001e e e uh it's the hour of 6:30 I'd like to start this study session of Urbana School District 116 uh roll call please member Staten yes member Hixon here member Baxley here member Jones here member langendorf here vice president exen president palowski here are there any additions Corrections or modifications to tonight's agenda hearing none move on to Citizen statements if anyone like to make a statement before the board there are these Golden Rod sheets in the back of the room please fill it out hand it to our recording secretary is over here uh Lori Johnson uh we only have one so far and that's from Julia hawm okay hi I'm Julia uh Julia henm um I know I sound like a broken record and I'm really sorry about that but um um please please
002try to reconsider the Sixth Grade Center uh I was really disturbed by some of the discussion in the last meeting about how the Sixth Grade Center is going to prevent people from going to private schools I think it's going to do the opposite um because uh because of the added transitions um and because it's not really actually addressing the um the academic problems that we have right so I so I was trying to pull up some numbers and I ran out of time so uh but uh if you look at the Illinois report card right um the number of children that uh that exit uh elementary school but at the end of fifth grade uh that are at grade level right um um especially um black kids especially um low income kids Hispanic kids are
003doing a little bit better than black kids but um it's basically um low single digigit percentages right very very very you know um small numbers right we um we're failing these children and I really wish we could spend the hundreds of thousands of dollars that it's going to cost to run the Sixth Grade Center right like the overhead that's involved just in in basically um splitting up the Middle School into two schools to actually put the support in say like the elementary schools right so that the students don't don't start um Middle School being way way behind right I think that's you know so or there's anything else that could be done you know please you know yeah um keep that in mind especially as you discuss uh discussing Equity tonight thanks that's all I
004wanted to say thank you uh anybody else wish to make a statement for the board this evening all right um next up our policy reviews uh starting with uh press plus 114 Dr Iber will lead that discussion okay so um you have a one of my little review documents I did go ahead um just because I think when we talked about the legislative update I couldn't remember if Jennifer was here or not so I kept that in there linked from our um last one of our last discussions around policy review so that is linked there for um so you have all of the legislative reminders around the things curriculum related that start um either July 1 or at the beginning of the school year so that is there for your reference um typically the press
005is um member Hixon is coordinated into kind of a couple sections um one section is really just fiveyear reviews so every year every five years our our press um subscription they go through and they review um all of our adopted policies and anything that is just like a five-year update where they might have changed a footnote or something minor um those are kind of listed here for you so the things that we spend more time focusing on when we discuss the policies are anything that is um updated with significant changes to language or um procedures or protocols for us so the most significant update um from this particular uh 114 review is the change in the uniform grievance procedures so um you've heard us talk about Title 9 sexual harassment um procedure so they're kind
006of changing that language to Title 9 grievance procedures so Angie's going to share just a small little just a short little update because most of the the um policy changes will be coming in the next review which we don't get into the fall so back and I'm sure Tori could even share more than what I could share but uh our uh the boards legal council from Robinson Schwarz are working on a training I attended a training in April to discuss the upcoming changes and it's really um the title n title has changed to be more encompassing and so not only will it address sexual harassment it'll also address and we were doing this already as a practice in Urbana but the coverage will apply um apply to sex discrimination including discrimination based on sexual orientation
007and gender identity which we were already following those policy Urbana is pretty inclusive for our students and for our staff and so um but that's just a broader Title Nine and so I've talked to Susan and Michelle Weber and they robins and Schwarz have a lot of homework this um this summer to provide uh professional development not only for our administrators but also for our staff members because it is required that everybody participate in that training so um it's a good thing okay yep okay so more to come about those changes but you will see that there are quite a few policies where basically they've gone through and they've crossed out any reference to Title 9 sexual harassment and just changed it to uniform grievance procedures so um we will have more to come on
008that in the fall um another big policy change is 2270 which is new language um regarding racism um free schools and so this policy is created in response to um new leg legislation that um specifically discusses discrimination harassment on the basis of race color and national origin so um you also have our Equity policy kind of attached to it so it's something we've been talking about um not attached to press but as another artifact for our document um policy conversation tonight so um starting effective 8124 um we're required to adopt a policy that prohibits um the district from any retaliation or any um discrimination or harassment based on those things and so the policy is was included um and that was one I really wanted to highlight another highlight was um just an update to
009the targeted School violence prevention program um I realized today that this link was not working but basically it was just an additional um footnote and making sure that um districts are utilizing the thread assessment language we already have really specific um policies and procedures for threat assessment so they um kind of linked what they're doing in Virginia here um I can send you the active link when I realize it wasn't actually working today and then um the other change was related to um Angie already talked to this in five 100 staff development program we will be required to offer some additional training for our staff related to the universal um grievance procedure and the other change was to 7180 so also um we've talked a lot about prevention and response to bullying intimidation and harassment
010and because the um Title 9 language is directly linked to bullying and U reporting of bullying there's also a lot of um references and updates in the footnotes related to our bullying policy so that was it so this one was um really specific to Title 9 and then that racism free school language and then um I shared with the board earlier because um I did receive an email so I'm going to switch to the equity policy now did were there questions about 114 specific things no y could I ask a question just um I was wondering it's called Uh press 114 review what and so what is Press oh you want me to sure so we s Once Upon a Time the school board uh would spend the beginning of every single meeting ging over
011its policies and reviewing them and making sure they all aligned with state law almost every single meeting even before I got on the board right before I got on the board 13 years ago they started a subscription to this service called press that basically does the heavy lifting for school boards so it goes through all of our policies and make sure that they're compliant with with state regulations and then periodically we review the changes kind of in a bulk fashion so it makes makes our meetings a little more efficient to do it this way so it's basically um I'll tell you what it stands for Po in case you want to do some homework on it policy reference education subscription service so um our attorneys also review press all school districts um their legal board
012attorneys review The Press language so it isn't supposed to be used in um substitution for legal advice from our attorneys but every school district the majority of school districts in the state of Illinois um subscribe to press and so it really does set the standard for legal um terminology and the um the translation of the legislation and the U public acts that we get they do all that heavy lifting for us so when we when our legislators sign new things into the law press takes all of that um legal ease and all the language from all of those really thick um really full um um things we get from the general assembly and they condense it and what they do for us is they align it to our board policies that already exist so then
013we don't have to do that so what Paul's saying is we used to do that ourselves so we would get that and then we'd go through our whole you know um the student section of our policies the curriculum section of our policies and we'd have to do all that now it's all digital they send it to us they say here are the suggestions of what we think you should adopt our attorneys look at it and um if the attorneys sees something that they say oh no you need to talk about this we don't agree with this that rarely happens um then you know when it does happen I usually bring it here and I say where attorneys say yes press is recommending this but they think we should do that and again that doesn't happen
014very often um and so then what Lori does is we say yes we're going to adopt the um specific policies from press and then she has to um actually manually go into our digital system tell press yes our board adopted these specific policies and when and then they get uploaded to our um digital system that we have on our website so they do a lot of that for us thank you that I told you that I had some just stupid questions no not a stupid question I'm glad you asked it was I don't know if I've explained it to our other newer board members in that way before so yeah no problem Sherry had a you had a specific one um yeah I compared these notes to the these notes to the other documents that
015Lori sent and there was one reference in all those listings that it also referred to discrimination against based on religion and yet I don't see it in any of the other which number is it it's not it's not on this document I don't have oh okay it's in the full one so yeah so I remember I remember seeing it in one and I just wondering why religion is not included in any of these and what our policy is based on discrimination against religion so I copy the the ones that are in here directly from um what they send us as kind of the overview so I'll have to go in and see yeah so why they don't have religion I don't know but here I'll look at the So the plan is to vote on
016this at our at our at the at a business meeting so we could certainly get that question answer before before that happens where we santor it's under Vision on this document oh you're on the equity yeah so I mean I thought you w't press Sherry I was going through this okay okay okay let me pull the equity I will share just since Tori said that she could tell that I wanted to talk so um the beauty of Urbana is that we've been pretty Progressive in terms of being inclusive and educating our staff and so some of our mandated trainings that our staff go through um we've already been doing this we've been doing implicit bias um for racial um discrimination and we've also done um inclusivity to our lgbtqia community and especially supporting transgender students
017so we were doing that as optional mandated trainings like when I say optional they were mandated for our employees but they were optional from the state and we as a district chose to do those things so now that they're um required it's not a shift for us because we were already doing them because of the because of our herbana values so so we have religion listed in our list of um in our Equity policy under our yeah so it is one of the areas um I was G to say I know we talked a lot about the equital opportunities and outcomes for students and here was the list of ways and list of areas that we wanted to make sure that we were um breaking down barriers but I'm not quite sure why it isn't
018listed in um I'll have to look through the p g through the one that you're specifically talking about in find well it's also I think important to note that in the vision statement here it says you know uh Equity is applied to the following list but includes but is not limited to right yes um so just to give you some perspective during during the height of covid large group of people met in regular meetings online to to craft this document you want to do make two things that make it difficult to write is is one as you do it online in in over zoom and the second thing is you include a large group of people it it took us a very very long time to paint takingly kind of put this put this together
019um so and I think that was one of the things it was argued about at the time is is what specifically to list in that in that bolt set of Bolt points but I think adding the is not limited to kind of calmed a lot of people down and I shared um for member Hixon a little bit of hicks history because I this is not the first time this draft has been in front of the board we just have not adopted it yet and we were a little forward thinking I think in terms of feeling that we needed to have something like this and now that we have the racism free schools law um we kind of have to have um language around the fact that we're not going to um discriminate and that we
020are going to have written policy that really prohibits us from setting up barriers and including procedures in our district that would um would allow that to happen and so um so yeah I sent that email earlier this afternoon so if you've not seen it there is a little history in there for you okay any other questions about uh any of the policies that are going to be voted tonight or or at our next meeting all right um moving on there will be no call for an executive session after tonight's meeting uh the chair would therefore entertain a motion to approve tonight's agenda I move for approval second move to Second and all in favor say I I any opposed um our first study topic tonight is our school resource officers end of your report okay
021so I am going to welcome up Michelle Robinson who is the school resource officer at Urbana Middle School and um Chad Bernett who is the school resource officer for um Urbana High School so John I'm going to do the first couple slides and then well actually you know what I'll drive because they only have the two do you guys care if I do the clicking okay so um as we um have done the last couple years we've invited our SRO just to give us um some feedback around the year and share data and numbers um one of the agreements that we made with the board when we started the SRO program is that we would um make sure the board was updated um year to year here on um arrests and um really specific like
022referrals to youth Assessment Center um really specific um information about what the sro's were doing and what you know what some of their and of course this short document doesn't Encompass everything that they do but it definitely is a way to just kind of keep the board connected to the um school resource officer program um and so yeah so here is our end of the year feedback so um I kept these slides in I know many of our board members are are really familiar with the program but since we have a new member I thought I would keep in the um early slides that really talk about what a school off school resource officer does and doesn't do so um our school resource officers are career law enforcement officers who are actually yes they're in
023our schools every day but they are Urbana Police Department employees um and they follow that standard of um continuing to be Urbana police officers but they work in collaboration with Administration and um our staff in our schools the primary goal of the SRS SRS SRO program is to um help us in as administrators and the board and the district continue to maintain a safe learning environment and um a lot of their work is around building positive relationships with not just students the staff but our school Community whoops so our sro's why do we have sro's um so we started off for many many years we had one Sr um who worked back and forth between the middle school and high school and um over the years that just did not wasn't conducive to the needs
024of our community any longer and the needs our of changes of our um student demographic so um several years ago we entered into an agreement um with the city to have an SRO at both sites which um has made a huge difference I think in the uh culture and climate and the positive relationships that we have in our buildings um our sro's foster positive relationships um not only uh to strengthen the police Community Connection but also to really help our young people understand they don't need to be afraid of police officers um that police officers are there to help them um when needed but also to make sure that our buildings are safe and protected um in high threat situations or just from everyday things that might happen that can come from the outside Community
025into our school um there were several incidents kind of at the height of when we added an additional officer um we had a lot of gang activity at our high school um there were a lot of incidents that happened in our community that would end up at our schools on Monday morning and so having the both of them in both of the spaces dedicated one to uh each school has really helped I feel like um and you'll see that in the data that they're going to share today um especially at the high school it really has um kept out a lot of that Community violence from entering into our buildings um because the students know like officer Chad is there and um so it has really uh limited that it really has decreased a lot
026of that and so we're really thankful that we've been able to um have the agreement with the city and the um opportunity to have two people I know there have been years when um their staffing needs at Urbana police were really significant and um when that happens they have people who get injured and people who um go on maternity leave and they have officers that have to do um some of their military requirements and things like that so there times where them giving us two people to be in our schools can really be hard on the department um but since Chief Boon has come in um I know he's really been pushing um having more officers in the department so that worry of mine every year in August of are we going to you know
027lose one of them back to the police department has gotten a you know a little less stressful but again we always have to remember they definitely are um police employees first first and um but we're thankful that we had them our sro's are trained specifically to work with students and intervene only in specific High threat situations so one of the things that previous boards have really talked a lot about is training and um our sro's and summertime is a great time for them to get um recertified to attend they Chad was just telling me when I was back there a few minutes ago about a training that he was at today um so we they really take their their training seriously and their re-evaluations and recertifications um and you know if you were around or
028watching when we started this process not every person has the the mentality or the personality to be a school resource officer it really takes a special person um and you know nor would we want every police officer from the uh Department engaging and working with our students every day so I do think it takes a special personality it takes a really different skill level um and it it takes a a real understanding of schools and because they're involved in a lot of our trainings and a lot of um their own training that they do on their own they really do have that mentality and understanding around how students work and how student Behavior works so this next slide is really talking about um the fact that we don't have sro's there to deal with student
029discipline issues they yes there are times when they have to engage in um unfortunately if there's fights or um really physical uh aggressive incidents as we we unfortunately get to see some of those things play out from the board level when we talk about some of those higher level student discipline issues but that's not why they're primarily there um but they are there to maintain safety and sometimes um getting involved in student discipline issues is a necessary you know something that just has to happen but that is not their main role or goal for being there um the sro's collaborate really well with the administration um we had a lot of conversations when we started the program about ensuring that we're not putting people in place to um add to the prison pipeline so that's
030something I think we take very seriously as an administrative team um Chad and Michelle are very thoughtful about every situation and that is why it's really important to have people who've been trained who go to trainings who are in the schools who know the students who know their parents who know the teachers um because when we when they say we need to arrest someone it is because we have really done every single thing that we could to divert that situation from escalating and so um they are really great at communicating um less this year with me because um Chad is really working really well with Mr Guzman back there and they've been making a lot of those decisions at the building level and then when I need to be pull pull in I'm pulled in
031but otherwise um I've really been trusting them to um work together and really establish that Baseline for um when we have to make those really difficult decisions to arrest and when we don't and you guys stop me any at any point so this is just a list and I'm not going to read all these to you but maybe uh highlight a few so these are some of the ongoing things that you know this slide hasn't changed from year to year very much because cuz these are the high level things that they do all the time so um kind of making us aware of safety things that happen um over the weekends so we know that there was some activity this early summer right so unfortunately um we're hoping we have a quiet summer but we've
032already had an incident or two where our banana youth have been involved in shootings or things like that on the weekend well that information all funnels through Chad and Michelle so then they get that information and they let us know what we need to know like we don't get to know everything but we do get to know what we need to know so we can support a student or their family um if there are things that happen after hours and on weekends so I think that is a really huge piece of what they do um is we have that that person who is AR liaison between Urbana police um who knows the families and students and know how we can help them the best um so that connection with the threat assessment teams is really
033important because their role again is to deescalate and not escalate situations so I think um the fact that they participate in our district crisis committees and our school crisis teams is is a huge plus um at the high school level Chad gets to do some things that not don't happen as much at middle school so he gets to participate in the driver's ed and some of those classes that he gets invited to you know come and talk to our students about um Court things or legal things um they are a great resource to students who um we sometimes have to do those ride homes sometimes it's for safety reasons because we have had young people who um were afraid to go home because of things maybe happening in their neighborhood and so the fact that
034they can put a kid in a car and drive a kid home to keep them safe is huge for us um they also are the Frontline of defense for confiscating Vaping devices and some of those um you know drug-free School kinds of things that we definitely want to always enforce um and we have had incidents where we haveen don't need to call the police because we have a police officer in our building when we have had little traffic incidents in the parking lot or um other things that have happened very close to the schools that they can um add do and kind of avoid an Urbana police person coming out and they kind of address it anything else on here that you guys want to highlight more the ongoing duty ones nope okay and now
035I'm going to shift and um let officer Chad talk about um his year at UHS good evening um my name is Chad Bernett for those that don't know me I've been here with well with the urand police department for 15 years but with the school going on three and a half now this was the end of the my third full year Co year was kind of a wash year year I would call it it was a waste in my opinion um but I've been doing this for three years this by far was our most successful year I would say at the high school um I want to start off by thanking our Administration Mr Guzman and his team and our student interventionist I think they worked extremely hard this year to be proactive and wrap
036themselves around um some stuff that was going on prior to it escalating to making it a big problem in the schools we did that to the best of our ability and I think with their help and their extremely hard work we had a pretty successful school year so we did have our incidents which you're going to see we had some problems at times which you're going to have that every year um but our numbers compared to last year are weigh down so I'm extremely pleased about that just for it just makes everybody's day smoother the student body the staff myself everybody's day is a lot easier that way I mean just you less worry I guess is one way to put it um if you look at these numbers here there were eight police reports
037generated um those police reports involve 25 students um you may look at the number of 25 and the eight and think that's a big disparity but you have sometimes you have a a F that involves eight students so those eight names might go into a police report there may not be listed as offenders but it might just be an informational report um so things don't escalate and so our department knows maybe things to look for in a community that they can stop or reach out to before it gets any worse um didn't have any youth Assessment Center referrals this year we didn't have any school related arrest this year uh there's times I could have possibly done youth Assessment Center referrals but because some of the students didn't qualify um I wasn't able to do
038that uh there was times where parents didn't want to press charges so arrests weren't made um and and Accord to qualify for youth Assessment Center you have to a you can't be on probation already you can't already be going gone through the system you have to be willing to cooperate and participate and a lot of times families don't don't they they don't want to participate um but those are the and you can't have already failed a certain number of Chances with them so um if you've done those things you don't qualify I can't refer you any longer so then it would be up either an arrest or just you know maybe not an arrest but just sending that report to the State's Attorney's office for their review and then they can make the call whether
039they want that student charged or are not charged um there were 14 emergency medical responses requiring ambulances some of those involved um mental health situations some of those involved students with medical situations such as seizures um others just minor injuries for PE and things like that but there was 14 of those uh we had 34 incidents titled um drug paraphernalia which could be vaping or under the influence of of maybe cannabis or alcohol um that number is probably a little bit light but um you know it goes on sometimes they don't get caught but that's th those are 34 incidents where students were were caught with that so not by me necessarily but by staff or whoever and then they'll turn the par paraphernalia over to me and then I confiscate it but um we
040did have fighting incidents let me put it that way when I say fighting it doesn't always mean physical um some of that is just a verbal escalation that I mean could easily go become a physical fight but it gets stopped beforehand so if if I look at that number in my mind I'm thinking that's very high for this year we I I didn't feel like we had that many incidents um maybe that's because the phys physical incidents um I think we probably maybe had 20 physical incidents where they were actually physically fighting three or four of those were larger fights which involved numerous people but um the majority of them are your your blowups that happen in the hallway someone looks at me wrong and someone doesn't like it and there we go um but
041then we had what's listed through our system as incidents of gross misconduct we had 152 gross misconduct is something that's vague but it it usually results from someone being removed from class or someone then deciding they're going to swear at somebody else or cuss out some staff memb usually or refusing ignore some instruction and then cuss somebody out so it's usually two or more things put together they then title it as gross misconduct see not by me it's just how our student interventionists title their referrals so um I I don't even know the number of transports I took home but it's a lot I mean I don't know how many days are in a school year but three or four times a week I'm taking somebody home usually you know for some reason whether they
042need to ride home after school or whether it's one of these discipline issues or whether they just we need to remove them from the building for a time parent can't come get them I'm doing that quite often so um and then just working with the Social Work team if they have questions about a situation that they is BR brought to their attention what services would I suggest we get involved with um whether it's DCFS or SAS or the youth and Center for Family Solutions how how can we get those um services to that student faster or if I could make any calls that supports them gets the person out there or that department out there quicker um they'll a lot of times involve me to do that so um I was going to share Tori
043just asked me a comparison for last year so um 64 was is way lower so we had 110 fights with and without injury last year involving 127 students so um and then the other gross misconduct number is um uh this year2 last year 205 so yeah so that's progress to me overall it just seemed like a much more successful school year than what we've had of any of the years that I've been there um again I credit our Administration and our student interventionists for being extremely proactive and working extremely hard as soon as they hear about something calling those students in seeing what they can do to intervene to make this go away to eliminate any of the violence that's happened at the school um and you know it doesn't always stop but it does
044sometimes stop it from escalating in the building you know sometimes kids take care of their business when they're not in the building unfortunately but um but at least at the high school level they are they are pretty aware and realizing that if they want to stay you know in the building and be successful then they're going to have to follow the structure that's there right now so um and I think that's something that maybe so in the past we haven't had that that good system in place and we're working to create it now so it's it's much better but that's high school good work good work everybody it's a team effort and as soon as I saw that the reason I asked her was because I thought the numbers were tremendously down and they are
045so well you can definitely feel it when you're when you're there working every day you you know I feel L and I'm not there every day so yeah good job is all I really thank you it's not me it's more yeah everybody back there everybody I'm looking at everybody so yeah um are the metal detectors that were put in are they being used and are they finding things uh the metal detectors yes we use them every day um the students walk through it at every day when they come into school at two different Doors door one and Door Nine both have detectors um they're set up primarily to find firearms and guns so as far as those we've never found a firearm an actual firearm firearm um there's been some like lookalikes and like not
046even real but plastic type guns come in but they wouldn't detect those regardless and and we have we had two incidents where knives were brought in that were were um that got through I mean and then someone reported seeing them and we addressed it and conf skated it and handled it as as we see fit but they were never there for to threaten anybody or do anything like that that people just had still had them on their person so um but yes they are they are used every day I think they're I think they're a very good deterrent for for what they're for I mean they can someone sneak in a weapon if they wanted probably but there's less likelihood of them doing that knowing that the detectors are there so yes but we haven't
047had a in my time at school we haven't had a real real firearm in the building yeah thank you Jennifer for asking that question because I have a followup on that regarding what is the protocol what would happen if something was detected um because if the entrance there are a lot of people coming in at the same time there are people coming and going what would you do and and how are all the different normally what normally what happens if if it detects in the morning at least Le if it detects in the morning um when someone walks through we have staff and administration at each door they'll pull that student aside um then they they will check ask them what you know what because certain things like umbrellas and things like that sometimes heavy
048heavy gauge steel water bottles will set it off and certain things you know but then that administrator will go through the book bag and if there's anything that's a a weapon weapon then I'm I'll be called they'll ask me to assist and then they'll remove that student from that location they'll go to an office and do and then do a more thorough check of the person but um normally if it's a weapon related thing they call me and involve me at that time because I'm better trained to handle that type of situation than an administrator I was just wor I was concerned about the protocol what happens when you're not there and how they determine that it is a a weapon yeah well I mean is is it just automatically beep you said other things
049could make it yeah other things can make it go off but the signal is then you stop that student and then you search that student okay whether that search is done um right there or to the side or whether that search is done is in is done in an office determines on what they see or what they see right away okay you're welcome uh can you give me give me your thoughts um tell me how the uh K9 sweeps went I'm curious to I it went it was very quick at our school um it went well I think I mean the students believe me when the students uh heard that the dogs may be coming into the building they're like what are you doing that why are you doing that why are you well you
050answer the question is why do you think you're doing that and they all know why they're doing it um most of our students at least the majority of our students don't use lockers so the the particular time the dogs came in um it was just a sweep of the lockers um book bags were still with kids in classrooms and whatnot and we didn't ask the kids to line up the book bags or anything we just swept the lockers and I went through they still um detected on a couple lockers or whatnot but um if our lock were our primary source of storage we probably would detected on a lot more yeah you find it more of of a a heads up deterrent exactly y yeah and I think the kids also understood that too but
051they they were very aware that at some point that was going to happen so they see the dogs once they don't know when they're going to show up again right and and I don't want to get in the habit of trying to scare students out of doing something but it does keep things out toes right yeah and we were going to try to have another one um and have them come back and the reason we did that was having them go through the high school 100% but it was really um to help us as a deterrent at ums um because of the vaping devices and the drug paraphernalia that we were taking off of students at the middle school because it was right after we um instituted the policy of no backpacks so we knew
052their backpacks would be in their lock and so that was the it was kind of intentionally planned that way um because none of the students had their backpacks with them in class which is the opposite of what happens at the high school I had a kid at the high school who got a locker when he was a freshman and I don't think he used it once in four years because they just carry every book around with them and so I but I do think um what Chad is saying is correct like the the weed smell out in the you know around the building and in the area dramatically went down when they thought the dogs were coming and when they knew they were coming and when they thought they might be coming back and so
053I think that in and of itself is a good deterrent um so definitely is something we're going to continue to do as far as that's concerned I think that is a lot less this year as well the weed smell throughout the building we had a bad problem with it last year I thought bad um this year it's been much less now maybe we also have um Vape detectors in our our B restrooms which that's a deterrent as well um it also lets us know what bathrooms are being frequented more often and we to maybe staff staff better so those are those are all things that are helping us figure out what areas we need to be in more often thank you and I and to Chad's Point around how quickly we were able to in
054one class period so I can't remember was it seventh hour I don't know but in one class period we took the dogs through both buildings because the goal was to not give students an opportunity to pass things off to each other or to get on their phones and text one another so once they were in a class they weren't allowed to leave and so we started at one building and went right to the next building and so it all happened in one class period and in order to do that we had multiple agencies and departments who came and um so it wasn't just an Urbana police sweep we had how many dogs do we have like 10 dogs that day or something I think there were eight total yeah from different agencies they all train
055together regardless on on a certain days so they just used that as a training day for for the their departments yeah any other questions for officer Bernett all right okay Michelle's gonna jump in and I'm gonna switch the slide all right good evening um I'm Michelle Robinson I've been with the police department for 14 years and I've been in the uh Middle School since September of 2019 um I wish I had a better report than what I'm getting ready to give but we have had a lively bunch this year and a very exciting year at the middle school for us so um we've had three incidences within the school that generated police reports one out of those three um ended in a youth Assessment Center referral which was a total of three students being referred
056um it was a large fight that occurred on an MTD bus still at the school that ended up inside the school and became more of an event than it probably should have which normally my referrals are like my last resort because we don't like to do that with middle school age children um we've had a total of 25 school reports of vandalism so property damage um what we call tagging marking um just destruction within the school um we've had a total of 39 school reports of theft from clothing to jewelry to cell phones um we've had one incident where a um fire was started in a bathroom this year um our biggest thing at at the middle school was we've had seven knives confiscated in first semester for us and a total of two what
057we call Orbee lookalike guns which is kind of the new thing they they're going from the airsoft to these these Orbee guns um and of course the knives were what inst like started our our um metal detectors at the middle school we've had a total of 13 drug paraphernalia and vape devices confiscated so when I say drug paraphernalia we've kind of CH we look at that as like tobacco Vape devices um we've had a trend this year where kids like to carry around empty smelly cannabis bags so there's no actual cannabis in it it's just empty but they smell like it so it kind of gives them credit and yeah and then um that also is like lighters and and things like that um we've also had a total of 13 under the influence and
058possession of controlled substance so that would be your THC vape devices we also have a big issue with the THC gummies in the middle school and actual cannabis that we have confiscated there um our fights are with injury and without injury it is a large number one thing I can say before I get ready to say this number it is a big change from the years in past most of our fights are oneon-one now compared to what you would consider mob action which is a big Improvement for us but our total number was 35 so that is you know where we're at um multiple transports home some of them for safety plans some of them to be an Uber driver um you you know other ones were just because for safety reasons getting the kid
059out of the school because a parent can't come get them we take them home which one thing I can say for that when a parent agrees for me to give a child a ride home I have developed a relationship and a trust with that parent and that is a big big improvement from the years in past I mean there's a lot of parents are like oh heck no but when a parents like doesn't have an issue with it that means they're starting to gain the trust of both Chad and I within the school and that's a big Improvement um so I am on the district threat assessment team as well as the school threat assessment team so I spend a lot of my majority uh dealing with our social work and our Support Services teams
060helping with um our mental health evaluations working with SAS um DCFS and also Youth and Center for Family Solutions and a lot of the the the center for the Youth and Center for Family Solutions is helping kids I I have a majority of what we call runaways in our school where children are not going home at a young age and so Youth and the youth and Center for Family Solutions is is an outside resource that helps to um mediate between the parent and the student to get them back home so so I can say this much the environment was very different this year even with the numbers that we have it was a much calmer environment we had some hiccups along the way and some some major events but just the atmosphere in general is
061a lot calmer and the staff has gotten very quickly to get things under control compared to years in past meaning that with my kids at their age if we have something break out in the cafeteria a fight very quickly can we get them back in a in a safe controlled situation than being just chaos the rest of the day so it has come a long way but it's been an exciting year B any questions for officer Robinson when you say it's an exciting year I'm just thinking about how excited I be there I I mean 305 fights oneon-one must be keep you busy uh my question is and you know that we are projecting a sixth rate Center and I wonder how it's going to be those Services if uh I mean next year how
062that's going to be the services with with an SRO uhhuh well if if Chad and I had our way I to put to the board if you're going to have a sixth grade Center what I recommend is another SRO within the district that SRO can work with the elementary school so Chad and I get a lot of calls to go assist with the elementary school level um sometimes I can make it away make you know be able to leave the middle school to go help but unfortunately if anything happens at the grade school level Patrol is responding to those things um that can be very scary to an elementary school student somebody that young if you get if if we once we have the Sixth Grade Center I feel that yes we are going to
063need somebody in there but it's going not in a role that Chad and I do but more of an in an educational role so we used to have risk watchat that went through the different schools which was something that I did actually before covid that was I was in all the schools that's I know most of the kids because of it I think it's going to be more of an educational one of the the trainings that we go that we go to is there is a lot more education coming out that we can actually put out there to staff and to students and I feel like that needs to be that sro's role because whether anybody knows it or not but there are a lot more incidences that are happening in the elementary level that
064are coming into the middle school level that weren't addressed when it should have been addressed and it becomes a continuation thank you and I'm going to add that initially we thought the department wouldn't be able to spare an additional officer to have a third officer when we originally started talking about the Sixth Grade Center um and then at one of our more recent um District um uh crisis meetings you know we talked to officer Bane about that and um I think that our current chief um one of his goals is community engagement um and it's something he talks about a lot and so I they have said to me um that it isn't off the table and that when that happens they're willing to kind of you know a lot of things nothing is free
065and everything kind of cost right so to pull a third officer from the Department to have them working with the schools um is something that they are willing to talk about but we'd have to be willing to agree to that and Michelle's right the number of principles that reach out to either myself or Kim um just this year the increase in the elementary requests to have one of them come to the school um to and it isn't always for students it sometimes is for adults um we have adults that show up intoxicated or um under the influence and um come to the school and it isn't always easy to um to deescalate those situations and no one wants to arrest a kid's parent in front of a kid right and so I think wherever we
066can deescalate and have people who are typically working with children going to those situations not that our Patrol folks can't handle it but again um it it just starts that relationship at an earlier age that police are here to help um not arrest your mom or dad and so um so yeah there have been other weapon related things drug related um kids have brought um drug paraphernalia to school um and so we have reached out to them more this year than ever before to ask them if they can go deal with something at the elementary level so when you said everything costs do we share costs for this so like we pay half the police depart we have a contract with the city that I think expires in June of 2 five we have one
067more year left on our current contract with the city which would mean that about a year from now we'd be talking about uh you know negotiating an extension and what that would look like which kind of would be a natural point with to talk about that third officer yeah but what so what is the um I don't have it in front of me but we pay more than the city does it was like a 6040 okay break down it isn't it was complicated by the fact that we bought new Patrol vehicles at that point in time too so that the amortization of those Vehicles just beyond the salaries and benefits it was so I think it's a seven-year plan um for the vehicles to so they have their own personal vehicles yeah which is required
068which is required yes yeah has hasn't it evolved through the year so that at one time they were paying the city was paying more and then we've we've taken more responsibility for it so actually um we started off paying more and then when the city um NOP we when it started we were paying more of that percentage however the city has worked with us the last two years since they've received arpa funds um and they have picked up um a little bit more of the cost since they've had a little more funding in or and it was um allowable I guess within some of the grant funds that they had um last year they were very short staffed um in the police department and we had to give Chad and Michelle up for the summer
069and um they were unfortunately back on patrol for a couple months and they gave us you know money back for and then you know we didn't pay for a certain amount of time and a quarter um and so yeah we have a great relationship with the city and we work really well with them and um you know it's just a great Arrangement not every city has the benefit of having such a um positive collaborative relationship with the police department but we're really thankful that we do so are the metal detectors at the middle school just used in the mornings when children are arriving or they used as people come in and out I went through them twice and it beat did nobody stop me and other people were going and when it did I thought
070oh I have my little pocket knife with me so yes they are used in the morning and our routine over there is completely different from the high school so every student's backpack our bag is searched as they're coming in in the morning and then they walk through um at that point once we are done with the morning arrival adults our metal detectors are more more sensitive than the high schools because we are trying to get those I'm going to say those little pocket knives um that being said when an adult comes through especially staff or a parent um your keys are going to set it off your cell phone's going to set it off and we don't have the staff to stand there like a TSA person and monitor that um since I've I was
071I was injured in the last couple of months um and have been on light duty at the kiosk and one of the things that it it gets is that if it beep like if it beeps one of the things we recommend is you you make sure they go directly into the office um it's not it's not there for adults I guess is what I'm I'm trying to get at it's it's not there for the person that comes in and is going to the office it's a different and most adults don't go past that unless they're staff members or they've checked in with the office with office staff it is mainly to deter the um our high amount of weapons for us that were coming in so that being said that's how our guns our Orbeez
072lookalikes were located was because we're searching backpacks and next thing you know we open it up and here is this Orbeez look alike in the backpack and so that's one of the things where it didn't get past the front door which if we didn't have that process it would have gotten into the school thank you anybody else is and is the procedure kind of the same it's a staff member staff members doing it that the same as at the high school so yes so every morning it is our srs's and admin they're at so I don't what's SRS what's the acan for the SRS oh student relations supervisors so kind of like the hall monitors but they do more than just monitor the halls and so that yes so student relations supervisors and then we
073have ad we have Administration that is there and then I'm always there in the morning for particular door one now we have other entrances only door one has the metal detectors one of the things that we did do was eighth graders are like we have certain grade levels come in certain doors eighth grade is required to come through the metal detectors and we did that in preparation for them getting used to going to the high school so we're trying to get some things uniformed between middle school and high school to give our students a better chance of success in the high school so it's not a big culture shock when they move over and we did do some randoms not a lot um after we started I um John would organize that and pull a
074few people um so I don't know I can't remember the number of times but we randomly would have um metal detectors place at the sixth grade door or the seventh grade door and students of course or staff didn't know when that was going to happen um because what we were afraid of is if the eighth graders are coming through door one every day and I want to get a knife into the school then what do I do I just give it to a sixth grader or seventh grader and so we um started doing some random checks so the students knew like you might show up at your door and we're searching bags for your grade level that day and so I think that was was also a really good deterrent so yeah we did a
075couple of those uh and just to kind of highlight since we've asked several questions about it uh the ones at the middle school the process and the how they work is a little bit different both of them you can set higher or lower so if we wanted to set the high school ones all the way down to catch your little pocket knife Jennifer we could uh but right now the bigger issue there was students bringing guns in so we have them kind of set for that and they're specially designed so that they don't pick up cell phones and they don't pick up your earpods and everything else so everything pretty much except your Chromebook uh you can just walk through with and it's a lot faster process at the middle school since we were having
076more problems with knives uh we had those we got some different detectors that are more of the TSA style that are better at detecting knives we can also set those kind of higher and lower but we kind of specifically set them so they'd find those medium small knives uh and not uh be finding like earrings and belt buckles but uh it is a lot more labor intensive process and requires a lot more staff uh I'm really glad uh officer Robinson's been there because she's been kind of integral to the process of kind of overseeing uh the morning entry there secr questions anybody else I I do have a question about the I guess the drug paraphernalia and the Vapes are you finding more because there are a lot of stores around in this little town
077that I've noticed you know when a shop closes they setting up Vape Mach vape stores in them and do you find that that's a Conformity of how I mean because it's still 21 to get those items right I know for a fact that my depending on the my young ones there are some shops that they can walk into and purchase with no questions asked some of them are getting them from family members and parents so a lot of times when you confiscate it it was like oh well they they they've gotten that from me but most of those are tobacco Vape devices um it's a lot harder to get THC in that manner but yes a lot of it comes down to we have smoke shops that are just handing them out basically thank you
078uh thought that was the case I'm kind of curious how they got the gummies I mean I could see how you could get some pot but how how do you they get to the because you have to go to the store right yes so this is the issue there is we have dispens there's there's two I don't know how there are two different strands that you can buy of THC there's a strand that is more potent and you have to get that from a dispensary and then there's there's a strand that it's not as Depot that you can actually get from a the same shops where they're getting these Vapes and so whether I they're buying those is not necessarily but it it's easy it's no different than shoplifting you can go in enough people
079go in you pick them up um I know I can say a majority of my students that we've confiscated them from it's come from within the household so at the at this point because the culture now is that cannabis and THC are legal and it's just randomly out um it's out it's kind of like the access to alcohol that we had in and when we were young that is where we are with it now so and that's that's another big thing so like I'm just going to bring up our K9 when it came we had the backpacks and we had um alerts nothing was actually found but our biggest issue is we have a lot of students that come in smelling like it that are not under the influence because it's no different than cigarette
080smoke in the home at this point and that is where it's coming into play and that being said the gummies are like your um what are that your fruit Snacks that's kind of what they look like and so it's very easy to pass it from student to student and students not knowing what they're taking um is kind of where it is and that's that's where we're at but a lot of it is not educating the parents and it being easily accessible within the home and there's often times when we confiscate say Canabis it's not necessarily Street cannabis in a plastic baggie it's store-bought cannabis that they bought from somebody else that has gone to the dispensary and bought it legally so it it works the same way somebody may go buy it at a dispensary
081but they're still going to sell it to whoever wants to buy it if that's what they plan to do so and gummies are the same way they their parents may buy a bottle and hey I'm going to take three or four and I'm just going to take them to school and that the unfortunate thing with gummies is they're usually a higher concentration of THC and it it probably tastes good and it can it can be very harmful so we need to watch that for sure okay parents and kids about side effects or so we tried to do that we brought an expert in and we had a um parent session that we um hosted at the middle school right after we started the metal detection and I think we had seven people come six people
082come and we sent it out in the um Mr Cooper sent messages I sent messages we sent Sky alerts we sent texts we sent emails and out of you know 900 students we had six or seven folks show up for that so I we're going to continue to try to do that we talked a little bit more about um maybe not focusing on parent education and maybe focusing on just student education next year um because the the parent session that we tried to have I mean it was on drugs paraphernalia cyber bullying social media I mean we were trying to really alert parents on you know a lot of kids are seeing things on social media they're reaching out to people just a a real safety session and we were really surprised with the um
083number of parents who didn't come so we're going to really just focus our efforts on um from the Middle School level trying to educate the kids next year what is the what is the consequence or what is the yeah the consequence that kid had when it comes intoxicated yeah I'll let them uh typically if a kid is under the influence and the administration would know better than me but that kid does not get to stay in the building under the influence of a drug we call a parent and that student is then sent home you know it's not they cannot go home on their own that's a safety risk in itself a parent or guardian of some sort has to come and get that student if they cannot come get that student then they may
084go to a Ru room or something like that until somebody can go come and get them but yeah there we can't have intoxicated or students under the influence of drugs walking through the building and just just creates other issues what's that and it's only for the moment it's like we cut you today you are not school but tomorrow you can come back yeah that yeah that's that's up to the administration and what however they deem deem that sometimes if it's a second offense or a third offense it might be might be a suspension or something but I don't set those so I can't I can't speak on that right thank you how about the um if if you actually find gummies or the intoxicant whatever it is with the student in the building typically it's
085the same situation that student's going going to have some right back in school the day not necessarily we're not saying that yet he doesn't handle that I don't handle that part I mean there there A lot of times there might be a suspension of some sort but I can't I don't know the exact number of days that student might be out I mean they'll tell me eventually but yeah I don't I'm not a deciding factor in that I'm sorry and we have real parameters like Mr Guzman they have um protocols and parameters so they look at all those things like if it is their first defense second offense um you know do we need to get this student some additional drug you know support or um if they're doing it a lot um and so
086yeah so there are consequences it's just very individualized to you know what has been happening with that particular student we can do youth assessment referrals I know that in the in the junior high level we look at it so one of the things that in in some of the training that I've been to is that once a kid is vaping in school it is an addiction at this point and so it needs to be treated as an addiction with Rehabilitation and so if it is like a repeat student that is constantly being caught that is one of the things that is recommended is some kind of mental health evaluation um and we do youth youth assessment referrals can be done for non-criminal and this and that's what what we do because then they have access
087to counseling and like basically their drug and alcohol counseling which is something that I I hate to say it but we are at with our juveniles in this generation so actually having like the gummies in school the thought of one child giving a gummy to a child who doesn't I mean it looks like a piece of candy um who doesn't know what they're getting I I see that as a danger to to the other children so I mean that's I don't know how you I mean there there's a difference between is giving it to them and then someone's trying to sell that while they're in the building now obviously if they're selling drugs in the building doing something like that which we haven't found that yet um if that's the case then that's probably going
088to result in a more serious consequence whether it's some type of referral or arrest or what that is I mean at this point all parties involved are Cooperative when it comes to those type of things so they know what they're getting and they're choosing to partake no no typically not thank you anybody else well I just want to say thanks to Michelle as well um I feel like the middle school is a incredibly hard time in life for a lot of kids um it doesn't mean that that Chad doesn't have you know his challenges and so forth but I feel like the Middle School school has a different set of challenges and a different set of pressure and I know you and I have talked on several occasions about just some of the concerns and
089things that you're seeing um yes the numbers are High um but it's also a time for adolescents especially as a lot of them hit puberty that they're really like finding themselves and they're challenging more and they're wanting to be more adultlike as they kind of hit that different um building and and so um you know thanks for your efforts the fact that you have a lot of people who have started to move to kind of trusting you more to you know coming to you more I know you've talked about um I don't know if it was in this setting or in the Middle School um when I've seen you like like students coming to you more and saying hey this is going on or this is coming or whatever um and then just having parents
090like yeah can you take my kid home and having that trust level is really important I think that you um set the stage for what they're going to also have at the high school so they get they start to get used to you at some point usually um and then by the time they hit the high school you know um they're ready for Tad I think so very tough job for you I think it is a little bit more difficult because of that age range and just the way kids are at that age so um while the numbers may not be the greatest you know we we hear at least I know the effort behind the work that you're doing so keep pushing keep keep keep keep pushing and and and we'll I'll stay prayed
091up on my end because that's what our kids need in these this day and age really is just a lot of prayer and and support and um and the parents too so thanks yeah yeah the mature [Laughter] yeah it is different yeah no yeah right anybody else one last time and we also hope that you're doing okay you're okay yeah recovering thank you guys thank you thank you thank you for tonight and for the whole year um our next study topic is the district school Improvement update uh John's going to lead that so John is actually going to transition out to the table because um Christina lowski um our director of um educational assessment is going to join John at the table give you the clicker and um so we have this broken out Paul
092by 8.2 and 8.3 so the first part of the presentation John and Christina are going to share the district schol school um goals and some of that Benchmark data and then if it's okay with you um we have our administrators back there then we'll just transition right into 8.3 because it's all in one presentation is that okay unless there's an objection from the board I think that makes a lot of sense okay so they'll start off with the district slides and then when they're done they'll switch over in our principles and we'll start we'll go right in order with the way they are in the presentation so it's Gerber and then Urbana Middle School and then Mr Guzman from the high school close us out and there is a little break in the presentation so
093it's two presentations so we get to uh present the district uh uh report on the school Improvement goals for this past year uh so these are the five uh things that we're going to be looking at uh for the district goals uh so we've got our systems uh student voice teaching and learning uh family and Community as agency and then professional learning and did and those are the strands from the equity action plan is how those are kind of couched yep yep okay all right so I got this one good evening everyone um so we're going to talk about systems first and the district smart goal for systems we have a portal that we use called Panorama and it um has four domains of data um we have have the academics attendance behavior and seal
094and so the goal is each school will exhibit fair or above as measured by the four key areas of Panorama Student Success Panorama identifies Fair as detailed with the percentages specified below so we were able to reach our goal in the area of academics um as you can see the goal was in the range between 20 and 45% and the results were was 44 were 44% in the area of attendance um the range was 75 to 89% and the results were 55% and so we did not reach that particular uh domain of data there and in Behavior 85 to 89% we did reach that goal for um the results were 88% and we did reach the goal for seal of 73% and so so we met the goals and we definitely understand as a district
095um that we need to hit attendance hard our chronic attendance um was definitely a focus on Friday last Friday we had a sip day where we looked at our U data that had been redistributed for our um schools for the upcoming school year um John was able to work his magic on that data um because right now we don't um July is our rollover of the data um so all of the teams that got together on Friday it was a really fantastic uh concentrated team effort to see that our teachers our administrators um everyone understood that we really need to do something about our chronic um absenteeism Y and I will add The Chronic absenteeism is a large Port of our some a large portion of our Summit of designations for the schools uh and
096also uh we're really focusing on putting the fine point of the knife on attendance because it also so dramatically affects uh student achievement because if you're not in school uh it's really hard to learn a quick question I'm wondering what does 44% mean okay so what Panorama does Panorama has these four different areas and I'm going to pass around this one chart I apologize that I ran out of time to make copies so that's why you you're all going to get this chart and it's going to help explain um do you maybe afterwards maybe afterwards and so it's very important to understand that the academic has its own um range of data uh percentages excuse me and so when you take a look at this each one has to be looked at within its own
097entity if that makes sense you can't uh compare them and this is all based on research um so hopefully it'll make sense when this is passed around and so when the teachers when the administ ministrators log on to Panorama the first thing they see is the color key and there's like a question mark and then they can um hover over it and then it explains to them and actually it pops up this chart that's being passed around and so it explains what um fair is so the 20 to 45% that is what it means for uh academics to be fair and so what it's saying is these are students this is what it means when your students are on track and for attendance fair is 75 to 89% and it's colorcoded um that's what we
098love about panorama is that it's data visualization it's very easy to understand right away if you see that it's uh red in which in this case attendance was red it's like oh boy what's going on with attendants um in this case academic mix was yellow so if it if you see the results and it's 44% and it's in this range then it is in the category of fair as so what dat I guess what Paul's asking is what data is it pulling is it pulling I is it pulling map is it pulling grades it's pulling all that yes and for attendance it's pulling about with that it's pulling straight from Skyward panorma has its own kind of internal metrics uh but we also have for school report card they have chronic absenteeism is if you
099are over 10% of the number of days of the school year then you're chronically absent and so then they have the ratio of those number of kids and then I think the for the other school Improvement plans you'll see uh days absent uh as a total so we're all kind of using different things but they're all measuring same I'm I'm all for metrics I just 44% without like units without an understand understanding of okay this means that you does this mean 44% of our students are passing or at grade level I don't think so because it's obviously lower than that and this is for the whole District or just for p primaries or this is first through 12th grade and so if you look at that chart the very first line it's what I had
100stated already which is it is telling you who is on track in the district these are specific range per the domain data four four pieces of data that it is coming from research that it is stating that if you are within this range in which the goals were within the fair range if it's within that range then your students are considered Fair on track within academics or attendance Behavior or SEO and I think are the these for Panorama this is different okay are those the quartiles though for 80% of days okay this different these are this is different okay yeah does that make a little more sense when you I'm sorry does it mean 20 to 45% of our students are doing okay is that what it means that this these were the kind of
101questions remember I said because I said I don't understand what I'm reading okay so you're talking about the gold the range of 20 to 45% correct well or 44% what what okay you want to know what the 44% means the 44% means that we have 44% of our students that are um let's see I wrote some notes down um yeah that are on track um so so do we have some more work to do absolutely and and what we can say is that it is falling within the category of fair Panorama gives us excellent good fair or poor and when you open up the portal it is showing uh a color of yellow for academics now fair fair is defined as oh know it's okay we have some more work to do but don't be
102confused with 44% um um it's well I feel like so real real quick so for academics the on track so the 44% on track is they have all a B's or C's proficient and 60% of Standards or or above there's a above on track thank that that's a big that's a big help that that that's a huge help and then attendance is greater than 90% so that's the same as The Chronic absenteeism uh behavior is incidents on less than 1 to 2% of school days and then seal is reported strengths in in at least half of the topics okay that's that's that's decoda Sor I I think that's what you're were looking for yes accurate I can pass around this chart as well for you all that well we can email that to you yeah
103just an email is fine I just didn't understand what the I didn't have the Dakota ring and that's exactly what I needed thank you yeah sorry actually I would like it if you to email it to me okay I'd like the rubric thank you all right where we at so student voice okay so since 2021 we've been giving surveys and the goal at the secondary we wanted to increase the response the uh number of the the participants the number of students taking the uh the surveys so we have some uh good news here the results here by the end of the school year we had 75.6% of middle school students that completed the student Benchmark surveys and we had 57.5% of high school students um the elementary participation rate was 80.7% so the summary here
104the middle school and high school they were very intentional in their strategy trying to um ensure that all the students took the survey um their efforts definitely were recognized um they definitely increased the participation 16.6% ATS and 32.5% at the high school so good job to um everyone there and the purpose of collecting this data is the can you go back John yep sorry panorama um the it asks the students questions like are you happy with school or do you feel that your needs are being met by your teachers do you feel this school is um a place that you want to be every day and so the first this is our third year using Panorama Christina y so the first two years we weren't getting great participation from our students which is why we
105set a goal the more students that complete the survey the more students then we can address some of their social social emotional um needs we can make sure they're getting mental health um supports if that's what they need and we can just plan more interventions to support them if we actually get them completing the survey so is this the results of the survey are what tell you the seal so part that was in the previous Slide the questions are very um research-based and very specific as to and the students are asked several questions in different ways even to um to make sure that you're hitting at whether or not they feel their needs are being met at school or not um so this goal is really just a participation goal flat out to make sure
106that we had and surve is telling you is that is that what tells you is that the seal part of the previous slide oh yes so academics attendance behavioral yes it's addressing students satisfaction with their social emotional needs being met at school so 73% yes but the district's goal was to have participation in the survey in this seal results from the previous one is if they felt like they succeeded in one of the more than half of the domains I think is what it said and I just want to clarify that the participation rates for the surveys for elementary have always been high I just want to put that out there they've always been High um the secondary that was the one that um we we've seen that needed uh some push and so we
107decided let's go ahead and create a goal for that um in the fall and we are so so happy that um we see the results because the secondary they're they're working they're working really hard and we see that they the results um show that so the next two are uh academic ones and uh we'll kind of tag team these uh so the goal three uh for teaching and learning was to make positive growth in all the areas uh for uh fall to Spring map testing so over the course of the year so students would meet growth for all of those areas uh as you can see for this chart for math uh they did meet growth in third and fourth grade and eighth grade uh and they did not meet growth in the rest of
108those areas so overall for the district for K12 projected growth for math uh there was a 42% who met growth over the course of the year uh and just for some context on how the growth Works uh every uh between every test there's a projected growth so you have your raw score and they project that you'll kind of go up so far uh if you don't meet your projected growth that means you're below the the 50th percentile for growth and that means that you're kind of falling further behind so any of those numbers that are below 50 is where our students are falling further behind academically uh and those numbers over 50 are where they're uh excelling and kind of catching up academically so uh really some work to do there uh meeting growth if
109everybody got 50 that would just be keeping us at parity and we really need to be above 50 to start catching up on where we need to be academically so area for growth there correct so we need students to exceed their projected goal so if their projected goal was 10 if they reached if each student like let's say each student was 10 and they all did 11 then we're going to have an increase in student achievement so according with this 12th grade only have 29% of student grow that meet the expectations and In fairness for 12th grade uh for the spring assessment for 12th grade uh the students who are taking it uh it happened like two weeks before graduation so the uh participation rates and the engagement for the 12th grade spring assessment are
110not par particularly high is that fair Jesse okay yeah so that's not to explain it away but that's a little bit of the problem with the 12th grade spring assessment it's hard to focus on standardized testing when you've got a graduation cap in your left hand okay so similarly for uh reading uh these are the growth results for uh k12 and English on the left side of the screen on the right side of the screen is first through eight for Spanish and uh similar to the previous slide uh below uh the meeting growth for almost all of the grade levels there with the overall for a 40% in English reading and slightly lower at 36% in Spanish reading and all that I think Dr Ivy Tatum was going to talk about agency I was gonna
111just can I respond to sit l a little bit when Mr Guzman comes up he's going to talk a little bit more about map um the um High School it we are still trying to build capacity around the students understanding that map is Meaningful and that it's important that they do their very best on the te the map testing um because we have students that classically have they've been taking PSAT and sat and they their focus is my AP tests my other tests that I'm um taking to get to college or do you know for other um areas and so because map is new we're still building the stamina around it because of even you know I had a 2022 grad and the students are like why do I have to take this again so
112they're just kind of you know Paul just probably dealt with the same thing with Tristan so those numbers I heard you say low expectations I don't think our expectations are low I think it is just we're trying to get these students to understand that yes this is important an important um benchmark test for the district and that we need you to do the very best that you can um but it's hard when you're a high schooler and you're studying for all the like I've got five AP tests I've got the P PSAT sat that is my focus not um a map test so I think when Mr Guzman comes up he can speak to that a little bit more but I heard your I heard your side conversation so sorry I just thought I would
113address it before we moved on too much further yeah but only only three groups uh meet the expectations so second grade first grade didn't um can I can I talk about the word expectations so um when expectations is probably not the correct um term for looking at at the map data and specifically for this goal that we're discussing because what we're talking about our students meeting their projected growth goal so I presented an example earlier if my goal in the fall I took the the test in the fall and it said Christina by winter you're going to have a projected goal of five points okay so now it's winter it's December I take the assessment I take the map test and I make the Five Points awesome I'm going to get a report and it's
114going to say your spring projected goal is going to be three points I take the assessment and I only make it I only do uh an increase of two points so I missed it by one so if I missed it by one and I'm in grade level let's say two of this data and there's Ting number of students that are just like me who didn't make their goal then that would be why it says no that grade level did not make their goal I hope that makes a little more sense so it's not like an so yeah so I'll just end it like that right okay so family is community agency um this is kind of plucked right out of the equity audit so one of our goals this year was to be more intentional
115and engage All Families um through some of our larger um events we weren't having success um previously at individual schools with doing some of these um more targeted um family like um Mrs Webster has been leading these efforts in the previous years and she was doing things like parent cafes and um having parent involvement um opportunities at the different schools and so we weren't seeing success that way so then we said okay when we um did a lot of the work around the equity audit and reached out to families to find out what kind of PD do they want so then we shifted to more of a district focus and we we started bringing um the the families together into different spaces and so um we had family cafes and we had Family Focus events
116um very specific to specific um topics um we had the village investment promise which was something that started with um Janice Mitchell that we continued and so it is um kind of a specific thing for our African-American families to really um try to meet their needs at a um deeper level and then the uh District parent teacher advisory committee which was run by doc Dr Norton this year here um they meet quarterly the um that is part of the um CBA so we have union members that participate on that group we have parents that participate in that group and then the bilingual parent advisory committee is another group which you've heard from several times this year which is um a group that um Lupe and um Joe we melt give uh guidance and Leadership to
117and so um that the goal was to be more intentional and um engage families to help remove a barriers around attendance and so attendance was really the focus on a lot of these and academics as well um and we need to continue the summary from Miss Webster is we need to continue to think outside the box to increase attendance for family and community events so I attended a lot of these um family events especially the cafes and attendance was really low and so um we are going to shift our Focus next year back to the building levels again and do whatever we can to try to um get families to come out you can see she added on there she was sending text messages emails Sky alerts at the elementary level we were sending papers
118home and kids backpacks all of the things and so um we just need to find other ways that we can engage people and get them out um so this continues to be a huge goal and um we're going to shift back to working with our buildings and hopefully y um be able to engage families back at the building level next year am I doing this one too yep so professional development um this is um the under the leadership of um yav Smith and so this goal is also from the um Equity action plan around the use of our staff development days and around the use of the uh winter Institute so this is just kind of a summary of at the district level um what we've done for the year um you guys all have
119the calendar so you know that we have the four staff development days every year um Urbana ear at the elementary level those students are home all day and we have provided district and building level um professional learning opportunities um sometimes with a a consultant that we bring in who works with everyone this year the focus was around math um next year the focus is going to be around literacy because we have a new literacy curriculum um the uh other schools Gerber UHS they also have Stu development time but it is around more of an early dismissal model instead of the students being home all day and then um those buildings do some of their school improvement work during that time and focus on some of their building initiatives on those afternoons um winter Institute this
120year was a hybrid so we have been doing um virtual winter Institute for the last three years and this year uh we pulled our staff and asked them what they wanted so it was really split so some staff like the virtual model and some staff said no I am tired of virtual PD I want to do it in person so we split it and we had the morning sessions um were via zoom and then the afternoon sessions we had um presenters come in to various buildings and um f focus on really specific topics so again we we uh focused on math but we also had some multilingual uh supports that came in this year we also um had some trainers around some of our lgbtq uh curriculum needs um during winter Institute next year our
121hope is to be fully back in person for the full winter Institute and it won't be winter next year if you remember for our from our calendar we switched winter Institute to happen in the fall so our focus in the fall is going to be very much um pushing as much of the um professional learning around the new literacy curriculum Ela SLA curriculum that we just adopted and giving teachers that professional development upfront at the beginning of the year instead of waiting until February to do that just one quick question I mean the beginning you had uh metrics set for goals for this year and then the reporting on them are the goals for next year going to be pretty similar so we're um yeah I was going to say that at the end but
122I can do that now so um we are shifting to a new template next year um as you know we have several of our schools that are in status because of their designations with the State Board of Education um and so this year we had one school that was intensive we have school um two comprehensive schools and then we have targeted schools and so one of the requirements from is is that if you're intensive you have a very rigorous um School Improvement template that you have to follow and they meet monthly with a um Provider from the state board a coordinator who kind of like a coach um who works with the principal and the school Improvement team um because we had one intensive School this year and we may potentially have more intens of
123schools next year based on the data that we we we see that we have some Ela and math um any we just don't have enough school students that are proficient and our chronic absenteeism numbers um are another reason why we're going to have more schools possibly um that are going to be under that umbrella of needing support from the State Board of Education so we decided instead of just having one or two schools doing this template in this process we are shifting everyone to the new template for next year um we like the template it is very simple it is very um very clear what is student Focus what the adults are doing to improve on the goals that are um written for the students so we're not sharing those now because we just have
124been working on learning the new template in the last couple weeks um and then I'm going to have everybody come back in the fall and share their new um goals so we're writing a goal for um language arts we're writing a goal for Math and we're writing a goal for chronic absenteeism so it'll be very basic just those three areas um and we'll come back and present those um probably in September because or maybe early October we want to have at least um what Christina was alluding to at the beginning of the presentation is the work that we've been doing most recently with the with the uh school teams is working with the data for the students that they're going to have next year so we didn't make we didn't feel like it made sense
125to right School Improvement goals for the students after we moved everyone all around so um you know if I'm a Dr Williams team member I am looking at data for the students that will be coming to me from um next year so we can have real uh real data to really look at okay the students that are with us right now what you're seeing today is the current students who are at those schools but then when when um administrators come back in October you'll see the current students that they um have and we may have to tweak it a little bit so we're writing the goals and then when the students come back in August we'll do a reassessment of those goals to see who we have and see if those numbers change after we
126do the first benchmarking and then we'll have them come back and present to you guys that makes and getting that data early also very important so students or uh administrators already have kind of their uh students with chronic absenteeism that they'll have next year year even though they weren't the same students as last year so they can already start making attendance plans and discipline plans and putting some of those wound supports in place that makes a lot of sense thank you for question I have a question regarding attendance um I imagine last few years with the results of covid tests students were even if they weren't sick if they tested positive they had to stay home was has that increase the uh the um absentee rate because students got stayed home more and got used
127to staying home more as well I think that's part of it because it isn't that this is not an Urbana or just an Illinois issue this is a national problem and um you know districts and public schools all over the community our community here and as well as just nationally are struggling with that so I do think um there is some there's some mental health things I think that are um definitely at play in some areas um students the social emotional needs are higher than they ever were before um just the fact that we provide five mental health days for students is something that we you know would have been unheard of two years ago um but now we have you know families can call in and say my kid is staying home for a
128mental health day and they can do that five times in a school year so um those are some of those reasons why we're seeing those higher numbers we are going to be um changing our policies around the excessive excuse too so we've allowed eight um excessive excuse absences per semester we're switching that next year to only four semester so you can get eight in the year before you're getting some really intensive intervention from somebody at the school level so there are a lot of things that we've been talking about like Christina alluded to in the last two days around the more effort being put in place in terms of getting kids to school it's not just the responsibility of the school secretary or the student engagement Advocate or the principal all all of us have
129to have a part in um making to improve our student attendance numbers could I just add to what Dr arum stated as well um really good question and this is why I love data because data tells a story right and so when we started doing Panorama in 21 the uh attendance was 51% % and so now it's at the uh 55% so the um High attendance rates yes it's a mindset and we are making those shifts right and even when you look at the results of the survey we used to not the students used to not do very well in the self-management category if you just Google self-management um Marzano John Hattie um any big Guru in education they'll tell you that once a student has that self-management the uh ability to control themselves basically
130then everything will fall in place such as their grades such as their behavior such as their uh attendance um so I just uh wanted to put that out there too because the survey results for the very first time this year is self-management uh made lots of improvement with our students so that's really good news Okay so they're going to shift out unless there are other questions and we'll have Jen rone come up first and drive and then Mr Cooper and then Mr Guzman hello am I on yeah okay um okay um since I have it presented to all of you some are of you are new since the last time I've joined a board meeting I'll just give you the the 10c version of who we are and what we do at Gerber school um
131some of you who have been on the board for a longer longer have heard my spiel um but Gerber's this unique collaboration uh between Cunningham Children's Home and Urbana School District so we are a special education setting a therapeutic Day School uh for students who are residentially placed at Cunningham children's home so all of our students have special education services and really um they are all involved in the foster care system in some form or fashion um so they bring us a lot lot of unique challenges um as far as their um academic backgrounds and uh the mental health challenges that that they're facing um so you'll see some similarities in uh the challenges and the goals uh that we have set and and the outcomes that we have um as you do in my
132regular Ed peers here um but then there are some unique spins that that we have just based on the the population and the mobility we have in working with DCFS um so our first goal is really dealing with uh social emotional learning and trying to build those skills in our kids so that they can be successful um out in the real world um and so uh last summer a group of my staff got together and really worked on revising our um Behavior system and working on um uh a point system that uh all our students do assessing uh their behavior uh throughout the day we assess it on things like being respectful being responsible and managing their emotions in class um so then we wanted to look across the school year and see if our
133kids were making progress in that um and they did not make as much progress as we had hoped in that and our group had a lot of theories about that some of that is wondering about the newness um because we reimplemented this system at the beginning of this school year how much did that play in with the way staff helped students rate their behavior at the beginning of the year um versus at the end of the year when when we were more familiar with it and maybe maybe holding kids more accountable um but you know some of the things that Mr Guzman and uh the SRO were talking about with kids getting ready to graduate we had an unusually large population for us of seniors this year and so we saw a lot of senior
134itis at the end of the year um we also have uh several kids who are getting ready to transition to their next step So that's its own version of senioritis um so we felt like some of those things may have played into uh our last quarter um progress but we're really interested to see as we continue to implement this system in coming years if this is a common Trend or if we can continue to move kids forward um with that any questions about that gole um our next goal is very similar to the other schools uh we did a literacy goal with map um similar to what Christina was talking about really looking at those individual um progress and growth for students and similar to District data on our literacy uh we did not have
135as much growth in literacy as we had hoped um we wrote our goal of fall to Spring and we only had 20 students that were with us for that entire time span we we have quite a bit of Mobility so we had some students that we didn't have in the fall we had some students that were not present in the spring Benchmark um but of the 20 who are with us really only six total um made their growth criteria um so that was really depressing to me um and I am really hopeful that the new District literacy curriculum that we're also adopting will help us kind of reinvigorating reinvigorate our reading and language arts um because I I think we've seen better growth in the past um so this made me really sad because our
136kids need to make more growth than this um our kids come to us with a lot of deficits and we need to be building them up more than we did um I think there where once again some of those spring factors that that played into our spring Benchmark data we actually saw that that we had a lot more growth from fall to winter with kids um than when we looked at the entire span so that's another thing that we're going to keep an eye on um in future years and and see how that pattern plays out um this goal made me really hopeful this is our math goal and just like the other schools in the district uh we implemented the illustrative math curriculum this year and I was very hesitant um because it's a
137really hard curriculum and it um requires kids to do a lot of problem solving and traditionally kids in special ed people have thought oh that that's going to be really hard for them and the the conversations I heard heard in our classrooms around math were just mindblowing it was really amazing to hear um and so for the math testing we had 19 students in that fall to Spring range and overall we had 12 of our 19 students um meet their projected growth so I feel like when I look at our previous year's map data we did not have near that percentage of kids moving forward forward this way um so I'm really excited as we continue to implement this curriculum like how much further we can push our our students and push our our teachers
138in in that implementation um and our last goal is a little bit different um than our our other schools in the district um because of our partnership with Cunningham our attendance looks different our residential staff makes sure our kids come to school um so we don't have that type of absentee issue like some of the other schools in the district what we do have is we have kids out of class um because of behavior and mental health um issues and so we recognize that those things have the same impact that The Chronic absentee has on on on kids in other schools so that's what we targeted as our our attendance goal is looking at time out of class and and ways to really reduce that because if kids aren't in class kids can't learn um
139and so we were really pleased about this we set a goal to kind of decrease that time out of class by 15% and we actually saw a 24% decrease so we were very pleased with that goal Ro and and that's one that you'll see again um in our new school Improvement plan in the fall so that we can keep moving that forward and and keep kids in the class and trying to make up ground any questions for me board members any questions for that time out of class for this last one is that um full full class period that they're out it's not full Class M period to um my staff um they do data on how many minutes each kid's out of class and so if if I'm out of class five minutes that
140gets marked down and then if I'm out of class you know two class periods later um in the week we convert that to minutes so we're looking at minutes instead of class periods um and and so yeah we can we can really get a little more minute with kids that way because we we've got kids that are you know I'm in class Miss ran yeah but you had that five minutes there and that 10 minutes there and and that can really add up um so yeah any anyone else uh before you go I just want to encourage my fellow board members as you plan your school visits do not neglect Gerber it is an going this year it's a love to have you over congratulations I correct me if I'm wrong but I think you
141you you probably have the highest retention rate of any building in the district yeah um there a staff the staff love working there they're highly positive and collaborative group and and uh I'm always inspired When I visit so so please make time for them thank you we I I love working there I love our staff members and I feel like we have people that are very committed to a very special population of kids so they do do you have a summer program we do uh we actually had at our summer school staff training day today and tomorrow morning bright and early our kids will be walking over from the residential unit so I miss them already even though it's only been a few days so be happy to see them and what are the hours
142of class during the summer our summer school program is half days uh so our kids are there from 8:15 to 12:15 and it's actually a six- week program we go Monday through Friday um from tomorrow to July 19th so we're in it for the long haul I was going to say it is very unique in that they do have the students way longer than we do for the summer and which means their staff don't get the same break that a lot of our teachers and to think that their retention is still higher when they don't get the same summer I mean they had a couple days off they're going right back in and they will be there until the third week of July which and they all still love to be there so we have
143great people yes great people yeah thanks again all right good afternoon so June is a really nice time because it's an opportunity for us to start obviously planning for the upcoming school year but it's also a time for us to be reflective in the in the past year and it was really cool to kind of go through our school Improvement goals and actually see all the amazing things that's happening ATS so as we're going through our school Improvement goals we we saw and and kind of went through and saw that we reached or nearly reached all of our uh goals that we had set for ourselves and I'll kind of talk through that so when we started in the fall we really did a really thorough job of doing some Partnerships with Roe and a
144retired uh student sorry retire literacy coach named Beth Meers uh Beth and I and our our administrators our school were able to to create some professional development opportunities that were really meaningful uh for for our teachers and when we did that we had to come with the understanding that all of our teachers at our school have to be reading teachers and we kept echoing that in our professional development uh meetings echoing that when we're having conversations with teachers uh I know at the secondary level we tend to look at ourselves as like content Specialists right but when we look at our data and really dive into that we see that the need is there to really teach those skills and that are typically uh you know typically learned and acquired at the elementary level so
145like that was a really good job I want to really you know celebrate our students our staff members our families and our uh you know our administrators for really you know taking up the the mantle and really kind of running with that because that actually went really well uh some things that we did with that is that we really did a good job with focusing on vocabulary protocols and what we call our content area of vocabulary protocols in the first semester and the second semester we went over into more summarization strategies and we were able to kind of see some results of that so for our literacy goal we were able to set a goal of of 41% of students meeting their projected growth goal and we achieved that we had 45% of students who
146exceeded that goal also want to add that uh next year it' be awesome to really see uh we are able to implement and get the PD opportunities for the new hmh curriculum so that's something our staff is also looking forward to in math we saw the highest growth uh amongst any of our areas or any other the assessments that we did for math we said that 39% of students would reach their projected growth goal and we actually reached that by 48% and again I kind of contribute that to the the new illustrative Mathematics Curriculum but also the you know the PD opportunities that our teachers and students had opportunity to kind of be a part of and kind of see uh some of the growth from that so that was awesome to see our third
147goal is a social and emotional learning goal uh was I think that uh Christina talked a little bit about it but our uh social emotional goal was created based on Panorama where students are taking surveys and we said that our students would go from 76% of students uh on track to 80% and we were just like 1% uh shy from reaching that so we ended at 79% uh and uh some things that we're going to continue to do again something to think about in that is that our students are work on things like social awareness uh uh self-management building positive relationships which has already been kind of said earlier in the presentation of how that's so important specifically at the middle school level when we're looking at the developmental uh abilities of our middle school
148students so and all of our goals I can see that our students are making progress even though in this one we did not meet uh that goal but we did go from 76% to 79% for tenis goal and it was also talked about earlier that we're going to be focusing a little differently uh in the upcoming school year in the upcoming school year we're going to be looking more at our chronic treny numbers uh this school year we focused on our average daily attendance and we said that from the start of sorry from last year to this year our attendance percentage would go from 81% to 85% we finished at like 83.7 so we just rounded up to 84% again we can see that that's like a 3% gain from where we want to go
149but still a 1% % shy from where we uh wanted to be at and again we're going to look at this a little differently because uh even with this so even we looking at this if even if we would have achieved the 85% uh of our average daily attendance that still does not speak to the fullness in of The Chronic treny numbers so that's why we're going to uh focus and look at that a little differently uh going into next school year and again we're just really optimistic again I know that you know you've heard the SRO reports and different things and and and challenges that exist at the Middle School uh level and but there's a lot of positive things happening as well and what I really like about the summer opportunity is that
150it gives us that time to really be reflective on fixing the culture and climate and continuously repairing the culture and climate of our school we want our school to be a place that students enjoy being a part of that staff members want to work there and I think that's going to be something that we're going to be just continuously uh working to develop and I'm optimistic that we have the people in place to do that thank you Mr Cooper for this largely positive report uh board members any specific questions for Mr Cooper the um math and the language arts schoal reading goal they were growth goals yes and but the seal grow goal that was actually 79% of the students actually feel good about going to school it's not a growth goal correct y yeah
151okay thank you that was great anyone else all right right thank you Mr grer thank you now foran High School oh there we go all right so um as I finish up my first year um it's been an honor and privilege to serve as the principal at UHS um and I just have to say that the students the staff and the community are really amazing they are really supportive and I am so glad I made the decision to come over uh across R Street to be here in this community and so um I just want to say thank you uh first and foremost for the opportunity um for that and so um our theme this year at UHS was New Year New You Because coming in we knew that we had to reset a lot
152of things lay some foundations build up some systems and re uh just put into in place some more measur measures accountability for everybody and I think as in with any school year we have ups and we have downs and I firmly believe this year we had more UPS um um for this school year at UHS and with that um our school Improvement plan um with three new administrators me being one of them coming in we had to create the school Improvement plan over the summer and uh it was not with a full team as it should be with teachers representative and other stakeholders simply because we were on a tighter timeline we had to come in we had to look at the data and we had to make our best judgments um with that you'll
153know with my personality I'm somebody who is go big or go home you set the bar high and you got to reach for it and you got to continue to do that and so you'll see that reflected here in some of our goals um for that and just because we did not meet some of them does not mean we are going to slink back and you know try to lower that standard right now that we uh know our students better we know our staff better you know we're going to revive the the goals to make sure that it is reflective and we are um meeting the needs of our students to make sure they are College and Career ready um with that our first goal um we looked at uh using map as our data
154source we looked at actually not growth but attainment for literacy and in particular we decided to focus in on looking at informational text key ideas and details and so because we know that that's one of the key skills to be college and CER ready is uh being able to look at informational text pull ideas and to get those details and so what I've highlighted below is I I firmly believe that you need to see the journey as well and so we do our fall Benchmark to see where we are we do the winter Benchmark then we do the spring Benchmark and our goal was from um the fall to the spring and also compared to last school year and so it's also be the same cohort of students and so we're looking at the same
155group of students we wanted to see a 10% increase in achievement percentile points so it's not growth it's the actual achievement percentile this is what uh map says for students at nationally normed this is where they should be now I didn't highlight those bars if you want to see those I can get those to you later but looking at the students who met it at the winter Benchmark for our ninth grade we had 66% meet uh met the goal so that was uh a 10% increase compared to last school year and so we met it at the winter for 10th grade it was 55% unfortunately we did not meet that goal 11th grade was 56% met that 10% increase so they met it at the uh junior level and then as we we talked about
156earlier seniors we only had 92 students take it and so that is a huge Reflection Point that we're going to look at as a team and as a building on what do we do with our seniors now it's not low expectations it's participation that we need to look at for our seniors because as seniors we have a lot of students who are at Parkland for part of the day we have students with open periods it's really hard to capture them some of them a lot of them are taking AP credit courses and so their focus is just not on map it's on other criter and and when you look at that for our seniors who are getting ready for the next phase in life we need to really look at a building like what is
157the map data really truly telling us and so that's something that we're going to look at going forward because I will say it's not low expectations I refuse to say it's low expectations it's participation that we have to look at for that and so with only 92 students taking it we did not meet and so that was at the winter in Spring we saw that across the board um just you know we did not meet it because the bar does rise from Winter to spring for the groups of students and so yes we had some increases but it wasn't quite where we needed to be for literacy and so as a Reflection Point going back now that we know what we need to work on looking at the attainment level we are really going to
158focus in and drill down with literacy going forward and especially since looking at informational text is a key skill for college in career Readiness and so while we did see the gains it wasn't meaning the goal that we set forward and so we did have movement but again it wasn't that what we set for um our reading in map goal now on the other hand let's look at our second goal is for mathematics for math we looked at actually um growth so goal one for literacy was attainment for goal two we are actually looking at growth and we were looking at 10% increase from last school year and so we wanted to see that growth of at least 10% from our students with that along the journey you can see at the winter Benchmark we
159had two grade levels uh make um the 10% compared to the previous year um and again it's the same cohort of students so we're it's the same students measuring their growth um n9th grade and 10th grade at the winter Benchmark made it and then our celebration is on the spring Benchmark all our students made that and so when we look at growth again difference between attainment versus growth and so well you look at the district data where we still did not make the growth overall but we still had 10% of our students move out and improve from where it needs to be and so while we still have the achievement Gap as you can see throughout the district we are making inroads into the gaps and so you can see that here with math and
160again I credit that to one is the new curriculum of IM being implemented which is very much strong with problem solving with collaboration and then we just have an amazing math department I just have to say our math department is strong at UHS and so um we are starting to see those gains and so the goal going forward is to continue to close the gaps ultimately where we see all our students making those projected growth goals and for goal three is just uh the Panorama survey when we came in Panorama survey was oh sorry forgot to click it over so with Panorama um students in the previous year only 26% of them took the survey and so that's not really capturing their voice capturing what they feel about culture and climate capturing about uh student
161teacher relationships um relationships within their own peer groups and so our goal was lofty at 70% and so I went ahead and laid out for each Benchmark so again as with map we did it three times a year with Panorama we also did it three times a year and you can see where we fell for the fall we almost made the 70% at 68% that's when we had the highest buyin then in the winter we had 53% and then for the spring we had 58% um to wrap it up and so while we did get that 32.5 at the end you can see our journey along the way to really capture their voice right and so um again we went big we went High because you got to set those standards high and so and
162then you see our journey along the way and so I just wanted to to Really emphasize that and to talk about that and again it's really trying to get our students to buy in and to really also do that goal setting with both map and with Panorama um more so with map but with you know that the Panorama just seeing their own data and showing them their own data and seeing where they are and where we need to go as a building and empowering our students to have that voice as well especially with pamar Panorama when we're looking at your own School climate right because our students have a huge in say in the culture and climate that set forth right it's not just the adults that said it it's our students who said it
163as well and so with that our fourth goal systems is um looking at from Panama pulling our attendance data and so what we did at the high school was we wanted to look at our critical attendance students attending 80% or less and so students who are missing 20% or more of the school year we wanted to get that number down and so last year it was at 33% missing 20% or more in the school year and so obviously it's a districtwide issue it's a national issue for attendance and so when we looked at what we wanted to do is we wanted to bring it down to 16% in one year I that was pretty lofty uh to bring that down and so um i' wanted to uh put two measures into place or two checkpoints
164as of early April we got it down to 24% of students in that critical category by the end of the year unfortunately it take backed up to 29% and so while we didn't quite get to well we did not get to 16% we did make some inroads but it you know it's attendance and getting our students invested back into school making School priority that's what we want to do and so those are our goals from our school Improvement plan for um this year we are currently revising and updating and creating new goals for next school year with a team of teachers that's representative we also want to collect feedback from our students and our stakeholders as well for our um sit plan and so I'm somebody who likes to have um like a general theme
165a general goal for the school year and I'll let you in on a big overview I won't go into too many details for next year but next year I am really going to focus in on school pride and Community Pride because I want our students to be invested in our school and in our community also student engagement College and Career Readiness we need our students engaged in the classroom and now that we've reset everything we've done the New Year the new you laying those foundations now it's time to actually dig into what's happening in the classrooms academically and supporting our students and meeting the needs of what's going on um in the classroom and also with the help of Dr Ivy Tatum um we're going to really create that a portrait of a graduate because
166we want our students to see in May when they walk across that stage what characteristics they need to have and what skills they need for the next level for whatever path they choose after they leave us and go on forth into the world all right thank you board members any any questions thank you and thank you for choosing Orana as well thank you so last Slide John or Jesse if you can click yep so um closing us out so I want to thank our administrators and also our school Improvement team so um as all three of them have already spoken to um we had teams in all day uh planning and working on school Improvement um goals the day after the last day I mean like this was Friday we sent kids home on Thursday
167and we were in a session from 8:00 to 3:00 on Friday really talking about next year I think there's a lot of excitement about resetting a lot of things within the district around systems and structures we're so thrilled to have new curriculum so everyone kind of talked about the math illustrative math and um while we haven't made like huge gains you don't see those huge um proficiency gains in one year um we're really excited about the um opportunities for next year with new literacy curriculum so I want to thank all the teachers who you know we had a large large group of people at the cafetorium um Friday Monday today tomorrow Thursday so we really hit it hard um the first few days after kids go home because then when people kind of scatter for
168the summer and get into summer mode um you know we do a lot of other individualized planning throughout the year so all of these principles will still be talking about these goals for the year um meeting with small groups pulling groups together to really do some really hardcore planning during the summer so we can really really really hit our goals um next year so um this second bullet is really talking about all the effort that we've been doing the last couple days have really been around the new students that are going to be in our spaces with um their new colleagues and peers and teachers um Everybody moving around and um kind of being in their new spaces next year and setting goals so we'll again as I shared when Paul asked earlier we'll kind
169of um bring those goals back forward again at the beginning of the year and um share those with you and um give you a little more insight into the ELA um math and the absenteeism activities and practices that the teams are talking about right now so thank you uh that concludes our study topics for this evening we do have an administrative report uh involving our board meeting calendar for the next academic year okay so um I think Lori has given you a draft to look at so this is the meeting where we um we set our meeting schedule for the 2425 school year so we can publish it at our next meeting um we need to talk about a couple things we need to talk about if we want to continue first and third third
170um of the month which we haven't veered away from that ever um we also need to set a time so I think first um if people are happy with the 6:30 time um we would like to continue as administrative team to recommend that we keep that 6:30 time I don't know if anybody has any other thoughts about going one way or the other with that yeah do people find 6:30 being challenging or yes yes keep it 6:30 or go keep it at six can we move it earlier to six you want move it to six yes and um also I want to ask something about the public comment if I know we limit people for five minutes but also it's important to hear them and it's important to keep having that engagement but if we
171can limitate the number of people who does because one of the nights go so long yes like the I we were here for two hours and they're really repetitive I know we can we go them also by email and by person so I wonder if we can limit the number of people who it is certainly possible other districts do have limits some some districts um champagne uh has uh I guess a a a set set of time at the beginning of the meeting and then they also have a a the potential for uh public comment after at the end of their meeting dist different districts do it different ways but for us to make a change we would actually have to have a a board policy update that we would vote on first we could
172certainly talk about doing that in the next academic year and that's something I want to talk about at our next meeting is figuring out what study topics and what specific goals we have um so people you know think about that and bring them with us for the next uh for the next meeting and then the first meeting in August try to set kind of a a study topic agenda and a list of specific things we want to accomplish in the next year but in addition of that also um I'm not so sure about the politics because I didn't read it about it but I know we in some point but we never know when we're going to end and I don't think that it's sustainable we should know when we're going to end that's kind
173of hard to do I mean we uh I mean a board member can can vote to close a meeting can can can can make a motion to close a meeting at any point in time and say we're going to defer the rest of our business to some specific date that is that's something that can happen at any meeting if somebody wishes but you you still need uh a majority vote of the board to do that you'd have to make up that that time or whatever you missed on the agenda either having a second meeting that week or we' either have to defer the business to to the next you two weeks later or we'd have to have a special meeting to do it it's is I mean yeah I don't like being here at 11:
174or midnight either but there are times when we just have a lot to do that that have external defined deadlines for whether it's voting on a on a on a contract or there's lots of reasons we have state rules with involving we we have to vote have pass certain things on a certain schedule so we to make a hard and fast rule so we're never going to go past 10:30 I don't is is something I would advise against and that's something that we have to consider as we add things to the agenda too as we think about what we what we really want to hear that's I mean as we and some people loaded up a lot of stuff this past year and so it makes the agenda even longer and not that those you
175know those things weren't important whoever requested it it was important for them but we have to think about that too as we as we set those and then also um you know we we have time before our board meetings to be able to ask questions nothing wrong with asking questions in our meeting but when we you know if we're asking 20 questions each you know that that also extends our meeting time you know some of those answers we've already had we can you know we can get some of those answers in too so that's draging up so all the little things add up yeah I mean I can do my best as shair to to to keep debate you know on topic and and keep things moving forward to try not to waste time that
176way um but I mean what we can vote on tonight though or request to be voted on next week we're not voting tonight but we're making a request for what's going to be on our agenda in two weeks if if people are amendable to a 600 PM start time um that's something we could do um so what are people thoughts that it's going to end earlier everybody we want to keep going until midnight well 60 help like when we move from 7:30 to 6:30 we were always here after 10 it was 7:30 for decades think about it it would be 10 o00 for us right now mostly because the former you know former board president really liked having dinner with his family before he came here well it's also nice because there we've had a
177lot of uh school children come and and so it's nice to have them if they want to speak to come or if we if they're going to present or whatever that they're here and can get home and get to bed at a reason time just just a quick straw poll um who will be in favor of a 6 PM uh start time okay I think they're sufficient uh sure yeah I saw I didn't get to look oh so five how's our I think we're okay with that I mean well I think it's I think I think I think bringing earlier I mean because because the staff who helped support this you know there the only other person we have to check with would be our to set up well not just ESS but uh the
178broadcasting Anna Yeah Anna she's here today thanks Anna thank you Anna um so I well anyway sounds like 6 p.m is we want to try it okay okay okay so 6 pm. eat earlier huh okay so first and third Tuesday will'll keep 600 p.m. we'll meet right here in the boardroom um John just went and checked with Anna and Anna said 6 p.m. works for her all right so let's dig into a couple of the dates so um as you know we had to move we sometimes have to move dates um because while the first and third is our calendar when we should be meeting sometimes we have Thanksgiving we have witer breaks um spring breaks and things of that nature that sometimes just don't align line with that first and third um schedule so
179we've already kind of looked ahead for you and so um we're doing okay until October um remember fall break is something new that we had this year we're doing it again next year um so the choices would be to either have a meeting on the 8th and um then we'd have two back-to-back meetings because the district is closed um there is no school and no staff on October 15th or we can push back to October 29th and um have and I'm looking at the wrong SE one yes 22nd and 29th sorry so there are three options for October um the 8th to 22nd or the 29th um the benefit of doing it on the 20 um 9th instead of the 22nd is we'd have to kind of prep for the board meeting in advance um
180and notice the meeting because all staff will be gone so all the Personnel items um we wouldn't have Lori would have to post everything kind of the week before um if we went on the 22nd okay because that is the week that is yeah yep they say 29th is fine 29th is okay and then we would be coming back on the 5th so be two back to backs two back to backs either way but election day is a is a holiday though so election day is a holiday in Illinois and it's not a Federal holiday so we checked with um we checked with Susan and the board can still choose to meet on Election Day which is why we but sched meeting sure but you all would typically have a day off on on that
181day right so we typically don't school is closed typically don't don't have board meetings on day when when our when our admin staff have holidays so um all right so for October then we would have the 1 October the 1st and then we'd have October 29th because of fall break and then for sher's checking oer 29 the first October 1st would be the study session meeting I guess I don't understand I guess I don't understand with with if if we if the district is closed on October 15th why is on the 5th October 5th is election day no no no no I'm I'm sorry November 5th I'm sorry I'm going back to October I'm sorry okay October so wouldn't get if we did the 22nd is that what you're asking was done during break but
182the offices are all closed during break and we can prep early oh now I get it that's what now I get it okay yeah yeah yeah it's the same reason we do it for spring break yeah yes okay now now I get it we okay October 1 2 so October 1 October 29th is that okay Paul yeah and then and then we'd move election day to November 12 yeah okay oh wait okay so yep we decided on the 29th 29th I think is that okay Jennifer does that work for you yeah and then we'd skip a election day week and we do a November 12th instead so November 12th and 19th for November so we'd have a back to back again because of Thanksgiving on the 26 is that I most likely won't be here
183okay yeah I I may not either on the 19th that's the due date oh yes oh yeah I forgot about that that's the only one okay what is it that his son remember they're having a baby and the 19th is the due date so we'll see we can manage without you for one meeting okay all right so October 1st yes yes that's a good excuse I'll use my phone right October 1st October 29th November 12th November 19th and then we're on schedule until March um for spring break so spring break is the week of the 18th so we could do either March 11th or March 25th the 11th makes more sense again for the same reason yes March 11th okay now will you have time to get the um RI notice is done yes so
184there is change in school code now you don't have to do it within the 45 days but our goal is always to have them done by April 1 so the 11th would work or the 25th would work for us but well we don't want to yes all right so March 4th and March 11th yes okay I think we've made Lori very very happy with this schedule all right so we will um bring an updated schedule for um the next meeting and then post it on our post it in all the places um after we meet and vote on it next week do we have the agenda for these meetings because I remember last year by no November December the meetings were really really really long so that's kind of what Paul's talking about is kind
185of setting our topics so one of the things we want to do we started doing this about three years ago is is the last meeting that we have in the Academic Year and the first one we kind of talk about what we want to talk about during the Academic Year and that gives admin the ability to much better spread everything spread everything out so we don't have you know one hour meetings and 4our meetings we have a bunch of maybe two and a half hour meetings and then in August 6 we'll bring all of your things and then we remember we had that tentative calendar where we took everything for the year and kind of spaced it out as much as we could now there are things that come up you know that are unexpected
186that we have to put on um contracts and you know other yeah kind of personnel things and things that get added but the study session meetings are meant to be longer and um so we really did try this year to keep business meetings um just business and not add a lot of presentations and sometimes that happened and you know during the redistricting process when we kind of had to work around our consultant schedule um I think we did have a few more presentations on business meetings than we usually do but I think we'll still plan to have those be you know stay on the business end so they are shorter okay all right any other questions um be prepared to vote on this in two weeks thank you um there is a call for a
187future special meeting on June 25th that's three weeks from tonight uh we will be uh voting on uh the uh bid bidding documents for the proposed Sixth Grade Center as well as approving a tentative budget for the 2425 school year yes which we will discuss at our next meeting yes approving the budget for the holding for the so so so every at so every at the end of every Academic Year um the CFO shows us it's called a tenative budget because not all the the numbers are in yet but it gives us a sense a general sense of what our expenses are and what our revenues are are going to be in a in a broad way for the next academic year and we're required to vote on that um by by July well we
188have to have a budget in place to in the fiscal year so normally we would have done the first read of that tonight but Katie's not here as you can see she had a family um emergency and so um we pushed it back to the next meeting to have the first read and is as is our typical protocol we have a first read in a second read and because we have the special meeting already scheduled we'll just do the approval for the tentative budget at the June 25th meeting and that'll at least have we'll meet that um threshold of having a budget in time for when we roll over all of our fiscal everything rolls over in July for all of our budgeting and fiscal um expenditure reporting and all of that so and then
189later on the fall in the fall when more of the numbers are are in we have the official budget that gets voted on and submitted with the state that's September September yeah there are a lot of unknowns right now like property taxes and you know a lot of rebates and you know different things that we kind of have to make assumptions for in June but then by September we have better better information so and that's according to state law and there is no meetings in July no meetings in July July is the best month of the year yes I'm going in July any yes I'm going I'm going to go to Mexico yes okay okay and then we have a really short did you say already superintendent report sorry I was just gonna say that
190okay so very short um just a reminder about summer meals we've talked about that a lot so um everyone has seen the schedule hopefully you're letting families know and we've been getting a lot of great PR from the media and and places where I've seen this posted so that's awesome we want to make sure families have um food if they need it um and then next um registration so we are uh really really really trying to encourage um early enrollment um we still have um although we've talked about the fact that we've moved students into their respective schools for the fall uh we do have a petitioning process and we do still have a lot of new families coming and so um we want our returning families to get in there and register please and
191then um physicals this is just that early reminder to families if you need a kindergarten sixth grade or ninth grade physical please don't wait until August to schedule those appointments um you should be calling your uh your care folks your pediatricians and all of those people um our school-based health center is always open to take um physicals and immunizations and vaccines um so get those appointments scheduled now now and um we don't want anyone missing the first days of school in kindergarten 6th and 9th grade also have to have a dental exam um so make those appointments and then this is just reminder that um our offices are closed because of the federal holiday of juneth on June 19th we have entered into our summer hours um so Jennifer you may not be aware of
192this but we work longer days Monday through Thursday in the summer and then this Friday would be our first Friday off as a longstanding practice ractice in Urbana schools and so our folks work a really long day four days a week and then they get the benefit of oh you remember that from being a staff member you knew that okay um Jetty Road's day is June 22nd so that is a h big celebration out in King Park um the uh Urbana Park District puts on a big um celebration with the king um neighborhood community and so um that is always something that is uh celebrated um in Urbana and then we have registration assistance on July 29th for any of our Spanish and French families at Yankee Ridge and then July 30th is when um
193we are inviting our new families to come to register ATS and then on the 30th and 31st um do we have information on life fers for the registration in juny reach so we will um I don't know if John have have those already been translated and Katherine has everything kind of set up to be sent out over the summer different times so I'm sure that she's already has a um Spanish and French flyer ready to go thank you okay um we have some foas you want to yeah go ahead and do that we have a pair of foyers that were completed uh first being from Tom schroer all text messages sented received by the superintendent that included public employees included public officials or pertained to public business the term text messages is inclusive of any
194similar short or instant message Services since two months one month month two weeks and one week were denied messages from the four days of January 21st through January 24th 2024 are being requested and from the news cazette Jeff Delio a total number of student cell phones confiscated for violating District policy broken down by school during the 2023 2024 school year uh any board reports ahead Sher Tristan and upo this summer no but not the I that's a good question he probably should have been okay well I know you wanted to do it last year so I'll do um I'd like to tell everybody about a free concert on June 15th at the orbana high school at 7 pm it's the Urbana pops Orchestra which is celebrating its 15th year so um rags to rapy rap
195rapid will feature music from the musical rag time and a preview of the cast of Oliver which is the um Park District production that children participate in and gers winds Rap City in blue and Buster Keaton's silent film one week with the pops um playing along to the um silent film so I really encourage everybody to come um there's a Arana High School sophomore Cavender Patel he is the winner of the piano kerto competition and he will play Rap City in blue so if it's at 7:00 on Saturday June 15th and come at high school at the high school right so yeah this is um um the urban pops Orchestra has been offering free concerts recital and educational opportunities in Champagne Urbana 6 since 2010 the ensemble's goals are to perform highquality light classical and
196Pops repertoire for free and to provide a setting for talented youth musicians to learn from seasoned professionals so it gives them that professional experience yeah it's always a great show okay and also I got a copy of the loophole um the 2023 2024 I guess they haven't been um public um um that word I want to use not publicizing it they haven't um public printing thank you very much appreciate it printing it for the last couple years but it is available this year we we watch um students participate in music and sports and this is an opportunity to see uh some of the drawings and poetry and short stories that uh students write and I encourage you to get a copy if you don't have one already I think $10 and maybe we can even
197get some copies in the orbana library for people to see that so thank you thank you any other board reports um this is not a board report more more like um a group of parents and administrative from the juny rich work together and we create that Ser of Pop play during um during this summer and the first one is going to be in June 5 June 5th from 6:30 to 8 PM in the crystal l park and the next one is going to be in Idaho um mobile park so you guys are invited to come it's just intention to get together families get to know each other the kids play and some of the administration is going to be there that's wonderful one and what time again 6:30 to 8 in Crystal Lake Park Crystal
198Lake at the boat house is in the playground playground okay got it that's awesome thank you June 5th and what was the second one that's tomorrow right yep that's tomorrow but what and what was the second one for the ivanho one okay we'll find I'll get it okay any other board reports [Music] sorry I just said I just said I had a a 17 Urbana High School student start on the University of Illinois campus on uh yesterday um they're in various jobs and I'll probably highlight a couple of them here and there um then we offer two more students that'll be starting on Monday so we've got a total of 19 that'll be working in various capacities on campus on a part-time basis over the summer so it'll be fun for them there's uh we
199have students from all over the community so not just orbana but um we have more Urbana students this year than any other of the schools so good representation I have information next one is going to be on the 28th and the Idaho okay yep that's probably like the little area there yeah that's great uh any other board reports hearing none the chair would entertain a motion to adjourn so move second move to Second and all in favor say I I see you in two weeks or not