April 2022 BOE Regular Meeting

001the meeting will come to order good evening um today i'm all for april showers bring me flowers but the torrential rainfore that uh kind of shook my house all afternoon not so happy about that i'm very glad that it stopped before we had to walk in here and i hope that it stays away for the rest of the evening last week i had the pleasure of being part of two the first two in-person actual information sessions on moving 15 forward we had lots of great questions and comments that came from the community members that were there following each presentation the school specific slide deck for that presentation will be loaded on each school's website so if any of you did not have an opportunity to come or you're not able to come to your own

002schools information meeting or your own community school neighborhood school you don't have to have children in the district in order to uh attend but if you're not able to make it you can go on your local school website and access the presentation deck by going on the very left bottom there's a touch point for moving 15 forward and if you touch that it'll take you to another screen where you can touch on the word meetings and if you want to see the deck itself you can choose your school if it's already been done it'll show up on a list on the left you can touch there and it'll take you to the deck if your school has not yet had a presentation if you stay on that meeting site you'll see the dates in the

003center right at the top and as you scroll down you'll see dates and location and the location is important because although your your school may be having a presentation there are a few that are at schools that are not necessarily the listed school or they're combined so um i know i have a propensity to go to the wrong place when uh there's a meeting when i make assumptions so i'm anticipating that there are probably plenty of other people that do the same thing um the next sessions that are upcoming this week there were none but next week there will be two sessions uh the sessions are at this point all uh scheduled to run from six to seven thirty next week we will have april 19th at carl sandburg and april 20th will be hosted

004at central road and um i'd just like to reach out and let everybody know we truly truly welcome your presence at these meetings um the point of the meetings is to help educate everybody in terms of what the potential plan is as well as garner feedback and comments from the community and kind of see if there are any any holes or things that were forgotten before we get to the point of formal presentation to the board in august and a determination on what to do moving forward so please come we'd love to uh for you to take the opportunity to share your thoughts and feedback as well as to ensure that everyone receives the correct information on the potential plans directly from the source as uh i know for years before being on the board

005as a community member i got a lot of hearsay type of information and that's not always the uh the best place for us all to be so on that note um we have a roll call please later here iannarino here hunt here khan here shupai here taylor here wong here the mission of district 15 is to provide are produced not provide let's produce them first world-class learners by building a connected learning community we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance that will be um covered by frank c whiteley you guys can move as far as you want in front of the dice that's perfect dr heinz president shupai and members of the board thank you for having the whiteley wildcat crew say the pledge tonight this is an amazing group of fifth and sixth grade students

006this is one of our clubs at whiteley that is facilitated by mr tiemann and mr armamentos and this crew is essential to everything we do at whiteley just a little information about everything they have done this year they oversee our school spirit days they have collected treats for troops they've collected items for a veterans hospital and created food baskets during thanksgiving they assist primary grade levels in writing letters to veterans and letters to a retirement home during valentine's day they helped organize our kindness week with activities for each day they created videos for our reteaching for pbis in january they create regular videos for our announcements to showcase different events and to teach positive skills they assist primary students throughout the building with daily activities they run our paw store every friday during the lunch

007hour and currently they are working on our multicultural week during the first week in may i personally believe that some of the most important attributes to highlight about these students is that every day even when adults aren't looking they model kindness responsibility empathy and a strong desire to help others before they like before they say the pledge i'd like to thank mr tiemann and mr armamentos but most importantly their parents the last two years have not been easy but parents you have been consistent in teaching your children that character is what will make them successful thank you so before we say the pledge i'd like to introduce our students quinn somalia shiva ara reno brady chloe kayla corki benato sophia jay isha trayama sanvi and ali with that boys and girls let's say the pledge

008i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all and a few students have a gift for the board members thank you so much pleasure thank you so much miss mr tieman's the only one in the back [Music] for just going the extra mile and for being here tonight and the board you're going to love that notebook i received one of those crazy white makeup books at the holidays and with a purple head and i love it very very much thank you you're very welcome thank you do we get to drink anthony or do we just uh [Laughter] do you want me to sing yeah are we gonna sing or what yeah let's go

009let's do it one two three happy birthday to you happy birthday dear anthony [Music] happy birthday to you thank you very much okay if we had a spelling bee song we would do it next good evening dr heinz president hi members of the board and members of the community my name is megan price i'm an assistant director of curriculum in the teaching and learning department and i have the honor of introducing you to our building spelling bee winners for the 21 22 school year we're so proud of all of the studying and work that they have done i am going to have them come up and introduce themselves and share their name and their school with you we're proud of the learning and the studying and the hard work that they did we're also proud

010of the bravery that they showed and stepping up on stage we know that's hard to do here and there so they're going to tell you who they are and what building they're at um good evening my name is pritha and i'm from willow bend hello my name is yusser and i'm from hi my name is emiliano and i'm from sanborn hi my name is grace and i'm from paddock elementaries hi my name is nichol and i'm from winston campus hi my name is hi my name is jane and i'm from jane adams hi my name is roddy i'm from virginia lake hi i'm avi and i'm from plum grove junior high so these students competed in their sorry these students competed in their building b and then they also competed in the district wide b

011we also have avie here who has competed he won our district spelling bee he went to our regional spelling bee in march and he actually won that as well so he is going on to our national spelling bee in june i believe in washington d.c so we're very proud of him we're proud of all of our students thank you all so much for your time we're so proud of them this is this price there are certificates for the children that are up there our winners you if you want to come up [Music] what would you like to do um [Music] this all right here we go [Music] this is the first group to get our newest student congratulations sweat this is a high five highlighter you're very welcome thank you so much nice job all

012around all right we've got a program assistant to honor this is paige are you i see you there we're not in any rush take your time if it was 10 o'clock it would be same different hi there good evening um board of education dr hines uh just 15 community i am here tonight um as the interim principal like louise i wear money many hats um but i'm here tonight with one of our program assistants this is aisha ahmed and um just about a month ago now um the 16th of march and she still has numbers i love that um we had we were eating lunch like a normal day and a student began choking in the classroom we were not all eating in the cafeteria at that time and so aisha was there as the

013supervisor called down for the nurse who quickly as quick as she could ran all the way upstairs to the classroom um by the time she got there there was really no need aisha had taken care of it she was able to perform the heimlich maneuver and make sure that the student was healthy and and could breathe and her airway cleared and i should get it and then like just didn't say anything about it like she just does she does so much for lake louise she does it all thanklessly she still even when i told her about tonight was like oh really it's not a big deal it's fine um and that's who aisha is as a person we're so lucky to have her at lake louise we are so grateful that she was there and

014able to act quickly um the day that the student was choking and we're just here to celebrate her and honor her thank you we do have a certificate here [Music] thank you so much [Laughter] thank you all right we will now open our meeting for public comments please remember that this is not a dialogue between you and the board if you have a specific issue that requires a response superintendent heinz will get back to you please state your name and identify any group that you represent limit your remarks in no more than five minutes if someone previously has articulated something with which you agree please state that you agree rather than reiterating the entire statement and finally avoid any comments that are specific to a person student or staff member respecting that person's right to

015privacy this is not the forum to comment on personnel issues [Music] all right um [Music] okay the i'm going to read the first comment she's here oh okay i got you um kathy nizak nishik out cathy the green light yep yeah okay it's on can you hear me okay okay uh good evening president shupai uh board and dr heinz and you too julie i'm here this evening to discuss my retirement and the circumstances which led to it i've worked for the district for 27 years in the graphics department on on my own since i believe was 2005 2006 whenever the last referendum failed no longer felt safe supported or respected at the district office i reported in good faith about being called the devil by a fellow employee i was called into a meeting with

016i'm going to stumble a little bit so i can keep names out with three administrators it did not take long for me to realize what direction this was going they had already decided to back the individual that was doing the name calling i was told i am now responsible for unloading skids of paper which contain 40 cases weighing 50 pounds each and a job that has always been done by a union employee i don't know if this was in part it was never in my job description i don't know if this was in retaliation for me being concerned about the name calling or discrimination because i'm an older white woman and not once during that meeting did they address the name calling i tried to avoid further confrontation with this individual but they kept trying

017to antagonize me i know this is not behavior this person displays to management but trust me i see it all the time i told him i did not wish to engage any more conversation with him at which time he used a very colorful term which shocked me and i certainly would not repeat in public did i tell anyone no why would i when i went to them with one issue i was unloading skids of paper i was i was also told i would be receiving assistance by means of a two-wheeler to help me unload that paper and that they would send me a link to look that up that never happened i was also told that this individual would keep the back doors because where my department was located was right outside the receiving area

018of the district office i don't know if any of you are familiar with it so there's double doors from my room out to the dock area out to the double doors to outside if you leave those two inner doors open there's a terrible draft the room is freezing cold there is no need at any time for those doors to be open i've been in there 27 years trust me they didn't need to be open every night that person opened those doors left them that way now these are their inner doors and my room would be freezing cold when i got there and anybody that knows me knows my space heater goes on all the time i i don't know if they didn't direct him to actually close those doors or if he just felt he

019didn't need to do what he was directed to do i was also told i'm expected to receive all deliveries if the people in the meeting knew anything about what i do they would already know i've been signing for deliveries for 27 years i was not planning on leaving my job i loved my job i loved helping the staff with projects that they have but my mental and physical health i had no other option i felt bullied during the meeting we tried to teach our kids not to behave this way maybe some of the administrators should also practice this i deserve as much respect as they expect from me i had many sleepless nights after this meeting after the meeting i put in for two weeks of vacation something i've done for years i wanted to

020take some time to digest what took place in the meeting i was told we're only allowed to take five days at a time and that hr didn't realize that was a policy i found it a little suspicious after all these years all of a sudden that was the policy fine i switched my vacation time after i put my letter of retirement in two of the individuals from the meeting came to me and apologized did i not feel that i did not feel supported i found it interesting that they thought i would i asked again about the two-week vacation and they again said it was policy i told them i knew someone who had scheduled two weeks vacation it was approved their response was there are different situations i asked why was my situation different their

021response was my work needed to get done i would think that holds true for everybody just so you know i have always gotten my work done on time if not early unless my machines were down i think staff always knew they could count on me then i found out i was not getting all my vacation time because it was prorated even though they made it impossible for me to stay after 27 years of being loyal and hard they would deny me this time was disappointing shortly after that i received a letter in the mail regarding the referendum they want my support and my money but they could not pay me for seven days during the pandemic i was at work every day obviously my job called for this to be there i was always coming

022in early working through lunch i was not asked to do this but it was important to me to ensure that the kids got the materials they needed in closing i would like to say thank you and goodbye to all the amazing teachers and staff that i was fortunate to work with it was always a pleasure and i hope that this doesn't fall on deaf ears and that maybe in the future when someone comes to somebody there's a little more investigation as to what actually is going on because to me there was none it was there you go so i ended up doing his work for him and he didn't have to do anything disappointing to say the least thank you for your time and have a good evening i'm sorry damn the color uh good

023evening um dan mccullough i am a parent at central road school as well as pta president at central road and i just wanted to thank the board and the superintendents for their time and efforts with our students so thank you for that um but i am here to voice my concerns regarding the soon to be discussed revised three-tier arrival dismissal schedule uh central road is being shifted from an 8 25 a.m to 9 15 a.m arrival in what appears to be potentially an arbitrary move based upon the disclosed reasoning high school schedules quoted central road and willow bend will be on two different tiers to help with traffic issues from rolling meadows high school why central road the school being altered central road school is 1.3 miles driving distance from rolling meadows high school while

024willow bend is 0.6 miles driving distance as well as feeding from a much busier route algonquin road central road school flows off of a frontage road student arrival for rolling meadows high school is 8 20 a.m willow band would still remain in direct conflict with its arrival and is within closer proximity quote unquote neighborhood considerations central road moved to tier three to avoid traffic congestion due to will abandon rolling meadows high school the majority of traffic flowing to rolling meadows high school comes from the east north and south of rowing meadows high school not the west where central road school is located on the border changing central road school and conyers to virtually the same schedule will cause more traffic problems on the exact same quarter that both schools enter and exit from the transportation

025update states that feedback has been received from district 15 families students staff administration local police departments parochial school administrators and community members i personally have spoken with rolling meadows police department rolling meadows high school district 214 transportation transportation supervisor and central road school crossing guard in my current conversation with these individuals and organizations no traffic flow problems have been reported as major issues and the reporting is that minor issues have alleviated themselves approximately two to three weeks following the 223 change has the district conducted any traffic studies or vehicle accounts that would support these reasonings and change this is a very difficult change for many families in the central road school community who just recently scrambled to accommodate the recent arrival change a shift of one tier may be much easier to adapt to again

026and does the district not hold the belief that once coveted fears are lessened that students currently being driven to school will return to bus riding and further alleviate quote unquote traffic concerns many families accommodated the district's request to transport students through any additional methods to alleviate bus shortages are we no longer looking to hire drivers for the 2022-23 year my ask is to put additional consideration and research into central road situation before just rolling this change out and i would like to request if possible i can turn my notes over for a written response if to that thank you absolutely if you you drop the box over here do notate that i have the rolling meadows high school zoning map which does illustrate my point of where the flow of traffic is coming from and

027where the students are driving from so thank you all right thank you if you uh pass that to dr hines then dr hines or someone on her staff will uh will get a response to you thank you i think some of it will be answered in dr qualtrich's presentation but if not she'll follow up thanks thank you yep lisa mallory would you like me would you like me to change the order of the papers do you guys want to sit together and we can just tim kaiser safety in numbers two of you can sit together and okay can you guys hear me alright we have yes thank you that's not gonna work wait i feel diminutive here uh uh good afternoon uh or evening dr heinz members of the boards my name is tim kaiser

028i'm on the board of special specified jurisdiction uh for saint teresa school and uh we came here today uh to talk about item 3.2 as i think is the transportation report and i have to apologize i've read in the face i've got notes written on the back of a sheet of paper i started this on the train we haven't really had a lot of time at st teresa i think we've had four hours to take a look at this report so we have not really been able to dig into it uh and the reason why we came here was to invite you to uh take special uh note uh of that report um and perhaps if if so kind of push off a final decision i don't know if a decision is going to be

029made i've been at st teresa about 23 years with uh fam family in the school during that period of time i have not actually seen a start time swing for saint teresa as as wide as we're seeing it in this case it looks like it it's gonna be at least an hour and a half change um and i would just note that in the report from what i could look at the changes that you're seeing reflected there are from february not from the beginning of the school year so where it appears that some of these schools may have changed dramatically if you compare them to where they were at the beginning of the school year some of them are actually back to the original time or within 10 or 15 minutes the original time i'm

030just saying that by comparison because saint theresa is now an an hour and a half off of its original time with this proposal and you have to understand that this will have an effect on saint teresa uh i don't know where they got the 500 students saint teresa is closer to about 415 maybe 420 closer to the size of holy family actually in terms of number of students it's it's running thin so lots of students jeopardizes the school and i just wanted you to be aware of that uh start times are baked as we all know into families dnas changes of 10 15 minutes are things that uh you know we most people can accommodate 30 minutes even but when you're talking about an hour and a half you're talking about people who are suddenly

031faced maybe for the first time with their third or fourth child with massive changes uh to their family life to their scheduling and they will elect to leave st theresa just wanted you the board to be aware of that so really why am i here i'd ask you to pay particular attention to i think it's item 3.2 i'm doing this off my phone by the way and so it was doing that on the train we would ask and i am representing saint teresa we would ask that the board further study the effect on the schools and particularly on the christian schools i didn't get a chance to read it closely but it seems to me that there's an opportunity to more equitably impact all the schools we're not saying we don't recognize and empathize with

032the fact that there's a driver shortage we we realize there is and things uh have to be done but we would like the board here to exercise your prerogative as board members and maybe instead of being informed of the decision you can step in if you feel it's your fiduciary duty you must step in and request this as an approval item we ask you to be engaged actively as board members and members of the community and looking at the analysis not just from february but for the entire year there are other considerations for example i'd ask the board whether the district has considered whether the elements for separate scheduling have been met if i read the code correctly the elements are has to be safer more economical and more efficient all three of them not

033just one of those i didn't actually see in my reading any analysis of that that seems to be an important item that would be in a in a report to these board members that you'd want to know have been covered off uh we would like to know or ask that the board just consider these just from a pure equitable standpoint make sure that basically the pain is being suffered equally across all the schools we don't uh we we know there has to be changes at st teresa we just would hope that there would be considerations and more dialogue with the school as i understand it we've had very few opportunities to communicate about this new schedule there are even other options that we'd asked the board to consider and i'm assuming you've been a form

034to them but we would uh ask to request you know what the uh to analyze you know uh whether a private bus service uh would be in order because that seems to be an option under the code that and that could be something that would work if saint teresa is that unique among all schools something that the board would probably want to consider and look at the cost of talk with the school administration to see if there's any way to defray that cost so we just wanted you to know there's lots of options out there we're hoping that this isn't a final decision and just as a as a final report that the board would step in and recognize that this is going to be a big impact on the community and recognize that saint

035theresa families and parents aren't in the district but they live in the district and they uh probably uh you know you're in the distance all of you or not so we would uh respectfully request that the board uh take a look again at that maybe uh put it on an agenda item for further down the road for further analysis and maybe seek some further dialogue from the affected schools and i suspect based on what i'm hearing right now that we may not be the only school but from what i could tell we're the only school that was almost three times longer start time impact than the others and i'm sorry i took your time it's okay and i didn't introduce you so go ahead uh so i'm lisa mallory i'm a parent of saint teresa

036i'm also the parent association president i do agree with tim i just wanted to say that we'd like to be considered with the middle schools with sunline as we offer several after-school activities just like the junior high and so we would want that to be in consideration that we are able to participate and continue those activities that we offer with an earlier end time we are very much like a junior high in that regard and we recognize that and we would like to think that someone may have studied whether we could be do joint busing i know we've got the separate busing schedule but if it's an option again i would ask the board to consider it thank you thank you all right thank you anybody else joyce slavic hi my name is joy slavic

037i am a parent within the district i wanted to raise awareness about a coordinated non-patriotic effort to attack our school board in public education itself freedom of information act requests also known as foia requests are legal they are meant to sure government entities have transparency and accountability but there are faith and bad faith requests all foia requests cost our district resources and therefore tax dollars uh to comply bad faith requests are used to intimidate harass or simply waste district resources you're in my tax dollars and because foia requests are themselves public information they're available in the online agendas for every d15 board meeting i encourage everyone to take a look each month and even in past months in the last couple of months there have been 18 foia response requests request responses four were submitted

038in the fall to d15 by local labs or local locality labs a right-wing lobbying group known for spreading doctored news and over 200 local news sites according to a 2019 article in the guardian the requests include topics such as covet 19 the 1619 project essa relief funds from the american rescue plan and panorama education which is software supporting social emotional learning an important way of supporting students sense of belonging and also a right-wing target in something but it's something we do in our district local lab submits these foia requests to districts in several states including illinois in our district these are bad faith requests to give talking points against honest accurate education in public schools another foia request made in january was for much personal information of union members in d15 requested by the anti-union

039organization freedom foundation this request was made by ryan brooks of olympus washington hardly a local community member looking for district information and good faith actually an attack on public education in our district and then we come to the most prevalent of the bad faith for class requests for photocopies of surety bonds liability insurance indemnity insurance oath of office bonds against school boards and superintendents you'll see lots of these requests for districts across the state from someone named ted novak who may or may not be a real person mr novak made his request of d15 on february 24th to do a search on ted novak and surety bond you'll get quite a lot of school district hits often there will be the same request same wording from someone local in d15 that local person is christine

040anderson she submitted five of these bad faith requests in january and february these requests cost actual time and money to put together but these requests are more nefarious than that they're organized by right-wing groups and very specifically coordinated by a group called bonds for the win they provide the verbiage for filing surety bond claims against public officials they claim are breaking their oath of office the southern poverty law center and anti-defamation link actually call this paper terrorism it's a scare tactic that a growing number of school districts across the country are facing according to a february article in nbc news these groups use obscure and inapplicable legal claims to force school districts to make policy changes initially it was to end coveted mitigations next it will be curriculum bans on race equity lgbtq plus support

041and sex ed right-wing groups file these basis legal and insurance claims to overwhelm districts with paperwork to intimidate board members and administrators their goal is to hopefully make money but mostly to intimidate school boards as stated in the nbc article bonds for the win is using these battles as a way of drawing in followers demonstrating how quickly a faulty fringe tactic can generate momentum as frustrated parents join forces with conspiracy theorists they take the anti-mass anti-vaccine momentum to keep people frustrated and angry for the purposes of power and money and make no mistake that anger is targeted targeted at destroying public education our schools our school boards our students and there is nothing patriotic about that thank you thanks joyce any other commentary all right next section um we will now open a public hearing

042on the inter fund transfer may i have a uh the meeting will be called the order may have a roll call do i roll again jules yeah we didn't change anything the meeting is called to order and it's all you uh good evening i'm josh director of fiscal services um essentially we're required by law to have an interfund transfer hearing in the budget we have a budgeted transfer from educational fund to fund 20 in the amount of a million dollars and then we would transfer 5 million from the operations and maintenance fund to the capital projects fund those monies are used to do capital improvements to the buildings to keep them up today maintain all time uh the school school code is the reason that we have this hearing but generally it's something that we

043do every year it's a recurring transfer every single fiscal year [Applause] all those in favor opposed hi you guys all had your mics on i just didn't have mine all right the uh the uh public hearing is adjourned yeah the next item on the agenda is the superintendent's report i'll do my updates and then dr qualcek will do her transportation update i think it's kind of a perfect sequence in terms of hearing from a few members of the public regarding update transportation schedules for next year and some of the emails that have been coming in since last evening so just like last month we are really in the throes and as president chupai said of our moving 15 forward initiative um at the end of march we sent our newsletter and the district one pager

044to over 42 000 households and we did receive a lot of feedback um from that mailing so we were excited that people opened the mail read it and took time to comment whether they had you know a praise or concern we were we're very happy that folks are are reading the content that we are pushing out we know this is a wonderful initiative we're excited about it and we want the community to be informed provide their feedback it'll tighten our plan and um we're just continuing to communicate we did a virtual staff session and we had over a hundred staff members tune in to listen to the presentation um we have also invited all of our staff to attend sessions either at their their elementary school their junior high or in some feeder capacity so

045they can see very specifically how this plan will affect in a positive way their their building we are doing as president shupai said ongoing community information sessions we had two last week and we'll have two next week and we're kind of pacing it around two or three a week through the end of may um here in another couple days the community newsletter uh it's been finalized and it will be mailed out you have a draft copy at your table place please know that when it goes to the printer it will be full page and each panel if you will will be the size of a piece of notebook paper or a piece of xerox paper so it'll be bigger and easier to read i said if it stayed that size we would have to send

046you just magnifying glasses to some of our residents but again it is very full of wonderful information about the plan very specific hitting our three priority target areas and giving more and more information on that plan we know that people need to read information multiple times to really um especially start to synthesize the complexity of this plan because it is so holistic in nature um paul hanley from beyond your base will be here in june and we will have a meeting that we will also be moving from may our citizen task force to june i think we're pushing out june 6th as the the new date so members of our citizen task force will be re-engaged before that june presentation so a lot still happening with the moving 15 forward earlier this week monday we

047launched our portrait of a graduate work and we had a very nice turnout we had a number of staff members community members from from across our our boundaries and those that participate in different types of work so higher ed faith-based groups we had a number of um we had a junior high student we had participation from 211 we're hoping um to have somebody from 214 join us our friends at harper were not able to join us at the first meeting we have three more to go so it was a very successful first meeting we have another meeting next week and then we'll have two in may our hope is to create that portrait of a graduate after what we hope would be a nine-year experience in district 15 kindergarten through eighth grade what would the

048habits the dispositions and the the readiness skills competencies look like in terms of when our students graduate when they attend either 211 or 214. so we're excited to do that as the first step that will lead us then to the launch of our strategic plan next fall and i think our hr department will talk a little bit more about this or i will talk on their behalf but very recently pritzker signed bill 1167 providing school employees with covid relief days so hr is working with legal to figure out what that's going to look like what we're required to do and then how to um to follow all the specifications within the bill when you have a staff of 2000 people so it's going to take us a bit of time hr did put something out

049um in terms of the the latest build that pritzker signed and that we're working on it and we'll continue to communicate with the staff as it becomes more and more clear in terms of what we'll do and and then what how time how timely it will be we hope for by the end of the school year or at least by the end of the summer to to make it to make it through everybody that may be impacted by this legislation all right claire and tom bramley dr qualcek and dr brandley or mr brandley if you'd like to come on up they will uh provide as they have um over many months in the past their transportation update um and our three-tier schedule proposed schedule for the fall good evening president shupai and dr heinz and

050members of the board we are here once again to talk about a transportation update if you recall we started speaking to you in october about the serious bus driver shortage that we were facing and how it was impacting our student transportation across the district as of this evening i have 101 drivers on our books by tomorrow evening that will be down to as we have another um driver retiring tomorrow at this moment we have 11 employee driver employees on long term sick so if you do the math there we're well underneath 90 drivers currently at this moment in time we have 95 routes which is way down where we started the beginning of last year with 137 individual routes and just let anybody know an individual route at the moment is three runs in the

051morning three runs in the afternoon with mid-days and in some cases activity buses added on to the ropes at the end so we went from 137 we got it down to 123. we did put some of our out-of-district schools on taxes at the beginning of the year and we have continued to do that but we have continued to see drivers the the amount of drivers we have drop considerably to date we have interviewed quite a number of people 30 people were booked to have interviews or come in for second interviews and didn't turn up we have i had further 35 that of that 35 10 have actually joined us as drivers uh so it's an ongoing struggle that we are continuing every day with the staff to supplement the drivers i have a routing coordinator

052i have my assistant director i have my trainer and myself driving buses virtually every day to try and get all the students to and from school at the beginning of this school year we had a situation where we had to double up routes not the most uh oh the best thing for the students where we were picking up a bus load of students getting them to school getting a teacher or a staff member to supervise them while that bus went back out again and picked up a second uh group and then in the afternoon we turned that round so the group that went in early were leaving later and the ones that got in later to school were going home earlier and and we did that with um eight separate buses at one time and

053i can elaborate on that so we actually we had double we doubled up i think we had 22 routes that we doubled up and that's when we came back to you in december to talk about the ongoing shortage i think when we were here in december i think we were down to actually 98 drivers at that time we have been actively trying to hire and recruit drivers all year long we've held five job fairs and as tom mentioned we did end up so far to date we have hired 10 additional drivers but we have had drivers retire um as the year goes on and um and so it seems like we get someone in and we're almost evening out to have someone out so in december we came back to you um and we did

054not see that this driver shortage was going to be resolved before the end of the school year and at that meeting we did make a recommendation um that we would that it would probably be best for the district to move from a two-tier bell schedule to a three-tier bell schedule in the in february um we we wanted to put that out there to the community and to staff so that they know that that was that was coming and we actually gave a proposed schedule of what schools we might be moving in february um to a three-tier system at that time we really wanted to have the least impact as possible on our our families and our staff because it was going to be a mid-year change um at that time we really didn't touch any

055parochial routes specifically for that reason because we knew that the best place for for our district would be to have peru routes on a third tier but we didn't want to tell a parochial school mid-year you're going to have to change your school time an hour and a half um we had to move up so in february um we didn't touch the program routes but every single school in district um 15 had to change their time in february our our first tier schools went earlier and then we needed to create some time in between and then we had second tier schools that basically also kind of went earlier and then our third year schools went later julie can you go to the slides and we can um it's not the one claire that's showing from

056fall too oh okay all right so so bait so that's what we did when we did our second tier so we we implemented that then we we came back to you again in january and we said we're going to implement this three-tier schedule on february 23rd so we sent out communication i do have a slide in there that that lists all the times that we did send out communication to families and staff after every single board meeting it's our our practice that we always send out board briefs we sent out letters we wanted to make sure people were aware of the of the new change and sys tears and at every board meeting since sense we have talked about we will need to continue with the three-tier system because there's no foreseeable um end to

057this driver shortage we've been told that it could last three to five years nationwide um so then and and we talked about we would look at the fall for changing our our three-tier system like we might be looking at some schools so since february now we have we've met with the local police departments we've met with the administrators from all the parochial schools we've met with our own teams really to look at our programs like our self-contained special ed programs and our our dual language programs and special programs in the district and those special transportation needs that come along with those programs and considerations for what tier schools should be on so we we built a set of parameters that we tried to follow to build our three-tier schedule now for the fall one of

058them that we learned is we had moved jane adams for example to tier two winston campus and jane adams are the only two schools that house our dual language program winston campus stayed on tier one with our junior highs because we share buses for the junior high with winston campus and winston campus junior high but one of the one of the um hurdles of having the dual language on the second tier is that students come from all over the district to attend our to attend our dual language program and what happens there is that um in the morning we can we can set suck those routes a little bit earlier to get the kids and bring them back when when jane adams was on tier 2 those buses are dropping those kids off at tier

059one then they have to maybe go out all over the district whatever those routes are to bring those kids into jane adams and then and then bring them back and it's difficult to maybe make it to school on time um another another big concern we heard from many families was that students that are attending our self-contained special education programs in our elementary schools many of them have set therapies like physical therapy occupational therapy speech therapy that they attend after school and that having them on a later tier it was very difficult for families to be able to get their students to their therapies so to be equitable across all of our elementary self-contained special ed programs we really worked then to get every single school that has a special every elementary school that has a

060self-contained program on tier two although like for example winston campus elementary also has special ed self-contained but they're on tier one but we move to get those students on tier two people had asked about junior highs we discussed this before our junior highs really do need to be on the first tier because many of our junior high students go home and then have to care for younger siblings after school in addition many of our junior highs have clubs or intramural sports we need those kids on tier one because their day ends and then they have their after-school activities and then we can use our buses on our tier three to drive them home you know we already have a driver shortage and we can't we have drivers what time do our drivers start tom our

061first drive was coming in at 5 45 in the morning and then to get people you know to to drive all the way to tier three at the end of the day we have you know people don't want to work from 5 45 till 6 30 at night so we have to make sure we have the drivers to be able to transport our students um we did hear um we received we just received along a very lengthy email today right before we came to the meeting we we heard from a lot of families at virginia lake of their concern over the traffic of high schoolers driving and kids walking to school or trying to cross streets or traffic congestion with palatine high school we had moved virginia lake to the second tier and it was

062much too close to the palatine high school time and it was really causing some congestion area concerns and also safety concerns that is why we've decided to move them to tier three we we did have issues by rolling meadows by the high school with willow bend and central road on the same tier the problem with rolling or central road for example is on a good day it gets congested there at dismissal because the parking lot is is awkward and for our buses to pull in and then when cars start lining up on that on central road then we can't even get our buses into the parking lot because it's very narrow there and and then when you have a high school and then you had another school and everyone at the same time that was

063difficult so that's why we're trying to move that to a dif a different tier so we won't face those those issues um yeah and winston campus our elementary would automatically stay on tier one because we do use shared buses that's one economy of scale that we can get with buses for the tier one so now if you look at this this year right now our current three-tier system that we operate under uh mr brownlee just mentioned we need to have i think 95 buses for tier one i think we have 87 buses for tier two and i think we have 68 for tier three and we're looking right now at literally employing a hundred bus drivers and ten of them are in fmla and like for example last friday i think in total i think

064we had 26 drivers out well the ripple effect that that happens we literally don't have enough drivers to cover the tier one again so we were really trying to balance out our tears to have like tier one and cheer two be a little bit more equal and then we have room to hit and and and we know nobody wants to be on tier three we understand that but we also heard um you know we heard from our community our and our and our staff can't we move some can can we let everyone feel the pain can can we move some of the parochial routes instead of having a parochial route on the earlier now if you'll notice emmanuel lutheran has five buses in st thomas we've kept them on tier one however they have such

065a small number of students on their buses that like for st thomas for example we can use our small buses that we typically use for our special ed routes to do that we're not using our large buses to pick up those kids um and and then we we've already told those schools i mean we have them listed as tier one but we've told them that your drop off time is going to have to really be increased next year right now we're saying school starts at 7 35 we're telling those schools like you're we're going to drop off those kids at 7 10 and then we got to be gone because we have to leave to send those little buses across the district because then they're going to start that tier two of picking up all

066of our students that are on self-contained bus routes that go to our special ed programs across the district so we need that extra time um then when you go down to tier um two basically that's all of our elementary schools that would have self-contained programs are all in that tier or the tier above and then when you go down to tier three we did have to move actually the start time for cla even back an additional five minutes because cla is also unique and that you know it it serves students from across our whole district so when those schools are when those buses are leaving tier two schools then they have to again disperse across the entire district to pick up students to bring them back um the issue just say one thing there in

067the morning when you look at these numbers and what i have on the screen it looks nice a lot of this is the afternoon because in the afternoon you're taking the students from school to distance but then you've got that whole distance to get back for the next school so the timing the afternoon is more critical than the morning if you go to the slide for example she is oh thank you like here's the saint teresa um here's our current like saint teresa route so we're averaging on a saint teresa route from 35.27 35 minutes 27 seconds all the way up to 42.22 minutes for a route and those are usually our larger buses right now we will we will say that in the morning we find that our buses everyone signs up for busing

068and we did work with the saint teresa principal to be like please if they're not going to use our buses can we can they you know decline service so that we could possibly reduce routes but the problem with saints reese is is that geographically it picks up the entire district so you'll see that each little pattern there of the routes and how long they take to pick up all the kids across the entire district holy family for example is a little bit different because they tell the people that attend their school that in the morning you can only have bussing if you live in the mary and jordan attendance area so we do double up for holy family in the morning those kids if you're going to go to holy family they get on a

069mary and jordan bus if they live in that area they get transported to marion jordan then they get off and then we put them all on one bus and then we bring them to holy family and when there's shut up yes yes and then when their school day ends they only require two buses to deliver their students home and at that time of the day because they're a little bit later we have two buses available then to drive their kids home but still their geographic area is not as as wide range as as saint teresa's um and we did meet with saint teresa's like we we we met with all the parochial principles in december to let them know that we had to make these changes and that they were coming and that we were

070going to leave their times alone for february because we didn't want to have such an impact on them but it would be coming for the fall and we did meet again on april first time and i went over to saint teresa's that's actually where we got our numbers from how many students do you have enrolled we looked up how many we had listed for busing um and that's and we you know we explain the predicament we're in if if we had more drivers i'd have everybody on a tier one or a tier two we just physically do not have the drivers and tom before we went to a third three tier when we were running a two-tier system how many drivers would we need to cover that route uh the teresa no just in january

071in general uh we we with substitute drivers we were looking at between 114 145 but we at the beginning of the school year we needed 127 drivers to cover our routes to physically drive the road so we took that down to 95 when we went to two-tier and next year we brought it down to 92 you know i was even asked can you get can you get it below 90 but then that meant even taking more schools to tier three and upsetting more people in the district and i just really don't want to do that um so we're we are for for hiring purposes we really are actively trying to recruit drivers we've had as i said we've had five job fairs to date um we have hired 10 new drivers this year we have

072people in the pipeline right now we've talked to our we've evaluated our salaries we are like right mid-range with competitors all in our area plus we offer an amazing benefits package to our drivers they only have to work 25 hours a week and they get free single health dental vision insurance they get imrf contribution from our board we offered we we came to you this year we offered an attendance incentive to our employees if they every two weeks if you you know for every pay period if they had perfect attendance we gave them an extra bonus um we are really really trying to do what we can to recruit and keep our drivers happy and i think it's very important dr kolachik just to make that point that you have collectively gone above and beyond

073mr bramley tuned into what's going on out in the field this is not a d15 problem or issue this is a us and it's not just in the united states it's a global issue bus drivers and truck drivers okay and it's been an issue in transportation with truck drivers even before it was an issue with bus drivers it's been for the last six years with truck drivers so it's just snowballing and you have done from my perspective everything you can to recruit people the people are just not out there and it's not just d15 it's private busing companies it's everybody it's districts around us there are districts that have stopped transporting children completely because they're unable to make it happen dr hines made a comment just a couple of minutes ago to me that if

074we hadn't switched the three-tier which i know the majority of the board was not about when we made that switch it was very painful to make that decision we knew it was going to reverberate in the community in a super negative way but without it right now we would be in serious trouble we're in trouble with three tier we would have been been sunk with leaving two teams basically 29 drivers short every day without drivers calling in sick or on fmla like and in looking at the personnel report this month we lost 10 drivers this morning yeah we hired two we lost 10 five bus drivers went to fmla two resigned two retired one was terminated yep correct and all i can say for the drivers that do come to work every day um they're

075doing an absolute fantastic job a lot of them are the heroes of the district at the moment getting up early in the morning to get these kids to school as are you and jude and your routers that means we don't have people answering phones or doing other things because they're out driving buses to get kids to school on time that doubling up some people didn't feel the pitch when we were doubling up but there were a lot of kids that were missing first period at the junior high every day could you imagine missing math every day that's not acceptable so as you said we we didn't want to have to go to our three tier thank goodness in the way we did because we wouldn't we don't know how we would have been getting our

076students to school so the third tier we understand in st theresa we certainly feel their pain they do have a big swing but if you go back julie to the slide that shows the numbers i believe it's slide 28 if you do the math and believe me we've cut this deck and i say we it's mostly tom and claire they're you know they tag team transportation we don't see a way to to make that change we can barely cover 92 and 90 with the drivers that we have if you had another seven buses and and because of the amount of time that that one slide where you tom i think painstakingly kind of moved through and showed the route there's a sprawl folks from saint you know from all across our district brownies you know

077happily and proudly attend saint teresa's but that those routes are long you can't finish them and then go somewhere else and and pick up more kids until the next tier starts or until that activity bus those seven buses are needed to get the activity bus uh run done at the junior highs is that correct tom and claire you're absolutely correct so and then if you go to there's i did do a a slide comparison of um designers slides 29-30 right excuse me is it this one claire yes yeah because we are you know now that the board packet was presented you know we are getting emails and parents or you know are upset and in my school time like take a drink of water please yeah sorry this is the pa left like we you

078know okay just please have a drink make sure you're okay um okay i and i we realized you know we're seven weeks into this schedule right now that we're doing but i'm showing the schedule of schools that where they started in the fall where they've historically always been on in our district and what our proposed schedule for them are moving forward would be so i know that there are certain schools that are very upset saying oh it's an hour later but really no one really is moving it's like 30 minutes later than the thing that they've been used to or 20 minutes earlier 10 minutes earlier um there are the schools that are in tier 3. um willow vendors 35 minutes later 40 minutes is virginia lake i think that's the the biggest swing of

079a school having to be later from the center clearly it was the um what was it's just very difficult for me to read the distance what was virginia lake's starting and ending time prior and what will it in the fall they were 8 35 to 3 15 and now for next fall they would be 9 15 to 3 55 although they were moved to on the second tier so they were on the um 8 25 to 305 which then totally conflicted with palatine high school so right now they're on that tier and that's where we're really seeing an issue with high schoolers driving lady email today saying she's almost been hit twice they're like not stopping at stop signs driving like high schoolers um so that's some of the concerns how about um give me

080tj where where they were at the beginning tj used to be a early start school they used to be a 7 50 to 2 30 a.m school and then they are an 8 25 to 305 now and they would stay 8 25 to 305. we we simply do not have room to keep them on the first year right and so i we had i had a question from a staff member at tj that with regard to that so they moved to the second tier but they have a seal program there and they're struggling with kids arriving on time because we are too extended on our first tier is that the why of we have adjusted some of those routes and the times are getting better but i do believe that um the special needs program

081is moving some of those programs next year closer to where some of the students actually live which is going to help us okay because right now tj has two self-contained special ed programs that pull kids from across the entire district so that program is moving to another area of the district so that we don't have specifically for that whole near neighborhood type of school right and that's not appropriate transportation that's a part of the equitable distribution of programs and services across the district right which is part of moving 15 forward so to balance that out as well change is there a way so i know in the past you know i mentioned how many times you've you know presented to the board and i shared all the information i don't know that there's a way

082to do this so again not minimizing the tremendous amount of effort that you guys have put into trying to solve an unsolvable problem um but is there i don't know how to phrase the question that's how complicated it is is there a way to show the reasoning and maybe even in a different way the reasoning behind which schools you moved you know i'm saying like why certain schools went to tier three instead of a tier two because you know the emails that we get the concerns that we have it you know those were the same concerns we were getting when different schools went to tier three right so those families were impacted and the other families weren't as impacted so there they didn't voice their opinion because that's just human nature it doesn't impact you

083so you don't really need to you know voice your opinion and so but it feels like when we read these emails that it's maybe a lack of clarity on the community's part on you know why certain schools get moved to a certain tier when you all present the tremendous amount of data that you do at these meetings it certainly emphasizes the complexity of of the problem and the amount of brain power that you have to invest into trying to fix this problem i just wonder if there's another way that that could be presented or and i'm not putting on the spot to do it today by any means but do you know what i mean i'm just wondering if that could help maybe people understand that there's no there's no solution there's no good answer

084for this problem um but i just wonder if there's a way to help the community understand why their school may be on the tier that it's on or why it moved not that you need to go back and redo everything all over again by any means but i don't know just something to think about i guess because you know we talk about all of our other decisions we make you know based on data and you are getting you know it almost feels like we were putting out a fire just to start another fire right um and so if there's a way to kind of show that the feedback you mentioned in the in the earlier part of your presentation today you got feedback from the staff community some emails that came in said they didn't

085feel like they had the opportunity to give feedback so i just i just wonder if there's a way that we could encapsulate that somehow some way you know can you talk about um not being not asking the staff and why that decision was made in terms of you asked 2 000 people right you know which we have 2 000 staff members and we transport 10 000 students you know we grappled with whether or not we could do that and if you ask a question and you're not able to kind of honor everyone's feedback right yes so i talked you know we we talked to like the department heads that run specialized programs for their opinion on what would be best what would be the best tier to meet the needs or or like dual language

086i talked to tom what's the best what's the easiest way for us to transport all these students and that's how those decisions were made to put those schools on what tiers for honestly if we surveyed all of our schools or parents or students or or staff i don't think any one of them would say we want to be on the third chair of course so you run the risk of if if we ask for that input and then i don't want schools to be pitted against each other um you you see that already right now some of our staff are you know why didn't you put this school on and they're trying to give reasons and we don't want our staff to be pitted against each other we just had to make decisions based on

087the parameters that we had listed in that that memo of you know we're gonna we're gonna keep our junior highs on the first tier we're gonna try to avoid traffic issues with high school we're gonna keep our self-contained elementary programs on the second tier or a couple on the first we're gonna keep our dual language because just so that we can efficiently transport the students um but to try to ask for people's opinion and then and then we're going to make people unhappy which we know that and then they're going to think we don't value their opinion but we we had to make the decisions based on our expertise and working with the people that work in our district to do what's best for the students in our district to get our kids to school

088as safely and quickly as possible and it's you know i agree yeah and i just wanted to make sure that i emphasize that i feel like you're doing the absolute best job that you can do the other thing i was going to suggest is maybe with an uh an issue as as heavy and as big as this is we should consider um communicating post board meetings in a way other than board doc you know the board briefs because as much as i love to think that everyone is just chomping at the bit to hear what happens at our board meetings i don't think a lot of people read those to the extent that information of this gravity should be spread i agree with you jim but all of the communication that is up there oh

089yeah over i mean months and months and months and i think you guys do yourself a disservice by not saying it also was talked about last year because this was brought up not consistently every month but it was brought up during last school year also like the first tom's first comment about three-tier happened during the last school year and because i can remember being like let's not talk about that the um there's got to be a better way there's got to be a better solution and i think it doesn't really matter how we communicate it if people are not reading what is out there and i think if you looked at some of the commentary on social media today it's clear from the people that said that's the first they've heard of any of this

090or what they're not paying attention and we got the same feedback back when we made the decision in december to go in february it was uncomfortable we got a lot of feedback and think about how many emails we all receive i know some of them unhappy about tier three many of them unhappy about tier one starting earlier than what our early starts were before how dark it was going to be when kids were getting on buses i mean we got a tremendous amount of feedback at that time yeah and that's still when we got to february people said they were surprised and i can't speak for all schools i you know my own children attend two different schools in the district and the communication came out from the district but it also came out at

091the school level so it's yeah i mean so the the recommendation is not by any means thinking you're not communicating well enough i just was thinking like you had mentioned up here you outlined all your communication i agree with lisa i think you sold yourself short on how much actually went out but in a formal capacity maybe there can be just just the transportation up here it's like so we can say if you didn't see it maybe move the rock we sent out a separate letter specifically and we're gonna do the same thing tomorrow we're gonna have times posted for the fall on every school's website in case anyone has questions we have worked closely with all three of our park districts that provide before and after school program they actually held off like their

092registration waiting for us to announce us at the april board meeting so that so that they they know that interests may may increase or decrease depending on what time of the school you might now need mornings care and not afternoon care so they they have been working with us to to help accommodate families um dr heinz has mentioned that like at our parents's partner meeting or or the superintendent's council like any possible meeting we told people in april we're going to present our plan for the fall i understand jim's point around the simplifying by school and the rat similar to how we're doing with moving 15 forward because people only care about how it impacts them and their school and so i think having that simplified nature of this is the rationale by school i

093think the guidance is really helpful in terms of the parameters but being able to then understand all of the different programs that are offered in your school and how that might impact your school i think would be helpful when we do roll out potentially a communication plan around this so i co-sign what you shared the other question that i had is we obviously have some boundary shifts that are being proposed at the school level i know this is very future state we haven't gotten into the nitty-gritty details around what transportation would look like but i'm curious like based on your expertise if we were to move forward with that proposal what would the impact with transportation be would it help simplify because we are removing the boundary overlay things like that would it simplify some

094of our transportation in a way that we could potentially have the amount of drivers that we need and who knows what context we're gonna be living in in a few years but just i'm just curious like are we in this painful point for two years and then potentially being able to alleviate it is i guess my greater question i don't know whether we'll completely alleviate it from where we are just now but having looked at dr heinz's uh plan and worked with jim coplanis quite a bit in the last few years we can only see it getting better because we are streamlining where we're picking the students up to what schools are going the one major factor and i know a lot of parents don't look at it but we're taking that railway out of

095the out of the picture so the the students that are on the north end of the railway will stay there those on the south side will stay there and that alone will save a lot of time uh and heartache for drivers that go across those railway lines many many times a day right um i can only don't have major impact tom yes yeah he he knows that he's selling himself short yet again he knows the the routes very intimately and having that you know the railroad tracks as he said north south as the divide 53 is another divide uh part of the plan is to have those programs and services multilingual special education gifted fanned out across the district equitably removing the bilingual overlay which are kids in the densely populated northeast quadrant of the

096district traversing the district sometimes coming from the upper northeast to the bottom you know southwest that's a 40 or so minute ride we're not going to have any of that because the the students in the quad will have been assigned to one of five schools that are north of again the railroads so that's going to that's going to significantly reduce and streamline um from just from an efficiency perspective transportation so as we build towards you know having all of this hopefully go live you know 24 25 we do have a few few years ahead of us minimally so when folks ask you know do you see this as in the for the foreseeable future very much so for next year and the following year and then depending on what happens you know in 24 with

097moving 15 forward initiative and and that being our target you know we will we will dive more deeply into that analysis this fall you know you might still need three tiers but maybe if our routes are that much shorter maybe we can move up you know that third tier time possibly maybe it could start earlier and end earlier because we don't need so much time in between now to go to get the buses back okay that's correct tom that question um you guys currently use like a software optimization tool for the routes we use versatrans at the moment we did purchase a transfinder program we're actually currently just about to start training the office staff on the implementation of that ready to give it out to the drivers as quickly as we can and the

098new system is actually a tablet on the bus so there'll be no more holding papers as they drive around um the tablet will do it but we we are well on the way of getting that implemented okay and then you can get live data back in and then potentially further optimize routes yes okay yes we can and as soon as they're all able to be trained when they're not driving buses that'll expedite our ability to to do that to use this new software that we've had in-house since i i've got to admit we are a little behind yeah i was expecting that to be um january february this year but we we we've hit a few hiccups but we're starting to move forward i think it's good for people to know that you guys are

099continually trying to improve and optimize the routes we're looking at a few other areas where we're having problems just now with the videotapes and everything else where we can um better utilize what we have uh to make the routes safer for the kids the one thing i will say this year that has made me very happy is that we do not have the racetrack kids which we had to try and support that's a great side and that route started at 5 30 a.m correct time frame another another couple of months i'd know here never mind white here yeah [Laughter] you drove that route all last year did i drove that one myself in the spring yes to cicero every day i just wanted to ask about a little bit of hope that i have um

100just we have all these um job fairs and um what has to happen um in order to readjust or re-evaluate these routes how many people have to be hired by what time frame so that we can reevaluate this is it 10 people is it five people by the end of this year are you talking about just drivers or are you talking about the whole department you know i i guess both okay on the department himself we've been very fortunate this year getting approval to bring in some extra staff which is now starting to show its worth in the office except that we've got four members of the office driving every day which does not help us move forward um i would say if if we could get another 10 15 drivers and get everybody trained

101in the office on the new software we are going to be in in great shape moving forward with this district and then we used to have a hundred and we used to have 140 drivers hired when we ran the two-tier and didn't have issues um we're looking right now to have 120 drivers and we only currently have 100 to cover our three-tier system right now and still have then some extra drivers in case people call in sick and with 140 drivers were we driving 123 routes 127 routes that's 27. and now we're at essentially 89 drivers trying to drive yeah and i know there was a point made earlier on um this evening about using private companies they're in the same position as we are if you look at downtown chicago this year we were

102looking at 40 drive nearly 40 drivers short at the beginning of the year downtown chicago which is all private companies were 500 short they're down to about 440 yeah they're still over 400 sure you week you know in the past i have subcontracted ie the cicero runs to private companies they just don't want to look at subcontracting anything just now because they can't cover their own routes we even had difficulty with when we might have a student that we outplace at a a school outside the district we have specific like taxi companies that have certified drivers that pass they have a hard time even giving us a taxi driver which but we'd rather have pay to have a taxi driver drive a student maybe versus then having to give up one of our bus drivers

103to go out of district so which for years we were able to do prior to this shortage we had students in a bus or two students going to a therapeutic school outside of our district and we had to change that so we do have individual students in many cases in a cab because we can't spare the bus or the driver do you have any other questions i'd like to just finish and say you know claire has been a great supporter this year we've gone through some bad times but i cannot talk highly enough about the driving and aids staff that we currently have they have done a marvelous job all year they really have done claire do you have your ceo no but i'm thinking of getting it that's my next person and my next

104degree i have driven with her i don't know if that's a good idea but again and to the parents are listening to this and may watch it later on it's so nice to hear from parents that understand what's going on in the district and have supported the drivers fantastically as well i really thank them and i also just want to thank those that are raising concerns too because i know that this is hard um and so i want to appreciate those that have shared concerns and issues that they're facing in their schools and their neighborhoods so thank you to those folks as well and tom you're right with regard to staff as bad as it may be today and as bad as we may be looking for next year we're lucky to still be running

105and we wouldn't be if it wasn't for the people that are showing up the drivers that are driving your staff that's driving every day as opposed to doing their regular job i mean that's going above and beyond in a way that's amazing thank you revised school calendar lisa reports teaching and learning our curriculum adoption 4-1-1 okay just because this was an important conversation to happen being michael at the time thank you all right good evening president shupai dr heinz members of the board of education i want to thank you on behalf of myself and my two curriculum directors robin cook and emily mcfadden very excited to finally have directors in our department as part of the reorg that you approved last year we are a much better staff to be able to address the needs

106of the students of district 15 as a result of that reorganization we're here tonight to talk to you about some curricular adoptions that we've been working on over the course of the past school year a significant number of staff members as well as administrators have been involved in these curriculum materials adoptions it's very important to emphasize that the curriculum materials themselves are not the curriculum they are to supplement the curriculum that we have established and the standards that we've selected as being important for our students to know and learn and be able to do so it is important to emphasize that the books are not the curriculum we establish the curriculum and support it with the materials that we're asking you to adopt tonight everything that we do in the department of teaching and learning

107is directly attached to our strategic plan and the emphasis of that plan is to make sure that we're addressing the needs of students and staff those are the two particular areas of the strategic plan that tonight's presentation is going to address we need to have the best materials possible in our classrooms to be able to make sure that our students are getting what is referred to as a guaranteed and viable curriculum and that we're able to address their significant and individual needs in ways that maybe we have not addressed them in the past so as a part of these curriculum adoptions the piloting teams not only went through different types of materials that were available to address the standards but they were also receiving significant some significant amounts of professional development in the instructional instructional

108pedagogy and the best practices in education to teach the areas that we are asking for you to adopt materials for tonight and those areas are 6 8 science 7 8 english language arts or ela and k5 math okay so we thought that we would problematize this for you a little bit to take you back a little bit to when dr edgar and his team presented the district achievement report a few months ago but we wanted to make sure that we brought this back up because this connects specifically to what dr schnorr mentioned about how we really truly are trying to impact the results for our students um and so just to take you back to this data to um jog your memory uh to take a look at the past five plus years of what

109our achievement has looked like as much as we want to try to have covid be a part of the conversation and it has had impact on our students and our teachers for sure i do not want to undercut that but i do want to make sure that there is very clear picture painted by our data that we have had very consistent achievement for over five plus years um and this shows just the importance of our work right the fact that what we're doing although in the best effort um we need to potentially shift and i hope that through our presentation tonight we're going to showcase some of those shifts that are going to be happening by the choices that our teachers have made through this process we're not that quick uh as i referred to

110earlier in the presentation we're very grateful for the fact that this board approved a reorganization of the department of teaching and learning last year and staffed us at a level that is appropriate to be able to address the needs of 12 000 students every day in a variety of subject areas so as a result of having a lot of new people in the department and people who were here but were taking on new new challenges and new positions it was really important for us to identify our strategic priorities as a department and you can see those on the screen strategic priority one was creating a sense of trust and reliability we were not staffed at a level that we were able to meet the needs of teachers in a timely fashion as we wanted to

111prior to the reorganization so that is something that we have emphasized over the course of this year if you've received an email from any of us you'll notice that there is a survey that you can take that is attached to each of our emails to let us know kind of in real time how we're doing and we review those results on a regular basis at a minimum once a month to see if there's any feedback that we're getting so that we can continuously improve our strategic priority too is to increase the knowledge and improve the performance and enhance professional satisfaction by designing professional development for teachers so we take feedback from our teachers we are constantly looking for ways particularly during covet it was difficult for us to provide as much professional development as we

112would like to because of the sub shortage similar to the bus driver shortage we just don't have the personnel to be able to sub into the classroom so that we can pull our teachers as much as we would like but we've really maximized every opportunity and resource that we do have available strategic priority 3 ensuring student success through the quality learning opportunities by supporting responsive practices with thoughtful interactions and high quality curriculum high quality curriculum like i said earlier is not just the curriculum materials but it is the instructional pedagogy it is the processes by which we teach our students to ensure that they are mastering the concepts that are established for their grade level we do that through a variety of ways but one of the ways that's most important is that we continually

113check for understanding and that is something that we're working hard for with professional development to ensure that teachers are putting in place tier one instruction is the area that the department of teaching and learning is responsible for and it is not simply academics you can see on your screen that we are responsible for tier one is what all students get so all students are receiving instruction in academics and behavior as well as social emotional learning so that is what our department is responsible for once we start talking about interventions and tiered interventions that falls more into educational services and then when we get into [Music] more specific and intense interventions that's when we start to talk about the department of student services so this is where our department covers all right so we went ahead

114and gave you a copy of our district instructional framework a lot of some of this information uh dr schnorr and i presented last spring to you after the reorganization was presented um and we wanted to bring this back because it is such a pivotal piece of a lot of our tier one instructional work as you can see in the framework there are five different dimensions that we've really tried to focus on and this focuses us as a department but also as a district around a common vision for what we really want our student and teacher experience to be in our classes like dr snore has mentioned we're kind of we're veering away from this idea of talking about curriculum as stuff as we're buying books and they are the fanciest and they have the brightest

115colors and they have glossy pages and the right stickers with the right names on them and they say they're standard connected but they um tend to lack the the rigor and coherence that we're looking for when we're talking about true curricular experiences of learning opportunities for students so we thought it was important as a district to really kind of plant our flag in the ground for what we stand for for kids and that includes there's people assisting documents here in the packet that you can peruse on your your leisure but the different dimensions to kind of give you an overview uh the content really talks about this idea of trying to dig into these disciplinary ideas in a different way than most of us probably experienced education right we really experienced a lot of these

116content areas as regurgitation of facts memorization of issues and things that would just be gone from your brain after you took the test and then never thought of again um so really trying to have kids be disciplinary thinkers and really grasp the idea of what is is really being talked about in connection to the real world the idea the dimension of cognitive demand talks a lot about this idea of providing allowing students to really grapple and have productive struggle and and for struggle to be a good thing and not to just be a struggle for struggle's sake but really to struggle with the hard work that should be happening in a classroom at the student level a lot of times what you see in classrooms is that the teachers are doing all the work they

117leave the classroom really tired and the kids are feeling great at the end of the day right and it should be flipped you know students should really be grappling with these tough ideas in class um and then the third dimension is equitable access to content that really gets to the heart of not just kind of the term equity that people talk about you know kind of use it as a token term that sometimes means like equal for all and that's not the actual true root of that when you talk about equitable access which is kind of like the baseline right people having just access to content and rigorous content that's not all that this is talking about this is talking about having kids have fair time and air time in the classroom um having their

118their backgrounds their thinking really be a root for learning right like showing kids that their diversity what they bring to the table is an asset right an asset for learning that helps others grow helps themselves grow and can help them build on their knowledge the fourth dimension has is called agency ownership and identity and that really gets to the idea of agency as they talk about in the dimensions here is really the kids willingness to engage right we hear a lot about engagement but for engagement's sake um but not just the idea of kids nodding but truly engaging in the thinking in the classroom um having ownership over the ideas that are happening in the classroom and presenting not just the work and getting those like worksheets turned in and then the heart of that

119dimension really is i've always come back to is this idea of identity having kids really feel like they have a strong identity as a learner i'm a scientist i can think like a scientist i'm a mathematician i can think like a mathematician um and then the last dimension is formative assessment which goes back to something that dr schnorr mentioned is this idea of really utilizing student thinking to drive what's happening in the classroom right seeing misconceptions of understanding as an asset to really move kids thinking and have go through these revision processes and their thinking to build their understanding to a deeper level so there's a lot of documents you can read here but that's a quick overview um so last spring when we first presented the framework i'm so sorry dave you've never trusted

120me with that microphone he's gonna email me tomorrow for sure also last spring [Laughter] i can lend you this and you can rest it on its side i see we got the original back here comes dave oh we don't need that kind of power here we go here [Laughter] along with the uh district framework that we presented in the spring um we also had a presentation last spring late winter i think where we started talking about this rdim process this research design and improvement model that really was going to help lead our district start to look at programmatic changes curricular changes and anything that we are trying to adopt as a district and really reframe from this idea of kind of just picking something that we thought looked nice or picking something that maybe somebody

121that was sitting in an isolated position thought was the best choice for teachers and students this is reflected in a lot of our department's strategic priorities and this idea of really building trust for teachers really stopping to talk about curriculum as a thing and it's not about you know not being about the stuff also about getting feedback so the heart of this rdim is really outlining a process that julian asks you on the next slide thank you that really does some extensive planning timelining researching and utilization of teacher and student voices in our process of selecting new programs selecting curriculum um it's something that's key to us because like dr shore mentioned we want to build trust with teachers and we know that if we're making these decisions in isolation with them nothing will change

122in the classroom for our students so we're going to go through a little bit that was in last year when we presented on this this was kind of like hey this is a great idea we're going to get started on this and now that we have a whole year under our belt we'd like to share with you how it went um this is our timeline for the next three years uh we are projecting that by the fall 2023 as we went uh the spring of we will have a we will have k-8 uh universal curriculum which is a big feat in our district because we have some curricular areas like 780 ela and it's not 20 years old our curriculum is 20 years old um those teachers have not had access to training or new

123materials for 20 years and so this is something we're very excited about and very excited to engage teachers about and i hope that you see as we outline the process and how it went this year that teachers are also very excited about how this is going so far i'm just gonna go with this what's going on okay great um so i'm gonna talk to you a little bit about what happened this past year when we went through this process and i'm going to be honest i get the really fun part because it's really exciting when we talk about all of these ideas and plans but we we lived this this year and we lived it with a lot of teachers and it's really exciting to be here with all of you to kind of share

124that process and where we've ended up so things started last spring we had curriculum planning committees and again that is in 78 ela 6 8 science k5 math and so that was done uh with robin and lily zanya were spearheading science and um math and then myself and megan price were heading up that 7-8 ela so what we did is we had volunteer teachers administrators and our instructional coaches we had them working together doing a lot of learning about what is best practiced in this content and in this grade or age look like um so we did a lot of professional learning about what is it that we actually want for our students when they leave these classrooms um and and things is which sounds simple as lofty as we want them to think of

125themselves as mathematical thinkers or getting a 12 year old to say i love reading and i just want to read i mean we just want 12 year olds to say they love anything so we are you know that was really where we were at we researched and reviewed a variety of materials and we used outside sources uh to provide us data and evidence as to why those curricular materials um were good and how they could be used in responsive ways to promote the kind of instruction that we're talking about that leads to these things for students um and then we use the true framework in order to be able to say if this is what we're saying we believe in do these curricular resources lend itself to that because if there's a mismatch there's no

126point moving forward so if you can go to the next slide um so the committees looked at all of these resources they chose two resources for each of those different content areas that they were going to pilot they determined what units and what the timeline would look like and we did all of this so that when we started off in fall 21 we were able to hit the ground running with our pilot groups so our first program pilots took place this fall our second programs um so the second materials that we were looking at took place this winter and throughout that process we did have you know larger level pd but also it was really pivotal that our instructional coaches at all of our buildings were part of this process because it's that job embedded

127pd where it makes a difference because it's great to talk about what a wonderful math lesson looks like but it's a completely different thing when you have somebody trying it out in your classroom and you get to kind of you know like you're watching sports and you hear people sportscasters talking about what's going on you get to have those live in person conversations with teachers about what are you seeing kids do what did the teacher do to get the kids there um and so our instructional coaches were absolutely vital in in making that happen so for our material selection what we did is we sought a lot of feedback um from staff who are the ones that were using the materials um like robin said it it's all well and good to have somebody like

128us the district office make a choice but the fact is the teachers are the ones they're the experts and the professionals and it is their voice and opinion that matters um we also we also surveyed students the most comical whole process we i would they are wonderful and as we know they are not shy in providing the most honest feedback humanly possible and um it's always appreciated so we utilized all of that feedback and so here's essentially the different curriculums we looked at um so for science you know science is still kind of catching up in the world of high quality curricular materials but we ended up you know looking at two very highly rated ones we had four different math programs that we initially looked at and we also looked at four junior high

129ela programs again all of them very highly thought of and all of them very different in their approach to their curricular content areas so that is part of the fun it's also part of the challenge when trying things out that you're really flipping from one thing to another what we what we have done though is through this process we have chosen materials for all three of these content areas and we'll talk a little bit about some of these i'll start off with literacy because i can speak to that and it is the most unique we're coming to you tonight actually requesting to get two different programs but i will explain what this means um units of study is really more of a workshop philosophy and that is actually the model that's happening in arcadis k6

130um ela classrooms it is a similar model um this specific program does not have as much explicit instruction and we know that our students need some more explicit instruction and explicit opportunities um to both learn strategic skills learn you know what is a what does a good five paragraph essay actually look like but amplify ela offers that opportunity it's highly digital and it is it has all of these different nuts and bolts which is really great for a program what we found though in implementing that during our pilot is it misses the opportunity for authentic application and units of study offers that units of study is built around you're just reading novels and kids are choosing novels and they're having conversations and the feedback we got from kids on that was we had so many

131kids say i've never finished a whole book i've never liked reading a book i didn't think i would like this type of book and now i can't stop reading teachers at the junior high not in ela teachers these other content teachers were complaining the kids wanted to read too much and i just thought well then we've won like that that's that's that's the seal of approval um so when you're looking at uh you know our ask for this evening amplify ela is a five-year you know it looks like a five-year contract we would have soup to nuts all of the you know different materials and pieces we need um units of study really what we're talking about is actually just buying books books for students books that will last in perpetuity and we know it'll

132last in perpetuity because our current 7th and 8th grade ela teachers are still using the same things that they have from 20 years ago so these are things that will last far beyond just this curriculum cycle it is truly buying authentic trade books that exist in the world because we want our kids to be able to be excited about reading and know how to write and communicate and do it not just that they can write the five paragraph at the site but it's beautiful and it's written you can feel them inside of it and so they're ready for high school and they're ready for high school um this decision of these two pieces was not made by us this was truly teacher feedback and we had 80 of our 7th and 8th grade ela teachers

133or co-teachers be part of this process and they came to us and said we're seeing where we need to go and we see how these pieces fit together but it's not just one of these things um and so i think that it's really great that we're talking about how much we want to value teachers and their voice and their expertise and it is truly in their expertise that they recommend this and and to be honest it's really exciting because that is i i don't know that we could have foreseen that this was the path to go down but they see it and they see what's happening for the kids and that's truly where we're most excited uh yeah we can i can talk a little bit about the math and the science selection then i

134will echo what emily has mentioned i think what is really powerful about some of these elections and some of the global shifts that we'll talk about in a moment that have happened with some of these selections is that um emily and i came to the district about four years ago um we've had a couple of different roles and then uh in the in the meantime and um we originally used our instructional framework as kind of a resource document for learning and professional development um and i think the uh seeing this now used in action across our district but not just used as like a document that we share and we read and we talk about but seeing it being used by teachers to make these important decisions for our classrooms is just hits me right

135in the heart right um it's it's pretty powerful when you talk about the difference that we're going to see that you know we've already seen in a lot of our pilot participant classrooms and i'm excited to see her across our district um i think one big piece that it's really reflected in is our k5 math selection that again we did not have a hand in all we did was collect the feedback we shared the feedback from students and teachers with the pilot participants and then they voted they picked these materials um and the two piloting materials that they used one was into math um and one was illustrative math to give you just a little bit behind the curtain into math is very similar to the math curriculum that we currently have in our district

136now we use envision math when it was adopted five six more years ago it was very cutting edge at the time it's pretty dated now in its practice and in its instructional pedagogy it's very skill-based very isolated activities lessons units you can kind of like piecemeal things together there's not a lot of coherence in the learning there's not a lot of relatability to real world and really digging down to math concepts and into math was very very similar to our current materials it was a it's a pretty safe choice and illustrative math is a project-based curriculum that is very very different it's very student-driven it's very rooted in discourse if you walk into a classroom that is utilizing that material you won't see the teacher talking much it's all kids talking it's very collaborative in

137nature and kids really get to the heart of mathematical learning and mathematical ideas and so we were anxiously awaiting the votes as they were coming in and we couldn't believe it was a resounding choice for illustrative math so we're excited to see um the learning for all of our k5 teachers moving forward with that the teachers did not go with the comfortable choice they went with the choice that was best for the kids it is very exciting is this still common core math is that what it is right so those standards are still in place right we still use those as our route um those were all part of the original conversations when we had those pilot planning committees there was a couple of things that before materials could even be looked at by our

138pilot planning committee that's probably the heaviest hand we had in this process was to say okay these are the materials that can even be on the table because first they need to be equitable equitable and access to our students and be able to be used across for every student that's in our district they need to be rooted in the standards and standards based so those are some of the initial checks that all of these materials had to go through and for the six eight science some similar things happened it's we have in our district our current classrooms for 6 8 science they had kind of a hodgepodge of materials they had an older material that some teachers were using and a lot of teachers were kind of using materials that they put together just from

139resources that they've collected over the last few years and amplify science was it's it's a it's a better curriculum it's pretty literacy based there's a lot of reading it's it's not as three-dimensional as the science standards are calling for and have been calling for since they were the newly released about eight to ten years ago and open sy ed is actually an uh an open source material that's been action researched in classrooms with teachers and revised with student work in mind and it's it's deeply rooted in actual science standards probably more than any material i've ever seen and i was a 68 science specialist in cps so you want to explain what yes so an open source material is a material that is usually grant funded by a company that from work from a non-profit

140that is open source free on the web internet that doesn't mean it's free for us to provide for our classrooms because obviously there's printing costs and kits and there's things like that we have to purchase but if you were just a teacher who were looking for who was looking for a very high quality material you could go online and pull the lessons off by yourself and start utilizing it it's becoming more and more popular in the education world as people are pushing for a force for equity across education so uh so we were also surprised when that was selected by our teachers um but very excited um so i spoke a little bit to this but there are some definite global shifts that we're seeing with this um that are are different than what instruction

141has looked like in our in our schools in a long time a lot of these materials are really rooted with student ideas being at the center of the thinking this is no longer a teacher standing delivering information that is now available at google teacher you know teachers we don't we don't need teachers who are just giving information anymore because kids have every information they could ever find at their fingertips and so this is really about a lot of these are things are about a teacher saying you know what i don't know but let's learn it together right and using students to really root that learning you hear a lot of teachers being facilitators right as opposed to giving givers of information um this really reflects a lot of the things that our instructional framework talks

142about with authentic learning that's not connected to just isolated facts but connected to like real world application of how kids would interact with this content in the real world in their real life it also talks a lot about a lot of the curricular materials are interesting to kids because it is connected to the real world it also helps to produce um intellectual independence right like we're really striving towards instructional equity here and trying to get kids to not just be like independent little worker bees and filling out their worksheets but really independent thinkers who can productively struggle through whatever they are encountered with this also is a huge shift in relation to our professional learning model like emily mentioned our instructional coaches i cannot sing their praises enough and your praises for helping build our

143instructional coaching team over the last few years because they have been pivotal for this we would have not been able to execute this and we will not be able to continue moving forward supporting teachers in the classroom without them because they really truly are the boots on the ground in the classrooms going through and struggling through these new endeavors and global shifts with our teachers and our students um so we wanted to make sure that we shared some of the feedback um so that it was just we want to make it clear that while we're speaking here tonight that there is a large cadre of teachers behind this work um and you know we we asked for that feedback also because this is a new process and we want to be reflective on is it

144working did it meet our intended goals because it's not just finding the right materials but it is helping teachers feel that they are part of this process that we are doing with them not doing to them um so if you look at some of the feedback i we highlighted some of the the great phrases of this is the best experience um they felt that it was beneficial they felt that they had a voice um just the fact that somebody said it's nice to know that our voices can be heard they should always feel that way um and so just thinking about how our coaches were able to co-teach and work alongside their colleagues or how meeting with district um that they felt that their voice and thoughts were heard and respected um we want to

145make sure that that partnership continues i mean that that is the work for us so we just wanted to highlight that there's just been a lot of really large level grassroot excitement um and we know that there's still a lot of work ahead i mean it's really fun to it's like test driving you know like it's a really fun process but now now's the hard part now we've got to do the work um and so we're really excited to start kicking that off at our may institute we're ready to to hit the ground running we're really excited for the opportunities that are coming ahead for our teachers and for our students and you know getting getting to build something that we haven't had before so at our may institute all of the teachers will receive

146their training you know if they were in the pilot obviously they'll be a step ahead of everyone else but our may institute day is really pivotal and making sure the teachers are ready to hit the ground running in august i will put it on a public record that i think i cried at three separate meetings or was brought to tears because of teachers telling us um that they had been they were happy like and also like the touching comments about i've been in the district for this many years and i've never felt like somebody valued my voice like this and so i think that that cannot be spoken about enough the fact that teachers are they want to be a part of this conversation and they see the value in it all right so you're

147probably asking yourself what are our next steps our next steps obviously we've talked about both our may and our august institute are pivotal and making sure that our teachers are ready for when their students arrive on day one and we're also a lot of people always ask you know teachers or administrators what do you do all summer it's like what don't we do all summer we are busier you know we're just as busy in the summer as we are during the rest of the school year if not more so providing professional development for teachers as well as administrators so that's going to be a huge part of our summer we're also going to have some summer work groups that are going to work on translating the new pedagogy and the new skills and the new

148curriculum that we're asking you to adopt this evening into a report card that really reflects what kids know and are able to do rather than simply just letter grades so that'll be a big change for everybody from teachers to students to especially parents working on common formative and summative assessments those phrases may be new to you but a formative assessment is an assessment assessment for learning so we're doing these little tests and these little checks for understanding as we go along that's a formative assessment and then a summative assessment it's like the sum of everything that we've been doing that is an assessment of their learning to make sure that they have actually mastered what it was that we intended for them to be able to do by the end of the lesson or by

149the end of the unit or by the end of the year obviously as a district we want to make sure that our teachers are using the board approved and adopted curriculum and we want to continue to provide them with explicit guidance as well as the support that they need to be able to execute the materials and the curriculum as it was intended an additional component that's not listed here that's going to be an important pivotal piece of our work is the partnership that we have with building admin as well as much as we're building teachers capacities and students capacities for this kind of learning we're also going to be working intensely with our building administrators to make sure that they're a part of this training and can do this work alongside with their teachers so

150that they know exactly what to look for when they're working with teachers and working with students right and that's what they'll learn as part of what we refer to as our administrative advance at the last week of july something that's been initiated since dr heinz started here so it's kind of a boot camp for all of the administrators either at the district office or at our school building so that we know what our plan is for the year and then last but not least we have all of the people who participated in all of the pilots so that you can see all of the names it's quite a few uh individuals who uh provided us with the feedback and uh took the materials into their classroom and implemented them so that we could make real-time

151decisions and if you just look at the sheer number of people that participated these are people who are you know when you think about our k-6 teachers they are teaching every single content area during a year of covet i mean it our junior high teachers are seeing you know 100 plus kids a day it it is not just that piloting is fun and exciting it's a lot of work and none of this would happen without all of these individuals just jumping in head first and saying this is hard and it's a lot and oh my gosh but i'm i'm here and i'm doing it and and it's working and here's what i'm thinking and here's what's not working and here's what i'm thinking and our kids need it and it's just been it's been really

152wonderful to see our district be able to have our staff work together at this level um to do this important work so that they are just as much as part of you know what's happening here as the rest of us so um we just sincerely thank all of them because it is not lost on any of us um that just the time energy and effort that they have put in throughout this entire process they volunteer for this and they volunteered i mean like this is you know again grassroots so with that we'll take any questions that you may have i have two comments and one question um first is thank you for including students in the process um i just wanted to shout you all out for that because that's amazing and what we should

153be doing in everything that we do um the second is i actually had to do some research the other day around skills that citizens will need for the future of work and was researching a mckinsey article and i just wanted to highlight some of the things that were called out like critical thinking communication asking the right questions teamwork effectiveness empathy self-awareness self-management driving change and innovation coping with uncertainty adaptability and you can clearly see the connection between what's outlined in research and what is being proposed here so i just want to thank you all um and also shout out dr heinz in terms of leading the district to where we need to be moving to prepare our kids to be the future leaders that they are um okay and then my one question was about

154evaluation so what does that look like what's the plan for evaluation as we consider implementation i think that evaluation is going to be really important as we move forward and a lot of that is going to have to do with the common formative and summative assessments that we're going to be developing as a result of this because the real proof is in the pudding is what does our student achievement look like once we have gone through a year or two years to start to see our students making the expected growth or hopefully exceeding the expected growth that we would want to see as a result of not only the new materials but as a result of the changes in instruction that we're making so really you guys as a board will see you know our

155intended changes through the district achievement report as well as we have our students with their benchmarking and their map testing every year so we want to make sure that we're still seeing significant amounts significant amounts of growth and that's really how we'll measure it i think another thing too like just to connect with some of the the topics that you brought up that you were researching that this work is very well timed because of parallels with our portrait of a graduate the lead into strategic planning and the data sets that our partners at hanover research are have put together for us we had a meeting with the assistant swoops the directors and assistant directors yesterday to take a look at the hanover research data sets in terms of where our achievement is now we sent

156them every bit of data that we've had obviously somewhat disrupted because of covid but we still want to know where we stand now and then those data sets will really drive the work of the plan um hanover has a dashboard we will get it in front of the board may or june we're not sure when that'll be so you can kind of see where we stand and all the things you mentioned sam are really part of portrait and those competencies in which there are 30 and we will narrow those down we're the meeting for monday and which i know you weren't able to attend really talked about future workforce where we are now are our kids going to be ready and it was impactful um is it impactful kind of video and conversation we're going

157to to further include student voice we did have one student gabby from winston campus join us we are looking to put together a survey for all of our students probably sixth through eighth grade um to give them a voice on a larger scale about those competencies and then we know we want to do that with the staff as well we did have a number of teachers participate but it's four sessions two hours of time it's with the sub shortage and just how tricky it is for teachers to get away many of them not nearly as many as this but wanted to participate but we'll we'll elicit their feedback on those competencies because that really is the direction in which we need to head we know that everything we're doing is aligned in that direction already

158but the strategic plan will be the cherry on top that'll position the district where we need to in a trajectory that's like this for the foreseeable future i think another component also of assessing like how this process is going but also how the implementation of the curriculum is going in its effectiveness of impacting student achievement there's obviously that idea on it but i think that we have to always remember too that this is an iterative process right like i think in the past that we a lot of school districts you bought something you're like okay we're all done thanks bye see you in five years um and i the a lot of those next steps that we're talking about those summer working groups we'd like to bring them back every summer this should be something

159that these are living and breathing documents that we tried it for a year how did it go we're not going to pick a new material but we might adjust some of those supports right like this is that monitor modified it never stops right it's exciting and exhausting but it's the right way to do it right so you just keep keep moving it forwards you keep refining if it's not to your question moving the needle in terms of achievement then you know we have to look at the curriculum we don't want to wait 20 years and just have flat data as a result we want to make sure that it's being responsive and i think that's something that as we continue to look at achievement as a district and as a board that you know we

160tend to look to like map growth over time in some of the standardized tests but really baking in some of those other components and common formative assessments also things like five essentials students speak to instruction in five essentials and talk about like if they think their quality of learning is high or low right and that that speaks for a lot we should be listening to the kids a lot more than we do do you think that the you know we're looking at the test and to see our our kids achievement to kind of evaluate the curriculum of these sources do you think that those tasks are sufficiently adapted to these new materials like i look at the new materials as complete like you said completely different than what was emphasized before we're looking at the

161portrait of a graduate is completely different what we want to see in our in our children but then i wonder if if the the assessments that we're looking at to evaluate this are also adjusted for that there's a lot of research out there that shows that if you have a rigorous coherent curriculum that is being taught to appear those standardized assessments that are really down here will take care of themselves right that old school model of like let's really teach to the skill that's here at the test is very low level educationally pedagogically an impracticality of like longitudinal learning for students right and so if we are holding our students and our teachers to a very high level of practice right and learning in our classrooms then those should take care of themselves for sure

162we should not yeah they're not an issue when we look at these um programs i just wanted to just double check cause i'm i was trying to listen for it but is there um i believe for open side there was an electronic component to it because as these kids have their um chromebooks and so on but um in all these programs is there um coordinated yeah absolutely um actually you know for amplify it is almost strictly digital and actually it was one of the pieces that the kids and teachers provided the most controversial feedback on in that they missed having books in their hands and that was a big thing units of study because it's you have just regular novels that you're using it is it's just more of a tangible process um so part

163of the nice thing about all of these materials is it allows us the flexibility to use and still maintain you know that instructional technology piece that especially we've developed over the past couple of years um so to continue with that but also not lose sight of the fact of that kind of kinesthetic doing the work of engaging with another human not on a screen and engaging with a book in my hand on both worlds it really is flexible so that we can we can reach kids in both types of ways what's really powerful about the reorganization that happened last spring as well is that we um became one with instructional technology as well so they're also in in our team with us and so we work very closely we actually had a meeting today talking

164a lot about the overlap of some of the digital apps that we use um some of the the digital tools that we use for delivery model for instruction and how we can partner with these materials they're all all their online platforms that they already provide but also some of the ones that teachers are already using to make it even better so i was just going to say um well one question does the math curriculum come with a parent class that teach the new math no i'm just kidding um but but really what i wanted was more of a comment than anything was that i think well first of all commending you again like sam said on including students including the staff's feedback because i think what you captured probably intentionally but didn't give yourselves credit

165for here is that we know that with the way kids learn has completely changed not only in the 20 years from our last curriculum but even just in the last two but more so the last say five years because you know we no longer can sit and be lectured um kids just don't learn that way yeah and so i think um this i'm really really excited about these honestly because i feel like it captures obviously what the students need and what the teach what students want and also what the teachers need and want but i think we will also over the years see improvement kind of holistically i think we're going to see a lot of of improvement in ability to attend in class because we're not sitting in the desk and just staring at

166a teacher while they talk at me um and i think that's coming from of course my ot brain and working in the schools but i feel like just in general even our our typical learners are going to really benefit from kind of just a new way of education almost and it's not not a complete overhaul i get that but it's again moving 15 forward and the strategic planning and it's it's such a nice way to package all of that that we've been even long before i've been part of the board have been you know really pushing the district forward and i think that's it's going to encapsulate a lot of that so great job i agree with you i think it really speaks to that holistic approach that dr schnort talked about right like we're

167not just focused on the instruction we're going to be focused on the entire child like your little venn diagram okay just amazing work by the teaching and learning department the staff everybody involved certainly the instructional coaches this is like exciting in such a weird way but we're all geeks about it we love it it's a big shout out to lily and megan also we couldn't have done it with them the newest assistant directors yeah it's the fruits of the reorg right here all right thanks so much so much multilingual okay um our esl and bilingual program uh department will provide multi-label will provide an update on their way up as rene urbanski our assistant for multilingual and our director of multilingual care key another exciting presentation good evening dr heinz and president shupai and members

168of the board of education my name is rene urbanski and i am just so proud to be the assistant superintendent of multi-level programs here in district 15 and i am here with carrie keith who is our director for multilingual programs and it is truly you know a feeling of being humbled and honored to be here tonight and to have the privilege to share with you an update on the outstanding work of our teachers our support staff our administrators our fellow esc departments our parents and our community who truly work together on behalf of our english learners throughout the district each and every day we know that every single one of us is a teacher of english learners so the work that we're about to share with you and the report is truly a reflection of

169all of the efforts of every single person in our district so when we present tonight you will hear how our efforts are really representative of the values the vision and the mission of district 15 to produce world-class learners by building a connected learning community and you will also see if you want to go to the next slide julie how we are honoring our commitment to students our commitment to staff and our commitment to results so we'll start with some demographic information on our english learners here in district 15 our number of direct serve students so these are students in our classrooms we see every single day we have contact with these students every day and it actually grew by five today so we have 3449 students this is an increase of 152 students since last

170year so our numbers are growing and current research indicates that they will continue to grow we also are proud that we have monitor students 483 monitor students for whom we do very closely track the progress of in our classrooms to ensure they continue to be successful after they exit our program we continue to be the 13th largest district out of 929 districts in the state of illinois in terms of the size of our english learner program and we continue to serve over 80 different languages we are a district that is rich in its diversity our top five languages this year are spanish japanese polish telugu and korean we also know that the guidance from the state requires that we provide what we call a transitional bilingual education program for any school for whom there are

17120 students who all speak the same language and who all qualify for bilingual or esl programming so currently we have six different programs in the district where we have bilingual spanish japanese korean telugu tamil and bulgarian teachers and we are not far from adding an additional four potentially our numbers for hindi polish russian and mongolian are quite high right now so you can see they are nearing that number 20. our students are also provided services based on their levels of proficiency so if they are at a higher level of proficiency they receive less service during their school day and those that are at beginning levels of proficiency receive more intense support during their day so you can see here in district 15 we have about 50 professors 50 of our students in half part-time programming

172and 50 in full-time programming and we are very excited to share with you our exit rate from the 2021 exit our firm access testing which is our annual measure of progress and english growth that every english learner takes we exceeded the state exit rate which was 6.9 percent here in district 15 we had 8.9 percent of our learners exit and just over nine percent did not even test last year and we're proud to share too that we started our testing at the very beginning of the window which was extended for quite some time and many of our neighboring districts held off they wanted to maximize the growth of their students and we did that here in district 15. this is another exciting tool that isb is providing districts with to help them measure their progress

173toward meeting the achievement and closing gaps for students across different subgroups and it is called the equity journey continuum right so this is information that will become public in october of this year but we wanted to share some preliminary data with you if you look here the category of student learning is measured by three different factors one is iar results and the dlm results for our students another is the english learner progress to proficiency so you can see that each of these categories receives what they call a step so they're not saying rating they're not saying rank but it is a step toward closing that gap with the one being representative of large gaps in equity and affording minimal gaps in equity and you can see for our english learners we are very proud to

174share that we're at a 4.0 based on the state's data and you can also see here that quality pre-k program and a an english grade or english language students are students who are passing algebra and enrolled in an algebra class is another data point that the state is looking at and you can see and i'm very happy to share we have strong plans in place as you just heard from teaching and learning we are adopting new curriculum new instructional practices we are working very hard to increase the number of students in our outer level math so we feel really confident that we will be definitely addressing these gaps we are also very excited to share that dr heinz and i received an email so i cut and pasted the language from the email um they

175said that they are pleased to announce that our district has been selected as one of the title three bilingual education award recipients uh for 2022. which means an additional 10 to 25 thousand dollars for our district and we will share our plans for that money in just a few more slides so we're going to take a look at our esl resource programming which serves students from every language all of those 80 language backgrounds we're going to take a look at what we've done in that particular program model in the last two years we really looked at our data when we looked at our data and we disaggregated it we saw that our students really were somewhat stuck in the areas of writing and speaking which are those expressive language domains where they don't get as

176much practice in fact some research has shown that english learners across the country who've been observed at different grade levels actually only speak two percent of their day right so we decided to take our program model and adjust and make sure that we were focusing on expressive language domain so every single one of those 80 different language backgrounds 4449 students receives 40 minutes every single day of writing and oral discourse and we can see um in the next slide i will show you uh we are also focusing on students who are not quite at grade level and we know there are several reasons they're not at grade level sometimes it's very appropriate because they're developing language and sometimes it could be reflective of a potential learning difficulty and this is a million dollar question for

177all of our teams for whom is it language for whom is it something more a potential learning difficulty because we want to ensure that every single student is receiving the service that they need so we developed what we call the academic strategizing template and we have implemented that in schools with great success i'm so far this year our assistant director who's over here for multilingual programs has worked with 67 different teams and 67 different students and we are so proud to share that 73 of those students have achieved grade level or have achieved their goals that we have set through this template so we're very excited about that progress and you can see in our next slide when we disaggregate our data for access we can see that students who are part of this program

178model more than doubled the exit rate for our um in comparison to our state so we had 14.9 that's 959 students that are part of this program 143 exits so that's pretty exciting now we'll take a look at our bilingual spanish kindergarten data so we have 233 students who are enrolled in spanish bilingual kindergarten classrooms across the district one of the sad you know data points that you know really i think pulls at everyone's heart when we see that a step that we've been assigned for quality access to quality pre-k programming the district is actually a 1.0 and so we are working very hard to address that we know that when we look at the data for our students and our bilingual classrooms less than 50 percent of them have attended pre-k at all right

179so we're really working hard to address that we've talked with parents right now we've talked with i was actually just at cla this morning um and we were meeting with the team and we are brainstorming how we can address that another research study that's really pretty prominent and that came out in 2017 is what we call the 30 million word gap research study and this is a study in which they placed recording devices in homes of different socioeconomic levels so they ranked homes as being either low income middle income or high income and after three years so this is at three years of age they found through their analysis that children who were from low income homes had actually been exposed to 30 million fewer words than their counterparts who were from high income homes

180so we know that you can go to the next slide julian we also look at the proficiency in english of our students in kindergarten and we see that by and largely at the very beginning levels of proficiency in english so if you go to the next slide we'd like to consider an analogy here so you can see there's a rock or a mountain here and we just liken that to education right all of our students need to climb the mountain they have to reach the top and some of our students show up with every piece of equipment imaginable to get to the top of that mountain and some of our students show up in their bare feet so when you think about all of the you know data points we just shared it is our

181great joy to help these students get to the top of the mountain it is our responsibility our privilege our passion and our joy to do that work so looking at our kindergarten data for this year according to fastbridge we saw that our kindergarten students came in with some pretty uh you know unsettling data for sure uh when we tested them in the fall only 24 of those students in our bilingual classrooms were what we would call in a low risk category so that means over 75 percent of them um were not at grade level when they walked in the door right we did not provide intervention to our kindergarten students this year and you may be thinking why on earth did you do that and you'll see in the next slide we chose to strategically

182target our first grade classrooms um to a high level because we saw very similar data in first grade and we thought we would give our kindergarten students time to acclimate and now we are doubling down on our efforts in kindergarten and we are providing intense intervention we are also following the research of leading experts in the field so we are not just making this up as we go we are really and truly following the experts we've had conversations dr kathy escamina came and spoke with our staff we partner with dual language new mexico and we're really closely following the research of dr john hattie who has found you can see here on his research he has studied through hundreds of thousands of studies that have been done he's analyzed the data to see what are

183the variables in education that have the greatest impact and he found through his research with millions of students that his collective teacher efficacy is number one and he defined that as teachers coming together with a shared belief that they can impact student learning even for those students who are disengaged or disadvantaged and that that variable in itself was equivalent to more than two years of growth for students so we are leveraging that we are meeting with teams and we're very excited to also talk about instructional quality which was his number two factor in terms of addressing the historical gaps that we've seen here in the district our department and our coordinators one of whom is in the audience here have worked hirelessly for the last two years and our teachers have worked tirelessly participating in

184over 100 hours of collaborative professional development even on saturdays after school it's truly outstanding their efforts and what we've done is we have it created what we call interactive read-alouds 375 titles in spanish that are culturally responsive one lesson for each of them for all of our kindergarten first and second grade classrooms which in english you can just go to you know that catalog and you can find those in spanish you cannot we had to do that work we had to look you know across the world um so we did that we also selected 101 books so that our students could participate in shared reading which is grade level reading so even if they're reading below grade level they are getting exposed to grade level content and we have developed guided reading training for our

185teachers so that they are implementing the strongest instructional practices we have also ready for this written 515 mini lessons which truly integrate the learning across all of these different components we've provided intense training on spanish phonics and we have developed what we call our english language development blog which prior to the last couple years was not a bad by any means practice but it was not universal uh each it bless you each of our classrooms while they were so well intended they had a very different practice for english language development and so we universally implemented phonics and word study in english and spelling and we also implemented shared reading and writing and we taught our teachers and worked with them so that they could use linguistically responsive practices because it is not the same to

186just oh we'll just do it in english we really want them to be able to build connections between the two languages and we're very excited to share that in early 2023 15 of our bilingual teachers who have spent the last year and a half participating in a master's program with national lewis will graduate and will have their certification as bilingual reading specialist we use grant money to fund that program for them so we will have teachers with the highest level of expertise in our classrooms and i think we may be the only district in the entire state of illinois that has 15 bilingual reading specialists so we're very excited about that we've also set a really lofty goal for our kindergarten students we've met with almost every single team at every single one of our

187buildings and we talked about how we are going to achieve this goal which is every single kindergarten student will be at grade level in literacy before they begin first grade so our plan here is and we've articulated exactly what it is those kids need to know they have to have letters on fluency we define what letter sound fluency looks like they have to be able to read this movie called syllabus in spanish and they have to be reading a level d by the end of kindergarten so our plan is we will reassess our students in may and we'll see who is still not quite where they need to be and they will get a personalized invitation to come to campamento 2022 um which would be super exciting to be held at central road for four

188weeks uh we'll be immersing ourselves in a literacy fiesta so we're super excited about that and back to those funds that we have been assigned are awarded from the from isb we intend to use those to get a jump start kindergarten program in place for our incoming kindergarten students and provide them with the same four-week literacy fiesta uh this summer and so they will start the year um ahead of where they otherwise would have so we're super excited about that uh so that's our plan for kindergarten and then we want to share a quick update on our bilingual first grade so again we know that these students have the same challenges in many cases they're coming to us less than 50 percent have ever attended a pre-k program they are impacted in the same way

189nearly 100 of these students qualify for free and reduced lunch but when we look at their data we are so excited to share this is where we provided intense intervention in the fall and you can see that we went from 29 to 59 of our students are now in a low risk category we had 181 students out of 255 who were not at grade level in august and we reduced that to 104 in january we had 107 kids that were at that high risk category and we reduced that to 45 in january so that is you know just a testament to the stellar efforts into the addition of those interventionists that you provided us so generously last year and then we have our summer complemento and literacy fiesta also um for any first grader who's

190not quite a grade level and second grader who's not quite at grade level so we're super excited about that too and now i'm going to turn it over to carrie here who will talk a little bit about our learners at the other end of the spectrum in junior high good evening it is my absolute joy and honor to share with you this update on our junior high bilingual and esl program we wanted to begin with an overview of what we've accomplished this year we have developed a targeted academic language development class for 453 students we use a curricular anchor called english 3d and it is in partnership with the nation's leading scholar for achievement of secondary level english learners her name is dr kate kinsella and here you can see her in a photo providing

191a summer professional development for our teachers we have trained all 20 english learner teachers at the junior high level with dr kinsella and her associate for a total of four days around 22 hours of professional development specifically targeting the instructional practices around high leverage portable academic vocabulary instruction it goes across their whole day and connects through all content areas this is inclusive of the vocabulary the grammar and the syntax that junior high students need to be successful in all areas we are measuring the impact of this program through a variety of data points but the first important one to note is our access data we are so proud to celebrate that we had 25 students achieve full proficiency this past year on access 13 of those students were from winston campus junior high and were

192previously considered long-term english learners in addition we have 71 junior high students who are in the next to exit category they have achieved a 4.3 to a 4.7 on their access test this evidence indicates that we are closing a historical achievement graph gap with a great sense of urgency we're very proud and we want to celebrate that achievement in addition we are partnering with an outside uh research study um through houghton it's a different sign oh get it did they they're okay we'll go to map next um our junior high map reading data is without a doubt critical when we look at multiple data points here you can see that when we look at just winston campus junior high of our 75 7th grade students 92 of those students met their one-year growth target 79

193of those students exceeded the growth rate expected for one year 53 percent exceeded the growth rate expected for two years 32 percent exceeded the growth rate expected for three years and 15 exceeded the growth rate for four years um we are so excited to share this data with you and it is an additional data point that demonstrates we are effectively closing our achievement gap at the junior high level we have this partnership with houghton mifflin harcourt and this is an outside evaluation of our program um we wanted to make sure that we are looking at our data internally as well as externally and they asked us to be a part of this research study they looked at our first year of implementation of our english 3d program and what they found was that english learners

194in grades seven and eight demonstrated school year gains equal to that of their non-english learner peers as measured on nwea these gains occurred during movement between in-person and hybrid learning it is actually in contrast to what is typically found of a widening achievement gap at the junior high level for english learners so we are just thrilled that both our internal measures and our external measures have confirmed that we are truly closing an achievement gap some additional updates about our multilingual program our dual language program continues to grow in size and strength with the hard work and dedication of the exceptional staff at winston campus elementary and jane addams we are thrilled to have received over a hundred applications for the incoming kindergarten class next year and as you can see by the purple band here

195we are excited to roll up to fourth grade in the 22-23 school year our multilingual program department truly appreciates the strong support of our parent community we have three parent advisory committees including a multilingual parent advisory committee a spanish bilingual parent advisory committee a dual language parent advisory committee these committees host a variety of events throughout the year including how do we develop develop academic language at home or how do we develop empathy within our students how do we instruct in dual language programming in ways that are unique to the needs of a bilateral model we also are thrilled about our parent mentoring program which is occurring at virginia lake jane adams and lake louise and we have received the grant to expand this to our rolling meadow partners we also have tutoring at edgebrook

196apartments and east park apartments in rolling meadows we want to share with you that we are um so proud of six of our students five are pictured here with their parents they were recognized by the illinois teachers of english to speakers of other language association for their excellence in writing on poetry so here you can see um what an amazing accomplished this accomplishment this was for our students and their families their poems were there we decided that um that it was a very loud atmosphere but they will be reading at the next poc fundraiser all of this work that we have shared with you today couldn't be done without an incredible team with that in mind we want to express a sincere thank you and a congratulations to all of our district 15 teachers our

197administrators our staff parents community and board of education as a final note we wanted you to have the opportunity to hear from our students how our collective work is preparing them for a bright future we would like to share with you a video developed just this week to celebrate our teachers and the beautiful authentic multilingualism of our students and please don't judge the tax kills [Music] foreign hi guys my name is i speak russian a little [Music] why [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] in conclusion our multilingual program proudly celebrates the growth the achievement and the strong preparation to be a world-class citizen that is globally connected and truly prepared for a brighter future thank you thank you do you have any questions for us i'm not a question but comment i feel like i've had

198a lot of those tonight but i was emotional before the video um so i'm gonna try to get through this because i've been in educational equity work for almost 10 years and there are times when it feels like we are not going to move the needle and to see this and the impact that you all are having and the work that we're doing like thank you it is incredible you guys the uh i mean we've been involved for a long time and looked at an insurmountable achievement gap and to see what an effective amazing program that you've put into place in in really a short time and we're already we're seeing results and it's incredible it's incredible well and i can share that carrie and myself have been doing this work for a very long

199time as well and we have never been in a place that has been so supportive and embraced this work in this mission and so we just thank each and every one of you from the bottom of our hearts truly it is a passion and a joy um that we share you know to come and do this work together so thank you yeah i want to express my thanks as well you know because a lot of times you know i think like as board members you know with very limited you know we we just know the the very most except for sam but we we don't know that we we don't know the details of how this works all we see is we see numbers we have we have ideals from the community that that we

200believe in that we want to have happen we just like hey we want this to happen how do you do it we're completely the community is completely in the hands of you know your department of superintendent everybody you know we're it's almost yeah like you said there is a little bit of like um not helplessness but it's just kind of like well if you're not an expert and all you're saying is like well can you change this really you know and we're we're here to give whatever resources that we can um it's really encouraging when you can show that not only in some of these quantitative ways where we're seeing the achievement gap you know shorten but that really just really does seem to have a you know kind of you've really touched on the

201community and really made a difference and really starts from whether you care about that community and i've always thought about this is that you know we go through the motions and a lot of a lot of these you know just saying the right things at different board meetings over the years but if you don't have a real like if you don't really care about a community or these communities that you know whether it be immigrants or or um you know if you don't have that care to start off with it just doesn't get off there's no chance of succeeding so i think that your care for those communities has has shown and i appreciate that oh and our community has been just amazing it truly is an amazing place so thank you we try not

202to cry i was that's issues but it is again two you know the rio are getting the right like the three rights right people right work right number of people we have the right focus teaching and learning wonderful presentation multilingual wonderful presentation these departments are working together they're breaking down silos there's communication there's there's respect sometimes there's disagreement but we work through it and we do it for kids so it's exciting to see it happen at such a large scale this is a big district this is a diverse district we've had a pandemic we're dealing with three-tier buses we're overhauling everything and it's we're it's working we're starting to see the fruits of all the good work and the labor so it's like very exciting i was going to ask really quickly i have i'm

203a little bit intrigued by the the template that you guys talked about so i've sat at the table um many of iep meetings or even problem solving mtss meetings where that question came up that you said renee about you know is it a language barrier or is it potentially a you know a learning disability or a learning concern and i've been in a few different districts that um they can't answer that question really that well and it's frustrating so um i commend you to just how far that the district has come in being able to maybe not easily answer the question but have a way to to problem solve and try to figure that out um and a question along the lines of that template is that something that's used at both elementary and junior

204high okay that's that's great yeah and we've worked you know with all of our departments in collaboration to to provide training so that people feel empowered you know it is still a beginning process for us um but we're really excited and i think it's a credit too to our teachers that they're willing to engage in it because it is it's a little bit of work for sure but what our intent is is to provide really rich language instruction and when we see that we have really rich language instruction in place we ask can we see do kids grow and if they're growing then it's language right if they're not growing then we know oh and what happens with when we use a template like this that is so robust over the course of time you

205see that for students for whom there might be some potential learning difficulties it doesn't get better we continue to try we continue to adjust but we know we might need to explore something a little bit more in addition to the fact that we see typically you know a learning issue is present in both languages it's not just present in english right are you using it at an mtss level like intervention level or at iep level or both goal is really to use it at tier one and tier one plus so we're trying to empower all of our classroom teachers because this is sound tier one instruction uh when we get to that tier two level we ask you know if has this been implemented yet would you like help can we design a plan together

206so sometimes we see it coming to us at a tier two because people bring students to this process because they're concerned they you know help come with the best of intentions so if we haven't yet tried that we we start there then really more of a curiosity question so i you know i've obviously come from the iep background so i understand when that plan is developed it follows a student through email elementary junior high and even into high school because it's a state plan or federal plan even so a program like this that we're developing at our district level and becoming so robust and so successful how what happens then when they leave us do we know they you know what i mean like i know that an iep would follow a student do we

207do do we know what's out there what's in place not that we have any control over that but i'm just curious obviously we hope to prepare them so that they're successful before they head on out of junior high i was just curious how that works well the state of illinois tracks that data for us in our monitoring progress they will track data we track the data ourselves for two years and then they track the data themselves for two years following that to ensure that any student who has exited the program continues to be successful wow that's great thank you carrie you mentioned 100 dual language applications how many can we take wow we are looking now at this time of the year we save space because we know that that program has to be accessible

208to all of our students for whom spanish is their native language so we have to reserve some space in there and we've also prioritized siblings and so if you already have a sibling in the program you're automatically accepted as well as students who live in the jane addams or winston campus attendance area and just with those two different demographics we've already filled the jane addams program and the winston campus program will be able to accept marilyn and i are actually debating either seven or ten um oh wow okay yeah and then can you talk a little can you talk a little bit about where we would like to go with that in terms of rolling meadows yeah so we're very excited with moving 15 forward our hope is to combine the jane addams and the

209winston campus program so we'll have a much larger program over at jane adams and then we would add a program at kimball hill so that we can have a program that's accessible to the rolling meadows families as well very exciting yeah very exciting we have a couple of your just like we had our assistant directors and the audience from tnl you have a few of your folks we do yes so um various gentlemen in the back jeff you want to wave there he joined us this is his first year here and then hilah theory who i am so proud to share is a district 15 graduate she was an english learner here in district 15. she came back as a pa and then a teacher and now she is a coordinator in our department she's

210a real d15 success story we are just thrilled to have them both on our team and we have two other coordinators that are not here because they are part of our master or one of them is part of our reading master's program and they have class on wednesday nights which has shifted to thursday night so it's a child care issue for them but we are you know super excited we have a stellar team that's doing this work together and again we just thank you all so much for your support thank you very much stuff okay so i promise i won't make anyone cry [Laughter] no big presentation nobody presentation we're just here the calendar did not change that's why i freaked out a little i'm like oh no not a chance um we're just really

211setting the last day of school when we established the original calendar we put five uh extra days in for inclement weather we only used one so as opposed to june 9th being our last day we are setting our last day for june 3rd and i don't think that'll make anyone no so our teachers are aware um and i thank them for hanging in for this really long year we'll make sure to communicate that i'm sorry in our you know with to the parents making sure they know it just reminders you're assuming there's no more inclement weather coming let's hope now we always establish it in april and you've never gone beyond an inclement weather day in april but you never know you never know but this will be our official last day is june 3rd

212great thanks thanks thank you we have a motion for the acceptance of minutes please um march 9 2022 regular board of education meeting and executive session as presented all those in favor all right all right all right post motion cares all right board committee reports frank everett all right this might make people cry right frank it's been busy a lot of stuff was going on in the legislature uh they were doing some marathon sessions there before departing for uh the spring probably for the whole summer until come back in in the fall but uh illinois is uh expected to bring in about 46 billion dollars and so they'll be able to uh meet the 350 million obligation for the evidence-based model so we don't have to worry about funding from the state not being there

213so that's good um we have some interesting legislation i know you brought up the uh house bill 1167 which is providing paid administrative leave to vaccinated school employees that have had sick days due to covert 19. so that was uh passed by both houses um another bill that was interesting was uh uh requiring not requiring uh substitute teaching licenses to hold a bachelor degree for uh from a higher education uh institution so that'll allow for more uh substitute teachers um let's see we already talked about i think it was last we were talking about but they passed the bill about not having to reveal through freedom of information acts the um school safety drills so that's good not to have the school safety drills revealed to whoever wants them that could be uh compromising security

214uh let's see another interesting one was uh we had talked about the possibility of passing legislation which did pass now that prohibits the school district from withholding a student's grades transcripts or their diploma because of an unpaid balance on the school and the student's school account let's see one more here um let's see okay it was that uh another one for getting more substitute teachers uh available was that substitute teachers may teach up to 120 school days as opposed to just 90 and still and still be under a contract in the same school year um and the last thing was they were working on a property tax bill that can allow school districts to uh that are under ptel to uh incentivize a rebate for property taxes without losing the ability to recapture the you

215know the previous increment for up to three years uh so this uh they're working on that and that way we can maybe get some property tax relief but because schools won't be afraid of not being able to uh reclaim the the increases on a yearly basis so that's about it all right thank you um jim one five foundation sure so um just a reminder that the teacher tribute program is still going on through the first week of may so if parents are interested in making a tribute to their child's teacher you can do that for ten dollars and make a tribute to your child's teacher the 50 50 raffle was a success that jackpot was around 38 000 with a winner a district 15 parent taking home 13 748.17 after taxes and that funding will

216benefit uh mini grants for next year and all other issues that the foundation might take on excellent thank you finance committee anthony winda no new update updates at this time but we do have a meeting scheduled in uh three weeks yes all right correct i quit equity zubair and sam well we um i attended earlier you know this week is gone so was it yesterday gosh where i attended the meetings it seems like forever ago but it was just two days ago so meeting uh the first meeting of i think three on the portrait of a graduate that was very illuminating there was a lot of great presentations um about all sorts of uh topics uh related to how we want our students to what things they have to prepare for in the future and

217what considerations uh kind of at a very kind of high theoretical level which is where we're at for that and i thought it was a good idea that we have you know equity committee members there that make sure we're that that's and that's already been part of the conversation even in our subgroups and uh you know that will lead you know basically to the uh strategic plan and as we've seen in these presentations the street strategic plan is kind of related to for all the other presentations so we want to make sure that equity is at the very forefront of our planning wonderful thanks um all right so we have a number of board policies that are in for first reading that were updated by uh by press does anyone have any particular comments with

218regard to the first reading policies me neither there were a lot it didn't seem really complicated most of them were pretty simple adjustments all right how about um second reading the uh we had a number of those also any comments or adjustments for the second reading at this point before approving them all right moving on to action items um item 7.1 may have motion please i make a motion to approve the recommended 2022-23 medical dental division insurance rates as presented second anthony is the second discussion roll call hunt hi khan aye shupai i taylor hi wong i aider i anna reno all right motion carries item 7.2 i make a motion for approval to adjust the multilingual programs and transportation department clerical positions to secretary positions second discussion roll call khan hi shupai hi taylor

219hi wong all right aider aye annarino hi hunt hi motion carries item 7.3 make a motion to approve the addition of five wellness days to eligible district 15 employee staff leave day allotments second discussion i just want to at least a clarifying question so this is different than what frank was just talking about in terms of the covet days correct this is something that we offering as a district right okay in terms of we when we impact the bargain of the change to the mass status right the um the tier three right the bus shift we bargained with the unions and this was part of what we provided it was impact bargaining which didn't require us to but we wanted two yes but you're right exactly i was making sure something that we wanted to

220add not the cover days correct okay further discussion taylor hi motion carries item 7.4 i make a motion to approve support staff restructure for human resources second discussion roll call taylor aye wong aye ayder aye annarino aye hunt aye khan all right shoe pie aye motion carries item 7.5 motion please i make a motion to approve the personnel report recommendations for administration certified and non-certified staff members as presented second discussion roll call aye ayder i anna reno aye hunt aye aye taylor aye motion carries item 7.6 i make a motion to approve the master agreement between arkhan associates incorporated and community consolidated school district 15. second discussion roll call ader i annarino i hunt i khan i make a motion to approve the curriculum adoption k-5 math illustrative mathematic materials for a total estimated cost

221of one million nine hundred and sixty four thousand five hundred and twenty four dollars and sixty cents for six years as presented second discussion i had a question on that is does that mean that we are paying that sum over six years or is it a paying all on the front end that covers all six years 7.8 i make a motion to approve the curriculum adoption of 6-8 science open psy ed materials for a total estimate cost of um one million two hundred thousand for six years as presented second discussion [Music] hunt aye motion carries item 7.9 i make a motion to approve the curriculum adoption seven to eight amplify ela and units of study materials for a total estimated cost of one million six hundred and eighteen thousand six hundred dollars for five years

222as presented second motion carries adam 7.10 i make a motion to award contracts from bid 22-08 to midwest computer products west chicago illinois for the ceiling mounted projectors in the amount of 124 and 72 679.72 and adorama inc new york new york for the ultra short throw projectors in the amount of 129 489.92 for a total bid award of 254 169.64 second discussion i have a question what's an ultra short through project i was thinking the same thing i think it's really close to the screen okay so it's like dave would you care to answer the question sure and that is the ultra short throw if you can't mount it on the ceiling like the one in front of you there just do the construction it mounts on the wall and then it has a

223short throw right against the screen if that makes sense thanks david sure how many projectors are there that we that are being replaced for this amount uh two two summers ago uh so 2020 summer 2020 we did 60 [Music] of the district and you know plans to do the other 40 percent and it was accelerated uh with esser funds to do it this summer okay so after this we replaced basically all the projectors correct yes all right with the refurbishment plan correct dave because they were installed at one point and really there was no refresh plan and now we'll have all new ones and then part of the ongoing tech budget will be to have just like our construction facility plan we're going to have that maintenance come home correct yeah so we've got a

224five-year warranty on these and then two summers ago we have funds in the technology budget the five-year budget for those that are two years old so far all right thanks that's true all right motion carries item 7.11. make a motion to award the contract for fresh bakery products bid 22-009 to alpha baking company incorporated of chicago illinois for a total bid award of 39 and 90 cents as presented second discussion roll call huh taylor aye one hi ayder i annarino aye [Laughter] make a motion to award the contracts for non-food supplies bid number 22-010 to gordon food services wyoming michigan in the amount of 7 395 and 12 cents and wilkins food service university park illinois in the amount of thirty five thousand one hundred twenty one dollars and fifty five cents for a total

225bid award of forty two thousand five hundred sixteen dollars and sixty seven cents second discussion [Music] motion carries item 7.13 i make a motion to approve the resolution authorizing an interfund transfer as presented second discussion motion carries 8.1 would anyone like to remove anything from the consent calendar if not a motion please i make a motion to approve the consent calendar items as presented second motion carries correspondence dr hines as usual does anyone have any questions about this month's submittals nope okay all right um ten may have a motion to adjourn question two second all those in favor all right media you