Regular Meeting of the Board of Education - February 23, 2026

001And staff in the districts are free with their ID at the door or you can reserve online at district100.lutas.com. But before I become a shameless plug, I just wanted to say that we have been very excited to work on this production and work with 120 students from both schools to make this a reality and to make this happen. So we hope that you feel present. But to give you a little taste of this tonight, we have two seniors, one from Belvedere High School, one from Belvedere North High School, who are playing the roles of Elsa and Anna. So we'd like to introduce Evelyn Savage and Layla Waters, performing the song, I Can't Stop. I did not predict that you would. I didn't think that almost 20 years ago, for good reason, obviously. Yes, I think

002we can all agree. But that when we come together, we can create something truly magical. These two students did not know each other before November, and they have created some relationships and bonds that will last forever. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay, it is now 618, and we are now out of closed executive session, and we will reconvene the regular meeting of the Board of Education with a pledge to the American flag. I 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. Roll call, please. Mr. Dusselmeyer. Here. Mr. Herrera. Here. Mr. Hemphi. Here. Mrs. Howe. Here. Mr. Mueller. Here. Mr. Piggy. Here. Mrs. Young. Here. Okay, before we start the regular meeting of

003the board, as a reminder, all board members are expected to follow our approved meeting norms and board protocol. Are there any items on the agenda any members of the board would like to amend or move? Okay, here are none. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the agenda of regular meeting of the Board of Education on February 23rd, 2026, as presented? I move. Second. Okay, member... Hempke made the motion. Member Dieselmeyer seconded the motion to approve the agenda of the regular meeting of the Board of Education on February 23rd, 2026 as presented. Discussion? Roll call, please. Mr. Hempke. Aye. Mr. Dieselmeyer. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mrs. Hout. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay. We will now have our district celebrations, and at this time, I'd like to

004ask Vice President Dieselmeyer to assist me with a few recognitions, starting with the STEM Century book release. All right. So this evening, we're proud to announce that Dr. Cassandra Shug and Mr. Matthew Fry are contributing authors in the newly released book entitled STEM Century. In their featured chapter called Thinking Differently About STEM, They chronicle District 100's unique journey in fostering student engagement and cultivating vital community partnerships. Their contribution highlights D100 as a leader in preparing students for a rapidly evolving world. Thank you. Congratulations, Dr. Shug, Mr. Fry, for your contributions. chapter in that book. So National Recognition and Achievement and we're proud of that here at our district. Certainly information for all our kiddos and our children to be motivated by and inspired by. So thank you for that. We have something here for you

005Dr. Scholle and Mr. Bryant. Thank you. Thank you. I just want to say that Mr. Fry worked directly with our community partners and with our teachers who have really highlighted our STEM programming in the book specifically or in the chapter specifically. It's highlighted some of our high school programming that has been really, I think, exciting to see develop and evolve. And we are just really, really happy to be able to have that highlighted in this book. So the people across the country can recognize some of the really good work that our teachers and our administrators are doing right here. So really excited. And I really thank Matt for all of his time as well. So thank you. It is also my pleasure to share two School Superintendent Association graduations, otherwise known as AASA. So tonight,

006we're incredibly proud to celebrate the professional achievements of two of our district leaders through the School of Superintendents Association. First, we'd like to recognize Dr. Carson for completing the National Aspiring Superintendents Academy. This program is designed for transformative leaders who are preparing to take the helm of a school district, focusing on the strategic and systemic skills necessary for the modern superintendency. Additionally, we celebrate Dr. Shug for graduating from the National Superintendent Certification Program. This is a significant milestone that honors experienced leaders who have demonstrated a mastery of the professional standards and the complex demands of a district-wide leadership. Please join us in congratulating both Dr. Carson and Dr. Shug on their dedication to continuous improvement and their commitment to our students and our community. Thank you so much. And at this time, I would like

007to turn over the recognition portion to Dr. Sharp. Thank you very much. And thank you for that recognition. Also really, really proud of Dr. Carson for going through the Aspiring Superintendents Program. But I also wanted to give a shout out to Dr. Ady and Mr. Mandera, who presented on our great place to work and our journey to a great place to work at that national conference as well. And I think they did a really fantastic job representing the district at the national level. So it was a really and a podcast that featured that presentation was also featured at the national conference. So it was really an exciting week to highlight. the work at District 100. So congratulations to Mr. Mandera and Dr. Gage. This evening we want to recognize Perry Elementary School who achieved HRS

008Level 3 certification. We are pleased to announce that Perry Elementary School received the achievement of Level 3 certification in Marzano High Reliability Schools. Level 3 certification means Perry Elementary School has created a guaranteed and viable curriculum which requires schools to create a single curriculum that is taught by all teachers. The High Reliability School Program was created by Marzano Resources to help transform schools into organizations that take proactive steps to ensure student success. Using a research-based five-level hierarchy along with leading and lagging indicators, educators learn to assess, monitor, and confirm the effectiveness of their schools. This framework, based on 50 years of educational research, defines five progressive levels of performance that a school must master to become an HRS, where all students learn the content and skills they need for success in college, career, and beyond.

009As you move through the levels, it represents a complete transformation in how schools are run. Schools must collect data and validate their performance to climb each level of the hierarchy. With Perry's recognition as an HRS Level 3 school, the Belvedere School District is now an HRS Level 3 school district. This landmark achievement is the culmination of over a decade of dedicated work. It signifies that every school within District 100 has successfully implemented rigorous systems to ensure a safe, supportive, and collaborative school. school culture, effective teaching in every classroom, and a guaranteed and viable curriculum. Congratulations to Perry Elementary School and the district overall on that level three accomplishment. Thank you guys very much. I feel like I have a seat. Okay, we'll do it. We'll do it. Thank you. All right, we also have some

010board shout-outs. The following people have been nominated by their peers for going above and beyond in District 100. Thank you all so much for continuing to send in your shout-outs to recognize our outstanding staff and here in District 100. We begin with Julie Briggs, Sabrina Rios, and Teresa Pearson from Caledonia. Do we have you here? Come on up. All right, I want to give you... This shout out is from Kim Phillips, and she says, I want to give a shout out to my para team, Julie Briggs, Sabrina Rios, and Teresa Pearson. They are kind and caring with our youngest learners. They help make our school day fun, safe, and productive. They are wonderful collaborators. They give helpful feedback, and they are open to new ideas. Early childhood is a lot of fun, but also comes

011with its own set of challenges, and these ladies rise to the occasion every single day. I could not do what I do without them. Thank you. Are we doing it for an hour? We're waiting until the end. All right. Julia Harding. Ah, there she is. From CMS. Carol Deutsch gave this shout out. She wants to shout out Mrs. Harding because she is one of the most valuable teachers at Central Middle School. She has positively impacted the climate of our building by co-leading the PBIS committee. Most recently, she organized a holiday bazaar where students were able to use their positive behavior, earn treks. to purchase gifts for their family members. Students were all smiles as they shopped for their family members. Mrs. Harding has also demonstrated outstanding leadership by organizing a field trip for the sixth

012grade Voyagers team to feed my starving children. This meaningful and memorable experience allowed students in just a few hours to prepare 49,032 meals, enough to provide a daily meal for 134 children. Congratulations and thank you. And Keith Kleckler. There he is. Mr. Kleckler from North High School. This is submitted by a parent. Mr. Kleckler was my daughter's math teacher last year. He is consistently amazing and approachable for his students. He is the kind of teacher every parent wants for their kids. There are not enough ways to say thank you to people who touch your kid's life that way. He makes a difference every single day, making genuine connections with his students. Thank you, Mr. Kleckler. And Carly Jones, Jennifer Polky, Melanie Arvidson, Linda Colson, Ricky Holton, Joe Hanson, Kirshna Soering, Leanne Walbaum, Peyton Petruchis, Liz

013Sherman, and Andrea Woldman. Come on up. Web and Link Crew are comprehensive transition programs that use peer mentorship to build a positive school culture for our incoming 6th and 9th graders. By pairing these students with trained 8th, 11th, and 12th grade mentors, we provide a year-long support system that begins with mentor recruitment and training in the spring and summer, a half-day orientation day in the fall, and follow-ups throughout the school year. Our data shows these programs are correlated to improved attendance, academic performance, and our students' overall sense of belonging. Furthermore, this initiative empowers our older students to develop vital leadership skills as they guide their younger peers towards success. We are deeply grateful to our dedicated coordinators for their tireless work that is creating a lasting, positive impact across our school district. Thank you all

014for all the work that you do. Thank you. We're making Mr. Herrera work pretty hard here. So a lot of shout-outs today. Can we say thank you to all of them one more time? Again, congratulations to all the folks that were recognized today. Appreciate your work and your efforts for what you do for our students and the district. We will now have our student council reports starting with Bubba Deer High School presented by Ellie Rohde. So first I have Washington Academy's report. As we settle into the winter months and focus on staying warm, we are incredibly excited by the academic growth our students demonstrated on the winter reading and math math assessments. The gains we are seeing are a direct reflection of our students' hard work, our staff's dedication to high quality instruction, and our

015continued focus on meeting students' individual needs. We are proud of the progress our Wildcats continue to make. In addition, many of our students are currently completing their access assessments. It has been inspiring to see our entire school community rally around these students, encouraging them to take their time, try their best, and show what they know. Our students have risen to the occasion, and we are proud of their perseverance and effort throughout the testing process. Beyond academics, Washington Academy continues to thrive as a strong school community. We recently held another family movie night, and the turnout was outstanding. Events like this highlight the strong partnership between our school and families. We are extremely grateful to our PTO for their continued support and for planning engaging events that bring our families together and strengthen our school community.

016Next is Meehan Elementary School. We are incredibly encouraged by our students' math growth in both math and reading. Our students have worked hard to set meaningful goals around their scores and to celebrate their accomplishments along the way. The growth we have seen is a direct reflection of our staff's commitment to our school's scorecard goals and our partnership with TNTP. It has been a busy and productive month at Meehan as we have continued to work with TNTP, particularly around strengthening math instruction. This month's focus centered on assessment practices and creating targeted instructional groups based on student data. We also completed multiple days of classroom walkthroughs to observe and support the team growth in our instructional practices. In addition, our staff participated in further professional development with a benchmark coach. They gained specific tools and instructional strategies

017that can be immediately implemented in their classrooms to enhance student learning. We are truly grateful for our staff's hard work and continued dedication to growing their practice and supporting student success. Next is South Middle School. Our winter math assessment results showcase significant academic progress at Belvedere South Middle School. Currently, 70.9% of our students are meeting growth expectations in mathematics, while 65.7% did so in reading. I am particularly proud of the performance of our 8th grade math students, where 76.1% have met or exceeded their goals. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our current instructional strategies. Going forward, we will focus our intervention efforts on improving 8th grade reading to ensure that all students achieve their end-of-year targets and maintain the positive momentum established this winter. In sports, our wrestling team has successfully completed its season, and the

018girls' basketball teams have just two weeks remaining. Additionally, SMS students are eagerly anticipating our drama club's presentation of Willy Wonka Jr., while our art club, math council, and tech club are in good swing. Lastly, this month, Our English Learner students have completed the Access Assessment and all students have finished the Panorama Assessment. Our 8th graders are preparing for the Illinois Science Assessment which will take place the first week of March. We are proud of all the efforts put forth by our students at SMS. Next is Belvedere High School. BHS is excited for the transition to springtime. Winter sports are beginning to wrap up, and the Crosstown Music School Frozen will take place the last weekend of February. In February, we celebrated Black History Month, National School Counselor Week, Junior Class Appreciation Day, and School Resource

019Officer Appreciation Day. The student walkout on February 12th, while not an endorsed activity by the school or district, is providing an educational opportunity to talk about the Constitution, student engagement, and a safe and orderly school environment. And Everest High School has nothing to report this time. Thank you, Ellie. We will also have our student council report from Bovadere North High School presented by Ascari Cantero. Come forward. Hello, how are we this evening? My name is Lascara Quintero and I'll be giving our student council board of the course. First Caledonia, it's been a wonderful February at Caledonia. Some of our activities include completing all access testing, teachers analyze most recent test scores, amazing time and turnout at our Valentine's dance, third grade levels are going to focus performance at VHS later this week. Lincoln Elementary says

020all access testing was completed and let's move it. Students enjoyed a Valentine's cookie on February 12th during their classroom celebrations. We have heard a lot of positive feedback from students about the fresh fruit and vegetables that they have been able to try this year. 50 of our fourth grade students participated in NAEP assessments. Here elementary said kindness thing for the month students need kindness post was created a chain of kindness actions by hate that hanged in the building the three students are teaching training for the people class teacher spend time analyzing map data and the PLC's and determine next steps for instructions and intervention hearing met literacy scorecard goals for January math assessment Colbert Culver and Kitt family night and field trips frozen theater to frozen theater performance and Berkley Museum and fifth grade band

021review. Students complete access testing and assessments. Seth Whitman said, we have been very busy, I said, this month. Some of our activities include bench work, advanced coaching for staff, PTO family ice skating night, dine and donate at Chick-fil-A and Red Robin, PTO roller skating, Seth Whitman night at BNHS basketball game, and Seth Whitman night at the iPod. Central Middle School said, we have been doing great this month at CMS. There are lots of celebrations happening. Math testing went very well and we're excited to have outstanding growth in both reading and math this year. We wouldn't be more proud of our students for the academic success that we've had so far. Fifteen of our eighth grade students also participated in an AP test after being randomly selected. Our sixth graders are looking forward to seeing Frozen

022at the Pack as well. The leader in our says we have reviewing some first semester data. I wanted to share the following highlights We have had a decrease in overall behavioral referrals 96 of our freshmen are on track to graduate We have had the highest percentage of students past it's from our classes 86 of EL students and 88 of our students with IEPs who passed more than six factors Finally, four years ago, achievement gap was 35%, and now it's down to seven achievement gaps between our English learners and non-English learners. And that is it. Thank you. Thank you, guys. Okay, we will now have our board committee reports, starting with business services on February 3rd. Mr. Hemke or Mrs. Haupt, do you have anything you would like to highlight or share from the business services

023committee minutes? I did just find out that there will be a roll call item that won't be voted on today, as was expected from the minutes. There's an RFP for the wellness center work that needs to be reworked. So we're going to have to bring that up later. Thank you, Mr. Hempke. Any questions for Mr. Hempke and Mrs. Houck? Okay. Moving on. Educational Services Committee on February 4th. Mr. Diesmeier or Mr. Mueller, do you have anything you would like to highlight or share from Ed Services? Megan, did you want to touch on the grant that you were talking about? Yes. Yeah, thank you. In school improvement plan. Yes. Consent sent. Okay. So, What happens is in the spring, which you did last spring, you approved the school improvement plans for our schools that have designations

024from the state. and then you approved the contracts to work with the approved Illinois providers at that time. We received additional funding, and so you'll see on here that there's two contracts because they're over $35,000 because the schools want to continue the work with those providers and utilize the money that way. And we had briefly talked at Ed Services that when this comes up again, We might want to create something where if you approve the plans and the Illinois providers, that if we do receive additional funding, that we have the ability to just kind of move forward versus bringing it back a second time with additional funds for the same company, for the same line of work. Or you might say, nope, bring it back if it comes forward. But that might be something we

025want to discuss. But there are two contracts on here. today, which are extensions of the work we're doing. It's just we received additional unexpected money, but we're grateful for. And so that's why you see two of the schools. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. Any questions for Mr. Giesermeyer, Mr. Mueller, Dr. Johnson, or Dr. Carson? Okay. Seeing none. Moving on to policy and personnel. Committee on February the 19th. Mr. Piggy, do you have anything you would like to highlight or share from the policy and personnel committee minutes? No. Okay. All right. Any questions for Mr. Piggy, Dr. Shug, or Dr. Ady for that matter? Okay. Seeing none, moving on. The following policies were brought forward from the policy and personnel committee for the first readings and will be included on the March agenda for final reading and

026approval. Does anyone have any questions or comments on the following policies brought forward for first reading? Seeing none, at this time, members of the public and employees of District 100 may make public comments. As a reminder, any person appearing before the board is expected to address the board only at the appropriate time and follow the directives of the board president and to maintain order and decorum. Identify oneself. limit comments to three minutes, and conduct oneself with respect towards others, and abide by board policy 8, colon 30, visitors to and contact on school property. At this time, Mrs. Gales, I'm going to butcher the last name, Stilton Colt. and thanks for the opportunity to address the board. My name is Gail Stonehold, my lip girl, Belvedere. I'm a member of the League of Women Voters of

027the Greater Rockford Valley and the Nation of Kingsfield County also, and I'm a member of their education committee. I'd like to share with you the League's opinion on the federal voucher program and request that you would consider one action item. The Education Choice for Children Act was part of the recent legislation passed by Congress in July. This is an expansion of private school vouchers and is part of a broader assault, in our opinion, on public education. We believe that public education is one of the most important common goods in underpinning American democracy. The voucher program is a tax credit scholarship program, which taxpayers contribute to a third-party scholarship organization called an SGO. Students then apply to the SGO to receive a scholarship, which is like a voucher. Taxpayers receive on their income tax bill for

028their contribution to the SGOs. The maximum a person can contribute is $1,700. 10% of that $170 goes to the SGO for... administration purposes, so all of your money doesn't always reach students. These are 100% public dollars. They are not private donations. When a taxpayer contributes to an SGO, they get all their money back, 100% tax credits up to $17,000. That money is then removed from the federal budget. So it is not used for federal funding for education. I know that one of the pulls of this is that it also can be used for public schools, but access for public schools is likely going to be not even. While in theory some money could go to public school students to access benefits, public schools, communities, and other areas like ours, we need to set up a

029501c3 organization, solicit donations from high-income individuals in your community to contribute to the SGO. And when a student wants to use money for tutoring or an after-school program, they have to apply to that SGO for the scholarship money back. So it's not a smooth... I'm a parent. I can just take this off my taxes. Like all voucher programs, this hurts public school funding. If a student leaves a public school, schools are left with the same fixed cost but lower per pupil funding from state and federal government, as you guys know. In Illinois, public schools serve 9 out of 10 children but are underfunded by billions of dollars. Our federal tax dollars should go through... Supporting public education, not in a money move from public to private education. I think most of this is kind of,

030I'm kind of reaching to the choir. I apologize. Of course, all parents have a right to send their children to their school of choice. However, it is the job of education to make high quality education available to all students. Students receiving publicly funded vouchers to pay for private school tuition will not be protected from discrimination on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religious language needs, and disabilities. At this time, Mrs. Stephen-Paul, three minutes are up, but thank you very much for coming in. I'm sorry. Dr. Shook knows my ask. I do. Thank you very much, Gail. Okay. At this time, would Mr. Zickert please come up? Thank you. Sometimes I wish I wasn't here. Sometimes when you play, I told you so, and it's never a good thing. I told people from Perry a couple

031of years ago this was going to happen. And unfortunately, we're in the same spot. We were last time we talked about Perry to vote 6 to 1. so the only 1 that I know of really has any reason to look at things differently is Carlo. Maybe she's not here. So I give her credit and she, she said what she needed to say. She didn't vote for everybody else did. Everybody had very reasons why they did, but they did. And I've looked at Perry and I'm thinking. If you want to starve something, you can do that. I mean, if you want to make it bad enough where it's not going to work anymore, you can do that. I think we've intentionally done that for Perry for years. I mean, we haven't put that, we still haven't

032put a new roof on it. How many years have we talked about a roof for that place? At least five at the minimum. But we haven't done anything. We keep saying we're going to do it, we never do it, and then we let it go. And I think from the perspective of a former board member, and I'm not the only one, there's other six that voted for it. I think if you ask a few of the other ones, they think now, looking at it from our perspective, that this was a case where we delayed it, we delayed it, we delayed it, now we've got a board that we want and we're going to close it. Because the last one didn't do it. And that's what they wanted the first time. Now, I think there's a

033lot of reasons for that, but that's, I mean, that's just my opinion. When it comes to the financial part of it is, Harry and I think the teacher contract, we need to scapegoat for why we have deficit spending and stuff. We approved that contract. I sat in that negotiating team. We were told by the administration it was a doable contract. We're fine. We can pay for it. Shouldn't be any problem. Now we're on the fourth year, and now all of a sudden that's an albatross. We've added all kinds of stuff since then. We did the yes or funding. We had 30, I think it was maybe it's only 23 or 24 million investors funding. We had to cut 13 million at the end. And when I sat in those meetings as a board representative, we

034cut, we cut, we cut, we got down to about a million and a half. I remember Mrs. Taylor behind me said, well, you know, that's close enough because those deficits really aren't what we claim they are anyway. We'll be okay. And she's probably, she was right. I mean, I didn't disagree with her. But we kept adding stuff back in and look at all the stuff we've added back over the years I mean look at the last two or three years a number of central office jobs and a number of non-student facing things The HVAC come to people the trades people we've added we all thought was cost effective We spent six hundred thousand at the last board meeting I was at for communications Look at our facilities plan, my favorite, that we spent $600,000 on.

035And I know at least two of you out there remember fondly that we did. So we spent a lot of money. We spent money on Nexus, maybe up to $500,000 for future planning and stuff. I mean, we'd go Belvedere North without doing that. And that was a $60 million building that would probably be an $80 million one right now. So I think what we need to do is, we all saw this happening, and I can't figure out why nobody said anything before. Thank you. Mr. Zipper. At this time, would Ms. Catherine Hensley please come forward? I'm Catherine Hensley. I've spoken at the two years ago when we did the voting. I spoke again at one of the last meetings. I'm just a parent. I'm a mom. I've had three kids go there. My youngest is

036going to be there this upcoming year. It's I just want to bring a little perspective again. I don't know what it's like to sit in your chair I don't know what it's like to have to worry about money and make these decisions So I'm just coming in with just love and compassion for a school that I love and staff that I really appreciate One thing I am a little Concerned about is this polling again. I think all opinions are warranted. I think they're important but to think that a parent's opinion is biased I would like to use the word passionate. We are passionate about our school It's not that we're just for our school, but we back up our school. We love our school We love the staff our kids have a good time again.

037I've been there for four years now with my children And I don't know about all the renovations or things that have happened, but they don't complain. So I don't know about what money has to be spent for the school, but I would just like to maybe put perspective that maybe some things could be managed so we can keep it open. It doesn't have to just be shut down and closed, but maybe there's a way to keep it for everybody because it will affect families and it will affect generations that have been going there. And it matters. And again, if you have any idea of where you should go, I was just in the special meeting before this, and we were learning about how students and teachers are the drive of the school. If you want

038to know what's going on at the school, please go ask them. I mean, they'll know you by name by visiting them one time. They know all of our names, and they know my kids' names, and they know their siblings' names, and they know the kids that already graduated from there. And they're just really, really good people. So if anything, again, I don't know what's going to happen, but... I hope that they're all taken care of because we're just people and we just want good things and good intentions. And I hope that good things can come from maybe hopefully keeping our work. I thought we were keeping it open and I don't know what happened because we take it a six to one vote when there was a lot of people who didn't want to keep

039it open. So again, just hopefully perspective that it means a lot to a lot of us. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Lindsay. At this time would mr. Mike speak please come forward I was hoping that we wouldn't be in this situation, but we are For those of you who responded to my emails, thank you very much for those of you who haven't responded to my emails I hope to get to know you anyone who does know me I can be loud, but big time Eric I thought that we proved our worth last time I were talking about this next survey of 400 random people. I respect it. I do. I, I respect that that you would be able to eliminate bias. But I hope that you're able to consider that these 400 random people might

040not represent the community where we live. These are people that don't know the heart of it that we went through a couple of years ago. These are people that aren't going to have to send their kids to another school or separate their friends and family. And it feels like we were blindsided by this. I've been sending these meetings these meetings for a while with the intention of being seen and we waited our turn kept waiting and waiting and waiting and our last our last real updates. Was in January where it was implied that maybe carries on the job. I don't know. Can I need to answer? Has anyone said the words we are considering closing? That's a genuine question. Has anybody said it? Because if you haven't, then I think you owe us an apology.

041Because we went through this heartache. And you're traumatizing us all over again. And I really hope that I'm making drastic assumptions. And if I am, then please let me be the first to say I'm sorry. I want to treat all of you fairly. I want to respect. Your decisions, but it feels like Terry's not being heard. Regarding some of the expenses, I realized that this is millions of dollars that you're responsible for, but I thought that this is something we had budgeted for. And any time I hear, oh, we're concerned about that 500,000 dollars for a roof. Are we looking at 1.2Million for the for a different roof on another building? How many other buildings have gotten groups and we've had to wait our turn. Time and time again, when's the last time you put

042a significant expense that wasn't. Into our school and lastly. I do. I know that you guys have a very important decision to make, but it feels like this 120 years of tradition is coming down to what's going to happen in the next three months. We're worth it. Please invest in Perry. Thank you, Mr. Shafiq. And I just wanted to clarify, Mr. Speaker, and for anyone else that is going to come up, I appreciate that sometimes people post questions and whatnot, but it isn't really a back and forth. We are listening, and we appreciate that. And certainly, Mike, you can reach out too, and if you want those questions specifically answered, we can engage with that as well, okay? Thank you. Okay, at this time, would Mrs. Abby Cameron please step forward? I'm going to take

043my three minutes to brag. So I've been fortunate enough to serve on the leadership team at Perry through SIPP and I'm extremely proud of the work that we have accomplished. Everyone that is here or is not able to be here tonight is a Perry staff member, has played a role in our continuous improvement efforts at Perry. We continue to set goals with high expectations for ourselves and our students and we continue to meet those goals. These individuals behind you and those that cannot be here. are being recognized that have put in the time, energy, and effort to do what it takes so that our students can be successful academically, but more importantly, that they know we are there to support them, push them, and cheer for them when they meet their goals. Under the leadership

044and guidance of Katie Hornbach, we achieved this through structured PLCs, SIP team meetings, and cross-functional collaboration. Kitty has always said that her goal was that the procedures and expectations were in place so that the work could continue even if she wasn't the one driving the ship. Thanks to her continuous hard work and leadership, this year, without the guidance, our school has not only met our KPIs for the year in January, but we also met our growth goals in math and reading for all grade levels. I would also like you to keep in mind that all of this was accomplished with the dark cloud of a possible closure looming over our heads and with multiple staff teaching new grades they have never taught before. These people right here and those that could not be here this

045evening are the reason why Perry students and staff are so successful. We either sink or swim together. Thankfully, we've had a leader driving our boat and our procedures are in place and we can continue to pave the way for others in our wake. So I'd like to thank the Board of Education for this recognition for our HRS Level 3 because we've earned it. Thank you to Katie Hornbeck for always believing in us, supporting us, and advocating for each and every student at Perry Elementary School. Okay, at this time with Ms. Teresa Tau. Hello, thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you today. I'm here today as a concerned community member to formally request review into recent leadership changes within the school's contracted food service program. Food service director position is employed by

046a private food management company under this contract with the school district. During the former director's tenure, all state and health inspections were passed. Program compliance was maintained. Performance recognition was received. No documentation infractions were issued. No corrective action was implemented and no formal performance deficiencies were communicated. The director was released effective immediately. No prior notice, no warning, no documented performance concerns, no progressive discipline processes preceded this action. It has been represented that this action was not initiated at the discretion of the food management company, but occurred at the at the direction of the district. CFO. Further there was not any public posting for the position, no competitive hiring practices and no recruitment procedures conducted. The position was built immediately. It's understood that. It is within the CFO's administrative responsibility to oversee that contractual obligations are

047met. However, the issue arises where oversight ends and operational interferences begin. In this case, it has been represented that CFO hand-selected a former co-worker from another school district and provided the individual's information to the contracted food management company with the expressed intention that this individual replaced the former food service director. It was also also representative representative. I'm sorry. Um, that the identified replacement towards the district kitchen facilities, along with the CFO and director of facilities and the supervisor of maintenance. This occurred unbeknown to the contract and food service management company. The prior professional relationship warrants warrants review and determine whether appropriate conflict of interest safeguards and ethical boundaries were observed. If accurate, this action exceeds contract oversight and enters the realm of improper administrative influence over a vendor's internal employment decision. This is not a

048routine personal matter. This is a governance and statutory compliance issue. Under the Illinois Code 105 ILCS 5, the board holds oversight authority of fiduciary responsibility for district operations and contractual relationships entered into on behalf of the district. Under the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act 5 ILCS 420, the Public Officer Prohibited Activities Act 50 ILCS 105, public officials are prohibited from using their positions to secure employment or advantage for specific individuals or to improperly influence contractual relationships. Further, Illinois public bodies are bound by fiduciary obligations to ensure that procurement integrity and vendor relationships are managed without conflict of interest or improper administrative interference. If a district administrator directed a private contract for whom to terminate and whom to hire, it raises substantial questions regarding interference in contractual autonomy, circumvention of competitive hiring standards, and undisclosed conflicts of

049interest. The district's authority is contract oversight, not operational control of a vendor's internal employment decision. At this time, three minutes are up. Thank you very much. Thank you for your service. Thank you. Is there anyone else that would like to make a public comment at this time? Okay, hearing none, we will be moving on to our demographics study presentation. In May 2023, the board contracted with MGT, formerly Davis Demographics, to conduct a demographic study for the district. That contract included annual updates for three years to monitor changes that were unknown in the area, the closure of the manufacturing plant, and economic development in the area, for example. This is the final report under the current contract. At this time, we are going to be joined virtually by a representative from MGT, who is going to

050walk through the demographic study for the district. and hit some of the highlights of those studies results. The results of the demographic study are also available in board docs. So you can see those as well at home or for the board as well. You can talk amongst yourselves if you would like while we await this transition. Ms. Hadley, should we continue with the consent agenda? Yeah, you can probably go ahead. Okay. Okay, then let's keep walking through the consent agenda, and as soon as we get her online, we'll go into the demographics study. Okay. Next on the agenda is our consent agenda items. Are there any items on the consent agenda any board members of the board would like to take out for separate consideration? I'd like to take out three. Okay. Member Young requested

051to have item number three pulled out for separate consideration. Any other requests? Okay. Do I have a motion and a second to approve all consent agenda items not requested to be pulled as presented? So moved. Second. Okay. Member Houck made a motion. Member Hemke seconded the motion to approve all consent agenda items not requested to be pulled as presented. Discussion? Okay. At this time, I would like to acknowledge the following donations. Sweet pants and underwear from, I'm sorry, sweatpants. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. And we got cameras running. Sweatpants and underwear from the Bavadere Women's. Club for Lincoln and Perry Elementary Schools. $80 from Rupp for Chapter of Illinois Society of Professional Engineers for South Middle School. My apologies. For South Middle School's math counts, competition, registrations, reimbursement. Roll call, please. Mrs. Huff. Aye.

052Mr. Hemke. Aye. Mr. Dieselmeyer. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. All right. Motion passes. Okay. Do I have a motion and a second to approve a consent agenda item number three as presented? I'll make the motion. I second. Okay, Member Dieselmeyer made a motion, and Member Hemke seconded the motion to approve Consent Agenda Item Number 3 as presented. Discussion? Okay, CNN, roll call, please. Mr. Dieselmeyer? Aye. Mr. Hemke? Aye. Mrs. Young? Abstain. Mr. Piggy? Aye. Mrs. Howell? Aye. Mr. Mueller? Aye. And Mr. Herrera? Aye. Okay, motion passes. Ms. Hadley, any... We'll keep working through the roll call agenda. Okay. All right. Okay. Moving on. Next on the agenda are roll call items, action items. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the vision statement, community

053rooted, every child included, learning, innovating, and leading, thriving today and prepared for tomorrow, as presented. So moved. So moved. Okay, Member Houck made the motion. Member Piggy seconded the motion to approve the vision statement. Community rooted, every child included, learning, innovating, and leading. Thriving today and prepared for tomorrow, as presented. Any discussion? I like it. Sounds really good. We'll be as far as we can, right? That's exactly right. We're really excited about this vision statement to pull together the strategic plan and the mission and core values of the district. And we appreciate all the stakeholder feedback that we received on it and the link we were able to make as well to the transition to the new brand for the district. So I think it's going to be a powerful statement that you will see

054a lot of. I would have to agree with Member Piggy. I like it as well. It's concise. It's to the point. And I think everything we're looking for our students to aspire to be. And our community. Okay, any further discussion? Roll call, please. Mrs. Hout. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Dusselmeyer. Aye. Mr. Hemke. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay. Do I have a motion passes? Do I have a motion and a second to approve the resolution authorizing the engagement of a licensed real estate broker as presented? I'll make the motion. Second. Okay. Member Gieselmeyer made the motion. Member Mueller seconded the motion to approve the resolution authorizing the engagement of a licensed real estate broker as presented. Any discussion? Roll call, please. Mr. Dieselmeyer? Aye. Mr. Mueller? Aye. Mrs. Helk?

055Aye. Mr. Hemke? Aye. Mrs. Young? Aye. Mr. Piggy? Aye. Mr. Herrera? Aye. Okay, motion passes. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the facility's master planning polling questions? So moved. Second? Second. Okay. Member Piggy made the motion. Member Mueller seconded the motion to approve the facility master plan polling questions. Discussion? Somebody here to answer any questions on them? We do have Nexus here this evening. And we don't have Mr. Leatherman here with us, but is there? You could probably answer. I will do my best. I will just say that we did leave these questions are not in the public input section because we are. In working with the polling company, they wanted to ensure that the people that they called were going to have those questions asked as they went through them.

056I will say we worked with the Morris Leatherman Company. They used a variety of questions for these polling questions that are essentially beginning with demographic information. Then they move into questions asking about... the performance of the school district, the financial management of the school district. how they feel about the board, the administration, the teaching staff, so trying to establish general community sentiment. The questions then go into questions that are specific to the facility's master plan, so talking about the potential for an early childhood center, talking about Perry Elementary School, and if an investment in Perry Elementary School or closure of Perry Elementary School would be the best consideration. It'll ask about boundary changes and how people feel about boundary changes. It will also ask about feelings about if the community is supportive of HVAC improvements,

057safe and secure entrance improvements. IT, special education improvements, those. So it really stretches across the entirety of the phase one portions of the master facility plan and also touches on only early childhood that would be in that phase two. But some of those broader items, again, like HVAC, that'll stretch across phase one and phase two. But again, we aren't... releasing the specific questions so that those 400 people that are randomly selected will be asked those questions without having seen and or possibly prepared for them. The feeling is that that's how to get the best data with the most integrity. But I can do my best to respond to any questions that you might have regarding them. There was just something referred to as a 4k class. Ah, and that might be... I didn't know what

058a 4K class was. So that is going to be referenced early childhood specifically, but 4K might be confusing language. So that's a really good call. Thank you. Okay. That was it? That's a very good question. I'm glad you brought that up because that really needs to be addressed in the survey. So thank you, Mr. Hempke. Any other questions about the polling questions? Again, the concept, I think, is out there, just the specific questions that we would not. We would not release it this time to the general public. Okay. Any other questions? I would just say about the process that should the board approve these tonight, I will send a communication out to staff, families, community, saying that this poll is about to take place. And so we will encourage them to answer their phone and

059respond to those questions. We don't take part in any way in that. Following that, the Morris Leatherman Company handles all of the selection of the individuals who will be surveyed. And then they have told us that they will be able to come back at the March 16th board meeting with the results of those survey questions for the board to consider at that time. Okay. Any further questions, comments, questions? Maybe one thing, ask them what number they're actually calling from. So maybe... Oh, that's a good question. People actually... I will add that. That's a good idea. And I also got to add the 4K piece. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions, comments, or questions? Roll call, please. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Gieselmeyer. Aye. Mrs. Helk. Aye. Mr. Hemke. Aye. And

060Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay. Motion passes. All right. And we do have the demographic study. So I'm going to turn this over at this time for the discussion of the demographic study. Thank you, Marcy, for being here with us this evening. Is there any additional volume we can get? Or Mr. Bell? Oh, can I use this remote that's right in front of me? Thank you. Well done. Technological genius over here. Just told me it was there. It's better. Not yet. We're getting there. Just give us one second. Keep talking, Marcy, so we can tell. My ghost will always start singing, but I think that's a different question. I think you're good, Marcy. We can hear you now. Okay, if you're bored, you can hear Marcy. Okay. All right. Go right ahead, Marcy. Thank you. You're welcome.

061Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here with you tonight to share the President's Student Forecast for our third year. So we'll get right into it. Let's see. Make sure I keep that screen on screen so people know if there's anything that you're not seeing at all. Okay, just a reminder about what our methodology looks like when we are doing resident forecast. This is important because we are using your student data. We take your student data, we're not looking at any of the class census data or any of the plan data, we're actually looking at your student data and we're creating factors that we advise that student data to create before it passes. The first factor is the birth factor that comes from historic birth data from the county or from the state. The

062second factor is the mobility factor. That factor comes from three historic years and your current year of student data. And then the fourth factor is a student yield factor, which is then applied to the residential developments that we've researched, which we have all of the residential developments that are happening or plan to be happening in the next 10 years. All of those factors, the student data, is how we create the forecast. So about the analysis we did, we once again, we took your student data, which we have in your current data and we validated to make sure that we are using accurate data and we're improving it and stuff like that. We then geocode the students or we put their location on the map so that we can do some spatial analysis. We also take

063your district attendance area and divide it into small study areas. So we have your district split up into 330 study areas. Here's an image that shows your student density within your attendance area within your district's boundary. And with the student data, we do spatial analysis of your attendance areas. So this is the attendance matrix for your elementary, your grades, kindergarten through fifth grade. And if you remember, I'll show you how we read this. We look at the reading across the row. I'll take the top school as Caledonia Elementary. That school has 410 K-5 students living in that attendance area. Of that number, there are 353 that are enrolled in Caledonia. 14 are enrolled at Lincoln, 2 at Meehan, 37 at South Whitman, and 4 at Washington Academy. As you read down the column for Caledonia,

064you see where all of those students live. So there's the 353 that live within the Caledonia Elementary Attendance Area, two live in Lincoln Elementary Attendance Area, four in South Whitman, two in Washington Academy. There are two coming in from outside of the district. Also enrolled at Caledonia is 153 preschool students, totaling 516 student enrollments as of early October. Taking those numbers and comparing them to your student capacities, we have two comparisons. The first comparison is your resident utilization, meaning if all and only the students that live in the attendance area. Were enrolled at the school the utilization would be your resident utilization The other columns are your enrolled utilization. So again in Caledonia we see 410 students living in that attendance area the capacity is of 565 that shows the resident utilization would be 72.6%

065But based on the students that are enrolled there, the utilization is 91.3%. Eight students in the district are transferring in, 57 students are transferring out, and then those two students transferring in from outside of the district. I'll just point out to you that the resident column here does show a bit of an imbalance in your resident utilization, with Perry having a very high resident utilization population. In the enrolled utilization, you see a different story and I'll show it up here on this map. You can see on the left side of this map shows in color form the resident utilization with the red being more of the underutilized schools and the darker blue, which is in the center area, would be an overutilized resident population. So that would be if the students that lived in the

066attendance area were attending that school, that's what the utilization would be. The map on the right shows that through programming and policy, that utilization is much more spread out and you don't have those underutilized or overutilized populations in the enrollment level. Moving on to the middle school attendance matrix, that's again the exact same thing. We have 866 students that live in Belvidere Central, 859 live in that attendance area, 7 in Belvidere South, and then from Converse, we have 751 students that live in Belvidere South, 735 attend that school, and 16 attend Belvidere Central. The utilization is a little bit higher at Belgrade Central than it is at Belgrade yourself. Moving on to high school, again, these numbers, 1106, you have 1059 that are at Belgrade High School, 24 at Belgrade North, and then 23 attending

067a non-boundary school. Belgrade North DC, 1,211 of the 1,279 resident students enrolled there, 29 at Belgrade High School and 39 at Mount Monterey School. 12 total students transferring in from outside of the district. The utilization at the high school level, very similar numbers, but not much of a percentage bite off. So those are the students that are actually enrolled, and were enrolled as of October 1st. So then once again we take that, we apply factors to that population. The first factor we apply to that population are the birth counts. We get this from the state. We get it by county, so within Boone County. We have this current year is our base year. So it would be the kindergarten year for 2025. What we just did was look at births five years prior, and that

068was 540 births. We see in years earlier, you had last year would have been kindergarten year 2024, five years prior to birth year. So we see a little bit of a drop. And then you can also see that next year, what we expect, a little bit of an additional drop because the births five years ago are going from 540 to 518, back up to 534, down to 511, so they undulate a bit. The columns, the two columns on the very right are the percentage, the capture rate percentage. So how many kindergarten students are you capturing based on the births? So you can see the history of what you've had. 81% last year, 82% the year before, 84%. This year you can see you have quite a high number of resident kindergarten students. And that is

069a capture rate higher than what we've seen before. We're not quite sure yet because of the trend. We don't know if there's a trend happening until we see multiple years of data that the 88% could mean that you're now capturing more students based on something that you're doing in the district. Or it could be an anomaly. Because it is higher than what we've seen before, the forecast is going to make some adjustments to say that. This year could be an anomaly and you might expect more than 84% capture rate in the future. So once again, continuing to monitor your growth versus your kindergarten is really important to see what has changed in the trend. Visually, and on the graph, I am a very visual person. You can see these dark blue lines are the historic

070births. So the bars on the left are the historic births. Would you see a general defining trend, but not nearly as much as we see in a lot of other places? The gray bar is historic kindergarten resident population. That's what we know because we have the data to show it. The pink bar is the current kindergarten population and the light blue bars on the right, those are projected kindergarten populations at that 84% to something between that 84% and 4% projected capture rate. So these numbers in the light blue, those are ones we don't know for sure. So that's how we try to understand what's going to be coming for kindergarten. The next factor is mobility, which is analyzing the grade cohort survival rate as students progress from one grade level to the next grade level

071within an attendance area. Because sometimes that changes depending on where in the district students live. This is why we see the grades going all the way up to grade 12, because we're not talking about the pool, we're talking about that boundary of that attendance area. So, California has a mobility at 1.07. So, if there were 100 students in 2025, because of an average of 4 historic years of student data, we're going to project that there would be 107 first grade students. You can see here by the looks of this that the light colors or the yellow colors are the low one and the blue crop colors are the low one. You have a modest inward migration or inward mobility, inward migration of students. So in other words, in existing homes, you see that you're gaining

072students. So that's a healthy growth. Small, very modest, but it is a healthy growth in a lot of areas. We see these numbers dropping continually throughout the grade levels, throughout the attendance areas, below one. So the fact that you have a lot in the blue shows that there is that inward mobility. The third and final factor are your student yield factors, we analyzed and kind of broke out into three separate areas because they are just different housing types. There's that central Belvedere, or what I call central Belvedere, there's the north of Fort Worth, and then there's the largest state, between state to north. And they, as you can see, do get different student yield factors, almost 0.7 students in that central Belvedere area. a little bit less in the north of Corinth and then much

073fewer in those larger states. This is, I know this is an extent where you can't really dive down into it, but we do have further mass visuals in the report. This does show the residential developments in the area. There are 13 projects currently active in four elementary and tenor areas. 269 units are included in the forecast, and the majority of those are single-family detached. And this visual shows where those are. You see that the majority of them, 159 of them, are in the central attendance area. And those are all single family detached. The ones that are a multi-family detached are in the Lincoln Elementary attendance area. So the majority of the housing is forecasted in the Belvedere Central Middle School attendance area. A little bit better in Washington County and the Belvedere South. So those

074are the factors of the forecast. We'll go on and show you the forecast of the resident population. And then the colors here on this table is just an additional formatting to help draw the eye to the high numbers versus the low numbers. So those purple numbers are the lower numbers, the darker the blue, the higher the numbers. First, I just want to go through where those colors are applied. The mobility factor once again goes from grade cohort to grade cohort. So K-1, K-2, and that's where those mobility numbers are applied. The development is applied through the whole forecast, all of the grades, all of the years. And the impact of the birth rates are affecting not just the kindergarten, but future early grades. So next year it's kindergarten, but the year after that we're raising,

075a lot of that information is coming from those birth factors. Because of that, I just want to point out that what we know is those kids that are born, we know that that is 2024. Beyond that is based on a trend. So the earlier years of the forecast are ones that we can rely on a lot more. Going back to the numbers here, just pointing out once again that you did have in historically, even in 2022, had a class cohort of 700,000. That was in your 11th grade class, and you're not seeing those anymore. You're seeing much lower cohorts coming in. Your highest cohort this year is, once again, the 11th grade class. You do have that lower mobility in your... High school, which is very common, as we see early graduation or dropouts, that

076hit a lot in that fall period year. You can see that you have, if you look diagonal right here, that you do have two larger class sizes. They're currently in third and fourth grade. And those are going to matriculate. Those classes are going to start hitting middle school in 2027. Both of them will be in middle school in 2028. So you do see an uptick of those numbers for middle school grade in that 2029, especially most of the years. And then you can see that perpetuate into starting to reach high school. and then 2030, 2031 school year. So kind of close to the latter half of the forecast. So total of current resident population this year of 7,041 students. In addition to that, you had 25 students that were not included in the forecast. Those

077are out of district students. So a total of 7,066 students. I do want to point out that there was a large drop in the population this year. This was unexpected and it's something I've seen every single one of the times that I've had. Even in districts that didn't experience a decline because it was projected that they would have an increase of perhaps, let's say, 3%, their increase was much less than maybe a 1% or a half percent. This is one of those things, much like COVID, where something happens, unexpected, and because we don't have all of the data that supports it, I don't have... Anything solid just kind of build information about why this happened, but I just want you to be aware that it has happened and it is also happened all over the

078country. We are continually discussing it amongst ourselves with our districts and at conferences and things like that. It's very It's happening, like you said, it's happening everywhere. In the chart from visually you see that you do even um, you know, it's a loss from this year. You do have a fairly stable Forecast and this is probably the numbers that I see most stable of these that I'm working with. Oh, well, I don't know if you're seeing declines, but because of that inward mobility and the lesser decline in your birth rates, you're seeing it hold steady much. as opposed to a very steep drop, which I see a lot lately. You see your K-5, especially there's some birth rates that are going to be dropping over in three to four years, so that's where we're starting

079to see that drop. And you see in the middle school grades, I was pointing out that those two large cohorts are going to start coming into your middle school grades, and they're going to start increasing that population there as they work through the middle school grades. and then eventually on to your high school grades. This map is showing those study areas that I was telling you about. And what this is showing you is just a net change between population, what we're expecting that change to be. The red shows, the red and the orange are showing areas of decline, and the green areas are showing areas of growth. These are small and large depending on the number of students. We really like to keep these at 30 to 50, maybe a apartment complex or a dense

080area, maybe up to 75 if there are. These are small, compact city areas. that we're showing you, which is why some plants that are really small. But this is what your district is, and the areas that are expecting you to grow and define in your district. I think potentially the last thing I'm going to show you, I wanted to just do a graphic visualization of the capacities versus your student population. So the chart, what this is, is the sum of the capacities of the elementary schools, the middle schools, and the high schools. The dark line is your current, a sum of your current population is 8 through 5, 6 through 8, 9 through 12. The middle column is your 20, 30. projected student numbers and in the light blue is a 2035 projected student numbers

081and this I think is a bit visual to allow you to see the available seats in the capacity. So some areas here you have some capacity available to fit in your K-5 compared to your total. Your total capacity you've got through and by the bedroom here at your high school levels. I write down the elementary even further. I can see that once again the some faces indicated and I just reiterate this is your resident. different chart, and it's interesting to compare the two. And then populate to that period is over. But there is capacity at other schools. And thus, as I showed you that map and both that and the tabular utilization analysis, you're seeing that your programs and policies are already for those students. Just in summary, like I said, we have just over

0827,000 students in 2025, the current school year. Expecting in the 2030 to drop a bit to 6,950. That drop will be seen in the K-5 in that elementary as we see the forward classes come in. That is expected to have a little bit of an increase in your middle school years and just a little bit of a smaller decrease in your high school years. And then the forecast of the 10-year, which is... Again, no based on trend, and that can change as development comes in, as the growth factors come in and change. As the resident population changes, those numbers will change more so. I do encourage you to continue with your journey of forecasting so that you can continue to watch those trends, map them out, understand what is happening in the district as time

083goes by. Just a couple of key items, once again. Do you have a gradual change of a decrease in student population based on the birth rates, the development patterns, and mobility? Your pre-fold enrollment is projected to gradually decline as opposed to a cliff enrollment that we see in the new areas. Growth trends are not showing any sustained growth patterns. The mobility does suggest that there is moderate, modest in-regret term retention. And the student generation from many housing is predominantly coming from your single family development. I do. Where did you get your capacity number? From the district. From the district? Because I just went back to the report that you gave us for 23-24 school year, and the numbers for capacity are very different. Do we know why that would be? The middle schools and the

084high schools, the capacity went up quite a bit in 25-26 from 23-24. So like BNHS in 23-24 was capacity of 2,250 students. And in 25-26, on the current report, it says it's 2,985 students. Those were changed based on the needs assessment and the qualification that was done when they walked the buildings. Those previous in the very first year of this was used from like the 1957 survey that the district had been using for quite a while. So 1957, but North wasn't even there. I'm sorry. A long time ago. It's like 700 students different. So now we're saying 700 additional students can fit in North than they could a few years ago. Kale went down. Like Kale said 795 in 23, but now it says on this one it's only 565. Those were pulled, when they

085updated those last year, it was pulled by the Larson and Darby capacity assessment when they did the needs assessment. They took the size of classrooms with the number of square feet that are recommended. So all capacities were updated during that study. You said Caledonia went down? Yeah. Is that because they went? I don't know. That's why I was curious as to why. The early childhood took some of the capacity away? No, it's still counting those classrooms. Okay. Overall capacity of the school is what it's counting. Okay. Yeah. So like in 23, it was 795, but now it says it's only 565. And my best guess, I'd go back to my notes and look, I can look at what that and get back to the board on that. But my best guess at this point without

086my notes in front of me is that the average space required to educate a child has been updated as people continue to look at how education looks and the space required. And now we standards require that they have more space to move and a lot more movement areas in classrooms. So that would have reduced space. But I can definitely go back and look at my notes and give that to the board as an update. Because VHS in 23 was $1,950, but now it's $2,820. I mean, those are just really big jumps to me for capacity. And again, both middle schools went up. Some of the elementary stayed fairly close. Lincoln was $780, now it's $715. Me, it was 770. Now it's 765. And I mean, I just, I looked at capacity and enrollment number total.

087I didn't look at the breakdowns by class, but just some of the numbers look really unusual to me, I guess, from the two reports. And I'm just on our website with the... The one from 2324. Well, we can definitely do some follow up in terms of how those capacity numbers were calculated. And it is always important to note that the capacity of the building isn't the same as how the building is being currently utilized as well. What the maximum capacity is of every classroom are used to have a classroom full of students looks very different than how a lot of those spaces are currently being utilized as well. So. We can definitely get back to you on that. It would be nice to paint a clear picture, especially the high schools now show that 120%.

088more capacity than is even required. Yeah, and that just seems kind of crazy to me. Well, certainly if you're in the high school, it does not feel that way. The high schools feel like they are well utilized. And again, another thing to note with those capacity studies is that they are imagining that they're going to be used every period of the day with a set of students in those classes. But most of our schools don't operate like that. Most of our schools have a teacher that is in a classroom. They might share it with a co-teacher, but that classroom is their designated space typically throughout the course of the day. So capacity is not something that we can really look at to see if our buildings are being used. efficiently? Well, I mean, it is.

089We can see what we could maximally fill to. But if we were to consider what our actual space allowed for, we'd need to really put people in those buildings and see how those spaces are being used. The principals would certainly tell you that there's not 120% open capacity at the high schools. And the middle schools, especially South Middle School on here. Looks like it has quite a bit of capacity. Again, when you're in South Middle School, it doesn't feel like that. They're utilizing all of the spaces that are available, just not for a class of 30 students every period of the day. So we have, you know, special education programming. We have smaller class sizes for a variety of different programs. And again, we have teachers who have... designated space areas throughout the course of

090the day. So there's a lot more to the picture than those base capacity numbers. And I don't think we would seek to make any meaningful decisions based on those capacity numbers. Really, we're trying to gauge. Is our population growing? Is it declining? And what do we need to plan for overall in terms of our future needs? And anytime you get out over five years into the future, those kiddos aren't born yet. And that's really a lot of guesswork. Again, I just those numbers were like, whoa, wait, what happened? A very, very reasonable question. Yeah, I mean, even if we wouldn't make decisions based on this alone, it does have the appearance and we should make sure that we rationalize it so that we don't. infer the wrong thing. I think that's, that is, those are

091very, very fair statements. And so we'll, I'll work with Mrs. Armstrong and we'll come up with some additional information for the board on that. And we can even post that as well on the website with the demographic study too. So people have access to that information. Those are good questions. Thank you. Additional questions for Marcy while we have her here? Yeah, one question I guess I had was, you said the 25-26 year we've had an 88% resident capture. You said that was kind of an anomaly that we had more kids. Could that be contributing to COVID babies? But I'm not seeing higher kindergarten classes or higher pass rates in general around the country. Okay, I guess that's what I was asking. Are you seeing it elsewhere? No, and pass rates are hard because we gather

092the birth data different depending on the state or however we're getting that data. vital statistics department, health in Boone County or in Illinois we get it by county in some places we get it by zip codes and so it's somewhat hard to compare different districts because you know sometimes I'll have a catch rate of 30 percent because we the district is in a small area of that entire county so a little bit harder for that Are you able to determine if it's a shift out of private and into public or anything like that? For the kindergarten, no. I think for the kindergarten, it's interesting because we're respecting drop. This year, you actually have more students, more kindergarten students. Again, kindergarten is interesting. The one we don't know because we don't have anything to compare it

093to except for grades. Also, birth dates are given by year and students enroll based on their birth date, whether it's an August or September date. So there's going to be a little bit of a fluctuation there. But it was interesting that you captured more. I will say that sometimes I have to say that I see that districts are capturing more because they are making a concerted effort to have an all-inclusive pre-K program. And that's where I've seen districts have a higher capture rate such as this. Sometimes I see a high cash rate and then it either resumed for dips the next year depending on if that was just a error or change in the months of the birth. So it's hard to tell and again it's kind of interesting to watch and we don't really

094know until it happens until we get the kindergarten data to come in next year to see if did it drop like we expected it to be this year or are you maintaining that 88%? Are you going to continue? Which would actually increase your your forecast would go higher so I made a little bit of an adjustment. I don't want to all of a sudden say oh wow. Your forecast is increasing drastically because this one year you would have 15 more kindergarteners than expected. But next year, if it's high again, we start saying, okay, there might be a reason why you're capturing more kindergarteners. We might not ever really know why. And the whole development would be if there is a private... Sometimes you see preschools that also have kindergarten and things that close down for

095some reason. That would be an indication or that was showing in your higher kindergarten numbers and be a reason why you have two or more students. So it's a great question to ask. I don't have an answer. They don't have the data of students in private schools. But it's a great question to ask and it would be interesting to see next year what your kindergarten numbers are like. It will be interesting to see because it does coincide with 170 additional students that we're serving in pre-K. So it will be interesting to see if that trend continues as we continue to see that additional kids served in our early childhood program. Absolutely, and that's a great way to get, you know, to have kids come into one of the things that I saw was that kids

096were coming in later in first grade and capturing them back in pre-K is really helping to increase those rates. Marcy, where's our, how's our birth rate compared to on a national level? And then where do you see the national level trend going? Well, the birth rate on a national, well, that's a hard question. I have districts that are loving down to the rates being in the years, the trend for 8, 9, 10 would be in the 0.85. We're expecting a drop of 15%. So the fact that it is staying steady in those 90s is actually, in my experiment, Less like what I'm seeing in other areas. So I think that your birth rates are are maintaining much better than many areas of the country. The other areas of the country that I see a growth

097are areas of high growth because because people are moving in more and you do have that high inward mobility having that inward migration. So maybe that is a contributing factor to your birth rate. But But I usually see it when there's a lot of new homes being built. So I think that you have a good, strong birth rate compared to when I split it on the tree. Any other questions for Marcy? Okay. Thank you very much, Marcy. We appreciate the update. Thank you so much. Have a great evening. You too. Okay. We are going to resume our roll call items. with the mathematics curriculum resource adoption and extension so do i have a motion and a second to approve the mathematics critical resources and adoption and extension as presented i'll make the motion a second

098okay remember this my remember happened remember deesmar made the motion member hempkey seconded the motion to prove the main i'm sorry the mathematics curriculum resources adoption and extension as presented discussion Dr. Johnson, anything you wanted to highlight? No, just mainly that Dr. Vallant does a really great job of working with the teachers. And it's part of the six-year cycle. It's driven by the teachers. They know what they need. She structures the process. So by the time it gets to this point, there's a lot of excitement for what they came to the conclusion of. That's the only comment I had. Obviously, they said it came under budget and stuff, but I'm confused on how it costs $55,000 to ship and shipping and handling from wherever. A lot of resources, but yeah. Yeah, they had some other

099free stuff thrown in there, so I'm sure it all offsets. But yeah, I was just blown away by the shipping and handling on the quote. Fair. Any other questions? Okay, roll call, please. Mr. Duesenmeier. Aye. Mr. Hemmke. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mrs. Hull. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay, motion passes. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the World Language Curriculum Resources Adoption as presented? I move. Second. Okay. Member Mueller made the motion and Member Hempke, I'm sorry, Member Houk seconded the motion to approve the World Language Curriculum Resources adoption as presented. Discussion? Dr. Johnson, anything to highlight? Just different content area, different set of teachers, but same great job. Any further questions, comments? Okay, roll call, please. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mrs. Houk. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye.

100Mr. Hemke. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Dusselmeyer. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay. Motion passes. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the district safety plan? I move. Second. Okay. Member Hemke made the motion. Member Mueller seconded the motion to approve the district safety plan. Discussion? I just want to say that Mr. Skola, Mr. Fry, Mr. Sackwell spent a great deal of time working on With the Donovan group on pulling together the safety plan and the safety plan itself remains a confidential document as it is how we respond in a variety of different situations. But I think the safety plan does as a whole make a safer district. I'm proud of the work that was done. I think it will be really, really helpful to have moving forward. But it is a working

101document that will continue to be updated and changed as necessary. But I just wanted to say thank you to all the people that were involved in making this comprehensive document the best that it can be and as timely as it can be. Any other further comments, questions? Okay, roll call, please. Mr. Hemke. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mr. Giesemeier. Aye. Mrs. Houk. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Motion passes. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the best memorandum of agreement as presented? I make the motion. I'll second. Okay. Member Deesemeyer made the motion and Member Young seconded the motion to approve the best memorandum of agreement as presented. Discussion? Roll call, please. Mr. Deesemeyer. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mr. Hemke. Aye. Mrs.

102Howell. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay. Do I have a motion and a second to approve the appointment of Matt Fry as principal at Everest High School for the 2026 through 2027 school year as presented? I motion. I second. Member Dieselmeyer made the motion. Member Hemke seconded the motion to approve the appointment of Matt Fry as principal at Everest High School. For the year 2026 through 2027 school year as presented any discussion I just want to say we are very very excited to recommend Mr. Fry for this position. I think he's gonna be really fantastic. We I have tried very hard to keep Mr. Lascola here forever He is going to have big shoes to fill for certain. And Mr. Fry is going to leave a position that he did incredibly well here at central office.

103So he's also going to leave big shoes to fill. But I know that his heart and passion is with helping kids. And he's going to be really at the forefront of doing that. Some of our kids that need the most support in our district and getting them across that line to graduation is really, really important work. And I love that he's got the heart for that. And I think he's the right person for the job. job. We needed somebody really special to do that. So really excited to have him serve in that role. So I really hope you guys are going to vote yes. It's a bittersweet decision, right? I hate to see Mike go, but we're excited to have a good person to take over. Any other further comments, questions? Okay, roll call, please.

104Mr. Dieselmeyer. Aye. Mr. Hempe. Aye. Mrs. Holt. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Motion passes, and congratulations, Mr. Fry. We look forward to your leadership at Everest. Okay, do I have a motion and a second to approve additional sick days, sick, I'm sorry, additional days sick leave for employee 0, 2, 2, 3, 2, 6 dash. So, okay, remember how made the motion member piggy 2nd, and the motion to approve additional sick leave. I'm sorry additional days sick leave for employee. 0, 2, 2, 3. 2, 6 dash any discussion. Okay, roll call please. This is how Mr piggy. Hi. This is young. Hi. Mr. Mueller. All right. Mr. Gieselmeyer. Aye. Mr. Hempe. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay, motion passes. Do I have a motion and a second to approve

105additional days sick leave for employee 02-2326-CH? I'll make the motion. Second. Okay, Member Gieselmeyer made the motion. Member Houck seconded the motion to approve additional. Day sick leave for employee 022326-CH. Discussion? Okay. Roll call, please. Mr. Gieselmeyer. Aye. Mrs. Houck. Aye. Mr. Hempe. Aye. Mrs. Young. Aye. Mr. Piggy. Aye. Mr. Mueller. Aye. Mr. Herrera. Aye. Okay. Motion passes. The following items have been added for discussion or will be coming up for further review and or possible action in the future. Background information has been provided in the board and we ask questions and or request. Clarification at this time, budget update. All right, we will start with the budget update. And I will walk through this and. So, Steve, what was the 1st 1 on the board discussion? Did we. I think we were going to

106do the update. It's just a second. Okay. I think we're going to do the update first to set the context, and then we're going to hear from Stiefel and PMA to talk about the specific funding, and then we'll hear from Nexus. The budget update will not take long, I don't think, although I encourage the board to ask questions and discuss. I'm going to walk through this with you, and please, Mrs. Armstrong. correct me where I go wrong or add additional information as need be. We know this school year we've been navigating a budget deficit, and we wanted to give you an update on where we were in terms of that budget deficit. As of the end of December, we had our salaries trending at about $2.5 million under budget, benefits trending at about $2.5 million

107over budget, and other expenses at about $2.5 million under budget. So overall, we were trending about $2.5 million under budget as of the end of December. So at that point, our projections were that we would come about $5 million less than the projected $9.9 million budget deficit. But we have updated information. So if you go to the next slide there. As of January 31st, so as of the end of January, we still see our salaries trending at under budget at about $2 million under budget. There's some caveats to that that I'll discuss later. And also our benefits still trending over budget. But again, some caveats that I'll discuss there. Expenses trending under budget. So approximately $3 million under budget overall. If we maintain these projections through the remainder of the year, we would be approximately

108$5.2 million under budget. That means we would realize approximately $4.7 million of that projected $9.9 million budget deficit, which would mean we'd need to anticipate reducing $4.7 million additional dollars going into next school year. However, if you go to... The next slide, we have some relevant information to consider. Overall, in order to offset that anticipated budget deficit, we'd need to make an overall decrease of 7.1% to our budget. Our salaries in March, we are going to see lane movements, which are going to have an impact on those salaries. So again, right now, we're trending under budget. We did just have three paychecks in January. So we did experience a little bit of an additional hit there. So it's good that we're still continuing to trend under. But we don't know exactly what to anticipate in

109March in terms of those lane movements. And that will be retroactive as well. So we will take some additional. additional increase there and that's why that's budgeted for it in that way. And while we're trending over budget and benefits, we have made some significant changes to our benefits program and we are expecting to see the impact of some of those changes coming up here in the next few months as well. So we are hoping those two pieces will balance one another out. But again, We hope, but we wait to see what those numbers are. Benefits especially are incredibly unpredictable. So we can only anticipate as much as we can. Other expenses typically also come in higher in the second half of the school year. There's supplies and professional development that happen in that second half

110of the school year. We have met with our administrative team and we are really asking our team to reduce where they can in terms of those spends, really focusing on needs, not on wants, professional development that is necessary as opposed to professional development that is desired and helpful, but maybe not absolutely necessary at this time. Most important caveat to note is that contract negotiations are going to substantially impact next year's budget projections, and those are ongoing right now. Those will be the single biggest factor for us in terms of salaries. So we met with our administrative team last month. We reviewed this, or actually this month, the beginning of this month, and we reviewed all of this information. And we shared sort of our principles for budget reductions, which is we are looking to reduce

111versus eliminate wherever possible. So we're trying to look at all of our programming and at all of our expenses, but still continuing to provide that programming. still, but really being as efficient as possible as opposed to eliminating those things. We want our students to continue to have access to all of the opportunity that we are able to provide here in this district. We are going to do everything we can to avoid reducing existing staff, but we are going to look very critically at attrition. So positions that are going to come open, we're going to evaluate all of those very critically again so that we can capture any budget savings in that manner. but we are not interested in letting go any existing staff or riffing any existing staff. We strive to be strategic and thoughtful

112in our next steps addressing this budget deficit and maintaining that climate of culture and trust, which I think is absolutely important moving forward. And we are seeking to continue to operate with openness and transparency throughout this process. but also respecting confidentiality as necessary specific to personnel issues. So when we met with our administrative team on that next slide, we encouraged them again to minimize our current year spending, to minimize the amount of that deficit that we will experience. Again, truly only spending on those needs. reducing spends on conferences, professional development where reasonable and appropriate, and reducing spends on supplies where possible. And we will also use this budget deficit as an opportunity to look at system efficiencies. I know... Budget deficit feels really difficult and unmanageable and can raise concerns and all of those things.

113But we do have efficiencies that we can be looking at. And we're really trying to look at this as an opportunity to create some clarity around some of our spending expectations, some of those on professional development. How are we choosing conferences? Who's attending? How are those costs reimbursed? How are we utilizing attrition? How are we hiring when we aren't looking at those hard to fill positions? How are we hiring on the low end of the salary schedule when possible and appropriate while still getting the best staffing available? Looking overall at our supplies, our foods, our wants versus our needs, our short and our long-term, clearer parameters around spending. and evaluating spending across the system for places to reduce inefficiencies. Any system of our size is going to have inefficiencies. And again, a budget deficit, while

114not what we're ever striving to be navigating, does provide us an opportunity to really look deeply and critically at where our spends are and where we can create some efficiencies. As we look at salaries and personnel, as I said earlier, we will be utilizing attrition wherever possible to create cost savings. We are right now looking at our staffing for next year. We are meeting with the administration, and we are being really thoughtful and strategic about each one of those positions. Any vacated position will be evaluated. As we just shared with you, for example, Mr. Fry is vacating his position. at Central Office of Director of Student Services and Career Readiness. That's an example of a position that we'll be talking about on Wednesday at Cabinet and really looking at how we're utilizing that position and

115what makes the most sense moving forward. Every such position, that's what we're doing to make sure that wherever we can combine, reassess, or eliminate, we will be doing so, but still making sure that we're able to serve the system in the best possible way. Hiring only at the lower end of the salary schedule whenever possible. And if positions are not labeled hard to fill, we will only interview external candidates for those teaching positions with less than five years of experience. And we will sustain that practice moving forward. We do have anticipated retirements, but we also will have movement that we will see throughout the end of the school year and moving into the summer. And again, we'll continue to look at all of those. positions critically and strategically moving forward. Buildings and departments. So we

116have asked all of our buildings and departments to prepare at least a 10% reduction. That is about $2.27 million in reductions. So that gets us of that $4.7 million. about halves about that number, and leaves us with about another $2 million that we'll need to navigate moving forward, assuming everything stays as it currently is. And again, we are hoping not to experience these full reductions, but we are taking note of how those will be challenging and what the impact on students and staff will be. But we really want to move into next year, either entirely not facing a budget deficit or having a very clear plan about how that budget deficit will be very quickly navigated in the future. And we are confident that we're going to be able to do that. We have tasked

117the administration, and we would open to the board and anyone else if there are other areas we should be considering in terms of capturing revenue for the district, other grants that we could and should be exploring and expanding. Again, trying to be thoughtful and resourceful when it comes to those pieces. But that is where we are sitting right now as we are looking to plan for the next school year and what we're anticipating in terms of that budget deficit moving forward. thoughts, comments, questions, feedback, or anything I missed, Mrs. Armstrong, or the rest of our team that was at those meetings as well. When you say buildings and apartments are between at least a 10% reduction, what could that look like? What does that mean? So, well, do you want to talk to that? So

118all of our buildings and individual departments receive what we have labeled as a local budget that it doesn't include the salaries and the benefits is the district maintain those at a district level budgets. So they're given. funds that can be used for professional development, for supplies, for additional pay if they're going to have people attend meetings outside of that. So that what could be classified as some discretionary funds that they have to operate, which it's not all discretionary. You have to have someone to operate that side. We're just asking them to take that look and see. what a 10% reduction in that would look like and indicate which of those are the most critical, that if we don't have to take that 10%, what they would like to have reinstated first if we did have

119to go that avenue. Our administrators did, I think, a really fantastic job of looking at those. Many of them submitted reductions that were over that 10%. And I think really, you know, took a critical look at where we're at and did a fantastic job, I think, of evaluating, again, those needs versus wants. And you will see some of those come forward in a budget amendment. Some of them are already willing and looking at budget reductions this year that they can already make in their budget. So those will be coming forward in the April meeting. We'll talk a little bit about them in March and then they will come for adoption either in April or May. That's good. It's also good to see people avoid reducing existing staff. Correct. And you see places where they're cutting

120teachers and they're cutting programs because of the budget cuts. So it's really cool to see that staff will stay in place despite the budget cuts, despite the deficit. That's pretty sure. And I think what you said about central office staff is important as well. I mean, we're looking at every building and staff and all these buildings. I think it's important. We look there too. Other thoughts, comments, questions. Yeah, just go ahead. Trying to understand the numbers again. So. We require a 7.1% decrease to the overall budget to offset the anticipated deficit for next year. That's anticipated on the reductions that we were able to make this year, but then increases that are going to happen contractually, which brings it back up to, yeah, okay, because 7.1% is like 10 million, is it? You have the

121exact number. I'm going to rely on Ms. Armstrong for the exact numbers, yes. So we're basically going to be back up to a $10 million deficit, even though we... But our funding... Do you want to speak to that? The funding will fluctuate with our tax levy and what we're getting in as assessed values continue to go up. So the levy kind of is set with that in mind. The negotiations of contracts, of course, will have bearing in that. But most of our expenses are salary and benefits. So as we make those reductions in that local budget size, there's that anticipation that we would also be making some of those. concessions, hopefully based on what we'll receive in revenue. So you see some increase. So you see some give and take across both sides. Gotcha. Yeah.

122Okay. And we do have the governor also proposing EBF funding continuing, which also will help us to navigate that. Good question. Very good question. There was another question? Oh, yeah. Just Joanne, when would the first draft of the next year's budget? be done, I guess, approximately once a month? Typically, we would start Usually don't have the first draft of it until July But I am hoping very much sooner. You'll have tentatives I think it will depend on a lot of where negotiations go as we get more of the assumptions of what projects we want to continue Like to be giving these budget updates in these projections for where you're going to see this year These figures and amounts are coming straight from the financial reports that you approved earlier on the consent agenda We'll continue

123to update those But as we solidify initiatives and things that we're moving forward, and we solidify some of the contracts I've already built in the contracts we already know are existing. Of course, the biggest 1 is still being negotiated. So that that gives us a big play area there, but being able to to plug those in, we have a forecast model that I'll be able to give you some better books at those. Thank you other questions on the budget update. Thank you for being patient with us as we walk through that. We thought that might be helpful. And we did bring CFO and PMA here today because we wanted, as we look into funding phase one of the master facility plan, to have a broader understanding of what our funding looks like. And again, that

124it is separate from what we're dealing with in terms of our operational budget and the current budget deficit. So I think this will help to create a deeper level of understanding. So thank you very much for being here with us this evening. Thank you. Good evening, everybody. I'm Ann Noble from Seafolk. Bob and Jackie's changed sides. Thank you. We've had the pleasure of working with the district for. Uh, steep fall on the right side as municipal advisor. As for the most part, we've helped the district refinance outstanding funds and manage the tax levy and tax associated with your bonds taking advantage of that county school facility sales tax to help work through that. But in these recent last couple of years, we've been helping you work through some of the options as you have taken

125on evaluating some facility needs. So, do you want to give me a paper or. I'll try to tell you to advance the slides. So, on slide 3, we're just showing you the district's current. So, you can see that 1st, you're the 1st bar on the left. That's last year that levy is done. The gray bars represent the actual. Um, amount you are levying for your bonds and the yellow bars represent the abatement. That you're doing with your sales tax revenue. So that's how much the sales tax is is taking that burden off the local property tax payers. So you can see, we have 4 more years of those bonds. Before the drop off that that has been planned and intentional where there is an opportunity to layer in. some new garland without impact. On slide

1264, we are showing you the districts statutory borrowing capacity, and this is just going to lead into sort of all the evaluation while the districts available funding options for the facilities. But your statutory borrowing limit is essentially just a percentage of the districts equalizes valuation. And from that, we did not outstanding. So, it changes every year as you make bond payments and as your EAV grows. But right now it's approximately 115 million in the current statutory deadline. There are a lot of different kinds of bonds and we'll be talking to you about some of those today that are applicable to the option. Working cash bonds are 1 of those tools and they're super flexible borrowing tool. The calculation for working cash bar capacity is sort of a subset of the 115Million. And right now that

127comes in at about 78Million for the district. Could I ask a question? Absolutely. I don't understand this page at all, really. There is a lot of information on the slide, and I'm trying to be respectful because I know you guys have a lot of information. What is the key point? The key point here is you cannot borrow more than $115 million worth of bonds without voter approval, except Or bonds that are secured by your sales tax. And we will be talking to you about those types of bonds, because those are outside of that statutory deadline. But that's really the key takeaway here. Anything the voters approve, you can borrow anything you want, basically. The voters give you an open chunk. But without voter approval, the district's debt limit is $115 million, other than whatever we

128can secure with the sales tax. Okay, and we're going to put some contacts behind all of this to show you specifically what it means for you all and our debt. Is 64 million outstanding bonds? Yes. 64 million. Okay. And our debt limit is 1. It's 115 after the 64. Your debt limit is actually about 180 million. We take 180 minus the 64 to get to the 115. Okay. Thank you. Okay. All right. Any other questions? Please do. I have so much data. Trying to get my house brand new. All right, I'm starting on slide 6. we're going to just overview generally the types of bonds that they hold to the district. There are sort of 2 buckets of bonds that school districts can borrow from 1 are called general obligation bonds, which lots of times

129people refer to them as go bonds, but they're geo bonds, general obligation bonds. These are the bonds that are on your left. These are the bonds you have right now, they are general obligation bonds. Okay. Because they're on your left. There are 2 types general obligation box. The ones that are approved by voters and the ones that are not not in reference. Okay. And today we're mostly just going to be talking to you about non referendum options available to you. And then the other bucket of bonds that are not general obligation bonds are bonds that are secured by things that are not part of that separate bond tax rate, that separate bond leg. They are bonds that are secured by all your revenue of the district for the most part and in what we'll be

130talking to you about tonight. They would be secured by the sales tax. Okay. So your bonds secured by your property tax levy and bonds secured by your sales tax. Those are the two buckets we'll be talking about tonight. Okay. All of those bonds are limited to a term of 30 years or less. Statutorily, except for those sales tax funds, actually statutorily go out to 40. You will not hear us. But that is an available option. Any questions on the next slide? All right. On slide seven, we wanted to highlight an aspect of your property tax cap that relates to your bonds. You're familiar with your tax cap as it relates to your operating levy. You have what's called an aggregate extension base, which caps the amount that you can levy for operations. On the debt

131side, you have a separate that went into effect when we were tax capped. And that cap is called your debt service extension base or DSA. It was set at the time that the district was capped. It's very random. Every district's visa is different because it's based on the amount of bonds. And the bond payment you had in place in the year you were tax capped. So it's possible you could have had no bonds in the year you were capped and you would have no debt service extension. Luckily, that is not true for the district. We did have bonds in place and the current debt service extension base is approximately 2 and a half dollars. What that 2 and a half 1,000,000 dollars represents. Is the maximum annual bond payment you can pay? So the principal

132interest in a given year bonds that are not voter. Okay, so a $2.5 million debt service extension base gives you a decent-sized annual payment on a bond that you can issue, for example, for health and safety purposes or other non-referendum bonds. However, most bonds, well, actually all bonds, paid for through a debt service extension base do require a 30-day backdoor petition period. Where we publish a notice and paper and tell the community that we're going to sell that kind of bond. And if they don't want you to do that, they have the option to sign up. And if up to 10% of the voters sign that petition. Then you're not permitted to sell those bonds. Without the exception to that are health, life safety bonds. And I will go into that a little a little

133bit further on the specificity of how that works. But your is a 1 of the constraints that you think about when you're borrowing on a non referendum basis. Health, life safety projects give us. More flexible, what was the 1st sent position rate again? What was the percentage? Yeah, 10% of your registered voters. They signed that petition during the 30 day period. Then then you can't issue the months. Okay. Take you there is health, life, safety is outside of that. So you'll hear us talk about health, life, safety bonds. Alternate revenue funds, which are the sales tax back funds. Do you have this petition process as well? And that percentage is actually 7 and a half. It's a little lower. Thanks so it just requires that you educate the community. You have to tell them. We're

134selling X type of bond. It's not going to affect your tax rate because it's secured by the sales tax would be the example for the 1 type of bond. For another example, it's not going to affect the tax rate because. We're not increasing the bond payment. We're holding the tax rate flat. So it's going to stay where it is. Whatever the back pattern is, obviously, it has to be transparent with the community and explain that ground into that. Questions on that. All right, I'm slightly, we just show you the district's current debt service extension base right around that 2 and a half 1 dollar amount. You don't have any bonds that are subject to that. So this extension base. So, so this, this graph is empty as far as the line. Let's go here. Your

135decent does increase every year with CPI. So that's what this graph is showing him. The data shows projected increases. Over time, if CPI is 1 and a half percent. So it does, it does increase life safety bonds, as I mentioned, are outside of that service extension base. So they are a very, they are the simplest form of bond to sell. All you need are approvals from the state to do so. It means the projects that you are funding have to be for approved life safety. They do require a public hearing, but but other than that, the district. Up to that full statutory government, all you can go all the way up to that 115Million dollars with health by safety bonds with no petition period and just a public hearing. If you wanted to, if you

136have that much in health by safety. And then it's like, time we're just showing your examples of potential health and safety projects. We all issued health and safety bonds. 2 years ago, obviously, those projects are already in the works and I know there's been a lot of discussion on that through the facility. Thanks, Sarah. Well, the good news is in the state of Illinois, lots of tools in the toolbox and it comes to raising capital funds. Bad music, it makes it complicated and confusing, but I think Anne did a great job explaining a good 30,000 foot overview of how it works without dating to the minutia too much. So when it comes to addressing capital needs, besides debt, you have pay-as-you-go budget from your annual revenues. So that would be like if you're running a

137surplus, which we just saw the presentation, you're not running a surplus. So you don't have ongoing surpluses that you contribute and build up additional funds for capital projects. You did that in the past. You had surpluses, and you directed a lot of that towards capital, which meant you didn't have to borrow. The other sources accumulate fund balances that happen over time as surpluses occur. Some of that happened during the COVID years when you got ESSER funding and ESSER funding substituted from other expenditures. So you're able to build up some fund balances. Ultimately the district Transfer about 10M dollars from the operating funds to the capital projects fund, and then use an additional approximately 2M dollars. So 12M dollars of district fund balance has been allocated towards capital. Through this phase 1 worth of capital projects,

138we'll give us a presentation. We'll summarize that as part of the funding sources. 3rd grants, you're always looking for grants. That was part of the budget presentation to, to the extent that grants are available. You want to get as many of those as possible. Unfortunately, it comes to capital. The state has not funded the grant program for let's says over 2 decades. It's probably been 2 and a half decades at this point. And there's no. Plans in sight to do that in fact, the state is you probably following news. Is this going to have a maintenance budget this year where they're not really adding anything to it. So the doubt that they're going to provide funding for capital projects for schools. Fourth are donations from developers as some of those subdivisions that were discussed earlier

139during enrollment projection study talked about some development taking place. Usually there's some impact fees in connection with that. So impact fees are great, gives you some money towards construction, but it's not anything of substance that's going to give you a lot of funding for the capital that you need to do. And then lastly, the last source of funds are the bonds. And already talked about them in the last section, you have the non referendum bonds. Those subject to the and those not life safety, you have referendum bonds and you have an alternate bonds, which are secured by the sales tax. Okay, so we're going to focus now on the non referendum bonds in this presentation. So you have. Well, you have the D-Sub which gives you the ability to borrow on an on-reference basis. As

140Anne mentioned, the D-Sub is a tax cap concept. You then have to go to your authorized statutes to see what type of bond you can do that is restricted by the D-Sub. You know, Park Districts have a D-Sub. Oftentimes community colleges have a D-Sub. Because that comes from a tax cap. But every unit of government has to look at what they're authorized to do under their authorized state statute. So when we look at the school code, The working cash bonds are a type of bond that can be utilized to fund capital projects and that they are restricted to the decent. As they already mentioned, they do have that 10% registered voter threshold for a petition period. Requires a hearing and they're paid from a separate level. By safety bonds do not have that 30 petition

141period. Did you have the hearing? You do have to have the approvals. So, last year. It was last year, we did life safety bonds and we had approvals for that over 22Million dollars, which gave the authority to issue said bonds. And those are also paid from the bottom. Now, lastly, at the ultimate bonds, which have a 7 and a half percent threshold and risk for voters. And a public hearing, and in your case, we pay back for the sales tax fund. You're going to see a couple of options when we look at the alternate bonds you're paid from the sales tax. One, let's say your sales tax revenues every year are $4 million. One option is to borrow, so your annual payment on your bonds is also $4 million. So you can get more out

142of that and pay the debt down sooner. The consequence of that, though, is you do need to pledge an additional revenue source because the law requires you to have a coverage factor on that. So we're going to look at an option where you pledge no other revenue. So you have the coverage factor. And we're going to look at an option where you pledge another revenue, which means you can pay down the debt sooner. So our assumptions are all geo bonds are structured to maintain the same annual payment. So that graph you saw earlier on the bond money, the goal is to keep that payment from going up. So it means really not even factoring in EAB growth at this point, which means over time, if the payment stays the same and EAB grows, the rate

143on the bonds will go down, the tax on the bonds will go down. And then we're assuming the D sub is kept constant as well. And our emission that increases by CPI, but we're holding it constant. So we're trying to be extremely conservative in the model that's been put together for your consideration. And then lastly, for the alternate revenue bonds, we're assuming no growth in sales tax. Over time, sales tax... over a long period of time is going to grow. But sales tax also is a very economically sensitive revenue. So from year to year, it could dip and come back up depending on what the state of the economy is. So we want to be very careful about not being aggressive on assuming growth because a couple of years from now, go to recession, sales

144tax revenues dip. We don't want to place a burden on other funds to pay them. So this next slide here is a summary of the funds. Uh, that are available under 2 different sources and are controlling various are 2 different scenarios. So controlling variables 2 scenarios is. The 1st, 1, we're pledging no other revenue towards repayment of the alternate revenue bonds paid by the sales tax. And the 2nd scenario, we're pledging additional revenue. Towards repayment, the ultimate box, so I'm going to put down the 1st column here. So, what Bob is saying there is not. That we're when he says we're pledging additional revenue on the alternate revenue bonds for the 2nd scenario, the 1, all the way over on the right. What that means is not that the district is. Probably going to have

145to actually use other district revenue to make bond payments. But you do have to pledge another revenue to provide a cushion on the sales tax. So in his example, if the sales tax is $4 million, you have to pledge an additional 25%, an additional million dollars of revenue as cushion just in case sales tax came in under $4 million. So, the bond payment is $4M and sales tax revenue came in at 3.8M. The district would be on the hook to cover the $200,000 shortfall from the other revenue you pledge. That's what's in the 2nd option on the right there. is if sales tax comes in under the current levels, we've assumed no growth, but if it drops below current levels, the district would have to cover the shortfall. Does that make sense? All right, sorry.

146No, good. I'm glad you pointed that out. And what's nice about the analysis is that we're assuming the sales tax as of today, but the bonds you'll see are not issued at 29 and 32. Likely by then, your sales tax revenues will be even higher than what we're showing today, which means there's even just more cushion built into this model. For the Phase 1 projects, you've already secured the $12 million from district funds and $20.8 million from the life safety bonds. So you have $32.8 million already dedicated towards the Phase 1 projects. Now, in order to complete the Phase 1 projects, We're informed that you likely need to obtain more life safety bonds because the life safety projects are the scope of the projects are larger than what was originally contemplated when the bonds were

147issued last year. So that would be the additional 18Million. So we take the 32Million. We already have another sale life safety bonds to get 50Million dollars to complete the phase 1 projects. And then you have the next line there. It says D-7 and or life safety proceeds around $27.8 million. The way we solve for that number is we looked at what's the most you can do on a D-7 bond and fit it within that constraint, assuming a 20-year payback. Well, statutorily, it can go up 30 years. We kept it to 20 years because by keeping it short, you pay back less interest. You also have the ability then to access capital again 20 years down the road versus 30 years down the road. So we thought it was more prudent to keep them to a

14820-year payback. And so you have 27.8, now that could be all DSEP. If you have lots of life safety improvements, you can always substitute and issue less DSEP bonds and issue more life safety bonds, for example. It just depends on the nature of the projects that you and Nexus determine that is best for you to proceed with after you go through what your capital needs are. Then we can once you know that that's when we can go back and tweak this plan to meet the objectives of what you want to do. Our goal right here is to give you an idea of what is available in this model that we've assembled. And then next week we built into a plan another series of our safety bonds of a minimum of eleven and a half million

149dollars to get to this funding amount. You can have more than eleven and a half million, but in order to get to the total funding amount of 141 million you need another eleven and a half million dollars. So I see on top of The 20 million you already did and the 18 million that were contemplating finish phase 1. Then you'd issue in 2029 alternate bonds for roughly 24 and a half million dollars. Now, why 2029? Why not 2027 or 2028? Because the district made that commitment to the voters that it would not use the sales tax or anything other than to abate the previously issued referendum bonds through that year. So that is the year after that commitment has ended. So you're able to obtain about $24.5 million. And then three years later, it would

150be another $27 million. Now, there's something that's set in stone that it has to be three years later. It could be 2030. It could be 2031. Again, this is just an illustration. Our clients issue the bonds, typically you're not going to be spending all of them in a short period of time. So we assume that they're being phased in because you have to have an expectation that you can spend 85% in three years. So that's why we've slotted those alternate bonds to occur three years apart. But depending on how the capital means that you select, that could be tweaked. It could be a year later, it could be a year sooner. This would all be refined depending on how you decide to proceed with it. So then you get two total additional bonds of $108

151million. So this is on top of the $20 million you already sold. Now, one caveat there. It doesn't mean you have $108 million for additional projects. Remember, you have $18 million that we're contemplating that you need just to finish Phase 1. So if you deduct that $18 million from the $108 million, you're down to about $91 million for projects beyond the Phase 1 projects. So when you take everything in the area, phase one projects, phase two projects, including the $12 million that you've contributed from district operating funds, there's roughly $141.5 million available. Now, don't take that number as being a firm number that, hey, two years from now, that number's going to be the exact same number because it's going to fluctuate. Why will it fluctuate? interest rates moving up and down across that number

152of the fuck street because remember we're targeting a payment just like if you target a mortgage payment in your month in your house of budget fifteen hundred dollars a month Well, it might be $1,500 a month today at this level of interest rates. If interest rates are higher six months from now, well, now I've got to look for a smaller house. If interest rates are lower six months from now, now I can look for a bigger house. Same sort of principles at play here. As interest rates move up and down, this $141.5 billion will fluctuate. We've used, in doing that analysis, current market rates plus a 40%. So this is being done over multiple years. So it's highly likely as time goes on. that this number will move up and down. Other reasons it will

153move up and down is that, you know, depending on the timing of your projects, it's going to cause it to move up and down. Okay? And the actual amount of sales tax when you go sell the bonds in 2932, if you were to proceed in that, but that number being different, it will cause this number to fluctuate a bit. Now, when you get to that last couple of rows there, that's where these two scenarios differ. When you pledge no other revenues and that the and you're going to see this graphically here in a moment. When you pledge no other revenues towards repayment of the alternate bonds, the consequence is it takes more years to pay off those alternate bonds. So the final payment with no additional revenues pledged to meet the coverage factor, it means

154you wouldn't pay off the alternate bonds in 2058. If you pledge an additional revenue to provide the coverage factor, those bonds will be paid off 11 years sooner. So you notice the difference in total debt service, one line up. In the first scenario, the total amount of principal interest paid back is $228 million. And the second scenario, the amount of principal interest paid back is $208 million. The delta there, $20 million, is because whether you pledge an additional revenue or not. So it's a pretty big difference there in terms of the amount that's paid back. Now, the pro of... Not pledging additional revenues because that coverage factor you have to have each year that you're not utilizing towards debt service means you have funds remaining of the sales tax that can go towards pay-as-you-go capital.

155So the very last row that you see, estimated annual excess tax revenues, around $820,000 in the first scenario, that's the amount that you would have left over from being in the coverage. So those dollars could go towards other routine annual capital projects outside this capital plan. And the other scenario, there would be no remaining excess. Now, in likelihood, there would be some remaining excess because your sales tax will probably grow over time, and we haven't factored that in. So, as sales tax grow, that will create some excess revenue towards capital profits. It won't be as great as the first scenario. Remember, the first scenario, you're paying back $24 billion in order to get the same amount of funds. So, the next slide. There's a lot of different colors here, so let me go ahead and

156explain these. The gray area in the front, that's your outstanding general obligation-bonded debt service today that you levied for. And the orange-yellish bars represent the portion you made. So that's what Ann showed you earlier. And then, so now looking at the columns, the gray area represents the current outstanding bonds as restructured. We have to restructure them a bit in order to maintain the payment and obtain those funds that we showed you in the prior slide. The blue columns represent those DCEV bonds. So those are the ones that are restricted to the DCEV. So those will be authorized as working cash bonds. Dark, I would say black. The black color is the 2025 health life safety bonds that you've already sold. The lighter green would be the 2026 health life safety bonds. And the darker green

157or teal, that would be the proposed 2028 health life safety bonds. So this is a portion I'd be levied for from... the taxpayers, but you notice that the line stays the same, go out of way of cross-sitting, no increase in annual payment. So then again, as EAD grows, your bond interest tax rate will continue to fall as it has been doing the last few years. So this does not reflect the alternate bonds repaid from the sales tax. This would just be the portion that you levy for. The next slide shows you The the sales cap the bonds repaid for the sales tax so the green line represents your sales tax as it is today You see it's it's straight all across around student negro, you know historically has been increasing every nearly every year The

158blue columns represent the debt service payment on the alternate bonds And you notice the gap between the green line and the blue bars. That's that coverage factor you have to do if you pledge no other revenue. You can't bring the bond payments all the way up to your revenue unless you pledge something else. And that's the difference between the green bar, excuse me, the green line and the blue bars, that's that $820,000 you saw in the summer. So that's what would be left over each year for PaysUGo Capital. But you notice the final year is 2058. You go to the next slide. So it's the same green line, but here you pledge something else. We keep talking about another revenue. What would be the other revenue? Maybe it would be helpful to say that. Typically,

159it's either your O&M revenues, because O&M goes through building maintenance, and or... EVF funds. Those are the two things other schools will pledge to supplement the sales tax dollars to meet that coverage factor. So if you pledge one of those other sources, that would then allow you to take the bond payments up to the green line. So consequently, there is no gap there, so there's no more funds left over for pay-as-you-go capital, but you're paying that off in 2047 instead of 2058. Now, what Anne was talking about earlier, the risk that you have in this scenario is really right at the beginning. Because we're being concerned, assuming no growth in sales tax. So if you have two or three years of growing sales tax after you issue the bonds. And then you go into recession

160and sales tax dips. You're probably still good because you had about two or three years of growth in the sales tax and it dips to a couple hundred thousand dollars in a recession. You're still able to make that bond payment and not use those other funds. The real risk is like, what if you issue these bonds and the very next year you go into recession and your sales tax drop. So instead of being at the $4 billion, it drops to 3.8. That's when you're tapping into that other revenue source to make up your difference. So in summary, With the conservative assumptions, the plan finances an additional $108.7 million for capital projects between now and 2032. But keep in mind, $18 million of that would be the additional life safety bonds to provide the remaining funding

161needed to complete Phase 1. So the net amount for other projects beyond Phase 1 would be about $90 million. There would be no increase in annual bond levy amount and no increase in sales taxes assumed. Maybe one other thing that I would add or just something for you to keep in mind is if Bob sort of hit this thread. Nothing we've shown you in here is an absolute. We could run these scenarios for you 28 different ways. We're just showing you one way to do it. The timing of when you sell the bonds can change. The type of bonds can change. The interest rate assumptions can change. EAB growth assumptions can change. There are a lot of variables that we could tweak here that would change the numbers or the final outcome and obviously the

162interest rates. Will change we know that because we're just guessing. Um, so so this is just meant to give you a general sense. It's by no means. Just trying to give you an idea of the wall size that's available on an on a firm basis. So, if you go through your capital projects. And prioritize things, you can kind of know what you can find and what you cannot find. And then once once we know what those projects are, and the time of those projects, that's when we refine the plan to meet the timing and the needs of those projects. But we didn't want you guys to go through that without this information, you go through your projects and you come up with 160Million or something. Well, you couldn't do that. The wall size is big.

163So, the last slide here is a reminder of if the board chooses to proceed with the next series of life safety bonds to finish the phase 1 projects. This is generally the timeline of what it takes and the key steps in order to issue a life safety bond. Well, if the board decides to proceed, T is when that decision is made, you know, that you decide, yeah, let's go ahead and secure the additional 18M dollars. The president would sign an order calling for that bond hearing that gets published in the paper. Somewhere between 7 to 30 days later, you can hold the hearing. That's like your budget hearing that you do each year tax, let me hearing and then about 3045 days later. You order to approve a resolution to sell said bonds. And then

164you would update your credit rating with one of the rating issues. You're rated by Moody's and by S&P. You only need to use one of those when you sell your bonds at all. And then the bonds could be sold as early as 50 to 65 days after the board decides to proceed, if you decide to go that way. And then the proceeds would be obtained roughly two and a half months beyond that. Now, what is assumed that before you get to team, you say, hey, let's get going, is you have those life safety approvals because you have no authority to sell life safety bonds without those approvals. And ISBE only gives you $10 million back to finish phase one. Well, that's the most we can do in my safety box. We can't do more than

165that. So this all presupposes that you do get a remaining $18 million of approvals back from the state. Any questions on the timeline? Yeah. If you're feeling like the plan is complicated, because it is, and I presented it in a board workshop on Saturday, the plan is much simpler. So the good news is you have lots of moving parts, lots of tools in your toolbox in order to address. And we're not needing to make any immediate decision on any of these pieces right now. Mostly, we just wanted you to have this picture and this understanding of how, first of all, we had been working to fund the Phase 1 projects, what we have available right now in terms of those Phase 1 projects, and what Phase 2 could start to look like, depending on how

166the board decides to move forward. Could you explain again? I probably have had to explain it many times. The sales tax that we have promised to use to pay property taxes. Yes, absolutely. Ms. Armstrong, do you want to explain that? Yep. So when the district took to and was part of this process, when the district asked taxpayers to approve a 1% county sales tax that can only be used for school facilities, they made a promise at that point. They had huge ballooning payments that were due for the Northside campus referendums. And so they made a promise to the community that they would use all those sales tax dollars to abate that debt. So until that debt is paid off, the district has been very conscientious. There was no formal... paper legal documents that said we

167had to do that it was an agreement that we made and so we have honored that agreement and as i said when i usually give this update we've abated at this point over 35 million dollars to our taxpayers since 2013 keeping that debt payment lowest for what we're actually loving against them so as soon as the the referendum debt for north is done we have at that point honored our agreement I mean, there's options to do whatever the board desires at that point. The sales tax can only be used for either baiting debt or for facilities. So it can't go into the ed fund to pay teachers and do those things. It can only be used for capital projects, facilities, or debt service. So this whole study is about how we can use that sales

168tax. To the best use of sales tax and once we've yeah, and sort of the tax rate that you've been levying on those referendum bonds after after the referendum bonds are gone, you can keep that tax rate flat and and borrow some additional money sort of fill it in and take on an additional project. And we will that be without going to referendum. Yeah. You've had that on the slide when when when that paid off we also want to be balanced budget Yeah, yes So they're explaining what can be done without going to referendum as well. Not that we would exercise all that. Yeah, it's good to understand. And the important part to remember is with fund accounting, they're all different checkbooks. So this sales tax can't be used to balance our budget in the

169fund, which is where we're deficit. And the debt bonds that we sell, unless they're working cash, can't be used for that ed fund. These are all primarily what we're addressing is health life safety and capital project bonds. But there is, other than the working cash bonds, you could use those for balancing the budget if you wanted to. Yeah, and the taxes collected in 2020 will be the final payments on those. Not the referendum so the ones approved for a building here north back today. Yes. So that's when 2029 that falls off. Yeah, that's why I'm at the slide. He didn't assume he assumed that a sales tax on until 2020. Because that's when that revenue basically, for example, how come working cash bonds require a 3rd day petition? But let's see if the bonds don't.

170Because life safety improvements are mandated by the state for the health life safety of your students. So. They are deemed to be basically mandatory for the district to do. So they do not require that petition. Where is the working cash on bonds can be used for any capital project and also could be used for operations if you sold them in the right way. So that does require competition because those are not. And ultimately, with the life safety bonds. You're not turning yourself your architect to go out and sell them is B has final say on what you can do in the process of mandating it. They're the ones that say, okay, you can't just go out and do it yourself. Right. Okay. So they're providing a check against your ability to issue a safety that

171by giving you better. Check and determine check and balances now check because we know that Bob with with providing those approvals. What are what does this be looking for? I guess to to approve those. Like, safety bond. You know, if we're looking for that 18, was it 18? Yeah, let me give a better question for Nexus, but they are the life safety code is very narrow in what they'll approve it for those types of projects. And certain things like asbestos removal, like the examples we've had at HVAC. So we fill out those documents. You have to word them very specifically to, to get the approval. Like I had one client that. had difficulty getting approvals because their architect just wasn't wording them correctly. They were saying things like, this HVA sequence is nearing the end

172of its useful life. Well, it has to be at the end of its useful life. It can't be nearing. The code's very specific on that. So, filling them out, wording them correctly is very important to get ISBE approval. But ISBE, there's dialogue with ISBE, like, they'll say, well, you need, this isn't worded quite right, or I need some additional documentation. You know, so there's some back and forth in that process. So it can take as little as, what, six weeks or as much as three or four months, depending on the volume and quality of the request. That is very much the firm name. And I like to refer to it as... By the socks, it's not anything going on. It's replacing. Repairing pavement or concrete that is a tripping hazard or a danger otherwise to

173students. Playground equipment that's dangerous. That somebody might fall, it's, it's, it's things that are truly a risk to. And I don't speak up to have the nexus, but it really come up and add to this preparing for this presentation dialogue. They felt comfortable that the additional 18Million could be obtained. To finish the page. Okay, so I guess my question is more to around how it is is even limit us. I guess it's a good question. You know, because I think I heard you say, you know, they're not going to, we can't ask for maybe the entire you can't do a classroom addition build an early learning center or or the discussion about the early childhood. That's not obviously. So that's how the effort restrictions, like, if you replace it, like, this type of each system,

174replacement of that type of system, you're not going to be more money if you want to switch it out. geothermal or something like that that costs more, but it's doing the same thing. They're only going to approve you to replace what you already have. So part of this is all of our Phase 1 projects that were health, life, safety were already approved. What we're seeing is that $18 million they're referring to is that inflationary costs that the board recertified that these are what our priority went to. are going to cost. So what would be the anticipated process is as we continue to bid these, we will update those figures with ISBE. They're already approved projects. They just have to approve the additional dollars because the project, we've already submitted our architect drawings, all of our

175stuff to say, this is a health life safety need. We've got the approval for it, but we have to ask for more dollars. So we've levied the $20 million that we needed to, that we thought they would cost in the first place, but now we need to update them to today's dollars. And ISBE has told us they want to... really to wait until we know what they're actually going to cost because they don't want you to keep coming and say, well, I think it's going to cost this. I think it's going to cost this. They would like us to see what it's going to cost. And so once we have more of those real numbers is when we can say, okay, this is what we have approval to do. But for the most part, none

176of our projects would be new projects at this point for phase one. And that $18 million is that difference between what we originally sold and what we had. Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much for coming tonight and I hope provided some needed context for the board in a very simple presentation. Thank you, Ann. Thank you, Bob. You are in charge of us. Let's go ahead and take a five minute break. If you need to use the restroom, take some time to stretch and then we'll come back and reconvene. Dave and Alicia, I'm thinking maybe we move special ed updates and strategic plan updates to next month, that we just keep those on the agenda for next month, because I think it's late. Does that feel okay? Yeah, that feels just fine. And I have

177nothing for summer school. And nothing for summer school. I just wanted to clarify You never know what's just gonna come out of my mouth tonight. All right. We'll go ahead and get started. Good evening. I'm Jeff Mangan. I'm a senior executive with Nexus Solutions. And next to me is Hans Knoll, senior project development engineer. And when Ann mentioned that her and Bob have been working together for 20 years, I felt inspired to mention that Hans and I have been working together for 16 years. So isn't that special? So there's a few other folks here at the Nexus I'd like to reintroduce. Lauren Wanner, Senior Client Executive. Rush Schumacher, one of the founders and principals of Nexus, who's in charge of design. And Mike David, also principal and founder of Nexus in charge of business development.

178So with that, I will get things underway in terms of our agenda. We'd like to touch on some of the overall progress with projects within the past month and looking out a couple more months. Secondly, I'd like to address the timeline for polling and with the approval of the questionnaire tonight. That's work that can begin tomorrow. So, that'll turn things over to Hans and Hans is going to describe Perry and the needs that exist there. For further discussion and touch on the master outlook and milestones beyond the next couple of months. And we have questions listed up the question questions and answers listed there, but feel free to stop us at any time if you have one. So I'm trying to get this thing here. So this past month, which well, soon expired the most

179notable. A piece of progress are the bids for the secure entries, which went out last week. Those bids are the RFPs, rather. The bids are due back next month. So we'll be returning with those bids with the intent of beginning construction on a portion of the secure entrances at some of the schools to begin in April and the remainder to begin in June. Design work continues for the roof replacements at Washington and Belvedere High School. Those should be completed by the end of this month. And then ongoing work is taking place in terms of design for HVAC, both here and at Washington. And we'll provide updates as that work continues into next month. interlaced with this beginning next month and in April for further discussions concerning Phase 2. All right. So, general opinion polling. The

180questionnaire was approved tonight. Work will begin, like I said, tomorrow. Phone calls to 400 randomly selected individuals will take place over the next couple of weeks. We'll get those results back on the week of the 9th. Peter Weatherman from Morris Leatherman will then analyze those results. And ready for your bid packs come the end of that week. We'll provide you with that information and then Peter Leatherman will be here on March 16th to present the poll results. Okay, with that, I'll turn things over to Hans. Perfect. Well, thank you. It's good to be here live last time. I think 2 and a half weeks ago. I was on the phone and appreciate your patience with me. At that time, you guys had asked for us to provide a detailed review of the existing condition of

181what was invested in and what was coming potentially come down the road. So. Start out kind of ground us on what what Terry is. It's a 130 year old building was built in 1897. I said a core red area. There was additions in 1954 on the East and West side. Actually the. Southwest Northeast, the buildings kind of keep kitty wampus cardinal directions. It's a multi story building. I'm going to talk about that a little bit on a couple more slides and that's kind of the impetus for some of the compliance that's approved as part of the phase 1. and then there's, you know, your demographer was here. She talks about it. Reiterated this 175 students at that building. There's about 275 that are in boundaries. So. Some of the reasons why the delta there is,

182is the programming that can't be done at that building those students. I ended up going to Washington and something else that we can also any questions on that. Next slide please. All right. So. We talked about the phase 1 projects phase 1 was approved by the more than 20, 24, 6.8Million dollars. What was in that 6.8Million dollars? 1st item is a secure entrance sequence. Just like we're doing at all the other schools. Suffer supplement already has 1. We have a secure entrance sequence there. What goes with that as a main office remodeling this building is a little unique in that we need to move that main entrance to an exterior. Walls take over 1 of the rooms, so it's much more invasive than some of the other buildings that Jeff just said are being designed

183and are out to bid right now. Number 2, 88 compliance doesn't have an elevator. I mentioned. Uh, that it's a kind of this multi level situation where you're going up half stories, going to 1 level of a past story, but another level, due to those 1954 additions. So we want to add elevators at this time. We want to update the restrooms and add a compliance to these restaurants. Number 3, tier 2 remodel this is remodels that have to do with installing the elevators and new stairwells. And I'll get into that in the next slide, but. I want to give you a little bit more background in 2024 architects came through offer 5 tiers of improvements. Tier. 1 was just infrastructure improvements. That's minimal. No models. Tier 2, which is this 1, which is approved. Is

184to do with the models as required and in the adjacent spaces for for installing the elevator and the new stairwell. Tier 3 was a remodel of the entire building with the existing store footage. Tier 4 was taking down going off memory tier 4 was taking down the, the East and West was additions the additions in blue that showed before. Expanding adding classrooms, expanding the gym. That was 248 year for he was done with the entire building replacing it completely. And tier 5 was done with the entire building, replacing it completely adding early childhood. Suffice to say, I go through that just because I want to say at that time, there was a number of options at at. Uh, Perry then tier 2 was what was what was, uh, landed on as included in the space

1851. The last 2 bullets are infrastructure updates, uh, hard access upgrades and some frustration. I should be careful. The frustration is replacing the shingle group on the original building on those 2 flanking additions. That's a flat room. It's not replacing that. It's a call restoration. It's a spray on polyurethane. It's then the life of the existing. So. Placing the shingle, restoring the on the 2 flanking additions. Makes sense. Any questions before I keep moving? As I said, I want to talk about that tier 2. So what you've got on your screens, what is up here. The important takeaway here, areas in color are what we are doing remodeling. There's a lot of area in white. So there's a lot of areas that aren't being touched in this building. Again, the core to this is to

186get 2 elevator shafts in here where they most feasibly get inserted on the existing stairwells. That means we need to rebuild several and 2 new steriles and locations, which are currently. Classroom or other programming, so the remodels that have to happen are to maintain the existing program in the building. To install those elevators, install the new stairwells. Does that make sense any questions. All right, what is not included? So we've estimated 7 to 9Million dollars at a minimum. We need to go into this building in addition to it. This is to bring this building into, like, your other schools. I'll go to these bullet points. Um, installing LED lighting. Sean, the building seeing the districts is already started making improvement, uh, an LED light into other buildings. We're slowly going through that. This building is

187no different. It's called a sprinkler system. Last time I was here, which we, I think you asked where do we expect that? I want to make sure. We're building a sprinkler system. Lincoln and we had have sprinkler system. All of your high school has a partial system. South has no school has a. The system that's that hybrid system that we're going to. I'll take care of as part of phase 1, or that you've got do not have circle system is in. Very California and at Everest. So, as we move forward, proposal, these are major updates, major interior improvements, replaces ceilings. This is the time we wanted to talk about any. More importantly, the state's going to start making. These buildings have a require in the sprint system. You have to do it when you're about

18850% anyways, along with a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, Start planning on anyway, so this is only so different doesn't have a sprinkler system. You recommend considering that. Uh, PA system, this is the, um, the, uh, excuse me, the audio enhancement system standardizing after the district that we talked about that to, um, 2 board meetings ago, starting the investment at 3 of those school districts. Clearly, we want to,

189we want to start trying to roll that out throughout the building and this building. No, no different. No generator at this building modernize the system. I've got a couple slides later on that existing situation. The side talk point what that is is the exterior really has, in my opinion, 3 major components. It's got the brick work. So it's got the border and for all that needs to be maintained. It's got expansion joints. These are caught vertical joints that allow the building to expand and contract. As the building forms and cold pools. And then it's got the, the, uh, see, once they go around the doors, go around the door jams around the windows. All of those need to be maintained. I would say every 4025 to 35 years and needs to be replaced. This building's

190not unique. All your buildings need some amount of the side tuck pointy. Um, but this building's this building has quite a bit of it that is indeed. I'll show you a picture of that. Aging finishes again when we talk about finishes, we're talking about flooring, ceiling, wall, painting case work. That's a couple of pictures that are photo to showing what that building currently has. And I think we can make a case that some, some amount of money should be put into the building to to update the look. Lastly, asbestos that goes along with the finishes. Now the asbestos there, it's all encapsulated. Nobody's at risk, but it's good practice as we do work at all these bullies to eliminate the asbestos on the pipes, eliminate the asbestos where there's an acid or glue, and obviously

191in the fluorine when we want to address that at this point. Aging playground equipment and then the newest ones that looked to wall leak. We're investigating that a little bit more or investing in that right now as we speak. There's a wall week and the 1 of the 1950 work areas. Water central training in, I've got some pictures of that waters, uh, waters coming through on the outside. Um, you can obviously address that. We've got, uh, we've got a team looking at that right now. We'll have more information on that here in the next week or 2. Any sorry go back pause there. I went through a lot any questions comments All right, I've got two slides. I want to do a quick photo tour We'll go clockwise around here starting on the very left

192side. This is a picture of your HVAC units up in the attic. You can see that that's the wood truss system in this building. You've got cooling units up there that serve each room. A little bit like, not exactly, but a little bit like a hotel. All of those classrooms have little cooling units, individual cooling units on it. And this is what provides that cooling up there in the attic. And it ends up overheating in the summer. When you need cooling the most, the attic is very hot. There's some ways to alleviate that, but it's kind of an existing condition. Going around the horn, if you've made an investment in the electrical system at this building, it's not. It's relatively new, but there are still, I think there's five electrical panels at this building that

193are 1960s, 70s vintage that are well on past their life that seem to be replaced. Keep it going. This is one of your classrooms. Again, this is asbestos tile there. You can see some of those cooling units. Going around the lower right corner, that's a unit ventilator, vertical unit ventilator that serves a couple of classrooms have those. In all your other buildings where you have your ventilators as part of phase 2, we're going to propose to replace those. I'm already at at South middle school where we're doing a upgrade. We're looking to replace those. You know, is it allowed in the room that got a motor in them? They don't do de, identify very well. So best practices we're building a new school. We're going to a traditional overhead air system. We're not doing those

194anymore. This is something we could we look to update at this building. We were allowed to. That lower middle picture, kind of tough to see. I talked about the tuck pointing. That's actually on the inside of the attic. You've got some effervescence coming through. You've got some really bad grout and mortar joints there that need some TLC. And then the last picture here is some galvanized piping. It's a little tough to see, but in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, galvanized piping was installed for off-building. It's very common. The reason why we want to replace that galvanized piping is the zinc coating starts to erode away after 20 to 40 years. What happens then, it rusts, it corrodes from the inside. You end up getting pitting in there, you end up getting weak points, particularly at the

195joints, at the elbows, and you're at risk of... Catastrophic failure of that plate also that corrosion goes down the line. It ends up at the end of that toilet flush valves. I hear no flash bells at 6. Causes a lot of maintenance headaches, so we want to alleviate that again. It's difficult when it's behind brick walls, but when it's exposed as we do additional work at this building. It's it's it's a good practice to take it down and replace it with either copper or any questions on that slide. Last slide here again, just trying to give you a little bit of flavor of the building. If you're not familiar with it again, showing some of that aging finishes. I mean, it's got really cool character, but but I think I think anybody would agree that

196this this building. As we go through, it's due for some update again, placement, carpeting. Finishing the wood floor and some painting updating the ceiling tile, replacing some of the cabinet. Uh, cabinet case work along the 6. So, there's an opportunity for improvement in the school. Any questions on this 1? All right, the last 1 here is that recent roof failure. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on it, but I do want to bring it to your attention on the very, very right slide. That's a little tough to see, but that's some of that water that's coming recently. There's a picture showing the damage that the title in there. And then on the exterior, that same wall where that downspouts have got a lot of mortar and joint work that really needs

197to be solved. And I believe it's a roof to wall connection. But, you know, we're still looking at investigating the root cause of that, but that's got to be taken care of questions. All right wrapping up. This is this is really what we want to kind of outline here. I said, this is a 6.8Million dollars has been earmarked to this building. We said potentially adding investment of 7 to 9Million. So we're talking about. 14 to 16Million in this building. That can easily justify. So this board, this administration, well. Dollars and cents aren't the only thing this is what I wanted, but we want to come to you to understand the dollars and cents portion of it. You make that investment of 14 to 16Million. There's still some limitation to this building. There's an undersized June.

198There's no kitchen right? And what that means is the limits, the amount of food options that those students have. There's undersized site and really what that goes to is limited site circulation that playgrounds too close to the road and insufficient parking. So those are items that. You know, we haven't even addressed as part of this accident can be addressed. But those are those are those are above and beyond the, uh, the, uh, 14 to 16 really good total. Does that make sense? Any questions. Out of curiosity, how much was the tier 5 plan back in the day? Gosh, I would say something, but I'd be wrong. I believe it was. That tier 5 had the early childhood edition on it. I think it was 30Million plus. I remember right? Was there I have to go

199back and look. Yeah. Was that. What was tier 4 was that tearing it down and tier 4 B was tearing it down and building. Um, but it was, it was not the same building. Was that any classrooms? It was condition kitchen and added. I think that was the 28 million. Again, I hesitate to even say that I have to go back to that report. It's been. A couple of months that I apologize any other comments questions concerns. I hope that again, I hope that I went through that pretty quickly that those late here. I really wanted to, I think, highlight the infrastructure needs that that building has highlight again. What what the board and the school has committed to being currently we're looking to start that 6.8Million at the end of spring, meaning start design

200on that. So. Our team's focused on, as Jeff had said, on this building and Washington design. Shortly after that, we're going to get going on the south, right on the heels of that. We'll start doing the interior design. And Scott, we can send to the board all those tier options. We do have those saved. Again, they were in. Old dollars, so they haven't been reassessed, but we can send that to you. We should have all those tiered options. Those dollars were 3 years old. I'm not 3, 4 years old. So I found an old presentation, but it had the various tiers. The new combined period and early childhood building on the new site would be 40.2M to 46.3M. What do you think it would cost to tear down and build it back to the same

201capacity? Tear down and back to the same with the existing square footage. Yeah, it's right now. It's about 30,000 square foot. Well, we've got, we've got this build up here. We think. The exact same building would be roughly 17 and a half to 18 and a half million dollars. But I, I, I'm using that as a, just kind of an apples to apples. Because if you did that, I think you, I think everybody strongly considered to provide the right size. Jim would provide a. In case you can be paralyzed and add a classroom so you can make it a 2 true 2 session school, or have some of the special education and so the answer a program. So. It's not really apples and apples when we start talking about what. What a new school cost.

202We can update those numbers for sure, yeah. And so you're talking like $15 million to do these updates that are needed. How long, like if we said do that, how long would it take? I mean, could you do that in one summer? I mean, we're going to have to shut down the school and redo it and displace kids until they can come back. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, this is going to be a base of one. I mean, already the $6.8 million is going to be a very evasive construction. Hoping we can we have to start design once we get designed on, we get about 2550% we started doing a check with our construction team and we started doing reality check to see. Can we do this work in 1 summer? Or is this going to take

203some phasing to it? So we're not quite there yet right now. We think we can do it in 1 summer, but we'll keep reevaluating and we'll get back with the admin team. The whole thing is definitely going to take 2 summers of that. And then... So like three years to get it, to spend that first $15 million just to get it to where it needs to be. So, and then the replacement value, or the approximate replacement, just tear it down and build a new facility, similar size, is $18 million. And how long would that take? Probably the same time it would to renovate it. Two years, yeah. And keep in mind, again, I'm trying to do a building-to-building comparison. No, I understand that. I want to make sure that wouldn't be the cost of building

204a new one. It would be a little bit more because we'd have some civil work in there. That would be required. There'd probably be some utility updates. So I don't want to, they didn't want to mix some of that. So $15 million to fix it and $20 to $25 to replace it? Not that much. Not that much. $20. $20 to replace it. Yeah. Okay. In about the same time frame to get the work done. But you're going to displace the kids. Either way, though, it sounds like it. Remodel, they would be there. Kind of, I mean, he thought you get phase 1 done in the summertime. Okay. We're trying to just where if you tear down rebuilding, you're displacing them for 2 years. Is it worth it to try to get a better understanding of

205a of a rebuild scenario? I mean, you guys are asking the questions and I mean, it. Does that, when you, you're just kind of throwing out numbers and I know you're just based on your wisdom and your intuition and your knowledge and like, would that be like a similar two-story building? Yeah. Yeah, because we don't have the footprint probably on the property to do a one-story with the same capacity. Would there be a kitchen in there? No. No kitchen. Oh, so it's, so you're talking just the same, like the same. Same square footage. Just everything is new. Just the building is wiped out and built. If you want us to look at what, I mean, that's why I have to talk to the development team and say, okay, you want us to put a number

206to a new building. Are we talking, you know, full size show? Is that a full size show in the two stations? Typical elementary school. Do you want anything? Do we want a kitchen in there? Do we want some added parking? Do we want to offer some parking? Do we want to consider buying some houses in that area so we can really do it right? Because we're already on a postage stamp. I don't know that you're going to get it. Parking in there, we do want to really rethink the playground area to get that playground across the street. We want to find some room for to maintain the, the, the, the kickball and the play field itself and reduce some of the hardscape playground or increase the hardscape playground for that matter. There's a lot that

207will go into that and give you the right number. We can start the full parking. Yeah. I mean, equity. Yeah. Equity for students across the district would be like a starting point. But I'm not saying I'm not requesting that. But that's like a starting point to understand what it would take. Well, yeah, when you're looking at this and it's 15 million versus 18 to 20 million, I mean, it's about the same to me. Right. But if you want to build that same school. But then you need a little bit more to get the equity, to get equitable school amenities. Interesting thoughts. Well, like I said, I hope we're able to leave you with an understanding of what, you know, is in that phase one, what's been committed and what potentially should and could be coming.

208Anything else? Do you want us to come back with more information about other options? Good question. And you can think about that. And you can certainly let me know if there's some. We'll be doing the board update. And as you have feedback, let us know as we approach this March board meeting. We can certainly talk to Nexus if you want to see some other ideas before. Well, and I think maybe before we look at proceeding with this Well, and would we potentially ask the community to, do I look over in that side? Do we ask the community like what their thoughts are on, I mean, is it the building that they love? But everything I'm hearing, it sounds like it's the people they love, not necessarily the building. So if it was a different building

209in the same location, is that, I don't know, is that something people are interested in? I'd be careful going down this road of a new building there unless you're talking about buying some additional land. It's going to be tough to build a, well, we could build another three-spare building. But you would want to build a one-story building. I mean, that is for an elementary school. You really, and you don't have a big enough footprint on that. I mean, is that accurate, Hans? I'm more concerned about the playground. The playground. Yeah, I mean, build two and three-story buildings for elementary. Degress and elevators and stairs aren't best for young kids, but if you put the youngest kids on the first floor, I'm more concerned that that's the appropriate square footage for anything more than a one

210and a half section suite. And I'm just going off of your sheet. That slide right there gives me like, oh, well, approximate replacement value versus what we're going to need to do. I guess, yeah, there's a lot to think about there. And it's a can of worms. I mean, it might be 8 million once you get in there. That's how old stuff is. It's a tiny school right up. We definitely want to be equitable for those kids. We want to make sure that they have everything that they need. Yeah, but it's right at the intersection of, it's right like at the nucleus and the intersection of all the different serving boundaries too. Makes it a little bit difficult to swallow building a new small building again. Thank you. Are we going to do the last

211slides? We're just not. We're going to have to do the last slides. Do we want to do the last slides, you guys? There's a few more slides. I think there may have been a couple more slides left in your presentation. We stumped you. We stumped you on some questions. It doesn't work like that. We're out. We're out. Let's go. I think it's good. In all honesty, it's getting late. With you. With you. These are milestones. Really, it's just the milestones. We really don't worry about it. Just wanted to say that we've been working with the team. We've got a plan for all your board. You don't need to go into some detail, but we've got a plan for each board meeting special board meeting for the next 5 months. And this will evolve as we

212can leave unless you have any questions. I just I guess what are the next steps we're doing from here. What about the poll? Well, I mean, so we will, tomorrow we will start the polling, and then at the March 16th board meeting, we'll have the results. Right now, that's what is on the agenda. I mean, that is, we would look at the results of the poll, which is, again, going to have not only information about Perry, but it's going to have information about the other Phase 1 projects as well. And then I think the board... needs to decide what other information they need and how you want to proceed. But we are on a tight timeline because if we're going to move forward with these projects at Perry, we need to move forward with these

213projects at Perry so they can begin the design process. And if we're looking at not moving forward with these projects at Perry and we're looking at a potential Perry closure, we absolutely need to look at moving through that process very quickly. So if we want to do a lot of additional exploration of other options, which is absolutely valid, we would need to really bring that information to the board quickly and perhaps engage in some of those special board meetings in order to make sure the board had the information that they needed. to feel comfortable with those next steps. So what I will do is, again, send communication out, get the polling started, and then I would just ask you, board members, to share with me what additional information you need at that March board meeting

214so that you feel comfortable you have the information you need regarding Perry or what those next steps need to be. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. You know, I do want to make sure you have absolutely everything you need. How long will it take to design or do you design for Perry? For what's been approved or for potentially the $15 million? Potentially the $15 million. Oh, typically you want to give something like that a six month runway. Any questions for Hans or for Jeff? Okay, I think we know what we have to do. So give Dr. Shug feedback, your feedback and what you'd like to see, hear, inquire about so she and her team can start working on that, getting us answers, if you will, put together. So that way we can discuss it soon

215and kind of figure out the path forward, if you will. Any questions you have or feel like you need information for, really, really important to get back to me as soon as possible so I can make sure that you have what you need. Okay. Then we would move into administrative reports. We are going to abbreviate those administrative reports. I will give you a longer superintendent's comments next month. We'll get all our strategic plan updates next month. Alicia is going to give you a full special education department update next month. Summer school programming updates. I think you can probably get the information you need out of that report. Here you're also going to see your six-day enrollment counts. And department highlights. Any questions on any of those admin reports? And again, we'll come back next month

216with some more information on all those pieces. Having no questions on those. 9.51. I turn to you, Mr. Herrera, that our administrative reports are concluded. Okay. Administrative reports and superintendent comments. And superintendent comments. I promise more comments next month. Lots of good things happened this month, and I don't want you to lose sight of that. In fact, we had Congressman Mahood visited this morning, so that was... Really nice to have him come make a site visit today as well. But I'll tell you all about it next month. Very good. Any questions for Dr. Shug? Okay. Seeing none, do we have a motion to adjourn? I move. Okay. I second. Okay. Member Mueller made the motion, and Member Young seconded the motion to adjourn the meeting. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed

217say nay. Okay.