001Mr. Cerrone? Here. Dr. Martin? Here. Dr. Murillo? Here. Dr. Polak? Here. Ms. Robinson? Ms. See? Here. Ms. Wenma? Here. And everybody stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, please. To the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic, which stands one nation under God, and to the people of Virginia, which does our honor. Is there somebody online? Is it supposed to be brandy? Yeah. Can we mute it till we have it? Okay, perfect. So we'll, we'll unmute it when it's ready. Perfect. You'll let us. Thank you all. Yeah, thank you. All right. Um, well, we're moving right into some action items here. We got 4.1. Uh, approval of district administrator contracts. Can I have a motion please? I make a motion to approve the district administrator contracts as discussed and presented. Second. Any
002discussion? No? Did you? Ms. Winman? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. With that, we're excited to welcome some new individuals to positions in our district. We're going to have Dr. Marquesa Mitchell share with us a bit about our new team members. Thank you, Dr. Kilgadi. And returning. Good evening, Board President Cerrone, members of the Board of Education, and Superintendent Dr. Kilgati. This evening, I am excited to share with you two district administrators for your approval. The first one is no stranger to us. Our new Director of Operations will be Andre Shennessy. Did I say that right, Andre? Shanzi. Shanzi, okay. Andre is exceptionally well qualified to serve as director of operations for Oswego School District due to his 25 years of dedicated service to the
003district, extensive operational expertise, strong leadership abilities, and deep institutional knowledge. Over the past year, he successfully served as interim director of operations while simultaneously maintaining his responsibilities as assistant director. effectively overseeing daily operations, coordinating district wide initiatives and ensuring continuity across facilities and maintenance functions without disruption. His ability to lead during a transitional period demonstrated his professionalism, problem-solving skills, and commitment to operational excellence. Andre has earned the trust and respect of staff through his collaborative leadership style, hands-on approach, and consistent accountability. His proven track record, operational leadership, and long-standing dedication to the district make him the strongest candidate to successfully lead the operations department and continue supporting the district's mission. Please join me in congratulating Andre on his new role. Our second district administrator, I would like to introduce our candidate for general counsel, Dr.
004Judith Zito Nash. Dr. Zito Nash is exceptionally well qualified to serve as general counsel for our district. Her distinguished career reflects a consistent commitment to educational excellence, legal compliance, ethical leadership, and organizational effectiveness. Few candidates possess the depth of experience she brings through her combined service as a educational leader. labor relations executive and human resources administrator her proven success leading investigations advising on employee and student matters supporting collective bargaining agreements managing compliance obligations and guiding organizational decisions makes her um the prime candidate for this particular role. Dr. Zito Nash's unique blend of legal expertise, educational experience, and executive leadership positions her to effectively support the district's mission while ensuring compliance, transparency, and sound governance. For these reasons, she is the strongest candidate to serve as general counsel for School District 308. Please join me in
005welcoming Dr. Judith Zito Nash. welcome thank you dr mitchell you're welcome and uh we've had uh quite a few uh legal expenses that were uh yes so this position is um it's financially prudent yes it's definitely financially prudent it allows us to be able to strengthen our in-house ability to support legal challenges that may come in um and to really be able to provide on-site support that we have not had before for a district of this large um i actually spoke with the superintendent of manuka which is a much smaller district and they've had legal counsel there and they said it's really incredibly much more efficient for the district to be able to have this kind of support in the work and to have meant to be able to facilitate with this level of schooling
006uh expertise is awesome welcome thank you appreciate it Moving on to 4.2 action item, approval of building administrator contracts. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the building administrator contracts as discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? Ms. Robinson? Dr. Polak? Yes. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. And with that, we are excited and thrilled to welcome some wonderful new school-based administrators to our district. I want to invite Dr. Mitchell to speak to their candidacy and just their tenure of service. Thank you, Dr. Kilgati. This evening, I am bringing four building administrators for your approval. The first one is Sarah Bell, and Sarah Bell is the recommended candidate for assistant principal at Bett Narsik Junior High School. Sarah. Sarah emerged as the
007strongest candidate for the assistant principal position at Bednarcic based on her performance throughout the interview process and the feedback from the selection committee. With seven years of experience within the district, she brings a strong understanding of the school community, district systems, and the needs of student staff and families. Sarah demonstrated exceptional communication skills, professionalism, sound judgment, and the ability to effectively manage challenging parent interactions. crisis situations and daily school operations committee members were particularly impressed by her practical problem-solving approach and her collaborative leadership style her combination of experience leadership leadership potential relationship building skills and institutional knowledge positions her to transition seamlessly into the role and make an immediate positive impact on the bednarcic school community please join me in congratulating sarah on her new role Next, we have our own Brian Hesick as the
008recommended candidate for assistant principal of operations at Oswego East High School. Brian demonstrates the precise balance of operational insight and student-centered disciplinary leadership essential for this critical role. He has proven his ability to drive meaningful systems change with a relational approach that mirrors the strict standards of SD308. His deep-rooted expertise in restorative practices, emergency protocols, and facility management directly supports our overarching district mission and his explicit commitment to cultivating safe supportive environments makes him an invaluable addition to the oe leadership team please join me in congratulating brian on his new role next we have rachel lane as a recommended candidate for assistant principal at southberry elementary school okay hi rachel Rachel brings more than 20 years of experience in education, having served as a classroom teacher in first, third, fifth, and sixth grade, as well
009as a reading specialist. She is currently serving as the assistant principal of a pre-K first grade building and has been leading the school independently since the principal resigned in December. In her many varied roles, Rachel has played an integral part of curriculum development, data analysis to drive instructional decisions. in reducing chronic absenteeism, staff evaluation, student discipline, and providing professional development aligned to school improvement goals. She has also built strong relationships with students, staff, parents, and the broader school community. Rachel's breadth of experience, proven leadership, and ability to successfully manage a school make her a highly qualified candidate for this position. Please join me in welcoming Rachel to SD308. And last, but certainly not least, Dr. Lakita McKinney is the recommended candidate for the principal of Thompson Junior High School. Lakita brings more than two decades
010of educational experience that includes service as a teacher, principal, chief administrative officer, district administrator, executive leadership director, educational consultant, and most recently, managing director of networks for leading educators. Throughout the interview process, she distinguished herself through her deep commitment to student success, extensive leadership expertise, and ability to build authentic, trusting relationships with students, staff, and families. Lakita demonstrated a student-centered leadership philosophy, strong accountability, and high expectations, and a balanced approach that combines relationship building with strategic planning and operational effectiveness. Her experience leading a turnaround school, coaching principals and superintendents, and developing positive school cultures aligns directly with the needs of the position and positions her to lead with clarity, purpose, and impact. Please join me in welcoming Dr. McKinney to School District 308. That concludes my report. Thank you, Dr. Mitchell. And really, I want
011to do two things. I want to thank your committees, your hiring committees that you've led. Really, the process of hiring, vetting, surveys. I want to thank our leaders, our principals for their work, for our executive directors for their work. And then also for our community members who joined this process, whether it was for district-level positions and or for positions that were in our schools. It's so important. you really see the power of that collaborative work coming together and i want to thank you dr mitchell for leading that and i want to thank our principals for their leadership um this is an exciting time to join 308 and we are we are thrilled to have you all on the team i'm also noticed in the audience at a recent town hall meeting we had mr bauman
012who served for many years in the district and so i know you're here in the audience and who's a retired member of our our team here and so thank you for your leadership over the years i know your mentorship has meant a lot to our team so i just want to acknowledge that it always takes a family and it takes a village to make things work and so so i know thank you of course all right now 4.3 renewal of 2026-27 district administrator administrator contract uh can i have a motion i make a motion to approve the renewal of the 2026-2027 district administrator contracts as discussed and presented second missy aye dr murillo Aye. Ms. Wendlandt? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Move on to our presentations for the night. 5.1
013is our college and career update. This is such an exciting part of our work this year, and I'm really grateful to have members of our team joining us, and I'm going to invite Dr. Kincaid to open up our presentation. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you, Dr. Kagade. Tonight, I would like to welcome both Ben Owen, he is our Director of College and Career Readiness, and Kate Lippold, who is our Assistant Principal of Student Services at Oswego High School. They have been feverishly working on a variety of new initiatives that are innately connected to our strategic plan. So without further ado, I'd like to turn it over to them to provide our yearly update. I'm Ben Owen. I'm the Director of Career and College Readiness for the district. We're really excited to be here
014tonight to really just provide a glimpse into a lot of the future readiness work that's taking place in the district over the last year, celebrate some of those things, talk about the experiences that our staff and students had, and then really provide a little bit of a glimpse into the future. So as Dr. Kincaid mentioned, as we kind of go throughout this, all of this is embedded within the strategic plan priority one, that future ready focus. So we'll have transition slides and kind of organize it based on that to pull those strategic plan objectives directly in. And then we'll provide a little bit further glimpse into the work that's taking place this year. All right. As Dr. Kincaid mentioned, I'm Kate Lippold, Assistant Principal of Student Services at OHS. This is all these efforts. really
015from the the lens of the school have been very meaningful for us in terms of connecting our students with what comes next so just a little overview regarding the pace framework again that's the post-secondary and career ready uh career expectations framework that is intended to be implemented with grades 6 through 12. certainly at the high school we're focused on 9 through 12 but this year we're really excited to roll that work that intentional work into our sixth grade and then also connect it with our our families and our parents um in the ways that they are able to interact with their student plan. So just wanted to touch on a few highlights related to our PACE framework. A lot of the work this year was kind of foundational in making sure that our buildings, in
016terms of administrators, but also teachers, understood what the PACE framework was, and then looked at what ways we were already implementing the components of the PACE framework. within our buildings but also what was missing so taking a look at kind of like a gap analysis what do we need to do different or better or more of in order to be more meaningful with our students in creating plans for whatever comes next whether that's college or career So we did have, starting in the summer, we did develop some activities, a scope and sequence, especially for our 6th through 12th grade students, things that they were going to be intended to know and do by the end of the year. As we rolled those things out, of course, you find out, like, what's working, what's not. We
017bit off. think a little bit more than we could chew and that's okay. So as we look forward into next year, continuing to analyze where those gaps are, where those needs are, but also where we can kind of slow things down a little bit and share some ownership, not just in student services, but in our departments. This isn't just about what counselors are doing with students. It's not just about what's happening in our CTE classrooms, but it's also what's happening in every curricular department in the building. The next focus area again is a legislative requirement that came from the state similar to the PACE framework but provides tremendous opportunities for our students. So this was really grounded in that but we're going to look at the college and career pathway endorsements. When we talk about
018college and career pathway endorsements and I think I had shared this with the Board of Education previously that's kind of the gold standard of where we would like to reach with our pathways for students whenever possible. There are some restrictions or some barriers that make it difficult because there's a specific requirements that not all of our programs currently have or may not be able to attain such as like a certain number of dual credit hours or early college credit hours but we're using that as the model for all the work we're doing in the district as we're doing intentional course sequencing developing these pathways with intentionality for our students so in terms of the college and career pathway endorsement highlights for this year Last summer heading into the school year, we did apply for and
019receive approval from the Illinois State Board of Education for the district's first two college and career pathway endorsements. Those are both in human and public services, according to how the state groups that career field. And those were in elementary and secondary education and early childhood education. So the education focus is often the starting point for many districts because we have a lot of those resources and that expertise in-house. So we're using that to kind of create a model that can be replicated across other areas as we look to expand moving forward. To support that work this year, we were fortunate to be able to receive the Ed Pathways grant from the state of Illinois, which is a three-year grant that provides hundreds of thousands of dollars to the district to support the development of those
020pathways, to introduce new dual credit, to update resources and other things that are needed. So we've began the implementation of those pathways and have started working with that grant to kind of enhance those. those classes or the courses that fall within that course sequence. One big call out that we're really proud of, in a short amount of time, we were able to meet the requirements and expand the dual credit opportunities within that pathway. So prior to last school year, we did not have any dual credit. We did have some articulated credit in our early childhood courses. But this year we did introduce, we received approval last year going into this year. We ran EDU 200 for the first time at both high schools this year. And we have enrollment and we'll be running EDU 202
021in partnership or collaboration with Waubonsee next school year. So two new dual credit offerings for our students. You're saying that prior to last year, there was none? In the education pathways, we had articulated credit with some of the courses, which can still result. But dual credit is a more direct alignment and is more transferable for students. Great. Thank you. For everybody else, articulated. Great. Yep. Can you explain? Yeah. So articulated credit is an agreement through us. It's a regional agreement through Valleys, our regional employment for education for employment. It is an agreement with the community college that if a student takes a course here and then attends the community college, they will then recognize those hours on the student's transcript. So if a student takes an early childhood class, for example, here, attends Waubonsee Community
022College, after they have attendance, they will then recognize and place those courses on the transcript. But if a student does not attend Waubonsee, it is not transferable to other education institutions without that attendance at Waubonsee. So, and then the last couple things here just related to the college and career pathway endorsements. As I mentioned, we're creating that model that is going to be able to be replicated. So there has been a lot of intentional course sequencing taking place. We're really looking at our career and technical education courses that we're offering, saying if a student comes to us, how can we help them at a younger age when they're making course selections as early as eighth grade going into freshman year, say, I have an interest in this area based on the activities they're doing in
023the PACE framework. through schoolings, what would a course sequence look like for me? So we've been really intentional and we're developing those pathways where if a student says I'm interested in the trades, specifically construction, they can select and it'll pre-populate a four-year course sequence for them in a variety of different areas, which we'll touch on a little bit later. And then, as we mentioned, this work doesn't just start in high school. So there's been some junior high elective work that's taken place, led by John Francis and others within the district. There's been a lot of intentionality with just the partnership there to make sure that we are focusing on that vertical articulation in what our students are experiencing at the junior high level moving forward will really align with and provide them a glimpse into
024those pathways that they'll be able to experience at the high school level. All right, so we're going to talk about school links, which I think. maybe we feel is one of the more exciting aspects of our work this year related to college and career readiness. So approximately a year ago, we brought to the board a proposal to implement School Links as a college and career readiness platform. In the past, we had used Naviance and maybe not to its fullest extent, and we weren't really seeing the same returns that we would want out of a platform. We brought in School Links. We have been implementing School Links beginning last summer, actually. and have rolled it out to all of our students sixth grade through 12th grade, as well as all of our families sixth grade through
02512th grade. School Links has been phenomenally received among our school communities. We have exceptional levels of engagement, and we'll show some data related to that. But Ben had mentioned when we look at that PACE framework. a lot of the things in that framework that we weren't doing in classrooms already are activities that we're able to use School Links to deliver to students. So that includes things like career interest inventories, college searching. We are using School Links for college applications almost exclusively, so it connects directly to the Common App. Teachers are able to do their recommendations through School Links. we've gathered all sorts of information about our students to share with our teachers and that has yielded some really fun opportunities for students that connect what's happening in the classroom with the kinds of things that
026they're interested in for their futures So again, as I mentioned, we've included parents and guardians. Every parent and guardian, sixth through 12th grade, has an account as long as they have an email address with the district. We hosted some parent seminars related to our college and career fair this spring, and we had a lot of turnout at that parent session. So that was exciting. We'll talk more about that college and career fair. But parents then are able to follow along with their students' plans. As we look forward into next school year, our next phase with School Links is we are going to be using this as our course selection tool. Right now, students use PowerSchool to select courses. idea is they're just picking courses year to year. What we really want students doing is making
027that meaningful plan align to their interests, align to their abilities. School Links gives us that platform to create multi-year plans for their courses. So we will be rolling that out to our students next year. And again, teachers will still be making recommendations for courses, but it gives parents much more transparency in terms of what their kids are planning and can help. rich rich in those really relationships with counselors and those conversations about what students do next and just to reinforce i know kate mentioned this um The School Links platform, when we presented the recommendation following the vendor review last year, one thing that we really focused on was how comprehensive the platform is. This year was really focused on implementation. It's a multi-year rollout for a platform of this nature, and School Links has exceeded
028our expectations in terms of what it is able to provide our students. It is truly a single comprehensive platform for college and career, regardless of what students' paths are. we are able to support them in finding those next steps through the various activities and assessments they can take, but also to plan for those next steps or for students who maybe aren't pursuing higher education and they want to enter the workforce. There's opportunities to engage in job boards and find opportunities and things also through the School Links Network. So I wanted to reinforce just how comprehensive it is and how it really, regardless of future plans, meets the needs of students. And then calling out. We talked about some data. So we had a lot of qualitative information there. I wanted to bring a few quantitative
029things just to kind of show the success that happened this year. As I mentioned, this year was focused on implementation, getting our students in grade 6-12 into the program, able to navigate it, and then seeing an increase in usage. Historically, in our previous platform, it was underutilized. That's one of the reasons that we went to vendor review, was finding something that we really could ensure that we could... meet the needs of students and justify the time and the resources that are invested in that. So here the implementation report card that you see, this was a mid-year report that School Links provided us. The first line there shows student activation rate. Our score at the time was 89%, meaning 89% of our students midway through the year had been onboarding and engaged. And for districts of
030our size, School Links indicated that a benchmark or where other districts were performing was at 82%. So they recognized us for exceeding that by 7% at that point. And then the platform usage just a couple months later is what's kind of outlined in the green circles at the bottom. You can see by the middle of second semester, we were into that 94 to 96% range. Our School Link success manager was on site for a day of differentiated training for counselors and other stakeholders and provided recognition. She said she works with 30 accounts and we were in the top. three for usage of all of her accounts this year. And she said that is a tremendous win for year one implementation. So And then just a final statistic, the two blue rectangles off to the right-hand
031side, that just is a quick glimpse from a couple weeks ago as we ended the school year of the number of logins we've had into the platform. So we've had 9,066 unique student logins, so just over 9,000 different students in grades 6 through 12, and almost 81,000, 80,500 total logins from our students since the middle of first semester when we were implemented through the end of the school year. Huge huge thing like this is I don't know the exact number because we don't have access to the data but like approaching double digits multiplier times what we were in in our previous platform. So big win for us. And as we were doing training, it's always interesting to see when you see something that kids like. We were doing training, kids were not in attendance that
032day, our students were off. And as we're sitting there real time, they were calling out like, this student is engaging in the college application manager. This student just completed the assessment because there's a newsfeed. So really neat to see the students engaging in the platform, even when they have a day off of school. because they see the value in how it's helping them plan moving forward. When you say there's a news feed, essentially that translates into for counselors or for who they're getting storylines that essentially explain what the data is. So anybody looking at this visual platform, it provides them a thread of that information, right? It gives them the highlights of that data set. So that's... for the public who may not be familiar with that. I think it's interesting to hear that. All
033of our staff members have a dashboard where they can see across the school, but specifically to the students that they work with most frequently, their caseloads, the things that are happening real time to kind of keep them up to date so that they can have those conversations with students if they see them in the hallway or have a one-on-one with them or in the classroom. I just wanted to point out kind of what this looks like in practice this year and how we're using School Links. We have had a mix of large group sessions with students. So at the very beginning of the year, especially at that high school level for our initial onboarding, we're talking large groups of students, usually our PE classes, coming to the auditorium and all working together to do onboarding.
034But we also did it in small groups. Our College and Career Center secretaries worked with students and were... like continually engaging them with the platform making sure that they're not just completing tasks but doing so meaningfully so that they can use that information during our ACT prep days where students have to you know create their my ACT account and get ready for test day we had students engaging with activities within small classrooms we had teachers accessing information about their students interests and then bringing presentations or field trip opportunities to students based on their interests so we really feel like we're able to get kind of a broad application of how students could use school links and hope to continue that moving forward All right, the next part we will transition into is the SD 308
035college and career events. And we're just going to provide a glimpse here into a few larger, more comprehensive district events. There's a tremendous amount of things that take place in our buildings currently. And what we are going to highlight is some work that's been done collaboratively with our buildings in partnership, getting some commonality, partnership with the district, with building leadership to say, let's take what we have in place already. great for our kids and expand and enhance that. So we're just going to call out a couple events specifically. The first one which Kate mentioned previously is the SD 308 College and Career Fair. Historically we had ran individual events within our buildings. We would have college fairs at our buildings and there was an event that took place at Oswego High School, a trade expo.
036And with different people kind of working on that there was a lot of repetitive work, taxing on our community partners because we're asking them to come to multiple events on a short time frame. So we really were focused on synergy. So this is the first year that we had a comprehensive SD 308 college and career fair open to any students in our district as well as surrounding areas. It was a large success for being the year, the first year we did this. We had 124 college partners who attended. and 54 industry partners who attended representing various careers for our students. A couple call outs the state does the state board of education recognizes our career pathways into seven focus areas or seven buckets so we were sure that we had representation from all seven areas
037for our students within the career area and then we also invited our SD 308 career and technical education teachers to represent their programs that we're offering within our high schools. to help students and families make that connection between what they're going to learn in various classes and careers and be able to have that conversation both from an educational standpoint, but also with an industry partner who could help them explain what that looks like after their time in SC308. We had approximately 400 students in attendance and just over 700 total attendees between students and family members. So for a first year, we were really excited about that. As we move forward into next year, what we really want to focus on is growing that industry partners and broadening the career representation. So obviously we know we
038were targeting in the 50 to 60 range this year based on space. We would like to grow that number next year and just to continue to increase those opportunities. and then just work on some of the logistics for our partners and our students to optimize that flow so they can really maximize their experience. Their feedback was really good, but it did get a little congested with the attendance at times, so we would just want to make sure that we optimize that flow. And then specifically, we've started some work with our non-traditional programs, Eastview Academy and Goal and our Pathways program, and we would like to... focus on increased support and opportunities for those non-traditional programs that began this year as we're looking at the fair and some in-house opportunities for them next year. And then
039a shameless plug, we do have the date for next year for the second year event. It'll be April 15th at Oswego High School next year. I just put it in my calendar. Great, thank you. So, yes. The next thing that we wanted to highlight from the district level is what we are referring to as SD308 career signing days. There's currently recognition events that take place in both of our high school recognizing students' post-secondary decisions, what that looks like. Those tend to be very focused just based on volume on students who have decided to continue on to a college or university. So we wanted to provide some opportunities. Part of this is based off feedback we received from community members in previous years. but also recognizing students who have made it a commitment to serve our
040our world, our economy, or our country in a different way. So we hosted the first ever Skilled Trades and Military Signing Day, which took place in April. We had several students interested. We had 11 students who attended and were recognized with representation from both high schools. There was family members, staff members, community members, representation from the various trades or the branches of the military in attendance. We had approximately 60 people total in attendance. And there was really, really positive feedback. It was a huge celebration of those individuals. And we look forward to making this an annual event where we can continue doing that and continue to grow this and recognize additional students. The other signing day that I want to recognize the first time on very short notice here, we had some amazing teachers within
041our high schools. kind of see the impact that the signing day had and those who are working on our education pathway said we've seen other districts doing this we want to recognize individuals who are committed to becoming educators in their future so we had two teachers with one in each high school through the Ed Rising program in their organize a future teacher signing day which they were able to align on very short notice with the national future teacher signing day and we had representation from both schools i think there was 11 or 12 total students recognized between the two high schools who are seniors and committing to prepare for a career in education so really excited about that that's awesome dr mitchell i hope you have their numbers those individuals the future teachers great The
042last real major highlight here is wanting to announce there's been a little chatter about this. I might have mentioned in a previous discussion is a lot of the work that we're doing, we're realizing that we need to be intentional about communication with our various stakeholder groups and providing resources to students, to families, to our staff members to help them really have access to the work that's being done in a way that helps them make decisions about our students' futures. So throughout the year, there's been a lot of discussion around creating a college and career pathway handbook. There are other districts who have done this and we have worked very, very. hard to create a model that is going to be really user friendly for the various stakeholders. So we are finalizing various pathways. I'll show
043a sample of this, but it's really going to be organized around some information at the start to help gain knowledge and a common understanding. When we talk about a lot of these things, there's a lot of terms that sound great, but if you don't have experience with them, it's educational jargon. And we want to just make sure that those who need to have access or understanding, it really makes sense to them. So we're just trying to grow knowledge with some information. The intentional course sequencing work that's taking place will identify those career pathways I mentioned. We, in the initial draft of this, or that we're going to release for course selection, there are 15 career pathways that will be introduced to students with those course sequences. This will be a dynamic document, so we will
044continue to work with department chairs and teachers. to identify and grow those as we move forward into next school year also. And then the main part of this, what will be most useful for most individuals who access it, is a quick access one-page document that really provides all the information. If you have an idea of the path you want to take, it'll have your recommended course sequence that's specific to that path. It'll have related electives. So if you want to take some other things, it'll help you develop complementary skills as a student. It'll identify those for you. It'll identify the graduation plan requirements. And if there's specific recommendations for those students based on that path, those will be outlined. And then it'll provide some supplemental information for them for post-secondary planning. What does this look
045like in terms of college majors, in terms of work, a variety of different things. So the next slide here is just a teaser of what these one-pagers are going to look like. You can see at the top here, this would be a draft for autos. It's got the course sequence related to that pathway. So those are all content-specific courses. Related electives that aren't necessarily going to pre-populate in there, but may help students develop complementary skills. And then the additional information at the bottom, career-related activities, what can they do or what can they experience while they're in SD308 to grow their knowledge in this area. what early college credit opportunities say they have and those other post-secondary information and opportunities. I'll just add, this really provides a way to explicitly help students, especially as we're coming
046out of junior high and into high school. I'm interested in engineering. What does that mean for me as a student in SD308? Why should I be taking the classes that I'm taking? What classes should I take? What activities make sense for me? And dovetails really nicely with the features we have available to us in School Links as well for course planning of being able to. make very clear the connections between the things I'm interested in and good at and how I get to my future goals. In some added features like Kate just mentioned, the connection between the two, there's been a lot of focus on being intentional. So the course sequences that we identified, when students are completing the interest inventories as students as early as junior high, when they go into course planner, based
047on those inventories, it will recommend the pathways or the course sequences that align with their interests based on the career clusters that come up in those surveys. So it'll all be connected to help connect the dots for students and families. Can I ask a quick question? Is there going to be an opportunity for if they get into a class and they, let's say physics, and as an engineer you kind of need that, and they decide that engineering is not going to be for them, do they then... have the opportunity to see what paths they could go to differently? Absolutely. So with all the work that we're doing with the pathways, the whole intention is for multiple entry and exit points. So it's not a student committing to four years, and if it doesn't work for
048them, that they're locked into that. I am a huge advocate. I say as we look at data and different metrics, we can tell success by kids who complete a pathway, and that's the right path. success is also a student who tries something identifies when it's low risk that it's not the right path for them and is able to pivot and find that right path prior to entering post-secondary training or committing to a career that really doesn't align with their interest so the answer is absolutely they'll have the ability for those entry and exit points all right so we'll hit a few highlights here from our college and career readiness experiences By and large, the focus is just enhancing and increasing the opportunities for students. Chances to try things that they think they're interested in, things
049that maybe they haven't experienced before, and figure out. where do they want to go when they graduate from high school? I think we've been very intentional in terms of saying college and career, because whether or not you go to college, traditional college, you will have a career when you finish. Whether or not you're like, I'm going on a career, you will have post-secondary learning attached to that career. So really trying to emphasize that lifelong, ongoing learning is going to be a piece of it, but so is that matching your interests and abilities with a career. So giving... students more opportunities to do that. We've really Kind of pushed ahead with school links and I think that that has been very useful for us early indicators in some of our key measures that we look at
050to judge our success for that report card suggests that our intentional efforts in making kids more aware of their opportunities giving them chances to interact with Interest inventories and that sort of thing has really moved the needle in terms of them seeing That there's a future that there's a purpose for this high school experience and it's going to lead to a future We've talked about that intentional course sequencing and again I think that making it explicit that students are taking a selection of courses including their core graduation requirements in order to prepare them for what comes next and making that very front and center for students. We've talked about expanding those dual credit opportunities. We know that whether a student is going directly into the trades or they're going to a traditional college experience having
051that high level of rigor in their high school career where the stakes are a little lower is going to lead to greater success for our students and more buy-in as well so we want to continue to expand those opportunities not just because maybe we can build a career pathway endorsement around it but to give kids opportunities to see success and be ready for the next step i think it's been really cool the different events that we've put into place again a lot of things were happening in both of our high schools and our junior highs but it was kind of like in pockets and so to to build a frame around what that looks like and make a structure that is clear and concise as an example of some of those events we've talked about
052the big ones but At the high school level, we have Military Monday. So once a month, we have our military recruiters come in. And so students know, I can go to the Career Center on Monday and I'm gonna get to talk to a military recruiter. We have Find Your Future Fridays. And that's not just a college rep coming to visit. Our College and Career Center assistants have connected with industry partners and career partners to bring those people into our high schools to talk to kids about what their job is. We've had representatives from Ulta, from Nike, from... our restaurants in the area to talk about getting careers and practice interviewing and writing resumes and things like that and then of course those college rep visits but doing it in a way that's not just i'm
053going to make an appointment with Counseling advisor Ben and we're going to talk about just the University of Illinois. Let's create panel experiences around a specific Area of study or major I'm gonna call Students who I keep picking on engineering But I'm gonna call engineering students down and I'm gonna have three or four different schools They're sitting in the room to talk about what are the engineering programs look like in our spaces and are they going to be a fit for you? so continuing to build some of these meaningful experiences that are personalized, that help kids explore what they like and what they're good at, I think is going to be that continued focus. And then just one last thing to add there. I just want to call out for the first, like this is
054the first time in several years that this level of collaboration. focus on this work has existed between our district and our buildings. Our building leaders, Kate being one of them, have done a tremendous job of growing their knowledge and capacity around these things and taking opportunities back and really owning it and driving these opportunities within the building. So it's exciting for me as a district administrator to sit and be able to partner with them. It's become a true partnership and we all get excited about it. So we have recurring meetings and different opportunities but just that level of collaboration and want to give a shout out and recognition to our building leaders and our staff within the buildings because we wouldn't be able to celebrate these things that we just did without the work that's
055taking place in our buildings. So on that note, it really started here with our Board of Education. As Kate and Ben talked about, this really is rooted in our strategic plan. Our entire first priority is future ready because that's the purpose of us being here as a district is to make sure our students are truly ready for their future. As Kate and Ben focused on, yes, year one was really cementing the high school, you know, whether it's courses, opportunities, access, information, really focusing on how we can impact our students and our families. Because just to get out the information, to know what a potential future or career could be, is really what the buildings have been focusing on. What you'll see over the next three years is really that backwards design. Next year, uh ben
056and kate both mentioned six through twelve more focus in year two on junior high and then uh year three moving into our elementary schools um in different ways but really focusing on kind of that um shared ownership across and really what are our possibilities for their future so thank you so much for being here and thank you for uh your support on your plan Thank you both again and for your leadership. Any questions from the board before you head out? I have no questions. I just wanted to say some highlights for me. It's a lot of information, obviously lots of great work in this area. The implementation of School Links I think is a big... beat and sounds like we're doing really well with that and my experience with School Wings thus far in different
057areas has been like the big it seems like a step up from Navia and so that is appreciated and then I think all the events and stuff has really whether it be the signing days or the career fair has really kind of been open in the public and so it's really making a name the work isn't making a name for itself outside of just you know the school day so thank you for all your work. I did have a question. Anybody else? No, I just had a comment. Go ahead. So if you go to the one previous slide, it was the question I had, believe it or not, was how does this help you do your job more efficiently and effectively? I understand how it does it for the students, but I also wanted to
058hear from your perspective. Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple ways. One is that, and I'll speak on behalf of my counselors. The kinds of conversations that they are having with their students have been surprisingly, I mean, they were having amazing conversations, and that's said as an administrator and a parent. But it's gotten richer and deeper. Even in the course selection process this year, we had just implemented School Links, for example, and we just had students take those interest assessments. We had counselors talking to their students about, okay, I see this is what you put down as a... area of interest for you. How about we talk about what, what, you know, different electives will look like or your courses will look like next year and see if we can fit some of those in. Now, sometimes
059we found that students said, oh, I just clicked through that. You guys told us to do it. And I just clicked through. I didn't know you were going to look at it again. But then that's, you know, sparked a different conversation. So that has helped them to better individualize the work that they're doing with their students, especially with. Not massive caseloads, but large caseloads. As an administrator, it has helped me be more efficient because we're able to plan holistically in the building for different activities and experiences because we know our students better based on the things that they're able to share with us. We've had teachers similarly state, like, oh, I know more about this kid and what they want to do. They get an easier brag sheet. Like, that sounds like something simple, but
060heading into that senior year and getting teacher recommendations. we have a hard-baked brag sheet in our school links that is also fueled by the kinds of interest assessments that they're doing and teachers have more information to match what they're teaching with their students the data piece has been big for us in terms of the reporting that we can get not just how often students are using the platform but what kinds of things they're looking at But then also on the back end, when we're starting to this time of year, looking at our state reporting and what are those post-secondary outcomes for our students, that's going to give us much more information in a quicker fashion. And so it's been. really important for us. And we can also do things like communicate very quickly using the
061platform and share our different events and that has allowed us to get more kids connected to some of those events including, which may be a hot button topic for our parents, our community service logging. So that has been much more effective and efficient. Just to add to that briefly also, for me, I'm glad Kate touched on it, but the data aspect is huge. It has allowed us to have consistent processes across buildings and really be able to talk the same language as we're collecting some of that data for our college and career readiness indicators and various things we have to report to the state. One huge thing that I've recently talked to Dr. Calgatti about is our students, our seniors also complete a senior year-end survey, which provides some of that. But after they... graduate
062and they move on, they provide information where it will start growing an alumni database for us. So all of our seniors this year, when we roll into next school year, will then become alumni in School Links because they have their accounts for life. So it just increases that opportunity and access and communication with those individuals to keep them engaged as they continue their journey also. So my only comments were, first of all, kudos to you for all the time and the effort that you've put into this. I mean, you can really tell the amount of thought and care that went into this. And I'm going to add on to your pre-plug for the College and Career Fair. I did go this year, and it was the first year, but it was, I mean, we're talking
063about three large areas here at East, two of which were college-based, one of which was career-based. there were schools from all over the place. And, you know, it was attended by Oswego kids, by Yorkville kids. I think it was, it went tremendously well. So again, if you get the opportunity to stop by next year, and if you have or know of anyone that's looking to be going to college soon, definitely have them come by. Thank you. Moving to 5.2. our annual technology update. Mr. Obafemi? Thank you, Dr. Kogadi and President. And every year, what we attempt to do is have one of our departments come before the board and provide an overview of the things that they do to support the district. And if you remember a couple of months ago, we had the operations
064department come by and talk about what they do. So it's the turn of the technology department to come up and provide information to the board as well as the community about how they support the education and the operation of the district. Without that being said, I'm going to pass it to the director of technology, Mr. Ken Kiger, next to him is assistant director of technology, Kevin McDonough. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening board members senior leadership and our community members. It's great to be here tonight Kevin and I am excited to walk you through our department's annual report for the past school year. I believe this is the first time our department has had an opportunity to present specifically about our department. It is great to put a spotlight on great people we have in
065our department and the great work they do, even though most IT people do not like being in the spotlight. They like being behind the scenes. Anyway, this year we really leaned into maximizing our efficiency to better support our staff and students. We've streamlined our internal processes and prioritized proactive, reliable service so that teachers can focus on what they do best, teaching. By minimizing technical downtime and fostering strong teamwork, we're not just keeping the lights on. We're actively empowering the daily work occurring in our classrooms. Our mission is pretty simple. We provide the tech services that keep teaching, learning, and our district operations running smoothly. With the constant changes in technology and education, we need to provide a future-ready ecosystem where we use data to make smart decisions, innovate responsibility, and be able to adapt to
066support our staff and students. To make that happen, we focus on four main pillars. Cybersecurity, keeping our staff and students safe along with their data, is paramount and is a critical part of evaluating our current and future environment. In part, to do that, we need a modern infrastructure, making sure our devices are updated physically and software-wise and ready to go. The infrastructure needs to be flexible and adaptable to support the ever-changing needs of the district. And then we have digital citizenship, helping everyone navigate online safety and the new world of AI while supporting the new and time-tested methods for teaching and learning. And then equity, ensuring every learner has equal access to the tools they need, no matter their situation, for them to excel in their educational journey. Now I'll turn it over to Kevin
067to talk about what our department does on a daily basis. All right. Thanks, Brent. Now let's talk about the sheer scale of what we manage. We have a dedicated team of just 17 people. That's it. But let's look at what those 17 people are responsible for. We've got 27 buildings, over 3,400 staff members, and around 16,800 students. On a $3.6 million budget, we're maintaining over 40,000 pieces of technology and all of the licensing and support costs that go along with them. Our computer network handles 10 terabytes of internet traffic daily. Imagine streaming 3,000 movies every day. We also manage 250 terabytes of stored data. equivalent to nearly 75,000 movies, like a small Plex server. It is a massive operation, and our small but dedicated team keeps it running 24 by 7. When you look closer
068at those 40,000 devices, you see just how much infrastructure we maintain. We have over 1,400 wireless access points that provide wireless connectivity to over 25,000 devices. Plus, we have nearly 900 security cameras and 1,400 radios to assist in keeping our buildings safe. Chromebooks are our workhorses. We are one-to-one with them in grades 1 through 12 and most of our staff are assigned one. We have nearly 23,000 of them across the district. We also manage over 950 iPads, 1300 computers, and 1100 classroom projectors. It's not just hardware though. We also manage platforms like Google Workspace, PowerSchool, which was our student information system, and ClassLink, which controls rostering and seamless logins to dozens of curricular applications like Amplify, Benchmark, HMH, and Master Connect, to name a few. And with this many devices, we have to be ready
069to help. Our ticketing platform, IAQ, reports that since last August, our department has seen a 14% increase in tickets, over 17,000 requests. I'm proud to say our team successfully closed nearly 16,600 of them with an average resolution time of five days. Even with that extra volume, we actually got faster, lowering our response time to just 1.6 days. You can see in the charts how our team really hit their stride. this spring as our processes became more efficient and smoother. But speed isn't everything, quality also matters. We've maintained a 4.9 out of 5 star rating from our staff. It's clear they appreciate the hard work and expertise our technicians bring and use every day. One of the great projects we like to highlight is the tech hubs at our high schools. We have a very symbiotic
070relationship with them. It's in close collab- In close collaboration with the instructional tech coaches, we provide an environment that gives students career readiness IT experience, such as customer support and managing tickets, and opportunities to obtain certifications while they're still in school. Beyond that, these students are doing the work. This year alone, they handled over 3,600 tickets and repaired 452 Chromebooks. They're keeping their peers connected while saving the district a ton of time and resources. I'm not sure what we would do without them. Since this is the first time we have presented to the board, we also wanted to look at some of the key accomplishments over the last few years. Back in 24, we set up ClassLink's OneSync product, which automates much of the account provisioning for staff and students across various platforms, and added
071critical security features such as two-factor authentication. In fiscal year 25, we replaced much of our network hardware and restructured and replaced our two-way radios and infrastructure. On top of that, we moved our whole department to the new IT center on Douglas Road. And then this year, we tackled a district-wide copier refresh, increased our collaboration and integration of assistive technology between the departments, and kicked off the development of the technology plan as part of the district's strategic plan. And speaking of the strategic plan, the development of the tech plan is our focus. However, we touch several other priorities and pillars and collaborate closely with other staff and departments to support their needs. As an example, we have involved, I'm sorry, we have been involved with implementing School Links, the portal to help students get prepared for
072their journey post-graduation and have worked with Ben Owens and the college and career team to get that done. We have collaborated with Andrea Parker and her team to set up various data integrations with Educlimber, the new data dashboard for the district. We formed a partnership with Student Services and Operations for the various safety and security initiatives that have been called out. Pillar 5.2.1, that's ours, and we will be gathering feedback across the district that will be used to inform the creation of the tech plan. helping Andre Shanzi and the operations team to implement the preventive maintenance plan using the district's ticketing system, and finally, working with HR and Finance to implement a new time and attendance product that will be used across the district. To close, I want to reiterate how incredibly proud I am
073of our small but mighty team. It has been a privilege to share a glimpse of the work they do every day. Their dedication to supporting our staff and students is an engine that keeps this district moving forward and I'm deeply grateful for this opportunity to shine a light on their hard work. We want to thank our amazing team, some of who are here tonight, the administration and this board for continuing to invest in our people and the technology in our district. Kim and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have. I just have a quick comment. I have a kid that's going to be part of the tech hub starting next year. And I like, I think that program is awesome. Keep doing that. We love it. Yeah. I've visited a couple
074of times. Yeah. For support. Yeah. My board docs went down for a second. Yeah. No, I was, I was, I was just reflecting that this is. You're right, we haven't seen a presentation about your department before, so I really appreciate you all bringing it. And when you put those numbers up there, it really speaks to how integral your work is to the functioning of our district. And I think to the testament of like, we'd like to, tech people sometimes like to play behind the scenes. We don't, I at least don't hear a lot of noise in the community about tech issues. And so I think that's, you know, to your credit, you know, sometimes not hearing more news about tech issues is the best compliment. Yeah, that's some of the best feedback when everything goes
075well. Yes, no issues, right? And you're not only maintaining, but also continuing to improve. You know, you're working on some of these large projects. with the data management and getting that information into our teachers. And so we really appreciate that. You're also very creative. I know that Mr. Obafemi regularly talks about your ability to do more with less. So I know that that is a hard thing. And I just recognize that that's not lost to us. Just the level of efficiencies you all have worked to find in your planning. You've also given a lot of time to be thought partners to different departments and transportation, for example. I know you work very closely with LaShawn, and so I want to thank you. I know that that is a very difficult position when you're trying to
076migrate DOS into a current modern era. So that is not hyperbole for those listening at home. I think recently you said, hey, can you find me $500,000? And you guys delivered, right? Yeah. I mean, these guys here, they're one of my favorite team members that I have the privilege of working with. And a lot of times we don't recognize we can't run a school district without technology anymore. Back in the days, we could, but now we can't do it. Everything that we do is on a technology platform. And as has been mentioned before, the team here, led by these two gentlemen, they work very hard. and they do whatever is necessary to keep us running. And our students, as well as our staff, are better for that. And they just don't get enough recognition. As
077was mentioned before, the same thing with finance. If you know about us, we're screwing up. So if we're doing everything we're supposed to be doing right, you don't even know we exist. That's the way we like it. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 5.3. All right. District 308 and Capital Financing Q&A. Yes. Good evening, board. Last week, we had a chance and we would invite Mr. Bob Lewis to come up. We had a town hall meeting where we had about 50 individuals, I would say, join us for a conversation about. proposal that our whole communities received news up regarding an opportunity to refinance and to think about our debt in a different way to use some of that those funds to be able to support a planning and investing in some significant
078capital improvements that are really our buildings are coming due I might know that the new story ran a store the newspapers ran a couple story and we put out there that our buildings needs are dick but there's a decline in some of the major essentially appliances, HVAC systems, things that are happening. A lot of these are due to a natural course of life. And so, but I think a big question that came out of last week was really understanding a lot of the concern around the debt and the capital financing involved. And so we thought it was important to bring forward Mr. Lewis, who was at the town hall and who asked, who was able to answer a lot of questions for community members who were there. And so I thought it would be prudent
079for the board to hear. Mr. Lewis directly about some of the points regarding our debt and then with Mr. Obafemi's guidance as well any other questions the board may have and then any of our senior leaders who were participating in last week's presentation please feel free to jump in and add anything as we go through tonight's presentation. Please explain your history with the district, the depth of your experience with our district, with other districts around the state and country, and your roots in the community, just so people get a sense of how involved you've been in our finances for as long as I can remember. Yeah, so I've been a member of the district's community 24 years now. I live in Montgomery. I don't know what's happened to my voice. It was fine. I started
080talking. Yeah, if you could. Thank you. I've had six kids attend the district at various times. And I'm working with the district. I've been working with the district for about 20 years now. I've been doing my entire career in public finance almost 30 years. And PMA has been the number one financial advisor to school districts as it relates to bonded indebtedness advisory work. I think 18 years in Illinois. I work with a lot. I personally work with a lot of school districts, especially the ones in this area. We had a bond sale for Camelon 302, the second series of their bond sale, $90 million sold competitively. Got six bids on it. Just before I came here, I was out at Yorkville's meeting. So I'm pretty involved with a lot of different school districts in the
081state. Talking points I have tonight comes from that experience I have working with you and also working with these other school districts. Thank you. Yep. So the presentation tonight is meant to summarize some of the talking points we heard at the session last week. I know some of the, maybe the talking points that are coming out in the community. And, but there's some key terms I thought it would be good to review before diving into this. Sorry. Okay. So, levy year. A levy year is the year of assessment and is for taxes collected in next year. So, sometimes you'll see diagrams that refer to a levy year. And then you'll see some diagrams that will have the tax payment year depending on the presentation, the materials it might be in. So if you see something
082that's got a levy of 25, that's for payments made in 2026. So levy of 25 corresponds to tax payment year 2026. And it's just the way Illinois goes about assessment. So when you see levy of 25, they assess our homes and our businesses as of January of 2025. But you don't pay the bills on that assessment. until 2026. So just make that clear because that sometimes creates some confusion. The debt service is the combined principal and interest payments that you make on your outstanding bonds. You know, I don't have bonds on this, but just as a reminder, bonds are a way in which large institutions acquire capital to fund projects, whether you be a business, do corporate borrowing, or you're in a government that issues bonds. U.S. government issues treasury bonds, the largest bond market
083in the world. And then you have the bond in interest or B&I levy, which is a portion of the property tax levy restricted to only pay debt service. That comes about either through the issuance of non-referendum bonds or referendum bonds. The bulk of your debt service is referendum bonds. So that can only happen if the voters approve it. So when those bonds mature, the levies to pay those bonds go away. Sometimes you'll hear questions in the community at these public sessions I've heard over the years, why don't they just redirect those tax dollars as bonds pay off to pay as you go capital? Well, because... The authority to have those dollars exists with the bonds. It's not like us. If I pay off my car, I don't have to ask my employer, can I use
084that income you're paying me on my car payment for something else? I can just do that. You can't do that as a unit of government. You have to ask permission of the voters to reestablish that levy. So this is what your current debt picture looks like. So this is on tax payment year. I have that there because I think it's clear to the community that reads that because that's the year you're paying your bills. A lot of times we focus on levy year and other presentations because that's your, because it's a legal way in which the levy is established when you file those with county. So tax payment year 25, that's a historic year. Then you have tax payment 26. Those are taxes being collected right now to make your bond payments in August and
085February of 27. Then you have one more year of that peak amount of taxes collected in 2027, and then your bond payments start to decline. And your bonds aren't just one bond issue. It's a collection of bond issues that are sold in different years for different projects. Some have been refinanced. But in the aggregate, this is what the payments all look like. So the timing for the conversation your capital needs is now because you can see those payments start to decline in 2028. Just because bonds... are approved in a certain year doesn't mean that it's going to impact taxpayers immediately. When you go to the voters and if it is approved in November, if the board decides to approve a question, which you would do in July or August, those bonds don't immediately come into
086existence. Your construction team has to take what is just a concept now and start turning that into actual documents and bids are taken later on. It takes months to get to the point where you can actually start doing the work and that you'll need significant amount of bond proceeds. So the bonds are sold much, much later, months later, and sometimes even years after the approval is made. You have up to five years to sell the bonds. So you would have until November, 2031. So the timing overview goes over that in a little bit more detail. The concept plan, because at this stage, you don't have a lot of details on when the money would be spent, so we put together a concept plan based off our experience, is that you'd likely sell the bonds in
087a series of tranches or phases. And the model that we did, you'll see here on the graph on the next slide, assumes roughly a third is sold in mid-27, 28, and 29. and the exact percentages will change as more information, you know, if this is approved, eventually the construction team will come up with, okay, we need this much for each month going up, you know, a few years, and then the plan is refined to meet those funding needs. So once the bonds are issued, unlike us when we do a car payment mortgage, you're making that first interest payment the next month or maybe 40, you know, I think maybe 45 days on a car loan. you know so and then every month thereafter municipal bonds are not paid immediately the interest payments the first payment
088is typically roughly one year later and every six months thereafter so when you issue bonds in 2027 if this were to approve you wouldn't have that first interest payment until 2028 which you see corresponds to that decline of purge so It's not that there's a, if approval of a bond occurs in 26, it's not going to cause an increase in taxes in 26 or 27, because by the time the bonds are issued and you have that first interest payment, it's going to occur in the year that your payment goes down. Can I just say for the public, this is our debt from 2004. That referendum was approved in 2006. 2006. Yeah. But this isn't, this is just the 30 years. Yeah. The 20 years, no, 30 years of paying it off. Yeah. Well, not quite
08930, but close. Yeah. What happened in 2020 or 2006, the first bomb wasn't issued until 2027. And then, or not, 2007. And then the last bomb was sold just before the five years lapsed. And then those blue bars represent some non-referendum bonds. That's what I was referring to earlier. Almost all your debt was approved at referendum. And then, yeah, so that makes up all the payments and it comes from that approval. So I've already talked about the fact that there's no need to raise taxes in 2026 or 27. Let me go back to those talking points. And in 2028, the pledge has been made that if this were approved, Tax bills related to debt would go down for the. 335,000 our home is targeted to be a 100 dollars. No, why 335? Maybe you heard
090300 at 1 point? Well, it was 300 before. New and you can't use a static. Typical home, because every year is adjusted. Everything's reset higher. So that $300,000 static home we were using, which was approximately what the median home was from the American Community Survey by the Census Bureau, that $300,000 home is now worth more today because we have new EAV out. So you can't just have static numbers. So the overall increase of districts EAV. was roughly 12%. So we just, we bumped that $300,000 home up to 335 to approximate that change in EAV because when that new EAV came out, because your bond payment's flat, the tax rate went down. So if we kept it at $300,000 with a lower tax rate, instead of $100 decline, it would have been a 90-some dollar decline.
091And then people are like, why is it 90? I thought you said 100. So you have to change some of the variables. We don't live in a static world when it comes to taxation. I did put a footnote there because while we have this concept plan of three issues, one of the things we'll have to talk about is approved. If it's approved is whether the district does need to do like a small financing at the end of 26 or beginning of 27 to provide funds to pay the architectural fees and other things for planning. This is a small bond issue. It still would be done in such a way that taxes don't go up because we use something called capitalized interest. which is using some of the bond proceeds to make those initial interest payments.
092I just want to make that clear to you and the public that one of the things we'd have to talk about through passage is like, okay, I need some money to pay some of these initial stock costs for the planning purposes. This is what the plan looks like after the three tranches would be done. So you see it all in green, but that would consist of three different financings. And, you know, so the first one would fill up. some of 28 and then the second one comes and fills up some of the 29. By the time you get the 30, you can fit in everything that you need to fit in when all three tranches would be outstanding. If we issued all the bonds at one time, indeed, we would go too high. In that
093first year, you see the green. So that's another reason why I have to do in tranches. One, you don't need the money right away. You have to have a reasonable expectation you can spend. 85% in three years. But two, we have to manage and make sure that we fit into the self-imposed constraints, that you're going to have a decline that's going to create that roughly $100 decrease on that $335,000 home, just on the bond side. Bob, I want you to clarify a question that we got. Sure. Where one of our community members said, we can issue all those bonds and just sit on the money. Is that possible? Only if you could spend it all in three years. Yeah, because when you sell your bonds as tax exempt, the IRS has all these rules you
094have to follow because your investors don't have to pay taxes on those interest payments. You get an implicit subsidy from the federal government that's worth about one and a quarter percent, give or take, of reduced interest rate. Well, they don't want you to benefit from that more than what's necessary. So they say if they have a reasonable expectation, spend 85% in three years. Well, I don't think with all the buildings you have, you could even feasibly spend it all in three years, let alone meet that IRS requirement. So it would not be advisable to do that. And nor would you approve doing that because we couldn't meet that graph. You know, even if it meant that, oh, we have to be a little bit slower, maybe at the construction begin with. We would, you know,
095we'd probably do that as a team to make sure we met that graph. I don't think you'd have to be, you'd have to be slow. I think you're going to get plenty of money in that first tranche to do what you need over the first couple of years. I think the assumption, Bob, was that we can issue the bonds and we'll just use the interest as we wish instead of not having to worry about arbitrage. And I just want to clarify that. Yeah, it may even be with the work that you're doing. a third tranche is even sold until the fourth year. Maybe you get to where you have to be in that fifth year, but all the work that has to be done in buildings, it will take time to get that done. That's
096why the state gives you up to five years to sell the bonds, because they know certain projects that you do may take that long to accomplish. So one of the questions that came up too was about capital funding. is this unique that a Swigel, or excuse me, District 308 is asking to capital fund a lot, or capital finance a lot of these projects? And the way I answer that at the meeting is various entities, whether it be a unit government or a business, use a mixture of pay-as-you-go capital out of your annual operating budget, and... finance capital. And it depends on a variety of factors. I've listed some here. I'm sure this isn't exhaustive. You may sit here and come up with another reason yourself. It depends upon the nature of capital improvements being funded.
097We're not buying Chromebooks with the referendum money. That wouldn't make any sense. That capital financing, you pay for that in your operating budget. the composition of your tax base. We all know that District 308 is heavily residential. So the residential taxpayers have to bear a lot of the burden for the schools. You have other communities that have significant commercial industrial bases that get more revenue that may be able to do more pay-as-you-go capital because there's additional revenue that they're getting off of that more broad tax base. State support. If you had stayed in tier one for an indefinite period of time, maybe there'd come a point in time where you could allocate more and more of those additional dollars you're getting annually towards capital. As we all know, you and many of the other districts
098that were tier one in the suburbs have now shifted to tier two, be it Plainfield. Plainfield's got press out there as well about... What this impact has had to them shifting from tier 1 to tier 2. So that means you have less funds for ongoing capital projects. And then available grants, there's been a lot of discussion over the years here about the nearly 50Million dollars that the districts. Oh, I don't know if you'll ever get it after 20 years for building this building that we're sitting in. And, you know, the state used to have a program to provide capital anywhere between 35% to I think as high as 85% depending upon need. We haven't had that in 20 years. So there's no longer those major grants that you would receive from the state. Another reason
099to do capital funding, let's say you could even pay for all this out of your operating fund. Somehow, miraculously, you could pay all this all now. You raise taxes on us. do all this capital in five years from pays you a capital, is that really the equitable thing to do? Because a lot of the projects, probably all these projects that you're doing are going to last many years, decades even. And by doing capital financing, you're able to spread that burden not only over current taxpayers, but over future taxpayers as well, who are going to benefit from those needs. So why would you place all the burden on current taxpayers? And then the other reason why pay-as-you-go, why I do incur interest costs by selling the bonds to pay for these capital projects, waiting to do
100things on a pay-as-you-go basis, even if you could do it all, those projects that cost a million dollars today are going to go, I don't know why I picked a million dollars, whatever the amount is today, are going to increase over time by construction cost inflation, which more than exceeds historically the general inflation. So capital funding helps you to tackle that as well. So on these next couple of slides here, put together a list, just going back to 2020, of all the school districts that had bond referenda approved. So this isn't everybody who attempted, that were $10 million or higher. A lot of downstate districts might do a couple million bucks or something. I exclude those from the list. And the total of all these referenda, you can see Indian Prairie there at the biggest
101one of 420 million that was just passed not too long ago. They are in the same boat that you are. All these buildings built at one time and with all these needs coming up at one time, their debt was dropping off. And they went out and got 420Million dollars approved to to address their capital needs for the buildings. We sold 2 tranches. We're not selling 1 this year next year. We're selling the 3rd tranche. And then we're going to go all the way up to the end of the 5 years on their financing as well. Here's the last page. So the, the sum of all these. In our district, we work with, they pass that 110Million in the spring. We don't know if they're going to sell a bond this year. It may not be
102until next year because, again, they're putting together everything on those plans right now now that they know it got approved. The last thing, what I was going to make a couple talking points about those dollars are that total districts you saw, if they were 58 and had $4.3 billion approved since 2000 through and including 2020. One note I didn't make to the administration I was thinking about as I was going over my notes, is those are just the referendum approved bonds. There's lots of non-referendum bonds that get approved as well to address capital projects, especially in non-tax cap counties. Your non-tax cap counties, they have a lot more tools in our toolbox than you have available because you're restricted on what you can do on a non-referendum basis. So there's billions of dollars more not
103even shown in this list that was done on a non-referendum basis. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, when you talk about the mixture of pay-as-you-go versus finance capital, there's an opportunity cost, right? For every dollar that you put towards capital from the operating budget, that's taking a dollar away from the classroom. So there's consequences for doing that, you know, that, you know, for example, It could be larger class size. If you took imagine if you took. And the dollars out of the operating budget, let's say you could even do that. That's 100Million dollars over 10 years, which doesn't even begin to cut your need to your needs. But if you did 10Million dollars and took that out of your budget. How many teachers is that? Raphael? I mean, approximately 300 teachers. Yeah,
104so, you know, so you're going to have larger class sizes, or you're not going to remain competitive with your neighboring districts. You know, eventually. And so your good teachers, your teachers are going to leave and go somewhere else if you're not remaining competitive. So there's an opportunity cost for every dollar that you take out of the operating budget put towards capital. I'm not saying that you shouldn't use any operating dollars towards capital. In fact, you have an O&M budget to maintain the buildings. And so you are putting dollars towards capital. So you can't do everything that way. So I'll pause now for any follow-up questions that you might have. I think the list of all of the districts that have done referendum like this for since 2020 is a good representation of this idea that
105this is how, and correct me if I'm wrong, but this is how school districts do some of these big projects. One of the questions that stood out to me at the community forum that we had was how come the school district hasn't been they've known that these buildings are aging how come you haven't saved the money to do these improvements um yeah and i know and it's a really good question i really applaud all the community members who really dig in and try and understand it because school finance is not easy to understand and it can be related to personal finance, but it's also very completely different. And so when you're only working as a community member with a reference of personal finance or your home, I really applaud all the community members who are
106engaging in the conversation because it's not always easy to understand. So could you just answer that question? How come? Well, that gets to the opportunity cost because if you set aside those dollars to pay for the capital projects, you'd be taking dollars away from something else. So it's one thing, the opportunity cost. And 2, I think Dr. Cal got it brought it up at the community session is at. Um, you know, at 1 point, this district froze its. Property tax extension for 3 consecutive years. Well, when you look at that. Decision and that benefited us as taxpayers, you know, right? We, it helped us and. But that translates, when I did an analysis a few years ago, and it's probably close to this, it translates to about 30 cents of your limiting rate. It's what
107that freeze did, that you would have today. 30 cents on your EAB is $10 million. Imagine if you had $10 million in your operating budget today, you could put that towards capital. So that decision is not one of the reasons why you're not, you weren't able to have as much to perhaps save and set aside for the capital needs. While people in my industry, we like to explain these complicated borrowing topics, we like to use analogies. What we do, what we have as households, the car payments and mortgages. And those are great, especially when you're refinancing a mortgage. And I come here to talk about refinancing a bond like last year, right? That... makes a lot of sense. We've all done that at least once or twice. Where the analogy tends to break down though
108is as a household, I want to get out of debt. I want my mortgage paid off. But as a governmental unit, the difference there is I'm a finite entity, right? And I'm not going to be around forever. This school district will be around forever. And it's got to constantly refresh its capital. And part of maintain refreshing capital, whether you're a business or you're in government, is to access capital markets. So while it's noble to try to be out of debt, it's highly unlikely, except in some circumstances, unique circumstances, you can find entities that are out of debt. You know, even when you think about my home, that's got to be maintained. The next person who owns it. it's going to put debt on it. So that home is going to constantly have debt on it,
109associated with it. I may not have the debt anymore because I've eventually paid it off. I've moved off to something else. But a school district or any other entity is likely to always have debt as part of this mixture of maintaining its capital. And the other way of looking at it, there's good debt and there's bad debt. What Bob said earlier before. If we were taking our debt to buy a computer with a useful life of three, four years, and then we still have 10 years left on that debt, that would not be a smart debt. But if you have a building with a useful life of maybe 40 years, 50 years, that would still be here. If you take our debt to be able to fix that building to extend that useful life, I
110think that would be a smart debt. I guess another way of looking at it, the difference between individual and businesses is most of the major business that we know of, you talk about the Ford, you talk about the GM, most of those companies who are factories, for example, where they develop their cars, there's no way they can save money to be able to build those huge factories. There just would not be enough profit. our net income to give to their shareholders or just they just wouldn't be so what they do is they issue bonds to and they use that bonds to build the infrastructure that they need to be able to build those cars and as they make profit they pay those back gradually over time very similar to what we're doing as a school
111district we have to be able we can't say we're not going to fix our building until we have enough cash on hand to be able to do that Knowing the mixture of our revenue, our buildings will actually be absolutely falling apart before we can get to it. We're asking for $317 million in the referendum bond. That is equivalent to our whole year's budget. Think about it. So there is no way for the folks who say, there is no way we can have that kind of money in our operating budget and still be able to pay. educators 80% clearly 80% of our expenses tied to teachers and educators so if we if we took that 80% out of that 317 where does that leave us not a whole lot more and then they need to buy
112books we need to have These are for our buses. We need to pay leases on our buses. We need to pay for electricity that we use to run our buildings, water that comes through our buildings. So just practically, there is no way with the amount of repairs that we need, 17 buildings that we'll build at the same time, to be able to do it with our operating budget. It's not enough for an operating budget for us to be able to do that. I did it just a small, it's basically $15 million a year over the last 21 years is what that would mean. You know, and then I also looked at the Minneapolis Fed and $15 million 20 years ago was $25 million, you know, inflation adjusted. So it's, that's a lot of, yeah, I
113mean, I don't even know if we'd be able to recruit teachers, to be honest, you know, with them. Yeah, with those kind of numbers. Bob, what I was going to say, thank you for being so informative. I feel like every time I hear you talk about this, I learn something new. I wanted to go back to, you spoke about non-referendum restrictions. Can you tell us a bit more, what are our restrictions as a district? Yeah, so school districts in Illinois, when you go to school code, there's non-referendum bonds that you can sell. There's working cash bonds, which can be used to pay for capital, any type of capital. There's life safety bonds, and there's funding bonds and tort bonds. And when you're in a tax cap county, your annual levy to pay for non-referendum bonds
114is limited by something called the debt service extension base. It's a calculation based off what your levy was when tax caps came to the school district 308. And so that caps your annual payment. And if your annual payment's capped, it ultimately caps how much you can borrow. And it's approximately the height of the blue bars because those blue bars were taken up to that maximum annual payment. If I were a non-tax cap district, I could do working cash bonds. Now, there's a separate formula that restricts the number of working cash bonds. There's other restrictions that come into play, even in non-tax cap counties, but they don't have to deal with the annual payment limit, which gave them more flexibility to do non-referendum borrowing. Now, the school code was changed a little over a year ago
115to lift that payment restriction on one of those non-referendum bonds called the life safety bond. But again, it's very restricted on its use. It has to be for just something that has a life safety approval attached to it, which requires a process to go to ISBE. And many of the things that deferred maintenance doesn't necessarily equal life safety. So there's that common misconception. So even though you could do some of that on a non-referendum basis, you couldn't do it all. Thank you for reminding us. Thank you. No problem. I do want to point out this graph. And one thing I didn't mention in the presentation, which I think we talked about the public session, is the difference from your prior referendum and many other school districts prior referendums and even some bonds done today is
116in the past, payments would go up every year, trying to anticipate and follow EAV going up. And then a few years ago, when your debt was refinanced and restructured and savings were locked in, it capped your annual payment to that. 35-ish million dollars. It's been that amount for a few years now, which means as EAV was going up, the tax rate to pay that payment was going down. When I look at what's happening, not only do you not only have a flat payment, we're showing payments going down over time, which is the complete difference to what it was in the past, which means if that stays the picture, And if those bonds are approved, as EAV comes into the district, be it reassessment or new property, new property is even better because then they pick
117up some of that debt burden. The burden of the debt will go down with each year. That tax rate will continue to fall on the debt levy as opposed to being maintained or going up, as had been the case maybe in some school districts in the past. maybe 10 years ago, our debt was about maybe 25% of our tax bill. But because of growth, that tends to go a smaller amount on a year-to-year basis. So that's why it's, growth helps spread out that tax burden. Because that is a fixed amount, that amount that you see there, that is a fixed amount divided by the number of, you know, tax, or... properties that are taxable. Right. And that's where it's also helpful to have some industrial and business. Yeah. Because it really helps on per capita.
118They tend to pay more than residential property. Now, remember, the pot doesn't change if I will use the analogy of an orange. The size of the orange is the orange, but you can cut it so many ways. Right. So the more you cut it, the less there is that will impact individual taxpayers. Right. So I just went through some like really quick math. And because there's a lot of numbers here where it showed all the referenda. And, you know, there are numbers like 40 billion and we're at 317. And on the surface, it looks like we're trying to raise a lot more. Obviously, we are a much larger school district than the vast majority of the ones listed here. But I wanted to break down some of these numbers, a couple of these numbers, by
119what the amount is per student. So roughly for us, at our $317 million at 16,500 students, it's about a little over $19,000 a student. If you look at the last one on there, which was Balchatham, which is $110 million. They have about 4,000 students, so we're looking at 24,444 per student. If you take a look at Shelbyville, good old Shelbyville, with their $40 million raise, they have 1,250 students. So their cost per student is $33,333. So, I mean, they all did, and they were all in 2026. We got to beat Shelbyville. No, I mean, the point being that the number looks huge when you break it down to who we're covering, the amount of people that we're covering. It's not as much as it looks at, like, first glance. So one of the questions hearing
120over and over again is, what would we save if we don't pass this? So year one, I... I think I heard if I heard correctly it would be $300 and instead it what is it instead it would be about a hundred dollars correct yeah it's a hundred dollars if it's approved and then that's another 200 plus that green there so okay so yeah so the way the way that you know you can kind of eyeball it this gray bar and the blue bob bob is using a pointer for that yeah sorry this like your current payment for that 335 000 yeah 335 000 home is about their debt makes up 1100 of the bill okay so if you actually got down to zero in 2036 that's how much you'd save is 1100 over that period
121of time but initially yeah it's about 300 plus in this year and then here probably about 400 and then you're getting to maybe like six five or six hundred here you know that is safe now that's assuming that um no other bonds have been taken no other bonds are taken if we were to delay this any longer then you would probably be looking at an inflation adjusted amount of needs you had a way you described it in terms of that we've been talking about that i think is helpful in terms of the cost so using that same example of the 335 000 home if you want to break it down to like the monthly impact um the referendum passing equates to approximately 25 per month to that homeowner so that's the investment back into the
122referendum so that equates to what you were talking about oh you mean that's what they would would have saved right if they didn't approve right yeah 25 a month right and it said it's more like 10. Eight. Yeah. So instead of 25, it's eight. So, yeah. Is there, you were pretty, you were very comprehensive. I had a lot of questions and you already answered them. Anybody else? Did you have any thoughts that you were hearing from the community? Yeah, I think this really names it. We really want to focus tonight on this aspect of it. The board has heard a lot in terms of the capital improvement needs. We've talked about the prioritization. I just thought it was important for us to speak to the broader conversation of the debt itself. And so one last
123thing, though, I think, Bob, is that on the tax bill, it doesn't break out, according to Kendall County, in terms of the tax bill. The debt. portion as well as what goes towards the debt versus the overall expenditure and so i or what the overall tax is is that something that is you know possible for our area for the tax because i think it becomes confusing we don't realize that there's a debt portion so all you see is a big number right and and and i wonder if that's uh who manages that and what's your experience Well, they don't do it on the bills, but you can get, at least I've never seen it on the tax bills, but they do break out the pension component, I believe. It shows you what you're paying towards
124pensions. But the counties, you can pull the agency reports, and then it shows you the tax rate by fund for every taxing body that's out there. And then you can, so you can see the rate for the debt, the rate for O&M, the rate for Ed. We also summarize that. And every year the district has to update its disclosure for its bonds and place that out on the internet. In there, there's a table of tax rates that shows you each of the rates by fund for the district. So there's a summary that we maintain of that. And, you know, the district can post that on its website perhaps. make that that'll be helpful to get that out there that information so okay well not necessarily good or bad it's just nice to know there's information
125good to know yeah well thank you again uh yeah you're welcome for being here thank you thank you all right 6.1 our superintendent's report um okay yeah a good evening board um just really uh Exciting summer has officially arrived and we have lots of programming, lots of wonderful energy. Our students are in opportunities and classes throughout the district. Our district level and principals and administrators are in full summer planning mode for next year. This is where I call it, we're getting the ship ready for sailing for next year. So we are full in. We are also excited coming up in about a week and a half. We've got Prairie Fest starting on the 18th, kickoff night, with our traditional parade on Father's Day. So happy early Father's Day, as well as, here we go, Prairie
126Fest. And we want to thank the Park District for being such a wonderful partner in really creating this event for our whole community and the whole 308 community comes out to celebrate. On the operational side, we are continuing our implementation of the hazardous study. This was started last year. You heard a presentation last year. We worked with transportation and our operations and finance department in terms of next steps. We are looking to continue evaluating, but also more importantly, areas where we have improvements and students can now safely walk to school. We will be implementing those this year. principals and the transportation department will be reaching out to the smaller subset of affected individuals and students. And if you have questions, please reach out to them. You will receive direct communication. It won't be a huge
127change, but it will be a small area, the Churchill Plank area, small group. I also want to thank everyone for coming out and supporting our town hall last week and also the week of the 27th. We had two big events. And just as a reminder, this has been a trending question that's come up a couple times, that the debt service tax rate is already set to decrease. This is not something that we are forcing or looking to, but rather we're bringing to the board an opportunity to take. advantage of this opportunity to plan for it versus waiting for a rainy day or emergencies to try to plan and organize these things. So this is really a function of strategic planning. And I would say I'm really proud that we're in a position where we can
128talk about this because we have taken a lot of accountability around our finances and our audits and these things. So they're very public and transparent. So everything is very laid out. If you have any questions, whether it's through public comment or reaching out directly, please do so. Also, referendum bonds are legally protected. That's the other thing. What we commit to do with those funds is very, very kind of locked down, as you heard tonight from Mr. Lewis. Those funds have to be used for what we are committing to do them, use them for. They cannot be any... you know, use of moving data to any kind of operational or salaries or anything like that. These are just very dedicated really to protect the most important of our shared resources. Back in the spring, I got
129to tell you how many classrooms I visited where just some natural wear and tear because we built our buildings 20 years ago in time for upgrades. The last thing, just look at our website. We have our Update 308 campaign. And so if you have any questions, please check that out. And then before I close, I really want to take a moment prior to starting the new year, the new school year. I want to recognize our senior leadership team and our district leadership team. So much of what you've heard, the successes tonight are a function of their individual. Our senior leaders spend a lot of time behind the scenes. And as Rafael said, we try to... you hear from us uh we know maybe we're doing something wrong but no whether it's front facing or behind
130um it's really their work uh they work so hard shoulder to shoulder with our staff with our students with their families and i just want to thank our senior leadership for their efforts and our district leaders for their efforts in supporting our schools this is really a a work that is committed to being there for students we exist as a district to serve students and that's it full stop so I want to thank you all. And with that, I want to invite board members who have some additional exciting news from around the district to share out. Do you want me to read it for you? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. Well, you know what? I've got it now. Congratulations to the Oswego High School girls softball team on an outstanding season. Winning
131state one year and fourth another. That's amazing. The Panthers earned their third consecutive trip to the state finals, finishing fourth in the state this year. It takes tremendous dedication and teamwork to reach that level year after year. And this program continues to make our community proud. And the Oswego East Scholastic Bowl competed in Atlanta. for the NAQT National Championship over Memorial Day weekend. They received their invite by going 20-0 in the conference this year. The team went four and six at Nationals, officially tying the 2022 Oswego East team. Congratulations on a great season. We look forward to celebrating both of these teams soon. Both OHS and OEHS yearbook programs have earned spots in the Walsworth Gallery of Excellence for their 25th 26 publications, prestigious national honor. This is the 18th recognition for Wolf's Eye Yearbook
132and the fourth for The Reflector. Both will be featured in Walsworth's Possibilities book as models for other programs nationwide. Congratulations to the students and advisors behind these great publications. Several students were chosen to have their artwork featured at the IAEA Statewide Student Art Show this fall. Congratulations to Oswego High School, Avery Thomas, Samantha Christian, and Vivian Hayes, and Oswego East High School, Alex Fisher, Giovanni Grazales, Lauren Laura, and Sophia Arias. Their work will be on display at the Renaissance Schomburg Convention Center Hotel from October 22nd through the 24th. Oswego East sophomore Grant Sepelfrich has been selected to represent the United States in the Latin America Baseball Classic this August in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Grant earned his spot after attending an open tryout in Naperville in February, great time for baseball, and advancing through the
133multiple rounds of evaluations. He will be coached by former Chicago White Sox pitcher Jim Parquet, who has held the USA bid for the LABC for over 20 years. Grant's family also extended their thanks to OEHS teachers, staff, and coaches, especially JV baseball coach Clifford, for their support throughout the year. Tyler McCance, a former OHS student in the STARS program, has achieved a remarkable milestone. After graduating, he continued his transition journey at Pathways Transition Center, earning his driver's license and landing a part-time job at Target. He was then accepted into Project Search at Northwestern Medicine Del Norte Hospital, a year-long transition-to-work program for youth. for young adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. On May 19th, Tyler graduated from Project SEARCH and secured a full-time job at AJR in St. Charles. Congratulations to Tyler. Well, thank you,
134Dr. Bugatti and fellow board members. Do we have any public comments? There's hardly anyone left. So we will be skipping 7.1 and moving to... 8.1 board member comments. I do. I mean, just a couple of quick things. As Dr. Calgatti mentioned, Prairie Fest is coming up in a couple of weeks. 308 usually has a strong presence at the Prairie Fest parade. So if you are a student, you're probably not watching this. If you're a student or a family member or a relative or whatever, come on down and participate in the parade. Obviously, we would love to have you. Also this weekend, also District 308 representation is the Aurora Pride Parade. Each year we seem to have a bigger number, so we're getting kind of bigger and stronger. So if you are so inclined and you
135have the time on June 14th, parade steps off at noon in downtown Aurora. You can find information online, or I'd be happy to answer questions. Amy? Nothing. Mine isn't really updates, but I don't think I say this enough in public. but I say it all the time in conversations with staff and community members. I want to thank all our staff for their dedication and capabilities they bring to our students and community as a whole. My priorities, my priority will always be students and staff that education supports our students. We have shown this to be a priority through our recent union contracts. These contracts lift salaries for staff more so than previous contracts. Help us compete with other districts for excellent staff. Reward our loyal staff members for sticking with us, even through the hard times
136when the district didn't levy and gave you 0.25% raises, while also reducing reliance on expensive and less-than-ideal outsourcing practices. One of the key financial focuses has been to reduce non-education-related expenses, increase revenues in ways that are new to the district, and improve efficiency throughout the system. Those gains are used so we can continue to focus on our students and staff instead of going towards things like unchecked utility and supply prices, overpriced printers, or other high-cost expenditures like buses and the financing of them. This remains a focus for Dr. Calgatti and his team. As many know, we recently were told by the state that funding was drastically cut. I think it is important for me to stress this to our staff in the community, how appreciated our staff is and, like, how awesome you guys are.
137So that's, I just wanted to share that today. I don't know. I just, I don't say it enough. So thank you. Thank you. Anything else? 8.2, our board protocol discussion. I think that's me. That's you. So I just want to start by saying these protocols are important because they help board members stay compliant with the law, maintain good governance practices, and preserves the board's ability to function as a single governing body rather than as an individual decision maker. And I think that that is really important for the community to know. The board protocol that I will read tonight are board policies three and four, board members communication via email. Board members will be judicious in their use of email and understand that most emails are subject to the Freedom of Information Act and such can
138be made public. In compliance with the Open Meeting Act, board members will not reply all to any district email or text. Board members will... CC the board president on questions emailed or text to the superintendent. If an email is sent to the entire board from a community member, the board president will respond. Number four, communicating with staff. Board members will treat all staff members with respect. When communicating with other staff in their role as parents, board members will remember the neon sign that reads board member. and will not overstep their parent role. Board members will communicate all questions and concerns about the district to the superintendent. It's just really important that board members realize emails can be requested by the public, media, employees, or community members. Written comments can be taken out of context, so
139it's something that we need to be cognizant of when we are responding. Also, our email calls for us to be transparent in terms of legal expectations for public bodies. Also, a reply all email chain can unintentionally become a board discussion. So it's something as board members we have to be extremely cognizant of. Additionally, it's important that the president is cc'd on all responses or requests to the superintendent to eliminate misunderstandings or conflicting directions to the superintendent. It also ensures the board president knows what information is being asked of the superintendent and it helps avoid the perception that individual board members are supervising staff as well and so i think that is really important um i think that that's all i have regarding our board protocols but if anyone would like to add to the conversation
140feel free i i think it your point about the emails, oftentimes there will be someone from the community that will email us all in general asking a question. And I think the expectation is for all of us to answer. I mentioned that. But I think the community needs to realize that it's not necessarily that simple. We are a board. We are supposed to speak with one voice. And the answer should come from the board president or whoever the board president designates. So to the extent that people get upset that we're not all sending out individual answers to your individual emails, there's a reason for that. And it's also not subject matter either. Absolutely. And it prevents us from giving individual answers. What people do need to realize is that we have, it is the expectation
141of the superintendent to get back with whomever reaches out to the board and that we are responding. But oftentimes our response will not come just from an individual board member, but instead there is a collective voice that we'd like to. provide to the public when they are reaching out to board members. This, you know, the one where the neon sign that reads, you know, board member, when we're, you know, we have to be very careful. I mean, it's very careful. I know if I am emailing a teacher, I'm like, thank you so much for everything you do. You know, like, I don't want it to feel You know, like, we're supposed to kind of follow the same kind of chain of command, you know, go to a teacher, you know, like, as any other parent.
142But coming from a board member, it can be, you know, kind of a lot of weight on a teacher. So if I'm emailing, if anybody's listening and I'm sending an email on behalf of my student, simply for my student and. I don't take any, I respect your opinions and just looking for help, right? Is that a preemptive apology? Man, I don't even know how else to say it. I'm just like, I so appreciate everything you do. I just don't want it to be, you know, like that, have that fear. And there's, you know, obviously there's, you know, people can fear retribution, you know, so we have to be very careful. I mean, let's face it. There have been people. There have been people that have used the office or tried to use the office to
143their advantage. And I think that's not what we're here for. Yeah. And, yeah, I don't even know how to say it. Call us out on it, you know, to the teacher community out there, to the building community out there, to our administrators, you know. And we'll, if there are issues, we'll try to fix them. I don't know anything, Erica. Let's keep going. All right. Well, unless, you know, I'm not going to A.V. anything. No, I'm good. Thank you. Thank you, Ravel, for leading that discussion. And we're moving on to, I got to be more honest, 9.1. Consent agenda. Can I have a motion to approve the consent agenda, please? I make a motion to approve all items under consent, including 9.1 minutes from the Board of Education meeting on May 11th, 2026, open and closed
144sessions. 9.2 to acknowledge the FOIA requests received by the district. 9.3 to approve the field trips for overnight and or more than 200 miles. 9.4 to acknowledge decommissioned items of the district. 9.5 to acknowledge gifts and or donations received by the district. 9.6 to approve the treasurer's bond for the 2026-2027. 9.7 to approve the renewal of 2026-2027 CLIC property and casualty insurance. 9.8 to approve the renewal of the 2026-2027. CLIC workers' compensation 9.9 to approve the Learning to Lead in Mathematics grant as discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? I have one question. On the decommissioned items, those appear to be all like textbooks and instructional materials. What happens to them? Do they get recycled? We try to sell them depends on what the item is specific Some of them are we do have buyback programs
145at times Sometimes we donate it if it's applicable and sometimes recycle. Oh basically we're just getting rid of it. Yes Okay, I'm done I just wanted to quickly shout out 9.5 acknowledgement of gifts and our donations I was surprised that how much is on there. So thank you to the community organizations, businesses, individuals, et cetera, that donate, you know, any quantity of money or materials to our district. Ms. C? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Those in the audience are meeting and it's still quite a bit of me to it We're at 10.1 for information and we have through 10.8 Financial information. I'm assuming this would be Yes, sir. This is so for the month of March, which is What we presented I know is
146a couple of months behind because it has to do with timing of the board meetings We don't get our statements up until about the 15th of the month. But for the month of March, what we see here as far as the finance is in line with what we expect. The only variance is that the salary numbers are higher. That has something to do with really. step increases because if you notice our teachers get paid more to take courses so they're taking courses at a higher rate than what we anticipate which is resulting in more uh more salary payment for them but otherwise everything else is in line with what uh what we expect at the time of the year so we're hoping that investment in their education um increases capacity and uh student outcomes creates
147uh an excellent education experience for our kids Something else I wanted to point out has to do with inflation. Now, as it relates to some of the expenses that we are dealing with as a school district, because we buy stuff like everybody else, marketplace does, inflation for the month of March was higher than what we had anticipated. So for the 12 month, from March of 25 to March of 26, it was 3.3%, which is pretty high. A big part of what was driving that, we know, is fuel, and that's a big driver for that. Because for that, the index for gasoline, just for the month of March, went up by 21.2%. That's a significant increase. We normally don't see something like that. We'll probably get a 10 basis point, 20 basis point, or 21.2 in
148one month is significant. So those are so many things. And we're in the marketplace. We buy fuel. But fortunately, we locked in the rates that we can get for diesel. I just wanted to point that out. That is driving inflation. And that's why one of the things that I pointed out in my public comment is... We're doing our best to limit those types of expenses. And so some of this here, the information that we have in here, for example, this is the time of the year, if you will, actually for us, if you look at our fund balance, we have a fund balance of $16 million. We'll get our first installment. from the 2025 levy that will be coming on July 25th to just about from the uh the three County Kendall will and uh
149came and then in September July yes then in September we got some money from uh and oh I believe uh last late last month we got about 7.7 mil from uh Kendall We had about 1.3 from Will and about $40,000 from Ken. So, but July is when we really get a significant amount of the first installment. And then the second installment is in September is when we have a high fund balance. This is like the tough time of the year. And we've been able to manage with some prudent decision-making. and without having to worry about borrowing. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wolf. I know it's a lot of work your team is putting in to really watch the funds in that way and watch the cash flow. So I want to thank you guys. Thank
150you, Mr. Swin. Thank you. My thanks to the team, really. I have a great team. And really the whole district, everyone, administrators as well as everyone else, they've been prudent with the way they've been spending money because we do a quality budget review that we actually match expenditures to what was budgeted to make sure we're in line with what we expect. Thank you. All right. 10.2, our, oh, back. Here we go. Our accelerated placement plan. Yep. I would like to, as I get set up, welcome our Executive Director of High Schools, Jennifer Cooper-Wells, and returning to our table, Assistant Principal Kate Lippold from OHS in Student Services. So they have a proposal that they brought to both our Policy and Legislative Board Committee, as well as our Equity Learning Innovation. um and would like to
151then present to all of you so hi good evening board thank you for still being here um so i am dr jen cooper wells i'm the executive director of high schools and this kate lippold assistant principal student services at ohs So one of the things we wanted to bring to you was to do a quick summary of the accelerated placement program with the changes that the state has done with their cut scores. We wanted to review this policy, go over what it currently is, what the purpose of it is, and then some suggestions that we would like to propose for you. So the accelerated placement program ensures that they have, that students that have high ability have access to advanced learning opportunities. And so this is making sure that students who wouldn't normally think that
152they could go into certain programs or certain courses that we then are allowing them to and encouraging them to. So this is advanced access, this is maximizing their potential, and then having flexible pathways in order to make it the reality. And all of this really comes back to our portrait of a learner where we want to make sure that our students, when they leave our school district, have these five attributes and that we really are providing opportunities for all of our students. So the key policy components within the APP is making sure that students have this framework of equitable access. And so this could be whether a student can accelerate within a single subject, whether they can jump an entire grade or have early entrance options. And we also wanted to focus on the decision
153making process so that this is not just a one person deciding that the student has this opportunity, but it really is bringing in the students, the educators, the families, as well as the administrators into this conversation. And then our eligibility criteria, we want to make sure that it's not just one single data point, but we really are looking at multiple indicators and looking at the whole student. When we're going through and we're looking at this, we want to make sure that we are increasing our communication with families. And we'll talk about that a little bit later as we go through this. So current eligibility for students in this APP program just does not follow on the students who are traditionally identified as gifted. This goes through and says that students that are scoring at and
154above proficiency levels based on state's test scores automatically are placed into these accelerated courses. Families who wish to opt out of this opportunity can do so simply through a conversation, but then providing us written documentation so that we can keep track of that. So with ISBE, they went through and they changed their cut scores this past year. In the process of doing that, they wanted to make sure that they were aligning better nationally with our scores with other states. making sure that when they were looking at how our students were performing on the state assessments, our students appeared to be lower than the national average. And so they went and took the cut scores and they lowered them to make them more leveled with the nation and what their scores looked like. in the perception
155of their proficiency levels. So based on what ISBE recommended to school districts, they said that students who are at who are above proficiency that they are automatically placed into those high rigorous courses and students who are meeting proficiency that they then go into are eligible to enroll and to be placed in but are not automatically placed in all right so that takes us to why we want to propose some changes to our policy relative to the accelerated placement program We're gonna go through, there's a lot of text here, I'm not gonna read it, but just to point out that the text in red is what our proposed changes are. In terms of the existing policy, there's an introductory passage. We've mentioned that the accelerated placement program is applicable to students across the grade spectrum. Our
156proposed changes really are focusing on the high school level because of the impact relative to specific course placement, so we're gonna key into that. In this introductory in particular though, what we wanted to call out was in the district we have an existing practice for open enrollment in our honors and accelerated placement and dual credit courses. So we wanted to make that very explicit in the policy and add that statement that students remain eligible and welcome to enroll in courses based on their interests, their needs, regardless of any kind of test score or identified criteria. And then as Dr. Cooper-Wells shared, when the state realigned the cut scores for our state assessments, it created kind of a tiered process for automatic enrollment as opposed to automatic eligibility. So we would be adding a component to
157this policy that would talk about that automatic eligibility. So to make it more clear, again, in the past, the current policy specifies that students who are at or above proficient on those assessments would be automatically enrolled. In this instance, for students who are above proficient on their state assessments, and that for our rising ninth graders includes the IAR, and for our current high school students includes those ACT suite of assessments. if they are above proficient again they would be automatically enrolled in coursework and then it's aligned to the subject area so reading assessment above proficient would correspond to an english or ela course placement then what we are proposing to add is a whole parallel section that specifically talks about students who are at proficient on those state assessments. Those students would be automatically eligible
158to enroll. So rather than an automatic placement, there would be automatic eligibility. And again, scores in English would be, or course placements in English would be aligned to reading scores, math to math, science to science, and so forth. So then when we're going through and we're looking at what does this really need to do? One of the conversations that we were having with lots of families at the high school level was that our communication needs to increase. And so when we're looking at this, diversifying what our communication strategies have looked like in the past and really building those up so that we're not solely. solely relying on email that we're including in-person events. So our Wolves 101 and Panthers 101 with the new incoming freshmen. In August, looking at our freshmen are looking at the
159Wolves and Panthers readiness days, looking at our curriculum nights, looking at any opportunity where we have families in person that we're providing this information as well to front load. you're going to be getting an email you're going to be getting a letter sent home in October which is going to be before we get to the course registrations what are we really doing in order to make sure that we've got text messages going out that we've got infographics so that we really are communicating this is a positive experience for our families and for our students we also want to make sure that we are focusing on those underrepresented communities making sure that everyone really is getting this information and understanding what a great opportunity these this is for the students and we're building up that transparency
160so that we want to make sure that this is a yearly thing where students can enroll or then opt out based on where they are for that current year So eligibility processes and documentations, we want to increase what we are doing in terms of making sure that the parent documentation requirements, if they choose to opt out, that we are providing lots of different opportunities for our families. Again, not relying specifically on just email. So we're working potentially with the CIS and seeing if there's a way that we can build it into PowerSchool. So again, we want to build that transparency, but also build the ease for our families to have the conversation. Impact on student access. We believe that this is going to provide more access for our students as well as increase the participation
161because our students are going to be flagged in our student information system, which will allow our teachers as well as our counselors to know who these students are and have those individual conversations with the students to say, we believe in you and we think that you should try this opportunity. Implementation considerations. So again, this is an annual communication that we will be rolling out in our community. This is not just a once you hit high school, this is the first time you're hearing it, but it really is an ongoing throughout the fall that all of our families will be hearing this information. We want to improve our documentation process so that we are monitoring which... students are doing it? What is the feedback that we're receiving from families? How can we improve at the high
162school level so that we really are meeting the needs of our students and families? We want to make sure that if this change in policy happens that we're training up our counselors and our teachers so that they understand what this APP really stands for. What does this mean for our students and how can we help support them in the knowledge so that they can communicate it as well when they're having conversations with the students. And then again, looking at that equity evaluation, making sure that our students who have this opportunity we want to find out who really is accepting this as a positive thing and how do we encourage those students so that they really are accessing this opportunity summary when it comes to policy 6 colon 3135 we really want to focus on Providing
163opportunities for our students to accelerate and move ahead. We want to make sure that they still have opportunities to skip the grade levels in certain areas and that they still have that early entry to kindergarten and or first grade. Those are not changing. So I just want to keep that in the back of your mind. This what we're proposing really is focusing at the high school level. who can participate. Again, we are saying that any student who wants to enroll in a course can enroll in that course and they do not have to be identified as gifted in order to participate. This is a team decision. So this is families and students, teachers, administrators, counselors, all coming together in order to find out what is going to be the best for the student. And then
164the specific wording change that we are proposing is that students who are scoring above proficiency, that they are automatically placed and enrolled into these accelerated courses. for those specific subject areas based on the test scores and students who score proficient that they are automatically eligible in order to be enrolled in those coursework. Students, they can skip courses. If they demonstrate the mastery in their content areas, families can choose alternative coursework that's going to better fit with their child's goals. And then we as a district are going to work on communication to make sure that we are communicating how students are eligible, how they, and then the different languages and different methods so that everybody. whether they speak English or another language, are able to access the information. We had mentioned, too, we anticipate, even with
165making a change in automatic placement versus automatic eligibility, that we do anticipate increased numbers of students who avail themselves of these opportunities. And that really is because in practice, what we found is the students who are above proficient are already accelerated in coursework. So that allows our teams to do a better job of having those multifaceted conversations with students who are at proficient in order to give them more information, individualize their plans so that they have a better opportunity to maybe take that honors class or take that AP class that they might not have considered before. Any questions? Or questions or comments? This is the third time I've seen the presentation, so I don't have any questions. But I would just reemphasize that this stems from, you know, the state law, right, that we have
166accelerated placement. And also that this is not the only way that students select to get into classes that might be more challenging for them. I think that's a really important point because we often have students who would do well in honors or an AP class and for different reasons don't enroll. And so those conversations I feel like are even more important than a process like this, which is also important. There's other ways that we can communicate with students about what we think would be best for their opportunity. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate you sticking around. Have a great night. 10.3. Hello. Hi, that's me again. Aurora University, direct to advance. Well, this is an exciting event or moment for our district here. Yeah. Aurora University went and came to us in the
167fall and said, we would like to propose a Aurora University direct to admit program, which would allow our students when they graduate in order with certain criteria to have direct admittance to Aurora University without having to go through the traditional application process. So here is what they are proposing. So with this, the premise behind it is they wanted to remove barriers so that students would be able to start getting access to four-year universities. And they have a similar agreement with other school districts. And so they wanted to reach out to us to see if we would be willing to do that. They are already a university that is in both of our high schools. on a regular basis providing resources for post-secondary and so they just wanted to take it to that whole next level
168so this would expand access and supports to families it would provide early college pathways it would ensure affordability through scholarship and aid and it would continue those preparing students with post-secondary supports The key features is any student that has a 3.0 GPA would automatically be admitted directly into Aurora University. All that our counselors would need to do would be to provide Aurora University their transcript. That is it. It would continue to allow students to remain eligible for a full range of scholarships and financial aid. So one of the things that we asked was If they have this, do they still have access to scholarships? And they're like, of course, it literally is just removing the application process for them. It would provide the simplified process for the students where they would just simply tell their
169counselor. The counselors would then get a batch of students who have that 3.0 GPA that are interested in going to Aurora University. And the transcripts would be sent to our contact person. And that was it. They, Aurora University would then do the admission and the scholarship letters based off of the information. They would continue to do dedicated Aurora University support that they already do for anybody who is looking to go to Aurora University. So whether that's family nights, that's their FAFSA workshops, one-on-one guidance, those all still continue for our students. And it's great. So the next steps is presenting to you this evening. Then the intent would be that you can ask whatever questions you may have. And then on July, then you guys vote on the action that you would like to do. If
170you approve this admin direct, it goes into effect August 1st of 2026. Did I see this was for like kind of a one year trial or is this? No. Okay. No, this would just be ongoing. for as long as we want to continue having this as an opportunity for direct admins with the university. I get why they'd want to do it. Yeah, I mean. We've got great students, Juan, and it helps our finances. We have received some feedback from our legal team, so we are working through some minor changes, but the kind of overview and purpose and intent of this partnership is what Dr. Cooper-Wells has presented tonight. But we will have the exact wording. That's why we... put the actual MOU where we did in the agenda. Thank you, Dr. Kukulwels. I'm Chip Ben-Owen.
171I know you both have been working on this. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's a great opportunity. Are you staking around? I wouldn't. At that table. No pressure. Action item or not action information item. 10.4 approval resolution. It's not an approval, it's discussion today of resolution delegating certain employment authority to the superintendent for a defined summer period. Am I correct? that's correct um so board this is bringing to you uh official practice many places have this already kind of standard um our attorney brought this to our attention as an option of the board does meet twice in july and then in august this would allow essentially just for a four-week period when there are no there's no second meeting tonight's meeting is a little longer because we also have when meeting this month as well. But
172this resolution is really to help keep the hiring moving forward during a gap where we would avoid losing any potential candidates because right early in August, we go right into orientation. And so anybody in between that period for onboarding preparation, this allows the board essentially to secure candidates who were seeking in the middle of the summer, which is already a tough period to hire. A couple of things that I want to underscore for the board is that this is not a unilateral superintendent goes and do whatever they want. This is a very clear alignment with the board policies, practices, and expectations for all hiring. And on August 10th, all those decisions would be ratified. I will be bringing to the board those decisions as well. So it's not like I make a decision that you're
173not hearing about it. These are actually decisions that you would then review and ratify at the August board meeting. So that's a big Point I want to bring to the board's attention is just really an issue of timing that we want to make sure that we are hiring folks again guardrails policy strong human resource practices process does not change So just to be clear then it's it's almost like a it's almost like a conditional hiring subject to Board approval at the next board meeting. Which wouldn't be any different than technically what we do now because generally we extend an offer prior to board approval. So it's in alignment with what our practices currently are. The only question I had was, is there like a... A list of positions we're hiring for, and we're not going
174to go outside of those already advertised as open positions. So are you asking if it's a new newly allocated, like if they're asking for an additional FTE, right? They wouldn't just add positions. Is that what you're asking? Yeah. Yeah, I know. So those typically, if it's a. We're only hiring with placement costs, essentially, right? So if we're adding new positions, we would operate within the budget. We're never going to operate outside of the budget. And if that is something, a new position, like a new type of position, like, you know, then that would always come to the board for review anyway because it's important that the board have way in on those types of, if I'm creating a new type of position. But if a teacher, if we have an increase in first grades, let's
175say kindergarten class size has increased significantly. I will be adding a budget, but that will be subject, again, to board policy. Is there a budget for it? Can we afford it? Can we pay for it? And we will operate within those confines of it. Do you, this would be particularly for teachers, TAs, we're not looking at... admin positions or anything along those lines that'll be in this emergency type of not emergency but this no i again if a principal were to you know worst case scenario resign for some whatever reason i would want to post it if we you know would happen but there's nothing predicted at this point but i would say yeah i mean i would i would not exclude it in any way and then this is uh this will all be
176On board docs, this will all be as transparent as August. Yep. As transparent as any other process. Just a very short period of time. And yeah, this is kind of in lieu of emergency meetings to hire a person. Well, and I guess that is what I'm concerned about. Like, we are all going on vacation. I know I am. And so it would be pretty hard for me as a board member. And just honestly. per board policy to do for me to log in or come in remotely because I'm being transparent. I would be on vacation and I don't know how many of us will technically be on vacation because we've had some of them. You can't even log in when you're on vacation. That's what I said. It violates board policy. Absolutely. And so I
177say that to say we wouldn't want to hamstring the district where they can't operate or function. And it is really important if you're hiring a principal or an assistant principal. for them to get in and understand like the culture and what the needs are, particularly if there are vacancies in that building where you need to hire. And I would argue just from, you know, an education standpoint, right now it is really tough to find. Certain positions. And so we're waiting until our next board meeting for recruitment and hiring to happen. You lose a lot of great candidates because most candidates aren't going to wait around until the board reconvenes. And then we've had a little discussion on this. You have experience with this. It's. It's very common. Absolutely. On a professional level, it's common. It's
178not like I don't think that the superintendent would be circumventing any board policies or procedures because, again, we will be voting on it. And I can't even underscore enough the fact that most candidates that we vote on, they've already extended an offer to. I don't think we've ever voted on anybody that didn't have an offer extended to them. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we don't actually hire people, like interview people as board and stuff like that. All right. Any other? Okay. Thank you, boy. 10.5, our waste and recycling RFP. Thank you. I'm going to have Ms. Sitar talk about this to the board. Okay, thank you. As part of our dedication to continue looking for savings on our annual contracts, we released an RFP for waste management and recycling at our buildings. After a competitive RFP process,
179we're recommending awarding this contract to GROOT. GROOT was selected based on the overall value across pricing, service capabilities, sustainability, and experience. The contract term is three years with an optional renewal years at approximately $197,207.50 annually. Well, as you can see, GROOT's base price was not the lowest bid. There are additional fees from waste management for contamination, porta potties, hand washes that drive their true annual costs higher. What is notable this year, we paid over $316,000 to waste management just in fees. So that's over the contracted base rate. LRS was the highest cost overall. GRUT also carries the lowest annual escalation rate at 5% versus the 5.5 and the 5.87 for competitors. Any questions? It's waste management. No more questions. Thank you for the process. Again, the RFP is a very important process when we can,
180outside of an emergency, take advantage of that. And I just want to thank you and your team. I know it's a lot of labor time, and so we want to appreciate it. Yeah, and we also reevaluated at each building how big the dumpsters are, how often they're picked up, do we need that much recycling, et cetera. Andre's team went through and reevaluated that. So hopefully that will bring our costs down and we'll save some money. And by the way of transparency too, this is our second go at this RIP. And we first developed the RIP before. I guess the search wasn't as wide, so we only got one submission from our current provider. So we decided to scrap that, start over again. And we decided to widen our reach and reach out to other vendors
181to let them know, hey, we're doing this. We're big enough to make a difference in your book of business. And then we did it again, and we got better response. That effort pays off. So thank you. All right. Oh. 10.6, district fees. Same. Let me see it again. All right. All right. Each year we review our student curriculum and meal fees around this time. For the school year 26-27, we're recommending no increase to the registration and curriculum fees. We are, however, proposing a modest increase to student meal fees to address the rising food and labor costs. Current pricing remains significantly below the USDA benchmark of $4.16. For context, in SD 308, our breakfast prices increased by 10 cents in 2017 and not since then. Lunch prices only increased by 10 cents in 2024. Also, our
182rates are comparable to neighboring districts or below neighboring districts. So as you know, since partnering with Aramark, we've seen improved participation, stronger meal quality, and better overall service, which was also confirmed in our recent ISBE administrative review. The proposed adjustment is necessary to maintain financial stability of the food service program and offset continuing increases of those food, labor, and operating costs. Additionally, we complete a full evaluation of the community eligibility provision program each year. While CEP can be financially beneficial in districts with a high concentration of directly certified students and severe poverty, SD 308 current data does not meet the threshold where it would be financially sustainable. In practical terms, the CEP only works out when your identified student participation percentage is high enough to offset the traditional free and reduced meal claims. A common
183misconception is that an eligible student includes all free and reduced lunches. It is only for students who are identified by the state as directly certified, homeless, migrant, foster, or runaway. I can explain this further if you'd like. So to be eligible for CEP, your individual percentage student participation must be above 25%. However, the CEP tool that ISBE provides shows that schools between 40% and 59% ISP are at a financial risk for the CEP program. To put that in perspective, we currently only have two schools over 40%. The reimbursement rate would only be about 64% of the free rate, and we would need to absorb the gap with local funds. This is a district-wide reimbursement decision. It must be carefully reviewed as districts are also locked into this for four years before you can re-evaluate. If
184you were wondering what it would take to be 100%, our severe need would be 60 to 62.5 ISP. That's where the multiplier would yield reimbursement close to 100%. Additionally, families living in the same district when sometimes they might have children in different schools, they would face unequal rules. One child might get free meals automatically while their sibling at a non-CEP school would require a pay account or an application. That being said though, we are committed to maintaining access and equity through fee waivers, improving food service quality, and making targeted pricing adjustments to assure sustainability. Thank you. Questions? Just a quick one. I know it's getting late. So schools in surrounding districts that leverage the CEP, are they being impacted the same way we would be impacted if that's a program that we decided to leverage?
185I would have to look into their data to see exactly where their free and reduced percentages and their ISP percentages. But like I said, if they're under that 65% or that 62%, they're not getting the full reimbursement rate. So, yeah, I would have to look into that to answer that accurately. We will have to, if the numbers don't work, we'll have to subsidize the international school lunch program. And that is one area, as it stands right now, that we don't have any issue with, as far as it being self-sustaining and in its own way. The concern will be, since our financial position is challenging as it is, how to subsidize a program. A space that can survive on its own. As it stands now, family and kids who are eligible for a relaunch, they get
186that. and those who are eligible for reduced price. We gave them that. So I understand right now the way the program works, there is no problem of affordability that we've seen. So I'm just concerned about not getting ourselves into a situation where we're creating a problem where there isn't any. Okay. Thank you. Mine is hopefully quick. As far as fee collection, I know we're looking into possible solutions. Can you just, what are you, where are we? As it stands right now, we have over $5 million. It's a significant amount of money that is duly owed to the district. It's not being paid. We're looking at different options and being able to recoup that. We are going to make outreach to family and try to get them to set up, payment plan to be able to
187to come and make a start making payment on those and then if that if we don't get the kind of response that we need then we have to look at other options including maybe partnering with a firm that is experienced in being able to convert accounts payable to revenue for us that we need to be able to operate the district We're looking at different technology. Yes, we're looking at different technologies that will help us with recouping. I also would think that technology a lot has to do with access. Families are very comfortable these days with newer forms of technology. You know, just look at Amazon. People order. There's lots of ways that people access ways to pay for things. And so we're looking at accelerating that. We're very committed to making, essentially holding. both ourselves
188but also our community accountable for those. Those are big investments that will really help with our budget. And so last week at the town hall, a number of people came in to what are we planning to do? We're very committed to recouping all those funds and ensuring that families have a way to really stand by their investment in our schools. This is a very this is an individual one and we're committed to it. And you'll hear more about those plans. And just to be clear, though. families and kids who were eligible not to have fees paid, they don't have to worry about paying fees. They've gone through the direct certification or income verification. The same thing applies to reduced fees. So what we're talking about is based on the criteria that's been set by the
189state and for... eligibility for reduction in fees they don't make those and there's no reason why they should pay the fees to the SS yeah so we inform the community that there is an issue and we're looking into the solutions to those issues as well so I just wanted to make sure yes and fill out those applications the new applications for the new school year will drop on July 1st fill them out thank you all right 10.7, our Oswego High School retaining wall RFP. I'm going to wow my newly approved director of operations. Take this on. Congratulations. Take it away, Andre. The late nights aren't as bad as they used to be. it's still gonna be late night i knew there was a reason i get to stick around for this one uh so as
190you can see in the memo we provided uh we have a failing retaining wall on the east side of oswego high school uh between the football stadium and our grounds buildings um that retaining wall is holding back the earth and the ground that the track is sitting on And as we all know, the fun and joys we've had with the tracks over the last two years, I'd hate to see any more damage be done to them. So we came together with putting out an RFP for the public. We reached out to a handful of landscapers just because we felt we weren't really getting any response to them. So it's not their forte to normally be looking for projects like that. So we directly contacted three of them. uh two of them were able to submit
191bids for the work done uh unfortunately one of them wasn't a complete uh and the third one had lots of questions but never did finally submit one uh so in our letter of recommendation uh it would be go to cox landscaping um they are telling us that they would be able to start that towards the beginning of august and have it completed by august 20th um We had some very specific drawings that we sent out to make sure that the right materials were designed and it's not just pull a wall down and put it up. We're talking removing dirt, adding in lime, adding in C6, adding drain tile. Behind the ground shop, we already have storm sewers back there. So they would be trenching under the ground to help pull that water out so that
192we don't have these collapse and failures in the wall like we're currently having. Mind you, that wall that's there has been there for over 20 years, probably since the last time we did the track. And the type of material and the style of building the retaining wall has significantly changed over the years. So it would just be that one section? Correct, just around the backside, pretty much on the bend of the curve, the track between the track and our gravel lot behind the grounds buildings over there. It's about 252 linear feet around. Any other questions? Thank you. Thank you. All right. Item 10.8, reasonable for all funded broke-call exterior improvements. Yeah, as is the case periodically, the state will get additional funding. I grant money, and they'll reach out and say, hey, we have this
193money. You got to spend it very quickly. That was the case here. And we reached out to the director, the principal of Procore, and to get an input and say, so this is the additional funding. How would you like to spend it? And she informed us, Dr. Rose informed us that she would like some outdoor spaces to be done to enhance the program. And so we went to work and did an RFP process, a bid process. The company that came in, that was the most qualified, that came in with the lowest price, and the ability to be able to do the work is the one that we are recommending. Because of the timing of the requirement for the grant, you got the money, you got obligated by before the end of June. We don't have
194the luxury of doing information and approval, which is why in the memo we're requesting that. The board makes an exception and approve it tonight in order for us not to lose the fund. If we don't follow that path, the state will probably roll it and give it to another district and say, you can do this, here's extra money. We know we need the funds, we need the resource to be able to enhance our early childhood preschool fraud program. Did you say whether or not the grant covers the entire cost? Yes. Okay. Yes. I know it's late, but we used an Eagle Scout to beat the outdoor classroom a few years ago. I remember bringing my dog out there and helping with that project and lots of dads with donuts. And so this is kind of
195nice that we're just, we're not having to go out and have this massive recruiting effort in order to improve our space. Thank you, Illinois, you know, for that. Ish. Ish. Send more. Send more, yeah. Keep us tier one. You know, we didn't all of a sudden get more money. All right. I think that was it for that. We'll see you for action item in a second here. All right. Action item 11.1, approval of bills for payment. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to authorize the payment of bills in the amount of $5,458,089.31 as presented. Second. Any discussion? Okay. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. C? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.2, approval of athletic training RFP. Can I have a motion, please? I
196make a motion to approve the award of the athletic trainer services contract to athletico-physical therapy for an initial one-year term beginning July 1, 2026, with the option to review for up to two additional one-year terms based on the proposal's overall value, cost-effectiveness, and demonstrated quality of services discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? Have we confirmed that there's a need for two at each high school for 40 hours a week? We'll have to follow up on that. Okay. Is there 40, it's 40 hours combined per school per week? No, it's two people for 40 hours. So 80 hours total per high school. Dr. Cooper-Wells looks like, did you want to add something? No. Oh, okay. Never mind then. Sorry. It's just. It's, yeah, we can double check it, but I am pretty sure that they would
197not. They are very clear, especially if you went through the RFP process. This was vetted. Well, and every time I walk by their office, there's kids lined up. So what we can do is I can bring a follow-up right away for the board. Okay. And for the next meeting. So it's 80 hours per school for $196,000. Yeah. Dr. Kincaid, did you want to add something? No. Okay. I'll have to seek more information. Yeah. All right. Dr. Polak? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.3, approval of photography services RFP recommendation for the 26-27 school year. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to award the district-wide photography services contract to LifeTouch for the 2026-2027 school year with the option to renew
198for the 2027-2028 and 28-29 school years based on satisfactory performances discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? No. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Ms. C? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.4, approval of intergovernmental agreements for municipalities. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the intergovernmental agreements for municipalities as discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? I just have a comment before the vote. I just want to say that I appreciate all of our intergovernmental agencies and our municipalities, et cetera. I've said before, and so I'll make sure that I'm consistent, that I don't see... The necessary value and, you know, kind of like full time school resource officers in our buildings and for us to provide the payment for that is something that I'm
199going to vote against tonight. So I'll, I'll say that although I appreciate. Mr bell's work, and I appreciate all of the cooperation of our municipalities. I will tell you that the 3 that are listed here are not the. Oh, I'm sorry. There's only three tonight was for Kendall County Sheriff's Department, Montgomery Police Department, and I speak of fire. The additional ones will come the July meeting that July 13th. We wanted to make sure that legal continue to vet some of those things. So this memo has been updated to represent the three tonight that are coming. Perfect. And so that SRO reciprocal reporting agreement with us, we go police will come the next time later. All right. Thank you. Do you do you need a moment to. reconsider or anything along those lines? No, I'm good.
200No, I'm going to change my vote now and vote yes to these intergovernmental agreements. I thought they were all in there for this meeting, but I appreciate it. Okay, because I don't want you to... No, I'm good. Thank you. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.5, approval of science and Spanish contemporary human geography curriculum resources. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the science and Spanish contemporary human geography resource proposal as discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? Just that we are in the process of reviewing our budget. We are definitely, the proposal will stand on a bridge to the board. I will note that as we are looking at significant budgetary constraints, we may have to
201bring an amendment in July, depending on where our budget process continues. And I just want to name that. So I am recommending that we continue to seek approval this evening, that we are approving this exciting progress for our community and for our staff and those sacrifices and the work that's been put in. I will say, though, that we are facing, as the community has understood, unforeseen and really outside of our control changes and that we have to adjust. So there will be some potential prioritization. Okay. I'll hold you to that. So keep us posted, please. All right. All right. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.6, approval of student rights and responsibilities handbook. Can I have a motion, please? I make
202a motion to approve the student's rights and responsibilities handbook as discussed and presented. Second. Anybody? No? Okay. Ms. C? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.7, approval of consolidated district plan. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve a consolidated district plan as discussed and presented. Second. Discussion? No? Okay. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.8, approval of Title I school-wide plan for Boulder Hill, Long Beach, Lakewood Creek, Fox Chase, and Plank. Oh, can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the Title I school-wide plan for Boulder Hill, Long Beach, Lakewood Creek, Fox Chase, and Plank as discussed and presented. Second.
203Any discussion? No? Okay. Dr. Pollack? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. Weinmuth? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.9, approval of Title I School Improvement Plan Year 2 of implementation for Fox Chase and Old Post. I have a motion, please. I make a motion to approve the Title I School Improvement Plan Year 2 implementation for Fox Chase and Old Post as discussed and presented. Second. Discussion? No. Okay. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.10, approval of Title I School Improvement Plan, year three implementation for Boulder Hill and Long Beach. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the Title I School Improvement Plan, year three implementation for Boulder Hill and Long Beach
204as discussed and presented. Second. Discussion? Nope. Okay. Ms. C? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. Wenma? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.1, approval of board policies. Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve board policies section 2, school board, 2,200, 2,220, 2,250, 2,260, section 4, operational services, 4,165, section 5, general personnel, 5,30, 5,50, 5... colon 255, colon 330, section six instruction, six colon six five, six colon 100, six colon 145, six colon 170, six colon 180, section seven students, seven colon 27, colon 57, colon 100, seven colon 185. 7 colon 220 7 colon 230 7 colon 240 7 colon 260 7 colon 280 7 colon 300 section 8 community relations 8 colon 90 as discussed and presented can you repeat that second i i used
205that line before i used that that Can I have just one clarification on board policy to 220? That was the 1 that we had legal review about whether or not. The yes versus no would add additional language. Legal review is that no additional language so leave it as is. So we will follow up with press because. It was a little confusing, so I just wanted to make sure that we reflected what our conversation was both in the policy and legislative committee and at our meeting the last time we discussed for information. Do we have to amend anything from our vote? No, because the policy remains unchanged. We will just make sure that our answer within press is in alignment to what press is really trying to say means no additional language. So we are leaving
206the policy as is. Okay. All right. We just have to go into press and select the choice. Okay. Any discussion? I don't know if I answered yet. Or did anybody second this? I did. Okay. All right. I think I appreciate that, Dr. Kincaid. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Dr. Pollack? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.12, approval of amended board meeting dates for 26-27. Oh, can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the amended board meeting dates for 2026-2027 as discussed and presented. Second. Any discussion? So there will be some meetings on Tuesdays. So, okay. All right. Ms. Wenmuth? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.13, approval of PFA-funded Brokaw exterior improvements.
207Can I have a motion, please? I make a motion to approve the PFA-funded Brokaw exterior improvements as discussed and presented. Second. Any concerns? This is brought up for information today, so okay. Dr. Polak? Aye. Ms. Wenman? Aye. Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Okay, motion passes 5-0. Action item 11.14, approval of a personnel report. Motion, please. I make a motion to approve the personnel report as presented. Second. Any discussion? Mr. Cerrone? Aye. Ms. See? Aye. Ms. Monmouth? Aye. Dr. Polak? Aye. Dr. Murillo? Aye. Motion passes 5-0. Action item 4.1. I have a motion to adjourn. I make a motion to adjourn. Second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed?