 4th being long lines those days beforehand tend to be a little bit less less trafficked so early voting takes place in a lot of different places if you're Hoffman Estates the Hoffman Estates Village Hall in Palatine 150 West Wilson Street at the Rolling Meadows Courthouse in room 238 in Schaumburg at the
006trickster art gallery that definitely sounds like the most fun out of all of them and at the Arlington Heights Village Hall finally it is really important to uh to think with perspective when it comes to this April election as a general we typically don't have very high voter turnout because people think that the kind of off-cycle Elections don't matter but the off-cycle elections are focused very much on local races and National politics although that impacts the nation and it's very important your local politics are the things that touch your home touch your school district and the people that are around you so please come out on vote and appreciate you being here today all yours good evening president shupai Dr Hines and the district 15 Board of Education members my name is Ali Friedman and
007I am the proud assistant principal at Hunting Ridge School this evening I'm excited to share this stage with some of our January student of the month winners one student from each class was selected by their teachers and peers for demonstrating the learning trait for the month perseverance at Hunting Ridge we describe perseverance as not giving up when we Face challenges or when things are difficult like all schools in district 15 we are looking to develop and strengthen these important traits in our learners these students act as models and leaders for others at this time I would like to take a quick moment to introduce them Shaw Noemi Estrella IRA padkar and Haley Melton please join us in saying the Pledge of Allegiance of the United States relationship if there are any parents that want to
008picture close up you're welcome to come up behind Becca and as soon as she's done you can snap your shots all right next time okay and thank you so much honey Rich Pledge of Allegiance leaders we have a high five district 15 highlighter for each of you and I have a special assistant screaming this one and can I send you one for Taylor I have Taylor was not here today is um well for whomever then yes thank you very much congratulations go to about two Ball winners come all the way in towards the desk coming behind Mrs Crawford yeah keep going gonna fit you all in we are super super nice over here we don't bite we won't tickle your ears just come on by we want to but we won't okay good evening everyone
009we are here to honor our two ball first place winners uh we even had a couple ties this year so let me tell you a little bit about uh two ball my name is Julie Crawford I have the pleasure of organizing a lot of our sixth grade events for our intramurals as well as working with our PE and other events in the district I work in the teaching and learning department so tonight we had so much fun uh even made it through the snowstorm the first night of the two ball event so at district 15 we do this annually it is a well-loved event in kind of a rite of passage in sixth grade this year we had 124 boys who competed on Wednesday February 22nd and 128 girls and they competed at Falcon park
010on Thursday February 23rd we have two divisions when we do this we have a large School Division that includes Hunting Ridge Paddock Virginia Lake Whiteley Lincoln School Marion Jordan and Kimball Hill and then the small School Division consists of Jane Adams Central Road Pleasant Hill Willow Bend Thomas Jefferson Winston campus and Lake Louise and Sanborn the divisions were based on our current sixth grade enrollment in those schools to try and divide them equally so a two ball event is really exciting if you have never seen it you can go online and look at it the NBA used to play it instead of the three ball or three-point shot and and some of the uh slam dunk competitions they used to play in the early 2000s and um so if you want to really get a
011good look at what it is go ahead and look that up but our students they were the ones who were playing it for us and it's worse two students have two one-minute rounds to compete for different points and they're marked all over the basketball court the teams need to alternate shots they need to play just like in basketball so they need to dribble if they're moving they need to pass appropriately and they always have to take turns shots can be worth different points two three four five points depending on where they are on the floor and they can earn bonus points for attempting shots from every single spot and if they're careful not to travel or double dribble each team gets extra points for that they get two attempts two one minute rounds to score
012as many points as they can those rounds are added together for their points and you'll hear about some of our teams and how high they scored they put in a ton of effort for this we really enjoy doing this with our kids because it helps tee them up for our Junior High Sports get them excited about basketball and some of the other sports so it's just a really fun and exciting time and we're really thrilled that we continue to have a great partnership with Palatine Park District who helps us to host the event at Falcon Park their beautiful news facility so that's a really wonderful opportunity for us as well thank you to the coaches some of whom I have here behind me and to all the administrators who showed up we had so many
013people there even on that really snowy Wednesday we had a huge crowd there cheering our kids on so thanks so much um so I'm going to turn this over to our coaches so they can talk a little bit about their kids and who won our small and large division we're going to start with our small division schools hello my name is Anthony Draeger and I teach at Pleasant Hill Elementary School in the small division our girls Champions scoring 87 points where Kyla can just take a step forward they have the Pleasant Hill shirts on and Olivia they scored 87 points our our boys division uh there I should have started with them they're all the way in the corner we actually we had a tie we had uh two schools from Pleasant Hill Thai for
014first place in the boys division uh one team couldn't be here uh the team that couldn't be here is Joey and Nate they scored 101 points as did Cameron who's all the way down and read 101 points small division champions hello I'm Gary Simone and feed teacher at Paddock school we had a tie two for a large School Division uh Paddock and Hunting Ridge Marcella and Skyler from Paradox with great teamwork with a score of 80 points hi I'm David Sobel from Hunting Ridge and we had also the tie with Paddock 80 points might be the first sister duo with Haley and Taylor and then also for the large School Division for our boys they had a new record of 121 points new District record uh Kian and Colin so congratulations to all the students
015who participated it was a fun and exciting event thank you guys [Music] same comment for parents if any parents want to come up and take pictures feel free to come on up here all right let's go together for me all right everybody ready okay smiley face okay best accomplishment don't set the bar too high [Laughter] congratulations again okay we've got some art recognition coming up nice nice waiting for my other guests to come in trying to get out of this hello Mr Z you can come stand wherever you guys would like President members of the Board of Education thank you so much for hosting us my name is Beth Richter and I'm an instructional coordinator for the Department of teaching learning and we're here to recognize some phenomenal student artists tonight uh March happens to
016be youth art month in Illinois so we're really excited to honor two students who already have been recognized by our regional Office of Education the north cook intermediate service center but it was actually last February 8th and where were you guys you were right here so we couldn't be here with you and there at the same time so we're going to recognize our two students tonight unfortunately our two students are not with us this evening one came and left so we're going to clap real loud for him he made a good effort to be here tonight and the other one was unable to be here so I'd like to let you know that we had two students were selected to have their artwork displayed at the North cook intermediate service center our regional Office of
017Education the artwork was selected using the Illinois estate art standards in alignment with the themes of Peace Hope and or positivity which we all need right now North cook recently moved into a new office and they held an art contest with all the Regional Schools so that the walls could be so beautiful like ours are which is really great we had two students recognize Stephanie G who's a fourth grader at Stuart R Paddock and her teacher Mr zielinski Andre zielinski is here tonight and then Andre a who's a fourth grader from Marion Jordan and his teacher Mr Dave kirkemeyer is also here tonight following their teachers nominating their artwork for consideration these two artists were selected among eight other students from the north Cook Area their work was professionally framed and is now on display
018at the North cook intermediate service center the students and their families as well as teachers in district 15 staff members were invited to the reception on February 8th we're so proud of these students submitting their work and we're really appreciative to their teachers for giving the students an opportunity for a global audience and an authentic audience which I really appreciate which supports our state standards um the north quick intermediate service center and Regional Office of Education is the liaison between the Illinois State Board of Education and the schools in the north cook region so the north cook ISD provides resources and comprehensive professional development for administrators teachers and support staff among 39 school districts and our students were selected with eight other students which is great so there were two pieces of artwork one is
019a snowflake by Andre and then La Nina bayadora from Stephanie G so I'm sorry these students are not here tonight again one of them made a good effort to be here but we really appreciate you recognizing them and if you could clap loud maybe Andre's outside in my own perspective that it's the students deserve recognition but Mr zielinski and Mr krugermeyer deserve as much recognition as the kids because you make it happen for this wonderful thing and can we try to determine what size T-shirts they need maybe we can send them back to school with you and then the next time you see them in arts we can get them their t-shirts for tonight sure we can make that happen too all right thank you too somewhere out there so we'll make sure that we
020get oh there she is all right thank you so much all right thank you so much thank you all right looks like Meg's pulling the next group in [Music] hello hello and thank you for inviting guys my name is Ava pitcher and I have been a bilingual resource teacher for 25 years now and I'm working at Willow event currently I came to the United States 35 years ago I came with a symbolic single sealed case and a hundred dollars in my pocket I came because of similar political situation that these guys experience in my wildest dreams I did not expect that this country is going to welcome me with open arms I feel after 35 years I feel fulfilled as a mother as a family member as a teacher and as an American citizen I
021also want to tell you that these five girls accomplished so much they just came to our country a year ago or in last few months and they competed in a poetry contest for our students of the other languages than English all five of them one beautiful crisis show your beautiful face [Music] I've been um I've been connected with the poetry contest for 19 years it has been beautiful for me to see how this contest has grown it has also been very beautiful for me to see how immigrants these immigrants and immigrants all together underage the culture of our industry thank you very much our girls would like to share their poems with you foreign well I tell you they are very nervous hello my name is Garrett great my poem is haiku myself she is
022black with yellow eyes she has floppy ears next Veronica lucava hello my name is Veronica my boyfriend Veronica smart strong driving chronic writing bloody Katya Natalia Helena drinking clothing playing clever funny baby costume Nicole all you need hi my name is Nicole linick I'm from fifth grade my poem Haiku horse handsome big and fast nice tale black soft hair long legs black eyes gray horseshoe and I am gonna read Maria's poem her poem won the first place and it was Diamante poem sharks and Dragons sharks great white swimming hunting eating fish ocean fire meat blazing flying sleeping powerful scary dragons [Applause] [Music] wonderful Coke cake and Coke are great outstanding taste kids like drinking it early mornings are so good for Coke thank you Dr Hines and support of education for inviting us parents if
023parents want to come up and take pictures closer please do restart [Music] scissors there you go perfect like my glasses oh okay ready all right cat noise [Music] thank you and then we got t-shirts we have T-shirts for you ladies congratulations and keep writing poetry all right and we do have one that we needed to postpone to next month so our March staff member of the month will be joining us in April as well and they lost their crew and then for our first Community recognition we are excited to have won five Foundation here so I'm going to pass it on over to our one of our trustees Natalie hello everyone I am very fortunate to be here tonight with this amazing group of human beings behind me who do amazing things for the students
024of this school district we are very lucky and very fortunate um for the last several years District 15's one five Foundation has offered an annual mini grant program open to all staff members and Community Consolidated School District 15. the grants can support a wide range of opportunities for students of the district with a focus on programs and Technology over its lifetime the one five Foundation has donated more than 2 million to district 15 to enhance classroom learning opportunities this year there were 15 mini Grants awarded across 12 district 15 schools Joanna R implementations of social emotional and trauma-informed strategies calming corner and flexible seating Tammy M special education achieving Tech technological equality we can just do a quick one in between Sharon F yoga and wellness club Carol C Bex for the win Laura R
025Classics done the visual way Alessandra K classroom transformations Jenny K the lightfold decodable detectives Allison B extra extra Read All About It Kate M recess reading at Stuart R Stuart R Paddock Katie B sunling Goes Pro with the GoPro Hero 11 Creator Edition Jacqueline E Duolingo faith f leap materials allowing flexible learning Lauren C and Sherry B communicate to learn kdn NEC and Heather k early childhood special education Core Curriculum manipulatives Elizabeth L and Jackie k a voice for all let's give these ladies a quick Round of Applause the foundation is able to fund these mini grants for staff through donations and the community's participation in our fundraisers and events currently the one five Foundation has a 50 50 raffle that runs from February 14th through March 17th last year's winner won 19 350 dollars
026the photos behind me are from mini Grant announcements at the schools a little bit about the foundation is that our mission is to acquire resources to be used for programs and projects to enhance and supplement the educational experience of district 15 students this is what we do this is what we are passionate about and it's teachers like you ladies up here that are just the the magic makers you guys are I just there's no words the foundation was founded in 1989 under the name district 15 Educational Foundation by a partnership of parents community members and local businesses and it is governed by a volunteer Board of Trustees from the district 15 community to date again we have invested nearly two million dollars plus towards advancing our educational experience for all of our wonderful students in
027District 15. again we are funded in part by community support through our fundraisers so please I encourage you to look at go to our website one hyphen Five Dot org foundation.org and take a look at our current initiatives um one of our goals this year is flexible seating flexible seatings in all of our school libraries our goal is to raise nearly two hundred thousand dollars to outfit all of district 15 School libraries with these flexible seating so these spaces can be used more effectively resulting in improved outcomes for district 15 students so if anyone is interested in donating or even joining the board you can visit again our website www.1one 5five.org thank you very much thanks Natalie very well done thank you all right guys okay as long as you can see me I can
028see you ready one two and three days thank you one last thing I do want to mention as well thank you Natalie for coming and joining us tonight um again we are not able to the foundation is not able to fund a lot of these amazing resources that are available in our classrooms without the support of our community so thank you to all our foundation does in order to support our students and staff look at this we have like some of the best teachers at Stuart our Paddock that are here today we had Mr zielinski we have miss kratzinger this is great May president Shanghai sorry president shupai members of the Board of Education and Dr Heinz I would like to introduce you all to Albert Martin who is affectionately known at Paddock as as
029our Paddock fire he may belong to you but he's really ours I nominated Mr Martin to be recognized by our Board of Education as a way to say thank you to him for volunteering his time over the last 20 years teaching fire education and safety to the students at Paddock every year Albert would use two to three of his days off from station 83 to come to the fire to come give the fire safety presentations to each grade level that seventh grade levels two presentations per grade level for at least 20 years which is nearly 300 classroom presentations all just for our Paddock Panthers four children Gibson Brody Elise and Darian all attended Paddock and for many years after they moved on to Junior High Mr Martin continued to come back year after year to
030educate hundreds of students at Paddock school and we proudly consider him a member of our extended Paddock family Mr Martin had already been scheduled to teach the fire safety lessons during the Spring of 2020 when we had to close the schools for in-person teaching due to the pandemic well that didn't stop our firemen in fact he didn't even skip a beat Albert took it upon himself to create seven individual video lessons one for each of our grade levels that the teachers would be able to share with their homerooms online so that the important work of fire safety wouldn't be inter uninterrupted simply stated Albert cares about fire safety and he cares about Paddock Albert is retiring from the Palatine Fire Department in 10 days and I appreciate our board of education for recognizing and honoring
031him for his contributions to Paddock and district 15. and I really can't think of a better way to say thank you to him congratulations I just wanted to thank Laura um when I first started doing the public education talks I had to convince them to let me come and then Advocates like Laura and and how she continued to educate her kids just allowed me to want to keep coming back um so it's because of her that it made it so fun to go back there every single year so thank you so much Jason do you want to get up there as they they are Paddock principle Laura you live particularly short today [Music] you got to stop hanging out with such tall tall guys all right thank you what a great evening for uh so
032much recognition not just students but also faculty members and members of the community and important uh D15 Stuart our Paddock firefighters great one um we are going to open up the meeting for public comment right now but before I do that I'd like to share a statement about a communication received by the Board of Education the district and the board feel it's important to correct any type of false information about our school's curriculum and or our staff and uh with the nature of social media and the ease of putting information out into the community it's particularly important to correct false information before it spreads like wildfire so last week we received an email communication from a group not affiliated with the school district itself regarding an accredited outside provider the district partnered with for professional
033development for our PE teachers this accredited health care provider supports several area districts not just District 15. in the provision of Staff training or health education to their students this communication that was received by the board asserted that said provider provided the links to district 15 staff that included among other things graphic descriptions of sadomasochism bondage pornography and transgressive sex the statement is unequivocally false it is false it's not true it's a rumor that's being spread and it's gone crazy out there and this type of thing is absolutely not beneficial for our district our children or our community the accredited Health provider has engaged with district 15 on three occasions wants to provide an internal curriculum committee with an overview of health education in the state of Illinois and two presentations that outline specifically how
034our PE teachers can support students in curricular activities to promote inclusive language in our schools none of the alleged links or controversial topics that the group associated with this outside provider were provided discussed used or even mentioned to district 15 staff or administrators none none of it at previous meetings we shared that the district is currently undergoing a comprehensive review of our eighth grade health curriculum our review is driven by the Illinois State Health standards and statutory mandates to determine what if any changes we intend to make to our existing curriculum for 8th graders this process has included reviews of several vendors that are commonly used among area districts as well as other curriculum options from accredited publishers once this process is complete the findings will be summarized publicly at a future board meeting our
035board has the utmost respect for our Administration and our educators we work hand in hand to ensure that our students and families are seen supported and see themselves represented in our schools and in our curriculum while we always welcome inquiries about our curricular review targeting this process with false accusations is completely unacceptable the job of district 15 the job of the administration the job of the Educators is to educate children to spend our time and our resources focused on positive education as opposed to fighting a fight against false information as always curriculum will continue to be evaluated on planned Cycles our board continues to support the current curriculum review process that has been used in district 15 for years here are the facts district 15 is not adopting the national sex ed standards also known
036as SB 818 district 15 teachers have not received training on the national sex ed standards also called comprehensive sexual health and personal safety district 15 students have not received curriculum that is fully aligned with the national comprehensive sex ed standards all curriculum revisions in district 15 follow a set format called research design and Improvement model referenced as rdim internally this model uses a committee approach and includes a review of state standards and Associated mandates as well as evidence-based best practices again the job is to educate the job is to educate with truth currently district 15 is in the process of this review for our 8th graders as part of the health curriculum no curriculum worth work has been done on our k-6 health or sex ed and district 15 has not adopted the elementary version
037of the national comprehensive sex ed standards committee work is still ongoing and will be presented later this spring as I mentioned earlier and any district 15 Board of Education member that has requested an update has received it but again the curriculum overview is in process it's not complete when it's complete it will be shared it will be open for discussion it will be publicly presented it is not the board of education's decision as to what makes up that curriculum it is our job to decide whether it is to be enacted and move forward or not when it's presented if there's an issue with any of the items that are part of the curriculum we'll have the opportunity to discuss it at a public meeting at that time and adjustments will be made if the Board
038of Education sees fit first and foremost We Trust our Educators they're knowledgeable they're professional this is their job we're Board of Ed members I mentioned earlier in my opening we are diverse from backgrounds what we do for a living our knowledge base our particular opinions our politics and our general ideas on life it makes us strong but it also creates good discussion count on us to be smart about that discussion and those of you that are pushing and passing on untrue information in order to get a rise please stop it you've also I had a response from a Community member today sending a door hanger picture to me and the comment was from a parent who had children that come home before that parent gets home children who have phones in their hands and can
039take a shot of the QR code that's on that door hanger and it takes them right to a bunch of very easy access I've seen sites out on the internet I know that's not what the goal was but that's what is happening so it's it's a very dangerous thing that's going on right now I have one final comment before I open it up to uh public commentary with regard to books in our libraries our teaching and learning department has Library collection development and review protocol as well as book objection procedures that are in place the protocol was adopted in 1994. not in 2023 not in 2021 not in 2000 1994. if a parent from that time till now has any kind of concern or had a concern about any particular book whether that book was
040in our collection or not they were welcome and I'll continue to be welcome to complete a request for reevaluation of Library materials the form for this can be found under the title of curriculum material Complaint Form and board policy 6 250. not 230 6 230 which is also titled library media program and in that board policy you can see a whole lot of other information also with regard to our established library media program are also welcome to request that their child not be allowed to access certain materials that may be in the general collection in our libraries providing the opportunity to opt out allows these items to be accessible for students and families who would like to have materials available to their children without restriction just because you believe it doesn't mean somebody else believes
041that no matter what it is where on the Spectrum it falls so it is an opportunity with an opt-out to provide information to those families and students that want it and need it but also to have parents have control have the feedback and the ability to to temper what their children are exposed to that same opt-out option has always applied to our sexual education curriculum from kindergarten through eighth grade as a former parent everyone knows my children went to bad Act it was well publicized every year that we could opt our children out of any type of educational perspective that was coming through in in the sexual education programming it happened then it happens now the same some parents choose to do it some do not that is the option that's out there thank you
042all right I'll open the public comments number that this is not a dialogue between the you and the board if you have a specific issue which requires a response superintendent Heinz or a designee will follow up with you as needed please state your name and identify any group that you represent please limit your remarks to no more than three minutes if someone previously has articulated something with which you agree please state that you agree rather than reiterating the entire comment finally avoid comments specific to any person student or staff member respecting that person's right to privacy this is not the Forum to comment on personal issues additional rules regarding policy 2 230 can be found at board policy 2 colon 230. you can search that up in Google if you'd like or you can do
043it on the board of Eda website on ccsd15.net all right Mr Lee Bennett [Applause] hello again Lee Bennett district 15 resident at past board meetings I've advocated for the district to provide more opportunities for boys to play competitive volleyball tonight I put forward a more specific proposal the district 15 and boys volleyball has a Spring sport starting in 2025. as is appropriate this is a change the district will not make lightly the administration needs to weigh the interests of many stakeholders not just the boys stepping forward with this request to better understand our community support or opposition to this proposal I ask do you support adding boys volleyball to District 15's intramural sports offerings why or why not by you I mean members of The Board District staff physical and virtual attendees of this meeting
044and the entire district 15 Community you can respond to these questions by emailing boys VB for D15 at wheretogather.com and get more information by joining Facebook group listed in order to inform your opinion I will present relevant background information in an effort to avoid my usual sleep in reducing delivery key information will be introduced within a skid featuring Billy an upset 7th grade boy of dubious maturity it's not in district 15 volleyball is the only intramural sport offered to only one gender this has been the case for many years as girls have been participating in wrestling really there's no place for you to play that game limited gym space is a barrier to offering boys volleyball however the district is currently upgrading its facilities with improvements for Middle School gyms track and Fields these compute
045improvements will be completed by 2025. mom my friends all get to do it six of the seven surrounding districts in area parochial schools offer boys volleyball other districts maintain gender Equity by offering popular girls options of cheer Spirit dance or Palms to balance wrestling's popularity with the boys son it costs too much money in 2014 when boys and girls soccer was added the projected cost was fifty thousand dollars adding boys volleyball is a cheaper as equipment's already in place for fairness a girl's oriented option should also receive additional funding but everyone else is doing it well Billy maybe not everybody but volleyball continues many years of growth in the latest data for high school girls volleyball is a close second to track and field for participation for boys volleyball participation opposite up another five percent
046while overall participation is down four percent now that you have some of the key facts I ask again do you support adding intramural volleyball for district 15 why or why not please respond by emailing boys VB for D15 at wheretogather.com and follow the information on the issue by joining the Facebook group boys volleyball for D15 Palatine thank you all thank you Mr Bennett that was great we didn't think you were boring before uh Miss Terry Paulson please [Applause] good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is Terry Paulsen and I'm part of the New Hope Community Church School task force and I am the group that you were just talking about I'm a part of that I came here tonight to talk to you about the teacher training teacher and staff training that was given to
047to students teachers and staff in district 15 by representative of Lori's Children's Hospital we of course sent you an email about this on February 23rd that was nearly two weeks ago it included some information about Lori's which we thought you should know and two requests one for a response within a week and two for you to put it on the agenda tonight predictably you didn't either so here we are with three minutes I have no idea well apparently you did bother to read what we said but you did you just told them we said a bunch of things we didn't say and we we will be addressing that but last summer journalist Christopher rufo wrote an article about representatives from Lori's Lori's Children's Hospital training teachers and staff in Chicago area schools in at least
048two districts this is what he wrote in at least two districts the activists at Lori's Children's Hospital also recommended that teachers offer a series of sexually explicit resources to children as young as 11. at the end of the Beyond binary presentation circulated to teachers the hospital recommended a kid-friendly website for gender affirming gear which sells items such as artificial penis Packers and lgbt-friendly sex shop for teens that sells a range of dildos vibrators harnesses anal toys trans friendly toys and kink and BDSM equipment we never said that this was given to teachers here ever you don't have to be a psychologist to see that this has nothing to do with helping kids and everything to do with adults using kids to validate their own perversity we thought you might agree that this more than disqualifies
049Lori's as a resource for anything in this District obviously we were wrong we found out today that Lori's is still considered an acceptable resource in District 15. a good school board would have gotten to the bottom of this immediately you on the other hand have done nothing we would appreciate a response thank you very much Jennifer musianti hello Dr Hines for president Supai and distinguished members of the board and imp teacher in district 15 and basically you kind of answered most of the things that I was going to say but I am against the nses and just wanted to make sure that you as the board knew that because the majority of the PE teachers are again set as well they're just kind of afraid to say it but I'm standing up and saying that
050so please do not adopt those terrible standards thank you thanks Jennifer we appreciate your feedback Nick gasso Mick gasso Mick Nick I'm with Nick correct yes thank you my name is Nick gasso I'm the Northwest Regional director for Illinois Family Institute public school exit team iifi is a faith-based organization that's pro-life pro-marriage that's marriage between one man and one woman in 2021 I retired as a public school teacher because as a Christian I saw was on the horizon with Senate Bill 818 part of my speech is from writers Chris Ruffo and Thomas Hansen and New Hope Community Church we know through information about pain from foia documents that the district brought in a speaker on the January 17th Institute day from Northeast Children's Hospital to talk to the PE and health teachers about the sick
051curriculum Laurie's has although B15 did not accept did not adopt SB 818 then why was Laurie's brought in Don Ravine the presenter from luries States quite frankly plainly in the emails that the programs align with the national success standards and the bill since the district has public rejected it again why was luries brought in parents don't let your guard down even if the district said they've opted out of this filth because schools continue the fight for control of your kids my lines and that is why they are thinking the state of Illinois is thinking about mandatory preschool they believe the sooner they can get to your children to the perverted way of thinking the better most experts agree the brain continues to grow until about age 25 when the frontal lobe the center of Reason
052becomes fully developed until then children tend to be governed by their feelings and are highly vulnerable the suggestion and manipulation by adults and in D15 the manipulation of your kids has begun ladies and gentlemen and yes there are only two genders in Mundelein District 75 and 120 luries recommends teachers offers a series of sexually explicit resources the children as young as 11 at the end of their Beyond binary presentation the hospital recommends a binary Exchange program to assist teenage girls in binding their breast an an lgbtq friendly sex shop for teens among other filth the hospital also incurs School District to designate gender supportive coordinators to help facilitate children sexual and gender transition under the recommendation of the confidential confidentiality policy that can be kept sacred from parents how sick this may be next if
053you leave your children in this district from homeschooling to micro schooling where there are many grades in one class to private schools there are many great ways to see your children flourish spiritually emotionally and academically financial aid will be available especially with the good soil good seed Foundation we have at IFI ladies and gentlemen if God forbid a school building was on fire you would do anything to rescue your children and in a manner of speaking the D15 buildings are on fire so please rescue them German Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said silence in the face of evil is evil itself God will not hold us Guiltless not to speak is to speak not to act as to act this district is poised to Rob your children of their innocence get them out now thank you thank
054you sir Pastor Pittman good evening my name is James Pittman I am part of the New Hope Community School task force and I'm also the pastor of the Hope Community Church I was going to speak about books this morning I mean tonight but I'm going to amend that I'll say a little bit about books one we asked months ago if there was a if they we could have a standard by which we could judge books um our standard that the board could put out so we could see what books are acceptable and what's not I do have your standards and I went over your standards but this book here Slaughterhouse Five has explicit pictures of bestiality on page 59 and kids as long as there's no standard against pornography and I've seen obscenity they'll keep
055coming so my question is who put who thought it was good to have a book that on pages 59 and 250 depicted beastiality and give it to kids whoever made that decision should be held accountable but again we keep wondering at the school to ask for us why is there not a policy by which kids can be protected from obscenity and pornography in books still asking that question so I had a lot more to see on that but I'm just going to let that go for now we are at New Hope Community Church concerned about kids in schools getting stuff like bestiality pushed on them because we do care and so some words were said here's my thing at New Hope Community Church we pride ourselves on telling the truth that's our Mantra and if
056there's something we said that wasn't true I want to know about this pastors of the North Community Church so we can correct it and so if something was said about our church that's a lie and it's something said that's lying about New York Community Church I want it retracted it was said publicly and I'm going to ask for a public retraction also so I'm just saying if you guys if if the if the board or anybody Administration is sitting up saying the new Community Church or spreading lies I want a meeting and I want to know what those lives are so we can correct it and if it is not lies then I want to attraction publicly for my line in the world Community Church thank you very much I got one more oh actually
057two more um Natasha Maldonado awesome hello hi um I am a former parent of uh two kids in District 15. actually graduated from this school as well um my kids really had a really pretty nice experience in District 15. little changes in high school but I appreciated all the teachers and all help especially as a single parent was not easy being a single parent to raise two kids by myself so I'm concerned about the books that were in the school I know some books have already been taken out I'm definitely concerned because I didn't have time to police everything and some of the stuff that we are in these books that are perhaps still in but I know if we're taken out or nothing that I wanted my kids to read and I can't I
058could only do my job as a parent at home making sure they do homework feeding them working a full-time job I can't do other people's jobs for them so whoever is in charge of picking and betting these books they might need some help and maybe maybe the school can have some volunteer parents I love to read my kids are graduated now I'd be happy to read books just to make sure that they're appropriate for the children in this community that's what parents deserve we shouldn't have to worry about what our kids are learning in school we just need the basics we just want them to get to college and as for Lori's Children Hospital that's supposed to be your uh my vetted uh accredited information source uh they push uh gender affirming Care on children
059and frankly I think that's terrible as castration of children they shouldn't be a source for you guys to look at um you know I don't know what's going on in other families if they have issues with the you know gender issues um but I know my children and everyone else's children that's personal that should stay at home they can work that out with doctors they don't need to have every children knowing every personal thing about other children so that's what I'd like to say so thank you very much I appreciate it thank you thank you also I don't know if you caught but the uh the um there's there's a link on the policy site if you've got a book that you're particularly concerned about fill out the document fill out the form it'll get
060reviewed [Music] I hear you um Miss Jeanette Harris president shoe pie Board of Education and superintendent Heinz um I just wanted to say a thank you for reviewing the policy on parent organizations and recognizing the partnership between ccsd15 and the parent teacher Association thank you Janette for everything you do for uh for our students and our schools yeah all right that's all I got as far as green papers go moving on uh Dr Heinz Europe okay I'm gonna skip around a few slides just looking at the time and knowing we have a few people here to present so if you can join it with slide 17 please oh sorry about that dude go to slide 17 please we have some new administrative assignments um that you will be taking action on later in tonight's board
061meeting so we have some bittersweet news for Plum Grove Junior High Dr Wilson is on tonight's agenda for approval as the new assistant director of Human Resources after a long and very successful career as the leader of Plum Grove Junior High she will be missed I'm sure by staff students in the community at Plum Grove but will be very much welcomed by the Educational Service staff when she starts her new role on July 1st 2023 I don't think Carrie or Dr Wilson's in the audience but we wanted to just congratulate her on her appointment and thank her for her years of service at Plum Grove and know she's bringing something great to the ese we also have some bittersweet news for Frank C Whitely principal Faith Rivera will become Plum Grove's new leader her staff
062students and families will miss her Dynamic and child-centered Leadership at Whiteley but Plum Grove will benefit from those traits and her you know expertise as a leader but we're very proud to announce that assistant principal Teresa Drogo so that I'm not sure I think she's here I can't see her face um we'll become the new principal please stand up and we're very excited congratulations that first principleship is always a special one so congratulations um additionally it would a new soon to be a superintendent please stand up uh congratulations Dr mcsmore oh you don't get to sit down that fast I know you're shy but you're gonna have to tough it out for a few minutes so she will be the new superintendent of NS SEO which is the North Suburban special education organization just a
063stone's throw away from here um after joining district 15 in 2014 where she uh very you know proudly and and with a lot of heart and dedication served as our assistant superintendent for teaching and learning and this year she took over the ranks of assistant superintendent for Ed's services so again thank you from the board for myself from our leaders for your dedicated service for to students staff and Community we know you'll be a wonderful superintendent and that you're close by so maybe we can meet at photos for lunch please come up here to get a little uh congratulations card and some flowers for your office if Meg's mom is here she can come often if your mom is here she can come up and congratulations and then we do have a few I think
064we have I see two other new um assistant principal sorry it's getting late that are here that will be approved later uh Sherry lazor Lisa Nas would either of you like to introduce two of our assistant principals that will be joining our ranks July 1st come on down hi everyone um there's actually three here tonight that we have the um honor of recognizing as our new assistant principals we have Amy Wagner who's currently a teacher in the district and going to be moving to the assistant principal role and then we have Adam West who's also he's new to the district and new um all right finally already referred to as Batman um legit name so you're you're out of luck buddy I stole the show of all the interviews of course I'm still going to
065be joining us as an assistant principal in the district thank you so thanks for coming the board will officially take action later on the agenda but we're happy to welcome you aboard okay if we could please advance to 5.2 again we will move a little bit out of order because we do have guest speakers here and then we'll go back to the mental health presentation [Music] so Mr deleonis if you want to head on he's on down the road we'll get your deck ready to go welcome back oh great thanks so much Latham did you get a picture of any of the new administrators thank you good evening members of the board Dr Heinz uh aristalianis here from the Frantic law firm uh Dr Heinz asked me to come back and give you an update
066on what's happening with the uh the uh let me advance here what's happening in Arlington Park you know as you I'm sure have read the Bears closed on the stadium they paid about 195 million dollars for it I was here about a month ago sort of walking you through the mega project Bill and just to refresh in terms of what this project might look like based on the imagery that's been provided so far uh the stadium area is likely if the mega project bill goes anywhere or some version of it that's where the mega project would be it would be the stadium and then what's called the the mixed use District sort of around the Metra station that is likely going to be you know based on not what has been publicly said but in
067a sense what hasn't been said a tax increment financing District which as we talked about last time you know that would result in the eav Frozen for that area likely at an extremely low level once those improvements come out and then any improvements above that would be uh generating tax revenue only for the Village of Arlington Heights so we've done some initial research in terms of what potential student generation might look like from what appear to be you know roughly 2 000 residential units and it's likely in the K-8 area around 325 350 students so you're really talking about sort of a small school that would need to be addressed in some fashion so this is a 326 acre parcel one thing the board should be thinking about is a having land donated for a
068school and having whoever the developer is and or the village pay for the building of a school because this is an imposition that's really coming out of left field you're not getting any students to district 15 from the park right now there are some students that you've been transporting to Cicero which is their home District but you know that ended several years ago as well so I just wanted to sort of refresh you on what the scheme of development is and what it might look like and then in terms of the two bills so uh when I was here last time I don't know that uh the mega project Bill had been introduced but or it had been within a day or two it's now sponsored by Senator Gillespie it's a Senate bill 1350. I
069have referred to assignments committee it's actually in the executive committee now uh there was a subject matter hearing today on that Dr Hines was a a science speaker for that and that I was asked to speak by Senator Gillespie as well just to provide a little overview based on my experience with Tif districts and impacts they have and concerns and observations and then a identical bill it was introduced in the house by representative Walker the state rep in the area that's been assigned to revenue and finance that's house bill 3565. so right now it is both of these are sort of in their infancy in terms of where they're going there have been no hearings it's really just a conversation as presented what I had talked about last time thank you the other bill that
070I think is worth talking about and this is the one where there was a the subject matter hearing today is 1391. this is Senator Gillespie's bill as well she's put years of work into coming up with some sensible reforms for uh the Tiff act the tax increment financing act in Illinois uh some of the reforms are just rationalizing what the eligibility criteria are there's 13 factors now they're highly subjective her bill would boil it down to 10 factors tighten up some of the definitions Senator Gillespie's bill would shorten the term of a tiff modestly from 23 years to 20 years it would also limit the ability to get extensions now it is not unusual to see like the Village of Palatine did recently a 12-year extension on top of 23. her bill would limit an
071extension to two years the bill would also limit porting so transferring money between Tiff districts it would provide the 10 percent of the incremental Revenue would go to the local Chamber of Commerce so that's kind of a novel idea and not something that I've seen in any other setting uh the what's most interesting is it would allow for school districts to opt out of Tif districts so right now as we talked about before the district would be a member of any joint review board The Joint review board is purely a recommending body that makes an advisory determination or report The Village can ignore that report and overrule it with a simple three-fifths vote so the jrb is really a highly ineffective body that really simply gives the appearance of due process but not actual due
072process is how I would describe it and this would this would force collaboration it would force Community buy-in and as I said this afternoon school districts and Boards of Ed would approve Tif districts if they were presented in a sensible way if they made economic sense not if they're just the default choice for economic development and because there's there's no other thought going into it so that's what 1391 does and and I applaud and I think you should Applause Senator Gillespie for taking this on it's a big cast to move something like this forward and hopefully we'll see some progress and then just to summarize high level just a few of the things that that I remain concerned about and I think you should be remaining concerned about is that Mega project Bill does have
073effectively a 40-year term it's a 23-year term but can be easily extended by the municipality for an extra 17 years the base year valuation is huge because that's the number you'll be living with for 23 or more likely 40 years you'll get no traditional property taxes other than what the base year evaluation is how the special payment is determined that's really an important factor in terms of what sort of a voice you have as drafted 1350 there's no seat at the table for any of the public bodies it's just the municipality talking to the developer and coming up with a number but there's no formal or informal mechanisms for input uh and that's what I'm saying by no seat at the table and then the role of Tiff in addition to the mecca project we
074sort of talked about that where people are predicting there'll be Mega project and then Tiff and then Tiff reform efforts we we've discussed so really here to answer any questions anybody has and just to provide more information this is a fluid situation that's going to be heating up uh as the months go on Aaron would you spend a few minutes talking a little bit about kozen and O'Connor absolutely yeah so uh district 15 along with District High School District 211 and high school district 214 have retained The Firm of kozin O'Connor it's an international law firm that also does public strategy work the group is called cozen O'Connor public strategies they have a robust and well-developed team of lobbyists who are providing legislative support to the districts and uh you know sort of eyes and
075ears on the ground talking to legislators talking to all the players in this process so it was a a lengthy search to find a solid team eight different lobbying firms were interviewed and and cozen frankly stood out Head and Shoulders as the the ones to go with and and that was frankly what the three School boards have approved with the three superintendents were very comfortable as were as was I so and then anything additional that you want to talk maybe to the board about in terms of the work with Ann Mahoney phase one of some of the modeling that she's doing for us that helped you and us glean some understanding in terms of low density high density housing and student Generations that could be possible yeah so you know that that's where when I
076mentioned you know 325 to 350 students in the K-12 realm that's where that information is coming from working with within and her team and that they are Professionals in the land planning area they've done a detailed analysis of the schematic drawings that we looked at and that's where the 2000 2100 residential units mostly of higher density development are are coming from so we're working only with the imagery that's been provided uh from the the Bears and and the village so far and it essentially takes into consideration only what would potentially be on the site so development that would happen outside of that site or on the other side of Northwest Highway or in the surrounding area which would also be D15 would be practically impossible for us to project that is unknowable because we don't
077have any estimates any imagery anything on that but within the footprint of the 326 Acres that's where those numbers are coming from right okay so questions any other information for Eris or anything that you want us to be thinking about we do talk every week we have a we do a meeting every Friday to receive information from Springfield and just to stay ahead of any news news that we're hearing in our planning efforts can you can you describe a little bit just about about that special payment in the in the current uh draft bill that's out there how is that special payment uh currently determined and how is it kind of divvied up well in terms of How It's divvied up it's divided based on the tax rates of of the public bodies that are
078serving that area so most of it would go to the schools probably 65 70 percent to balance to the parks libraries Etc how it's determined you know the current bill like I said it's 114 pages but it provides very little Direction on what that incentive agreement is to include other than just talking about a special payment which shall be negotiated between the developer and the municipalities so there's no formula there's no factors that go into it now that's obviously an area where if the concept moves forward we want we would want to have a voice on that the other thing would be this is the whole Mega project concept would have to be approved by the Illinois Department of Revenue they get the certificate perhaps they'll be rule making from the idor that would help
079flesh that out as well but as drafted it's completely nebulous and unclear how that number is determined other than the schools have no voice in how it's determined that's real thing right that's clear yeah during our last meeting I know the mega project Bill had just been introduced and we knew that it was just a starting place has there been any movement do we see any shifts that are starting to happen in terms of content we have not seen anything formally you know you hear stories and and and sort of anecdotal information but the bill is remaining the bill that was introduced so there has been nothing the needle hasn't moved in any way on that uh you know there there some of the public reaction from important people in our state has been fairly
080lukewarm you know if you saw the governor's response he his response was hey this is a a family-owned business what you know why would we have hundreds of millions of dollars of subsidy for something like this I think that's a sensible response from the governor and uh I think some of the other leaders in the state have reacted similarly so we'll see what happens I mean there was a big story in cranes today about where things might be going but nothing Beyond what's in Senate Bill 1350 at the moment okay and how are we continuing to engage with the Village of Arlington Heights at this point you know there hasn't really been any formal engagement with them at all I mean they they have hosted some meetings I know that Dr Hines has been at
081and some of the other school leaders but you know it when that came out I mean even they were somewhat distancing themselves from the bill I I wouldn't say you know at arm's length but uh they were not embracing it let's put it that way okay I don't think guards these two bills um What's the timing look like on these theoretically would be something because I had heard that it was something that they would have to make a decision on probably around me is that the correct time frame yeah so the general assembly session you know unless they end earlier it always ends on the last day of May so that would be you know the 31st some days that's Memorial Day other days it's not uh my understanding is the the the leadership in
082the Senate and the house have said they'd like to make sure their members have their Memorial Day weekend and are looking to finish business by the 19th of May that is what has been stated so it won't run until the end of the month but obviously that could change but certainly as we get closer to the end of the session you would expect there to be some activity thanks any other questions I want to thank you Eris it's been uh wonderful to have you involved with this right from the beginning with us with Dr Hines being on top of it making sure that we're aware of everything that's going on with regard to potential conversation yeah my pleasure happy to help Dr heis really has been taking the lead on this from the earliest days
083and I think that's paying off now in terms of being prepared so I agree she was out there with her sign getting a seat at the table on that first day right thanks so much thanks okay now we've got to buy one thing and I think we have a few yeah oh you okay are you you're done you don't have anything else no all right we're going so we're going to go at the end okay six one all right add services related Services mental health awareness foreign all right hello good evening president shupai Dr Hines the members of the board uh we are here to talk a little bit about the mental health awareness program and um we've given an overview about this in the past so today we're going to kind of talk about
084logistics a little bit more but I'm Laura swanland the director of comprehensive mental health and related service and I am Megan Meyer I am trauma informed intervention coordinator and school psychologist coordinator thank you for having us and our social work and counselor coordinator Kelly schwarzek couldn't be with us and I've she helped with this presentation as well on this information and this is actually going to be a summary of a workshop that we did at the National Association of school psychologists where we kind of shared about how our mental health awareness program has been going we've been doing this for quite a while in terms of How It's evolved over time and today we're focusing a little bit more on what what it what our practices are kind of what we learned and then some
085of the outcomes and the next pieces around some of this work so the first part is that we had had a presentation to the staff a couple months ago in D15 and one of the things we shared first and this is kind of just about the behavioral mental health and education which has helped him to show that the mental health needs are something that is continue to be a need Nationwide is continuing to grow the service providers for mental health are continuing to be a very strong need Across the Nation and we just were trying to help show that this is not something that's unique to district 15 alone that we are continuing to try to do everything that we can to support the needs of our students to have a comprehensive approach to prevention
086identification and Service delivery and these kind of were pieces that just kind of helped to highlight the area of need okay so I'm a couple slides in I does she have a clicker do you have the clicker no thank you no wonder all right that's something new enjoy it all right I'm like I'm like yes um so this is what I was just kind of highlighting a little bit of um the the recent news and some of the highlights around this work and the need uh so this is an overview of some of the highlights of the nature of what percentage of children are showing um some sort of mental health needs um in various levels and I'm not going to read all of this to you but it just really helps to highlight where
087we are current where we've been over the past few years and also we are where we are currently at in terms of um just the level of need and this is something that we are also seeing here within our community as well uh and this is an overview of what we currently do so we kind of look at it in terms of that multi-tiered system so we have the universal targeted and individual level and the at the universal level so our mental health awareness is an example of a universal meaning that it's accessible for all the students and something that we do as a prevention initiative and program and that includes our Erica's Lighthouse and also we have climate culture teams in every building social and emotional learning programs such as second step and our
088positive behavior intervention supports at the targeted level so this means it's group based level so students who may need a little bit more CBT that's cognitive behavioral therapeutic type of approaches and groups and we also have our interventions within our positive behavior supports like mentoring programs check and check out uh social academic instructional groups that's what that stands for as well as we have trauma-informed groups so cognitive behavior intervention for trauma in schools and bounce back our example of those and we have social and emotional plans for students who may do that as well and then at the most intense individualized level we have our functional Behavior assessments and behavior intervention plans wraparound plans person-centered planning and kind of some more more intensive level support so this was just a highlight of the overall system
089of practices that are in place and this kind of helped show what it is that we did for this year so this this year we provided the program to fifth through eighth grade students we are just finishing up fifth grade so we are almost at finishing so we started with the Junior High in fall and it's kind of been then we go through the grade levels and end around now we have as part of this Universal screener basically what that means is that it's a way to kind of help see if any students are having any just kind of Social and emotional needs so this is not meant to be diagnostic or any way shape or form say that a child has a mental health need it's more just social and emotional kind of support
090and and we helped utilize that in order to kind of see are there any students that may may need to check in with somebody that we are not already aware of and we you and we check in with them first before we do any of the program um that's what we do by early implementation meaning that students that we know may have may have needs and are already provide getting Services if I provided this in a smaller kind of setting so that we can kind of help support their needs in those ways and then the area Erica's Lighthouse program is what we use across the board for everybody and then we also have a system to make sure that we are following up with any students right at that time when it's done as well
091as supports that we provide further along like afterwards so so if a student is like I have any level of need we don't just stop there we make sure that we're continuing to provide support we make sure we address that right away so what we have linked with that cesdc is our screen is the screener and the form that we use in order to make sure that the child is okay and determining if they might need any further level of support um this also highlights some of the parent components in terms of just ensuring that the parents are aware of the program that they can get any of their questions answered we have like a video that we've shown a traditional in the past that we can have for the parents for the parent night
092they get letters they're able to opt out of the program they are able to opt out of this group The Universal screener that's provided to everybody so we really try to do everything we can to just make sure everybody's kind of aware of when we're doing it what it involves and are able to answer any of the questions that they have we also will have multiple languages available too for the parents during those times too so that any of the families can be able to get the information that they may need for that and we also uh will let the parents know if their child was screened in any way from the program so if they received internet further kind of check-in the parents are made aware of what that means and what any next
093stops would be um and this kind of goes over the information implementation logic Logistics I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on this um but this kind of it really shows the detail of how we make sure that all the buildings have the level of support that they need that we are able to ensure that each student that would need to talk to somebody that that's available that that's done in a timely manner and that there's a follow-up from that we also partner with our local agencies they sometimes come to the schools and help provide the program or we find out who has availability if any children are needed are needed to see for further supports outside of the school setting and we like we mentioned we integrate that with the supports
094that we talked about on our you know targeted and individualized and Universal programming as well [Music] and so just as in any a failure thank you any program that we do or any initiative that we do we want to make sure that we're looking at the outcomes and we're measuring the effectiveness and we're looking at the data behind this program so we're actually currently doing this as Dr swanland mentioned we just finished fifth grade mental health awareness yesterday so this is timely so we are still compiling some of the data and information but we're going to take a few minutes to go through the information that we have with you um to highlight some of the data and outcomes from our mental health awareness program so as Dr swanland mentioned all students in fifth through
095eighth grade who were opted into this program did take a universal screener this is actually the first year that we had all students take an SEL screener so that was um as for our team and the clinicians we thought was a really good way to identify any students that may need extra support who may not otherwise be identified so this what we use is similar to what we through fast Bridge what we use for our academic screeners as well and it's an SEO screener it's called My Savers there's information LinkedIn presentation it's a quick screener 20 Questions students taken on their Chromebooks they have headphones it is read to them and we also made it available in multiple languages this year as well as we thought we saw that as a need and this is
096just some of our overall data from looking at the mysavers so you can see um in the fall we had all sixth through 8th grade students take this and then in the winter we had our fifth grade students also take it so overall we had over 4 000 students in our district take the screener and this is what the overall data shows this screener does identify by risk level so it identifies any students that may be a high risk for social emotional concerns some risk or low risk and overall you can see it was pretty aligned between the fifth graders and then the sixth through 8th graders and it's what we would hope to see we would hope to see that less than five percent of our students would be high risk and we are
097right between that one to three percent thirteen to fifteen percent with some risk which is what you would expect to see kind of that middle tier some some risk but um able to you know hopefully get some supports and then low risk was in that 84 percent um so overall it's what you'd hope to see um with how our students when they took the universal screener so and then any students in Dr swanland mentioned this who are in that high risk category and some students in some risk we then presented the mental health awareness program to them in smaller groups so they were able to get more support if needed or ask questions and also just get connected with a clinician in their building so our clinicians also did follow up with the students that
098were in that high risk category through that way and then we also collect data as we do the mental health awareness program so I want to also commend all of our clinicians in the district because this is a lot of work the mental health awareness program takes a lot of effort a lot of time a lot of commitment they are on the ground running really following up with students providing these presentations following up with families getting students connected to support so I mean just you know commending our clinicians who work really hard and we at District 2 go into the buildings to support our clinicians through this program as well but this data helps highlight and show the number of students that we follow up with and then the number of students that we connect
099to resources within or outside of the school for mental health or social emotional support and this data is just for junior high because we just finished fifth grade yesterday we're now going to be looking at the data for the fifth to sixth grade on this next few weeks so we will have more data in the coming weeks but this is just through seventh through eighth grade because both of those grade levels finished in the fall so we were able to collect this data Within our junior high buildings so overall you can just take a look at that data the one I really like to highlight is we have we there were 136 students that were referred for additional follow-up after our mental health awareness program how I see this is 136 of our students who
100may not have otherwise gotten any support we're then able to receive some social emotional support either through groups at school or connected to outside resources so it just highlights the number of students who receive support who are seeking out some social emotional support not many emergency or crisis situations happened in the junior highs this year as a result of this program which is also good to see a lot of students you know were able to receive that support within the school or you know within talking in their family and getting outside support we also then collect data after our program so we really value our staff input so we we do surveys we talk to them at our department meetings to really get their input and feedback as to how the program went how things
101can improve what we can do differently last summer we spent a lot of time working with our some of our clinicians on revamping the program for how we can make it more feasible for this year so far the feedback we're receiving um and we're going to be receiving more formal feedback from them it's been very positive that this year it's it's gone very smooth across the district we did spread it out um because we didn't move it it used to primarily be in the junior highs and we've expanded it to fifth through eighth grade and we did spread it out so it's more manageable for our clinicians so we are you know getting our staff input for how it's going we're then working with our teams to identify any students that need additional support at
102tier two or tier three through groups or individual social emotional supports at school Dr swanland mentioned the Community Partnership some we keep in touch with the bridge and other community agencies on any students that need additional support outside of school and then in the summer we really prep and plan for this program for next year of our next steps for mental health programming with this program and things that we're hoping to continue to do and to improve on for next year we are working to get more of our clinicians trained in the trauma group that Dr swanland mentioned it's an Evidence evidence-based intervention for trauma in schools see bits and bounce back so we are working to train more clinicians and get that rolled out across more of our buildings We are following up with
103our teams and our clinicians on how the what we do is we have post we call them post mha groups and what these are are just mental health we use the curriculum to follow to help support students with anxiety depression stress coping um so we're following up with teams and how those groups are going and then collecting data on that as well we are updating our um our just our general curriculum for tier two social emotional and behavior interventions in our district we're working on updating that this summer and then we've talked about we're looking into um administering my Sabers more than once a year to look at progress and to look at it and you know any changes throughout the school year and we've talked about you know opening up to different grade levels
104as well so these are all just discussions and things that we're talking about to figure out how to best meet the needs of our students with Mental Health social emotional social emotional um supports can I ask you both before we turn it over for questions can you please speak and you said something that's so very true the clinicians really are managing this process as a lot of work um but there's a staffing shortage especially within our clinician team so can you please spend some time talking about the how that impacts this work yes those are both very true statements um uh this this is a an undertaking for sure because we want to we want to meet the students where they're at in terms of and of the students who could use that early implementation
105providing that working with the teachers on the programming and then all the follow-up um and these are the same providers that are servicing students with IEPs and the services within all that who are addressing the ongoing mental health needs that we see in our school every day and the various level of Behavioral supports and whatnot and all those that we have and we we do struggle with the mental health provider shortage which those two articles do kind of talk about that um there that we are kind of in that state of the needs are going higher and the ability to provide to find Mental Health Providers is becoming more challenging um so yeah we're not fully staffed in our psychologist department and Social Work counselor we are but we do rely on contract employees meeting
106individuals that are not direct hires but from contracted agencies and things like that so you know it is it is something that we we are working through and um and we need a balance ensuring that the everyday supports for the students are provided through the individual education plans through the 504s through our intervention supports as well as being able to do this work so I think we all come together as a team with all of us and the providers that we have in our 20 buildings to dedicate the time to this work so that with no so that no student it goes unnoticed really and we're able to see if any if somebody has a need in any way that we are getting that noticing that early before it becomes something more serious and one
107I could just speak of one example of that is last year we did include fourth grade in this and this year due to staff input and how taxing this was on our staff and we have a shortage um we did you know just move it to fifth to eighth grade to try to help support our staff with this process too so that's one example of of how that's impacted this kind of programming I have two questions um so on the point about administering it one more than once per year right now as you are doing it year to year are you able to track exits of students who maybe were at the the middle level of risk who now come down to low to be able to see what impact the curriculum and supports are
108having yeah so we track it in multiple ways so fast Bridge can track um for students that take the my Sabers it tracks the data through the fast bird system um so we're able to you know look at progress like the benchmarking that's what it's meant for to do it more than once a year we also have a system a really robust system in our schools that we use through PBIS where we track any student in intervention so we're tracking in multiple ways we track their progress in any of our interventions so students in the mental health program who um receive follow-up support through our groups we track them that way too where we're tracking a little more frequently every month as to how they're doing with the supports and if they need more or
109if they you know they can exit from that support and then my other question was um we talked about how the screener is offered in multiple languages how do we handle supports in multiple languages yeah so so it's it's like read to them as well and then if the student needs uh more support we work with the building around the um individ individuals that can support them in that native language so yeah so they're translating it we worked with multilingual to translate um some of it into for some of our newcomers in Ukrainian so we have the screener in Ukrainian um with fast Bridge it only it translates on audio in Spanish only but I know fast bridge is actually working on expanding I'm hoping you know we have more languages but we did get
110it translated in different languages based on building needs yeah so then yeah finding people within those buildings to translate which sometimes is tough there's also a translation service that can be used um as well okay and then when the actual interventions and supports are put in place how do we handle that for our multi-language students like after the screener if they've identified you know if we have a Spanish-speaking student who identifies as high risk or that Medium risk are they able to access the same degree of support um as needed based on their identification yeah so that's then where they will are um building-based providers will work with the multilingual department and the ESL teachers and bilingual teachers in the in the programs and for example if it's like a newcomer program or something like
111then they they have a number of kids to work together in order to be able to provide the social emotional supports needed okay fortunately we do have some you know a number of bilingual clinicians yes we do in our buildings we are grateful for when you provide those supports and they really help each the department helps each other out thank you can I piggyback on that um question a little bit um in terms of um once the students are screened what's the timeline between identifying those um some risks or high-risk students for intervention yes for intervention it's right away so so the so the screener happens and then there's like a timeline for the early implementation so from the screen or they then say are there any students that we didn't know about already and
112the students that we know that RC receiving Services they're all getting that early implementation and that's a few weeks and then the programs provided everybody and then from the program students can say if they want to talk to somebody so that's a second layer which we didn't mention yet that that can happen so at the end of the program there's an exit slip where students any student can say I want to talk to somebody and they can say if I want to talk to somebody now or within a week or if they want to talk about a friend because a lot of this program is about just identification it's about the difference between stress and something more serious and um and it also helps see when your friend is feeling this way this is what
113you do so they can also say I have a friend that I'm kind of concerned about and I want to talk to somebody that happens right away so right away we'll we'll talk with those students and um let the parents know what the outcomes were based off of gathering more information and then uh quickly after they get those groups up and running for the um for the Post mha groups due to the quick follow-up and that's why I think yes there's a lot of work for our clinicians because they are running around following up and those students and figuring out the groups to get things up and running can you just um Define for the board what does foley staff actually really mean um that's a good question uh that means that we have the
114allocation that we have provided and it's based and the allocation is based off of workload caseload so we look at the um the known workload and caseload around students who have IEPs 504s and the tiered supports then we add in what we know about all this and that's the so that means the the amount that we have allocated overall so if we were to grade our fully staffed where are we we're pretty close so in the social work and counselor Department we do have every role provided for in the psychologist Department um sorry about five at this point that we are not at so we then get really creative with how we support those and when you think of around 20 psychologists that is yeah so 20 is where we yeah like 21 is what
115yeah and how many of those um you know Laura and Megan our contract agency because we can't find right now we have about five contract psychologists supporting our district and one contract uh social worker so I have a question with regards to when they do the assessment and you find some are some risk and some are at high risk what are the I guess interventions at those two levels so that's the targeted individualized interventions so the at the secondary level so that's more the group based so kids that have some risk those are the groups so the trauma-informed groups the social skills groups the kind of executive functioning or like organizational kind of skills groups will be at that level as well as mentoring kind of programs um for students who just need a little
116bit more feedback and positive interaction and those kind of things that is at that tier two group level at the individual level is when you're doing Behavior plans so very individualized for that child based off of what they need and what will work for them as well as like wraparound supports that's when um it's it's beyond the school so those are supports where we're really working very closely with the family on almost like a 24 7 kind of plan that supports the child and the family and then social and emotional plans are for kids that um that might be more the students who may have like anxiety or depression or those kind of features but are okay in school are doing okay behaviorally but they need a little bit more of that um kind of
117cognitive behavioral type of approach to support them with whatever you know might be impacting them so these are students who maybe are struggling with who's coming to school or maybe um have kind of performance anxiety or any any of those kind of things so we have plans for them as well so that looks a little bit individualized for for those students so basically the idea is whatever the the need is for the children we kind of have it so that we figure we determine what that level is and then what it is that's going to support them and again many of you students if they if they require an individualized education plan that then is in addition to everything I just talked about okay and then uh at what stage do you engage the parents
118at is it what if they have some risky you let the parents know or I guess what stage does that happen so parents are informed about the program before it even begins they have the option to opt out of the program um just you know so they're informed we send a very thorough letter explaining the program we offer a parent night where parents can come in to view part of the program learn more information and so they're engaged from the beginning before it even starts um with my Sabers information it's for what and we did a lot of research to look at this and any student that's identified as high risk are the ones that we targeted first to make sure that they have the early implementation and then parents were notified of that as
119well so any students that were identified as that high risk um parents found out immediately through letters emails some clinicians did personal phone calls I'm saying we're going to be working with your student in a group for early implementation for multiple or for mental health awareness as well and then parents are informed whenever we follow up with a student through this program we um do parent contact as well to let the parent know that we met with their student and what the outcome was what the outcome was and then uh how long does it take typically to uh administer the ice Savers assessment it's like but some a little longer they're short questions 20 questions um and it reads it to them um so and students move quickly through it so it's on a computer
120um so it you know it works through the questions with them okay so very very quick they take it in their classrooms so it does not disrupt learning um they take it we recommend that they do it during their social emotional learning time in the morning typically that may look different at the junior high but it's very quick okay we often talk about Mental Health in separation from academics can you speak to how investing in mental health support for students also supports their learning oh that's yeah we are planning on talking about that Institute in may actually that is a a part of our overall behavioral um and social and emotional training that we are have we have launched continuing in May and then leading up into August when we start to look at Champs
121and everything so we are making that that connection for teachers very explicit in the upcoming training that we're doing and through that we're just helping them see or just helping focus on community and um relationships and like just uh well most most I would say understand why that's important but just how to do it like ways in which we can really support this through just our everyday teaching and then that will enhance the academic so yes that is that is something that we continue because many of our teachers are definitely seeing you know that this is a need so it's it's helping with what we can do so what everybody can do as a part of this uh work because together we can do more and together we can really help more students because a
122mental health provider can do so much but the community is really where the power is at so that's kind of been our focus and there's a big connection because you know we often say like stressed brains cannot learn so if we're having these high levels of stress and mental health needs we need to support that to then optimize their learning anybody else thanks Laura thank you Megan all right thank you yeah six two uh 23 24 staffing recommendations first first special ed teachers related Services multilingual instructional coach in like a five minute break yeah yes all right five minutes right sorry while we set up the next thing so it is eight minutes to nine right now three minutes to nine we'll start back up foreign hi hello again hello we have the uh memo
123in your board packet for the staffing for special education and for Educational Services and I just wanted to start off with does anyone have any questions about the memo we don't need to reread it to you if you've already perused it and uh happy to take any questions you might have yeah a couple of mine are uh because of our extension of our Continuum which we're very excited about we've been laying the groundwork for a couple of years so one of our Junior High editions is the seal Junior High program which will for next year support our seventh and 8th grade students which has been a pretty giant hole in our special education Continuum where students were supported in seal K through six and uh then we didn't have an offering so our students either
124required support in gen Ed with resource support and coton instructional classrooms or some of our students would then at the end of their educational career go on to Conyers Learning Academy in our Aces program so we're very pleased that classroom next year will be housed of course pending board approval tonight at the Winston campus Junior High and um with uh we were able to with the staff that's there their resource staff numbers for Winston campus are going down next year so we are able to utilize one of the FTE that is at that school to support the opening of that classroom and the eight teachers that are there will remain there for next school year which we're excited about those FTE and the um Junior High we at you'll see in here are we have
125I put in here the we have sorry not just I all of us so Dr swanland and Dr uh Jeffrey also supported Dr Schnur and I with this uh the preparation of this so we put in here the uh five-year trend for our what's called our December 1st child count data and that is the arbitrary date across the state of Illinois where in every school district every district has to report on that exact day at the end of the day how many students with IEPs we have obviously it fluctuates every day because students move students are found eligible for services or dismiss room Services every single day across school districts that's why they have an arbitrary date as you'll see the trend data over the five years um I we we thought it important to
126share obviously the year before the pandemic we know that there are higher needs with our students since the pandemic but just across the board the trend is higher for special education support and needs in our district as we see everywhere across the state and our district Still Remains under the state average for special education overall our overall identification our levels of Early Childhood identification are significantly higher than they were pre-pandemic and that's certainly understandable given what what has occurred right and so um we also just wanted to make sure that you had that data in there and one of the biggest areas where we have seen a pretty significant need is in junior high so for example here at the school at Sun Lane next year we're going to need an entire FTE more for
127in order to meet the caseload needs of students that are identified with IEPs here at the school so that's where you see the junior high resource Edition is the FTE for uh for sunling and then there's one that's listed as cost neutral but we wanted to list it because it is an increase in one program area so uh we in our elementary k6 our aim and mile programs are at GMS and we have had two of each of those classrooms next year we um the caseloads warrant five classrooms so three aim classrooms and two mile classrooms however at our Junior High we are able to collapse the for next year only the mile Junior High program because we don't have the students to support it in seventh and eighth grade next year so it's that
128ebb and that flow of the up and the Down based on as students matriculate up through the system in our cohorts as to the increase and in the closing of classroom rooms so I think that that explains the the classroom FTE for special education and I just wanted to put um a narrative around that so you understood understood the why other questions so I was looking at the numbers here and um let's see for the um for the IEPs it looks like the increase from like say the 2018-2019 present that was about a four and a half percent increase in the number of accounts from 1186 to 1239 and then um I also noticed on the 504s there's a significant increase from the 2018-19 to the 2019-20 and went from 587 to 855 which is
129about a 45 increase which do you have any idea or guess as to why that happened because then it seems like it's kept pretty consistent after that right the 504s can be written for anything that requires a student under the Five Section 504 to be eligible for a 504 plan so the increase from 2018 2019 into 2019 2020 that is a steep increase and it was mostly medically related students becoming eligible for any student who has an EpiPen has to have a 504 plan any student who has diabetes has to have a 501 so is that a change in policy as to what we could what's being considered for a 504 no it's not a change in policy that has always been that way just there were changes over time not necessarily that year but
130for example The Diabetes Care Act that came out in Illinois was one that mandated that schools have formalized plans traditionally under 504s for students obviously we don't have an increase of 300 in students with diabetes but that's something that came out in the mid I think actually the around 2011 or so don't quote me on that but that started to prompt more as well as um allergies allergies that was another one that's another legislation so over time I think that we've become better equipped to be able to identify students who are eligible not only for um for medically or you know health related but also our students with extreme anxiety we are seeing a significant uptick in students with anxiety and we were before the pandemic and as students become diagnosed unfortunately as mental health
131issues become more mainstream and discussed parents have found out that they are eligible for certain accommodations and we have seen an increase that was just kind of surprising to see that in one year and then after that though it's completely leveled out so from 2019 to you know 2022 or you know it's completely leveled out that I believe was also the year that the district I was not here but I believe this year the district moved from Tyler sis to IC so the student information system for reporting so I'm wondering if that made it you know what though we'll look into it Frank and we'll get back to you I think two is something to consider too although it's a small percentage in the dentist and I'm here so sometimes but like when a student's
132being evaluated for for an i o for an IEP for eligibility for an IEP they may be found ineligible for special education services but could be supported with accommodations under the Section 504 act so then if you look at the numbers of evaluations that took place a percentage of that may have fallen into 504 instead of IEP on the flip side of that students who may be progressing very very well through their IEP and exiting special education services but still the reason they are successful is because of the accommodations that are in place May then leave IAP and fall over into a 504 plan because they don't necessarily need the specialized instruction to be successful in school but they do need the accommodations that they developed throughout the IEP process that they were in special
133education services so that's not reflected on here and even if that were the case it's a really small number because I do look at the other numbers but it could be it could be a portion of that that took place as well yeah well I mean you're not seeing the IEPs change from from you know 18 to 19. but then you see the huge spike in 2019 and then for looking at the case study evaluation numbers those numbers look like they're declining I mean because it was you know 288 now it's it's gone it went down to 255 to 231 and then it's 240. so that's when it went down about uh but you know it's doesn't never getting things changing significantly there with the case study evaluations do you think that it might have
134something to do with the fact that we have now a net service department that focuses on Intervention and we're providing layered support prior to moving to case study maybe more swiftly and I I don't know what just I think we're doing a much better job in our identification of students who may be eligible for supports than we were in the past because we're better staff than we were prior to 2019. yeah so I mean I guess my overall question is I mean these numbers don't look significantly different except for that Spike from 2018 to 2019. I mean the the IEPs I mean it's a four and a half percent increase um I'm just I'm just kind of wondering why we I mean because I mean for the last two years we've increased staff quite a
135bit in our specialization I think the individual student numbers don't don't account for the degree of severity that we're seeing in our students and their needs for supports yeah she was saying that you know these numbers are not necessarily much different the amount of involvement or that the kids may need is something a little bit more severe more time consuming yes I would say I guess it's more of a question than a statement but I think numbers that show how many IEPs or how many 504s aren't necessarily a reflection of the adequacy of addict you know of the staff that are supporting it it's really more on identification of the students needs regardless of the staff to provide the support so an increase in IEP number is necessarily because the education or you know not
136that that's what you're saying but like you know that that we're not providing enough of of support to the students and so they are defaulting to specialize or anything like that I think it's sometimes the opposite is that we have really adequate teams who can say this student really needs to be considered for these type of services it's and not the other way around often well stated and just a really simple example a student could be eligible for consult for speech language and only take up 10 minutes a week of a therapist time where there could be students who you know have 120 Minutes of speech but they're both counted as one student other questions okay thank you okay great thank you thanks Ms Renee next and it was six two and then back to
137six three yeah sure so for the multilingual Department this year we are proposing that we add an instructional coach to two of our largest buildings Virginia Lake and Lake Louise where we have over 600 students who are English Learners and that instructional coach would be Grant funded and focus solely on supporting teachers who have English Learners in their classrooms as we have more and more newcomers coming into our buildings we've had well over 300 newcomers just this school here and we want to be able to support teachers to higher levels and our students to higher levels so we'd like to repurpose some of our funding to allow for an instructional coach that would be shared by both of those buildings are there any questions as soon as you send grant funding we're all in sure
138thank you very much that's great thank you Renee yep 6'3 border reorganization the reorganization meeting and schedule we had two things um I had two through the next slide please yes so during a March meeting in ad number years the board establishes a date for a real reorganizational meeting to be held sometime after the election has been canvassed but within 40 days after that Consolidated election so two years ago in 2021 that meeting took place at our regular meeting on May 3rd so this year the Consolidated election will be the first Tuesday in April uh number year so it's the 4th of April to go to the next slide we have a variety of things so those four things that have to take place at that meeting so we'll each success successful candidate will take
139a note before they're seated and they'll be provided with a copy of the board member oath and code of conduct new board members will be seated the board shall elect its officers who assume office immediately upon their election and that night and the board shall approve a time and date for its regular meetings there is a draft schedule within four ducks our organizational meeting my proposal is it will be held at our regular meeting on May 10th we have until May 12th so we don't need to schedule a special meeting nor did we need to do that in 2021 so I just wanted to make sure we have to have this information out you know after March so you're all aware the community is aware and just so you can get it into your calendars
140any questions about the board organizational meeting oh did you guys correct that one oh yeah there was one here the Tuesday that said Wednesday before the previous yeah all right keep going we got it I was like wait a second is the date correct or is the day correct you know I was like in the calendar yes okay previous time we had an organizational meeting that wasn't at a board meeting was it yep it was oh so we moved upward meaning right before right before the meeting got it because I mean May 3rd is not usually the typical day it's usually the second Wednesday right so we had that one early okay because I was wondering too I was like dude we have a separate meeting I don't remember that oh I think for some
141reason we may have had one of those meetings that had to be on a different day week I don't remember I feel like the at the front end of us being seated it was a different day that was Standalone and ever since then we've had it rolled in behind it yeah it just really depends on how those days fall within the 40 days after the canvas if you can if you have a meeting scheduled within that window or not sure if not I just didn't remember if we had a separate meeting or if we had actually just had moved the regular meeting I think every time that that it's been done that I've seen it's always been on a day of an actual meeting only there have been a special meeting she must have moved
142up that yeah two years ago all right okay okay so May 10th it is yep 6'4 um substitute pay rate Lisa thank you president chupai Dr Hines and the rest of the board we're coming to you tonight um to ask you to vote on an increase in our substitute rates um there's three rates that we are going to ask for a adjustment mid-year we've said it over and over again at board meetings it's not just district 15 but universally we're seeing a sub shortage despite our efforts we've continued to struggle to secure Subs to cover our daily absences let alone professional development so we were hoping that with more competitive rates we'd attract more people so there are three areas that we were hoping to have an increase in when we looked at districts in
143the area we'd like to be more Market competitive currently we have a daily rate of 125 dollars for a substitute teacher our neighboring districts range from 120 all the way up to 160. we would like to see that rate go up to 135 dollars a day rather than 125 dollars a day which will put us kind of right in the middle of of our surrounding area um another area that we'd like to have changed is some districts specifically wheeling and Schomburg give a special rate for those teachers who retired from the district the benefit of that is they've already gone through our training there's very little they need to do to jump right back into substitute teaching those rates range somewhere between 150 and 200 and we're asking for a rate of 165 for our
144retired teachers once we get those teachers back they're usually our best subs and then our program assistance that we do struggle not only to fill as a sub but we struggle to fill those on a daily basis just as full-time employees right now we have a daily rate for program assistance of 95 these are the people that typically work one-on-one with special education students or in special ed classes and those people are needed and it's required by law it's often in an IEP are required under school code for staff ratios right now we're paying 95 a day for that substitute the range in our neighboring districts are from 120 to 125 we're asking to come up to 105 dollars just so we could get more competitive we went through a thorough investigation with their business
145department I'd like to thank Diana McCluskey who went through crunching a lot of numbers to make estimates and then see what the budget could hold obviously um we'd love to pay more than everybody else but we want to be fiscally responsible and make sure that that it matches our budget needs as well so if there are any questions so with guards to these uh the substitute pay rates the district also sometimes has long-term Subs they do have long-term subs and uh so what would qualify as substitute teacher is a long-term sub and is the pay rate different it is that's a good question Frank so when we were looking at surrounding areas we were pretty competitive with our long-term rate a sub has to be in the same classroom for 16 consecutive days and their
146pay rate goes to approximately 215 a day it's 214 and some change when we looked at other areas we were definitely Market competitive so we didn't ask for an increase in that area okay thanks yeah are there additional responsibilities that come with that long-term the long-term sub different than a day-to-day sub is responsible for lesson planning and communicating with parents um so more mimicking at what a teacher does on a regular basis the one-off one days teachers are leaving lesson plans but you're talking about like long-term medical leaves birth leaves and things like that Lisa how do you like assuming that we're all good with making these changes and we're more competitive how do you get the word out on the street to try to I mean the whole point here is we're so short
147staffed with the subs how do we get them in once we once we've got the money a little bit more right yeah if we get a raid of raising their rate we'd have to blast both social media we have weekly job fairs we would work collaboratively with Becca to make sure that that's out on our website and on our social media sites and just get it out there as especially I found actually that the word of mouth from a school is one of our best ways to reach our substitute teachers so um advertising at the school buildings when parents come either pick up or dropping their lunch off that their student forgot heavy material out there really has been quite beneficial okay thank you all right thank you very much Mr Bramley Dr Walter and
148Dr branch [Music] thank you monster if you want me to uh we came to the board back in January December too many months ago uh December asking uh for uh your permission to go ahead and bring in a private company for seven drivers uh this started in January and we are very close to the end of the three months contract that we went into I cannot talk higher enough in two things one how our own drivers have accepted them as part of the team and also how they have helped get a lot of our students to school and Home in a better time frame than what we were doing at that time so we're here tonight to ask you to hopefully vote and say yes to extending this contract through the 2nd of June which
149will be the last day of the school year so there's a there is a law that allows us to which is what which we used um to get it approved before there's an emergency Clause that a district can use an outside company outside of our bargaining unit when we have um positions to fill and with our bargaining unit with our with our DTU we can only fill positions that we currently have like ideally in the perfect world it would have been nice for us to hire 20 drivers so that we even had extra drivers when our drivers come in sick our negotiated agreement says we can only contract out for positions that we have that we didn't so we had seven open route sets that were not covered so that's what we went out to
150fill through the contract agency and those that emergency contractors only for three months so our contract started on January 7th and it ends on April 7th um but we are in that time frame unfortunately now since January to April um we're actually negative one driver than we were back in December so we're one driver even less now than we had before at this very moment in time uh well until about five o'clock this evening uh we have eight to two drivers um of our own one of them is long-term sick uh we did get one of our long-term sick back uh on um I think the third or fourth of March which does help us but unfortunately we had a call from a driver today she's been off work for a few weeks and has
151now decided that due to the her medical condition she could no longer come back so as of this evening we're down to eight to one drivers we have [Music] um One driver who had just started training but he's an ex driver so he should go through our training very very quickly one gentleman away for getting his CLP his commercial learning permit he has to do all the written tests um we did have uh an interview this morning but unfortunately we've had to decline uh that person and then last night uh we sat in the office till after 5 30 for a no-show and that is becoming quite the common uh thing is to get people interested set up interviews and then have no shows up your continuous driving right can we add now that we're
152down additional can we add them to this if you get these no because that route was picked at the original rope pick for the Union uh in August and we can only use um the least drivers as we call them for routes that were never when I picked okay I gotcha so um we are really working on trying to recruit more drivers just like you said how do you get the word out so you know that the board agreed and we we entered into negotiations with our DTU early their contract was supposed to be up at the end of this year we entered early so they a pay raise was granted um January 1st and then there'll be another increase on July first further contract um Becca and I have been working tomorrow we're placing
153an order we are going to Let's splits the town again with signs with the new pay rate and Banners to hang on fences we're trying to do everything we can to advertise that we are more competitive now on our wage so hopefully we'll bring in some driving candidates I'm curious I thought that um so we were limited to 90 days for the contract as part of I think by law right so are we able to to renew yes is that okay yes and that's within our legal yes okay yeah and so you have a whole new contract again tonight that we're asking for approval on okay yeah so on the routes then um that aren't picked that's where we're filling in this these um and the this company this outside company is can any of
154our drivers pick additional routes so that we can um you know utilize our own staff or is this not a possibility we are giving out extra work on a daily basis I've seen the two dispatchers um some days it will take them 10 minutes to get the extra work covered other days it can take them 35-40 minutes to get everything covered by calling out to all the drivers um at some stage um through this year I I've you know I've been out driving and I'll get a call on the bus radio we've been through everybody we still have routes to cover and I will approve over time to get some of those routes covered but like for example on our first year we needed we needed 97 drivers to physically Drive buses so even that
155we had even if we had extra we didn't have the drivers to cover the extra but like maybe a driver that picked a route set that has a tier one and then a tier two route but they weren't scheduled to do a tier three then they might pick that up so they're getting more hours per day so so our individual drivers might be making more money per day but we actually also need more drivers to physically Drive the buses and the other area we have to look at and we can't do it until we get more drivers in we have to look at some of our uh very young students that are 20 to 25 on a bus um some routes where we have some of our um Special Ed I know you've just been
156talking about IEPs and 504s but we've had to get some of these students on regular buses to get them to school which is not um The best scenario we do have just to let you know we do have um four part-time drivers um two of them work afternoons only two of them what mornings only which help us out one of them we just mourning only he has another job and he has to take time off to go and cover some of his duties I do have what we classes on call drivers um we have one lady who's available on a Thursday Friday for us and we use her every Thursday every Friday um we have one gentleman who also does a lot of work um at the ballparks um downtown but when he's available he
157will work for us and unfortunately uh one lady who's not with us at the moment because she's um what do you call them snowbirds she's in Florida we will be joining us again in the spring any other questions for us no thank you thanks for working hard for us [Music] all right we have a motion for acceptance of minutes [Applause] I make a motion to approve the minutes from the February 8 2023 regular meeting of the Board of Education and the executive session as attached second second discussion boy we're all slow tonight trying to catch up discussion around yeah all those in favor motion carries um board committee reports Frank Edward okay so the legislature has been in session they've been doing they submitted like tons and tons of bills so I'm trying to I'll
158give you the the rundown of the the ones that are of some interest um there's a full day kindergarten bill which would make full day kindergarten mandatory Statewide um so that's something interesting uh there's lots that you need to take into consideration with that because there's all the added costs associated with it with us we're going to be adopting full day kindergarten come 2025. 24 25 right so um yeah I wouldn't really apply to us but I think that was interesting um there's actually a bill out there for a a mandates Review Committee to actually review all the school mandates that the state creates and to uh create a report and recommendations on the the backlog of mandates that schools uh are required to meet but are difficult to meet um there's also a bill
159for new student arrivals this would create a new student arrival Grant and appropriate 35 million to this fund uh the new arrival student grants are available to school districts to support the needs of students who are newly arriving immigrant immigrants so I know we have had some students new to our district uh in some I don't know what the quantities are exactly 300 this school year but 500 since last January yes quite a few there so this was uh be something to kind of help out school districts that are having to take on the the extra costs of bringing on all these additional students um there was a bill here with regards to uh tenure dismissal hearings uh so this would be that um when a teacher is up for a hearing on their tenure
160if there's uh there will be accommodations made for all students or persons under the age of 18 to testify at a teacher dismissal hearing so that's to prevent them from being intimidated traumatized or re-dramatized so I thought that was that's a good thing um they also had a bill here with regards to clear and present danger so this amends the open meetings act to provide that a public body May hold a closed session meeting to consider security procedures School Building Safety and Security so that makes sense um along there is a if a school administrator uh notifies Illinois State Police that someone may be a pose a clear and present danger than within 24 hours the state police can you know determine whether or not they need to revoke a person's uh FOID card for
161holding a firearm um and then that would go to a to a hearing so that's I guess it'd be something that's a nice tool for things that may come up in the case of an emergency after the Highland Park shooting yeah so yeah so good stuff there then the uh we already talked a little bit about the Tiff Reform Bill which is something I think is sorely needed my personal opinion uh where we can reduce the tips from 23 years to 20 uh make them renewable for only one two-year term instead of two 12-year terms schools can opt out so they can still receive their funding this nice little uh a 10 set aside for any small businesses so that uh not just the big box stores and huge developments can can take advantage of
162the tips but the smaller business can also and this is something I don't think we've run in too much around here but I know in the city of Chicago they do this a lot where they take Tiff funds from one district and move it over to another TIF district which is completely insane first I've ever heard I was like how can that possibly be legal it's like Tiff funds from one place completely to another but that will get rid of that so that's the whole build to me sounds like a really good one so hopefully that goes through uh there was another bill about mandatory trainings to kind of consolidate all the trainings requirements to a five-year cycle and to give the uh the school districts a little more autonomy on determining which trainings are
163actually applicable to employees so that's that's good too so there you go big list but those are the good ones all right Foundation Jim yeah so um Natalie did a great job with sharing most of the details earlier today with um obviously the biggest update being the mini grants that were awarded which I think was 15 mini grants that were awarded thanks to the money that was raised by the community um 50 50 raffle is in its final week currently the pot is at about twelve thousand dollars so the winner can take at least six thousand but we want to make that bigger so get those tickets if you want them proceeds uh fund the mini grants that you just saw awarded tonight so that's one of the biggest opportunities to help fund those the
164first one five excuse me Family Fun Run walk tickets are available online the proceeds from that help to fund all the programs supported by the foundation and that is currently scheduled for May 20th another upcoming event would be staff appreciation that will be in May it is the same week as teacher appreciation week but this year the one five Foundation wants to extend the possibility of appreciating all district 15 staff not just the teachers and there'll be more information to come on that in April so more information getting tickets and all the things I mentioned you can find that at 1-5 those are the words not the numbers 1-5 foundation.org okay thank you very much uh finance committee Anthony or window no new updates at this time for finance nice good short report Equity committee
165zubair Sam uh we will be meeting with Lori and the team to review the first draft of our strategic plan um so Equity committee will take first uh review before it is presented to the board beautiful also happy International women's day and happy Holi for those that are celebrating thank you um so we have the first reading of the board policy that was eight colon zero nine zero about parent organizations does anybody want to speak to it have questions like any adjustments Claire anyone we took out the language for booster clubs because we don't we're not a high school organization there was some confusion around whether or not we backed PTA completely out of there making it seem as if um you know the board and or districts were not in full support of the
166PTA and that was not the case at all so that's really what you're seeing there it's reinstated but we did take out boosters just so you understand and that's what Jeanette spoke to right tonight right all right um action items item 9.1 motion please I make a motion to approve the Personnel report Administration certified and non-certified as presented second discussion roll call Khan aye shoe pie aye Taylor aye Wong aye aider I enterino hi hi motion carries item 9.2 motion please I make a motion to award and assign trade contracts for 2023 Edition and Renovations at Walter our sun Lane Junior High School as presented second discussion I'm sure it doesn't need to be said again but it came in under budgets before we adjourn I was gonna say we didn't do 5-1 I will
167go over those couple of slides to provide you an update on where we are construction which are absolutely right it did come in under budget all three bed packages so awesome nice so when we finish action items we'll get back to your slide okay more discussion welcome Taylor aye Wong aye skater hi annarino aye Han aye Khan hi shupai aye motion carries item nine three I make a motion to split the bid and award contracts to music and arts Frederick Maryland in the amount of fifteen thousand five hundred eighty seven dollars and two cents music is Elementary in Lindenhurst Ohio in the amount of ten thousand five hundred seventy six Steve Weiss Willow Grove um Pennsylvania in the amount of 343 dollars in Sweetwater sound in Fort Wayne Indiana in the amount of 1419 for
168a total bid Award of twenty seven thousand nine hundred and twenty five dollars and two cents as presented second discussion Juan aye Khan aye shoe pie Taylor aye Wong aye aider I Anna Reno aye motion carries item nine four and make a motion toward a three-year contract for unleaded gasoline and ultra low sulfur diesel fuel to AI Warren Oil Company in Hammond Indiana and the estimated one-year amount of 239.80 as presented second discussion [Music] roll call shoe pie hi Taylor aye Wong aye ader aye annarino aye hunt aye Khan aye motion carries item nine five make a motion to authorize the emergency expenditure of funds and the approval of an emergency transportation agreement for unassigned school bus routes as presented second discussion roll call Wong aye ader I anarino aye Han icon aye shoe pie
169hi Taylor hi motion carries item 96 I make a motion to approve an increase in fde to support the students with individualized education plans and related services including a multilingual instructional coach for 2023-2024 as presented second discussion roll call Hater I panorino hi Han aye Khan aye shoe pie hi Taylor hi Wong aye motion carries item nine seven I make a motion to approve an increase in the substitute pay rate as presented bring in the subs that we desperately need it's this is a good use of funds agreed okay motion carries did anyone like to remove anything from the consent calendar motion please make a motion to prove the consent calendar items as presented second roll call shoe pie hi Taylor hi Wong aye ader eye annarino aye hunt aye Khan aye motion carries all
170right we're gonna go back to Dr heinz's room 517 just quickly I want to provide the board and update on construction so Walter our sunbling was out to bed in January bid opening again quite a bit of Interest nearly 40 groups came out in February and hope tonight you will approve that under budget all three phase one packages under budget with a lot of interest so we're very excited what you see here is an aerial of some of the work that we're proposing for assembling it's exciting if you go to the next slide please a lot more and we were we were able to have bid out the options that we were that were the optional extras sure we did base bid and then we have not determined if we're accepting any alternates we want
171to see how how we move through the projects and where the needle is in terms of the overall budget there's still cost escalation so we're just monitoring we're not moving on alternates just yet okay so how much under bid was it close to a couple million dollars correct Diana each bid package was two to three million dollars mm-hmm it's probably close to seven to The Good the total bid was like what 11 million something much more than that was it I can flip to that point in in just a moment slide 18 just to continue uh to provide an update in regards to Summer construction so again all three schools within phase one Plum Grove TJ and sunling uh James kaplanis Andy Diaz Diana myself Nicholas construction our architect teams from Wold and archon uh
172have been going to schools with the site plans to walk the sites and to really iron out summer construction details with the building principles and the head custodians all of them know the buildings very well and we're getting fencing locations and whatnot timelines ironed out we're waiting in terms of Permitting from nwrd which Metropolitan Water Reclamation District their permits are pending so the tentative construction fencing and groundbreaking times have been established we are targeting that window of spring break where there's no staff for students so we're going to put some fencing in knowing full well that depending on how those NW or RG permits come in we're hoping they come in within the next three weeks if not things may be fenced off for a few days before the community or staff see trucks and
173and workers but we want to capitalize on just no traffic no kids no cars so that is the plan we will communicate the impact at upcoming staff meetings on a upcoming early release Friday at Plum Grove TJ and suddenly we will bring teams there so the staff can hear the plan see the maps ask any questions and then we'll leave we'll do what we're going to call a leave behind so everybody understands timelines and when they have to pack and when certain areas may be fenced off and and so on and so forth we'll make sure to communicate as well if there's any new traffic patterns uh you know with our our parent Guardian community and then we will be working with the park districts regarding restricted access to some sites so unfortunately you know
174over the summer the park districts tend to use some of our fields and these three the likelihood that these three schools will be available to any outside uses pretty slim too really none and we'll make sure to communicate and you know try to flex as much as we can but they're going to be active construction sites so we don't want to have additional community members or students anywhere near the construction and then lastly you know we're very proud of you know all three phase one all fake timelines within phase one if you can go to the next slide um as we're outlined in moving 15 forward they've been met like it's been a huge team effort we planned well in advance of to be ahead of schedule and and we're continuing to to meet the
175mark phase two design work is underway at the following five schools and we will again then meet with each principal and head custodian to make sure they're aware of what's happening at those five schools and then the associated timelines and what we need them to do and we intend to go out to bid in June so just in a handful of months for phase two and then phase three and four we have eight schools that will be touched and we'll go under a much greater review fall of 2023 and you can see the remaining schools listed there so we continue to meet on this multiple times a day and uh puts on the gas and we're we're meeting our timelines it's very exciting overwhelming but exciting Bagel Frank take a box of candy yeah um
176one question one question about our moving 15 forward newsletter who what is the audience for that that's automatically receiving those so the audience would be parents and staff and anybody in the community that has signed up to receive um a digital mailer for us so we're working right now on a magazine that will go out that will have a lot of information about what the district is working on the kind of Center area the largest kind of fold out will be an update for moving 15 forward and that will go to all of the households within our boundaries so if anyone who might be listening or knows people that would be interested in receiving those if they wanted to receive the newsletter they could do so by going to our website and just signing up
177for our general newsletter and they would automatically be added to that correct okay and we will make sure to put that information in the mailer we did that with moving 15 forward trying to pick up when we were really focused on engaging with everybody within our boundaries we'll do the same thing within the magazine yep when you mentioned that the fences would start going up um spring break is some construction going to start yes good question before yeah because it's going to start waving starting in April and then move towards the building starting in April with most of these sites or as soon as that W mwrd permitting is done we will start in April or very shortly Water Reclamation District okay okay Metropolitan Water Reclamation so it'll be we're our Target is right after
178spring break April 4th we'll see how the permits uh come in is there any any issue with those permits or is it just that there's taken a little bit more time slow process [Music] and Club growth and that's because we're going to be building on what used to be open land it has to do with permeable space the water has to run off sometimes right permeables based or less thereof because we're building construction uh Claire I'm not going not going to throw all of my super and clear um and Lisa was also someone involved in in the calendar to reach out to District 211 based on the parent feedback that we received at our last Board of Education meeting uh Becca if you're the driver if you wouldn't mind clicking that link for d211 update
179let's see if I can I have access all right so now I have the access okay it's not coming through I have talking points I can okay go for it um so there has been some communication and emails coming to us regarding um our eighth graders that will graduate in 2025 because then they'll start high school in the fall of 2025 and as we've discussed the summer before the 24-25 school year will be an extended summer because of all the construction but then to make up our required number of days the summer that ends on 25 going into the the fall of 25-26 that's a shorter summer so some parents were concerned that if they have 8th grade students that were going to become freshmen's um that that are going to be freshmen that there
180might miss out on some of the summer programs so Rolling Meadows high school d214 starts their summer programs on June 9th um District 211 was starting their programs on June 2nd that's what they have advertised on their websites so I did meet with Dr small this past Monday to because some of the suggestions that we had received were could 211 switch their dates to match up with 214 to 2 9. are six nine I'm sorry and um um District 211 will not they're not going to be able to change their their academic um courseworks she did say that they're more flexible with their Sports um clubs starting like that's not a hard set date that they have to start on June 2nd but they will have the first semester of Summer Schools continue to start
181on June 2nd and then they'll have the second semester however she did say that any classes that were just specifically for freshmen only um that are just one semester classes in the summer they would offer all of those in the second session so none of our kids if they wanted to take a one semester freshman only class they won't even be starting in that first so they won't miss that but there are some classes that go over both semesters in the summer time and she said that you know historically in the past um we've had we've had students maybe still in school when their summer school is starting and that she said it would not be an issue that they would work with individual families she's like attendance isn't as important as is um I
182think some parents are very worried if their child missed a day or two of a class like it would affect their grade she said we will work with individual families and we'll make it work out we can so she assured me that that wouldn't be a problem and for sports um she also wanted to remind us that tryouts for all of our Sports um are in August so they're not in the beginning of the summer so she said that is it's okay if if kids missed a few day of Sports Camps um and I know Lisa and I we've been looking at our calendar we are trying to figure out for that that last school year how we can condense as many days as possible so that our school year won't have to end as
183long into the month of June and we also are investigating um asking the state for a waiver because maybe our eighth graders could finish school um a week before our Early Childhood all the way through seventh graders so that they would be done and they wouldn't be missing as many days in the summer so we are working on it but um 211 they wanted us to share that information that parents if your kids want to take a class that first semester they will work with each family individually all right great thanks Claire and I think that's it in terms of things we wanted to make sure that we I think that's all we really wanted to ensure that we shared with the board you can see the other slides um correspondence or as we always
184do we receive Freedom of Information Act requests we include the um the requests that we receive and I always ask do you have any questions or want to make any comments about what has been shared I know okay yeah all right closing items may have a motion to adjourn please make a motion to adjourn all those in favor all right