Urbana School District 116 Board of Education 09 19 23

001I like to call this meeting of uh School District 116 to order uh before we get started tonight I'd like to ask anybody who's participating in the meeting to please get the microphones close to your mouth I've gotten reports from several constituents attempting to watch our meetings on video that they are unable to hear us so please get really close to the mic and speak clearly and plainly um roll call please remember Baxley here hasanatka member Jones member Stanton yes member langendorf here vice president Exum here president polowski here we have Quorum there is one requested modification tonight's agenda and that was we'll be swapping administrative reports 10.3 and 10.4 so that we can kind of keep the adult education discussion you know one cohesive flow um it's time for citizen statements if you'd like

002to make a statement before the board uh there are golden rug sheets in the back of the room please fill it out and hand it to our recording secretary Lori Johnson first up tonight is Kate McLean all right um I'm extremely nervous so bear with me for a little bit um my name is Kate McLean I used to work at Wiley I now work at Leo and I love it it's been really good but over the past couple of meetings I've been disturbed by disturbance not the right word concerned by people not speaking to a couple of things that I wanted to say and I'm I think some of you will be surprised by what I want to say but but I'm really nervous so let me let me go back to notes um I

003told you about how I work for the district I'm also a parent I've had two children go through the middle school one is in the high school now one has gone on to college um I live in the area and I'm a really big fan of Urbana I didn't go to school here myself but I'm I'm a big fan and I really enjoy it here um I have a bunch of points and they're going to feel unrelated so one of them is that parents really like neighborhood schools when we moved here nine years ago there are districts we didn't move to because we liked the way that Urbana had it set up and I think a lot of people like that we do have a lot of neighborhood schools so hold hold on to that

004thought um we chose Urbana for that we also chose for small schools and some of our schools are getting larger and larger second Point um the middle school is um you know always a topic of discussion and I have had two kids go through it um one thing that I need to make sure that the people here is that our Middle School teachers are probably the most vulnerable um we cannot lose any of them especially not the veteran teachers and I would really like that to be considered that their opinions and their needs come very high at the top of the list um we can't lose any of them we have fantastic Middle School teachers I know that there are developmental Developmental and logistical issues with having the middle school at a different building kids

005who are accelerated different programs whether they're going to be able to have a homec type classes which my child is really enjoying right now so that was um something that she suggested I must mentioned um and then the developmental part is that our sixth grade students are going from fifth grade where they've been for a few years and then to sixth grade and then on to a different school and I'm concerned about the continuity there because I think sixth grade adolescent students are going through a lot I want to make sure that there is continuity through there so that they have people that they trust as they go from one building to another building and then to another building um so and then two years later to another so that's that's a concern um I'm

006really optimistic for Urbana and that's part of why I'm here um I told you I'm a fan right uh I think we have a really good chance to grow and some of you maybe went to the football game last week right we're having a rough start but we didn't have a team a couple years ago but now we do and I think we're really growing and maybe the district's growing too which kind of brings me to my my main point um I think we're trying to solve too many issues with one building and I know money is of course always an issue but I think when we get down to it we're trying to slice up a pie that needs to be bigger um we need two buildings we need another Elementary School to spread

007out all the kids we need another Middle School we might even need a DL school we need more buildings and it's not something that can be decided at this meeting but I want us to think big and there's a big sign over there that nobody at home can see about changing your mindset and about growth mindset and we talk about this at school we're growing we're gonna be growing believe me we are and we really need to be thinking of the future and having more bigger Urbana so let's think and plan for a bigger better Urbana and Urbana School District in the future thank you very much next up is Lauren Corpus is this on okay um hi I'm the parent of a kindergartner but I live in the Wiley Zone for the newer board

008members I recommend that you watch the early meetings from this year's board if you have not already to see the massive absolutely massive outpouring of community support that you saw from the Wiley community and you saw an entirely unanimous voice from the Wiley community parents were told repeatedly by boarding administrators this is just about the abatement I could quote many of you saying this is just about the abatement when you voted every question and potentially viable alternative proposal put forth by the community went unanswered and they were told this is just about the abatement but the parents knew that by intentionally scattering their children to three other schools without attempting to keep them together which might have been possible if some of the questions that were raised had been addressed or even seriously answered based

009on the empty classroom space in the district at that time parents knew what that the intention was to close their school permanently so after just one meeting for parents during which no time was left at the end for questions um no virtually no visits from current board members as far as I'm aware no special meetings with parents about any sped transition planning no meetings with the district's Dei administrator at Wiley the school was closed in two weeks and students were scattered to the wind so I think it's important to note that this all contrasts pretty starkly with the amount of public meetings and the time that was given to the committee on Dual language last year so I find myself and I know other Wily parents do as well who I'm in regular communication with

010um I find myself repeatedly asking why there was so much time for Community concerns and voices and so much debate among board members about the Dual language decision but really almost Silence about the Wiley decision it was like there was no discourse or vigorous debate or opinions about the decision it was just the vote really um so when the committee composition was announced it initially just had two Wily parents and six Middle School teachers on it any reasonable committee would have had equal representation from various interests with some deference given to the affected Community which eventually happened after a lot of community spoke out against it the composition of this committee absolutely predetermined their conclusions it is important to note that both co-chairs of the committee voted against the Middle School decision after many months

011of research and service and I know that one of them was initially leaning in the other direction and it was after this research that both co-chairs made the decision that to vote no for the Middle School um so I guess my question is why didn't the administration from the get-go say we want a Sixth Grade Center here's why here's our budget proposal here's why I feel like this would have saved parents many worried nights wondering what the end goal was here um some questions I have that I really hope you guys debate vigorously tonight and I'm willing to be convinced you know the Sixth Grade Center presentation was pretty convincing personally I'm all for a tax referendum we'll pay more taxes we're Urbana who cares so think about all Solutions on the table guys come

012on um how does overcrowding our Elementary School classrooms help our ability to recruit teachers my understanding is that a long-term sub is teaching an elementary level class and my child's building right now I'm just you know concerned about the ability to recruit Elementary School teachers I didn't know it was an issue at the middle school maybe someone can explain a little bit more about that to me as well um how do larger Elementary School classrooms and more transitions improve student learning my understanding I'm not an educational expert but my understanding is that fewer transitions are better to from what I've heard from other people um because I'm concerned that the lowering our elementary school levels will trickle up to the Middle School eventually in terms of outcomes um if the financial argument is the stronger

013argument and there are major concerns about paying staff then I think we should seriously look at having the board scale back budgets where possible but also ask taxpayers for a referendum you know because we can't be in a position to be sacrificing fundamental student learning outcomes in the name of a budget that's not what education should be about in this country um we're clearly already at crisis Point um so I hope that you have a really vigorous debate and think about how does the Wily decision need to happen first or can it not be wrapped up with redistricting because that's my question thank you next up is uh Sarah Jansen okay this fall you all are expected to make two huge huge decisions what to do with Wiley's School and also whether the district will

014convert a neighborhood Elementary School into a Spanish dual Language School both of these decisions will feed into a proposed redistricting to be completed later this Academic Year now at the end of last week's meeting I noticed that one of our newest board members asked a question about the proposed order in which these decisions are being made this was an excellent question and one that I'd wish to revisit right now last spring I along with many others encouraged this board to create a strategic plan a strategic plan is used to prioritize efforts effectively allocate resources ensure that stakeholders and organizational leaders are working towards shared goals and ensure that those goals are backed by data and sound reasoning given the purposes of a strategic plan I would argue that lolli's question is one that should not

015be ignored I encourage you therefore to vote no not now on the Wiley proposal and to delay a decision on the Dual Language School I'd also encourage you to delay redistricting which has to happen after those decisions are made but in my opinion the district needs the strategic planning process first the strategic planning process can conceivably start immediately and it should be used to determine what the district's most critical needs are that answer should be driven by data by input from all stakeholders and sound reasoning as a board I hope you will carefully consider the process that will be used for sharing information and importantly for soliciting feedback from diverse stakeholders we must all be open to differing opinions and views the process itself is designed to help you as board members to allocate resources

016more effectively and make informed decisions that will shape the outcomes for a banister students for the next decade the current approach however asks you to make these important decisions without thinking about trade-offs it forces you to allocate resources without a comprehensive view of stakeholders priorities I don't think this is fair to you as board members and I don't think it's the interest in the best interests of the community one example of this is the concept of neighborhood schools that someone raised earlier Paul you campaign on a platform of protecting neighborhood schools a booklet on the district website highlights some of the benefits of neighborhood schools including from the booklet building Community relationships hire family engagement diversity and cultural engagement and increased safety these are all good things potentially worth prioritizing within the next few months

017you will be making two decisions that have major implications for those neighborhood schools shouldn't we first ask ourselves whether we still value neighborhood schools I'm extra worried about this because the district's website which used to tout neighborhood schools as a strength has suddenly been stripped of any mention of the word neighborhood at all we need transparency and we need an open dialogue that's why I'm asking for Community input regarding Community Values and priorities before making any major decisions for example the Wiley recommendation has been made without soliciting input from the community you need that input to make an informed decision reflecting the priorities of the families that you represent the decisions you're being asked to make involve trade-offs they do and I really hope we can talk openly about those trade-offs the impacts of these

018decisions will affect our children our community as a whole for at least a decade let's not rush let's start with the Strategic plan thanks thank you very much next up is Paul Hickson good evening folks I'm sorry sir could you missed a little closer to Mike yeah thank you like this yeah we want to make sure the people at home can hear you okay thanks good evening we the public are starting to see a pattern here Time After Time the administration brings an emergency situation before the board and asks for your rapid endorsement of their response to the emergency du jour it began with the Dual language program that could only be solved by making Leo a dual language only building never mind that the parents of the monolingual students had been excluded from all

019the discussions leading up to that point and even that many of the Dual language parents expressed a need for more information no you were told there was an emergency and you had to act and you had to act even though there was reason to believe that a number of best practices in how to successfully operate a dual language program in a two-strand school were not being followed fortunately that issue has been put on pause for now so while many are glad that it wasn't endorsed by the board that possibility still exists next up was closing Wiley because of pressing asbestos problems a problem that had actually been known for several years and the asbestos was safely contained awaiting abatement at the proper time but no there was an emergency you had to close the building

020and it was only after the building was closed that the idea was trotted out to repurpose it to be a sixth grade Attendance Center and again it's been submitted to you the board that this is a sky is falling emergency that calls for your rapid endorsement last meeting we heard the superintendent say that we've been kicking the redistricting can down the road for six years and she needs you to act quickly to approve this Sixth Grade Center and then quickly approve the Dual language program so we can quickly get on with redistricting all that so that when this is done we can then begin strategic planning as was just said by the previous speaker that's totally backwards to Common Sense and established strategic planning processes the craziness of this thinking could best be summed up

021when I restate it this way think how crazy this sounds we need to rush big decisions so we don't delay the process by which we can make big decisions that's just nuts folks and it leads us to this question is this fuzzy thinking that would be bad but many are asking what's the real agenda here are there hidden agendas many residents increasingly think there are Urbana 116 is in danger of losing public Trust and you the elected board members have a critical role here you need through your questions deliberations and decisions to begin the long and I'm sorry to say slow process of re-establishing that essential Trust and it must be there so that public support for Urbana schools is going to be there moving forward the ball's in your court we are pulling for

022you the community is pulling for you and this is terribly important finally I want to conclude as I do each time I speak to the board by reminding you that there are many in this community who want to help Urbana schools be successful it's in everybody's best interest but we strongly believe the only way to do that is to adhere to those four principles we keep talking about approach new issues as problem solving exercises in which you really don't know where the best answer is going to come from or the best tweak be fully transparent in all your actions always make sure that all decisions are held up against the end goal of academic Improvement for all students and be attentive to research in these areas and guided by it please hear my comments as

023being supportive of you it's a tough job I appreciate what you're doing I wish you really all the success in the world thank you thank you Mr X next up is uh Jennifer Hickson if anybody else wishes to make a statement before the board at this time there's golden Rush sheets in the back of the room please fill it out and hand it to her do your issue go ahead to our recording secretary Lori Johnson later on in our meeting there will be an additional opportunity to address the board with on Wiley School sorry sometimes my hearing aids are I don't know it's okay just yeah okay yeah please get the mic close to your uh to your mouth though thank you [Music] um I have some comments and questions about the Sixth Grade Center

024report my focus is solely solely on academic achievement and that part of the board the report that I kind of know something about we need to improve academic achievement levels in Urbana so number one will having fewer elementary schools increase class size your answer is there are only four Elementary classrooms needing a class size adjustment ta this doesn't answer the question let the board see and compare this year's in last year's class size numbers teachers often prefer to having one more student and needing a class size adjustment Aid rather than having fewer one fewer just one more student but at least you got some help the number of class sized adjustment AIDS is not an indication of overall class size or teacher student trust stress because of class size according to the report at the

025previous board meeting DPW now has 495 students this is almost 50 above the self-imposed limit that the district had placed on students there we were told last year that having more than 450 students there was untenable bad for teachers and students and that we had to figure out a way to deal with these overflow students that is fair to DPW families dpw's academic achievement is the lowest of all the elementary buildings so is this fair to the DPW families if those students must be placed in other buildings how will that affect class size in those buildings based on the teacher's shortage would we have enough teachers to reopen Wiley as an elementary school smaller class sizes require more teachers there is some research that supports the theory that smaller class size is a stronger predictor

026of increased academic achievement than the strength of the teacher in the room could we team an experienced certified teacher with a new uncertified teacher to help us get through this crisis would that have some chance of increasing academic achievement our teacher vacancy rate when looked at on a per pupil basis is larger than champagne why is that what is the best use of the staff that we have according to the data on the school report card we have more administrators per pupil than the state average do we have staff members who are doing mentoring or administrative work that would be better used in the classroom during this shortfall emergency are we using their talents as well and efficiently as we can to improve academic achievement dual language and multilingual Services these will be more difficult

027to schedule and manage teachers will need to travel between schools when I had a teacher travel between King and UHS we lost important significant instructional time for students because the teacher was driving we paid extra for mileage for that time and she wasn't teaching or planning instruction or collaborating with colleagues all of which are activities that could help improve academic achievement higher level courses our highest attrition rate for students is at the middle school level I know families who took kids out of Urbana during the Middle School years and then returned for high school and some who once they were out stayed out there is research that shows that academic achievement goes up for sixth graders in a Kasich school and down for sixth graders in a middle school but that can be offset for

028some families if their kids can participate in the higher level classes part of what keeps families in the district is that ability all scheduling don't kid yourself all scheduling six through eight will have to consider time for students to travel students and teachers who travel back and forth lose significant instructional time this is a drag on academic achievement and I predict fewer options I would feel better about all of this if I felt that the district had had a process that looked at many options all with the focus on increasing academic achievement I'm going to throw one out of left field all k through eight buildings ought we should have all k through eight buildings with K through weight dual language program in our middle school building and use redistricting to make the numbers work

029the benefits some research shows better academic achievement for middle schoolers in a K-8 building than in a middle school almost all Research indicates better school climate students report not being as scared this solution finds a great home for the DL program families are loyal to their Elementary buildings we might not have the attrition we have now and we would have a better shot at raising academic achievement levels for all students thank you last up is Ephraim Tutwiler okay do I hit the button for the just just make sure the mic is closed if it's green then you're good to go just make sure the mic's close to your mouth please all right cool okay there we go my name is Ephraim I'm a uh I'm a parent at uh Thomas Paine um what I would

030like to urge you guys is the board is just for more transparency I as a parent we started this new school year here and there's still some gaps I think what we need is more transparency so that we retain more teachers the original idea was that we were gonna fill the holes you know because we had a shortage well right now we still have shortages like Mr gutzmer I saw you crossing guard on Philo Road we're still missing a crossing guard on Philo Road there have been other things that are going on that that was promised to us when we switched over and we were going to take our kids from Wiley to Thomas Payne that's a big gap that's a you know I've seen the principle out there but there's other things that we've

031had that you know should have been there and I know that there are other like if we had better transparency earlier maybe we would retain more people and things like this wouldn't be an issue I'm really concerned with the Wily decision because there wasn't enough transparency in the first place we did have a lot of teachers leave we're still missing teachers we need more help and I feel like if you guys are going to take the time and do it I think that we need we can have a better uh a better way to communicate not only to us as in the community whether or not my total feelings aside if you guys feel that it should be a Sixth Grade Center we need more research to tell us that this is going to be

032okay because I we hadn't seen enough and on the board side I know that there would I don't agree with the makeup of of the committee but at the same time like you guys are basically making the decision you need to show us reasons to to have more trust in this whole decision if it's going to be a Sixth Grade Center great if it's going to be an elementary Center or still in elementary school as much as I'm on edge because I don't know what to think you know what I mean and I'm not the only one here if I knew more information about what you guys thought here on these decisions if you took you guys could have said this six months ago and now we could have more research now you guys could

033tell us why you think that it should be a Sixth Grade Center you guys could tell us what you guys are thinking but at some point I know you guys are in charge and there's a decision to be made but at some point we got to have more uh more transparency so that we can have more trust in you guys in the decisions that are being made for us and for our kids because right now I don't know what to think and I know that there's a bunch of other teachers and parents and others that feel the same way and the rush decision to close Wiley and how everything's going here like there was a lot to kind of be desired on the parenting um I'm trying to find the nicest way to put that

034uh it has been a struggle for me and just looking back as a parent here going through the transitions I know that we needed more staff in the in the in the in the uh in the lines for drop off over at Thomas Paine like so I can't imagine what some of the other schools are dealing with but yet if there was a little bit more you know planning that was put and I'm asking you guys for more planning into whatever you guys are going to do because the execution here is definitely going to reflect on you guys like and and it's going to help create a better uh sense of community because right now like there's a sense of broken Community here on my block across the street from Wiley we got three different

035we got kids that my kids play with and they're all going to three different schools and it's in the district right it's crazy all that we're going to a a previous school and we're all kind of getting different things here and I mean this is the community that we were living in that we were that was built and now it's taken apart you know and and I'm just asking for more transparency so that I know I will feel more comfort and and when you have more people who have more more comfort in there they're going to help build more trust in other people as well and they're going to help bring more people to the community but until you get more uh trust from us which we you know and and more of us to

036believe in you guys the more you're the more it's going to be you're going to get more pushback the more you're going to get more frustration and I feel like I'm sure you guys feel the same way frustrated just like me right thank you thank you Mr Tom wheeler there will be a public forum later in this meeting for people to come to address the award with regards to Wiley School um there is no call tonight for an executive session after our meeting is there a motion to approve tonight's agenda as amended oh yeah before we we progress out Ms Jones is sick and liked to have a state for the record that Robbie is present even though he wasn't here during roll call um okay is there a motion to approve tonight's agenda with

037a slight amendment of swapping uh administrative reports 10.3 and 10.4 is there a second second all in favor say aye any post okay we have an agenda um there are no accommodations or recognitions tonight it is now time for our public hearing so I will open the floor for people to come forward and and you know give a statement with regards to Wiley School Beyond uh what we had in our public comments section to be all right I first want to note that I'm still personally undecided on the issue um I'm only here to raise some of the concerns that I have I specifically want to focus on what happens when you remove 12 classrooms from the elementary school system that's the number of classrooms at Wiley there are really three options right you either

038increase class sizes you repurpose other classrooms or you assume that the district will shrink the district's own frequently asked questions documents suggest that is restrict is not shrinking so we can rule that one out to see how classrooms have increased I requested data on class sizes from the district I appreciate that that data was provided very quickly um so that I can answer this question Today class sizes in the district have historically averaged 20 students and that's been true for the last five years across schools and across grade levels this year monolingual classrooms throughout the district have on average 1.4 additional students so that's a seven percent increase relative to last school year on average these impacts that are concentrated at three schools Thomas Payne DPW and Yankee Ridge Thomas Payne took 87 Wiley students

039but they actually didn't see major impacts on class sizes because they used five of their eight brand new classrooms to accommodate the influx which is naturally what should have happened this allowed them to soak up one Wily classroom basically at every level but DPW and Yankee Ridge have on on average three extra students in every classroom this year relative to last that's a 15 increase at those schools this is true for DPW even though DPW didn't take on very many Wiley students so why is that it appears that DPW kept their overflow students because Yankee Ridge didn't have room for them it sounds like there is a capacity concern that we need to be thinking about so two schools saw a 15 increase in class sizes on average and let's not forget evidence suggests class

040sizes can have significant negative impacts on student achievement so this worries me one other way to keep class size impacts low is to repurpose classrooms right that was the third option that I gave non-instructional classrooms are used for important functions like literacy intervention special education ESL instruction and probably a lot of things that I don't even know about the impact on those students though should be fully assessed before approving Wiley as something other than an elementary school what worries me most is that the the information that's being provided isn't acknowledging any of these trade-offs so for example the frequently asked questions doesn't actually answer the question about class sizes as someone already pointed out it just says class sizes don't exceed the contractual Max more than usual in my opinion being at the contractual Max

041is a worst case scenario for example this year my third grader is in a classroom with 28 students that's eight students more than the average class size in the district last year but it still doesn't require an aid it's not over the contractual Max in other words the frequently Asked question answer simply says we mostly avoided a worst case scenario I hope this school board will seriously discussed and consider any potential negative impacts including to the Wiley community for special ed and other special programs thinking about all of these children all of these children in our district who will be going through multiple transitions and the impacts on Middle School programming there will be negative impacts I cannot say if the negative impacts will exceed the positive impacts I can't but ignoring them is foolish

042we need to anticipate them we need to plan for them before moving forward with a recommendation to close I'd like to propose a radical alternative Jennifer proposed a radical alternative instead of a Sixth Grade Center maybe we should consider a second Middle School maybe at Wiley maybe somewhere else someone else suggested somewhere else let's say it's at Wiley with 900 students ums is one of the biggest schools in the state another radical idea is that those empty classrooms could potentially be used for a DL school I have no idea if it will work folks but what I'm asking you to think about is all of our options this decision is going to affect our children it's going to affect our community for for a decade let's not rush the decision thanks thank you sir would

043anybody else like to address the board in our public forum calling once calling twice all right closing the public forum we will have another public forum in two weeks thank you student ambassador report sorry Paul Paulina yeah okay Yeah It's Tricky all right um this is the student ambassador Port from me and Dominica um for September 19th um the focal importance are maintenance within the high school and then some students had a lot of opinions about the new food service quest for lunch and some of the accomplishment accomplishments of the Urbana tigers um for Quest Food Management Services specifically for lunch um some common perspectives are loads of students want juice back in the cafeteria and some students desire more food options for lunch and some days students are only offered white milk and students

044don't take anything to drink for lunch because of this um but the fruit has been a big hit and students love the fruit and they're always gone really fast and they really like the sandwiches and the pizza and they're really long lines for that um there's been some problems with inclusivity for lunch um there's been some instances where Quest doesn't have non-pig options therefore students who are Muslim may not have the option for protein for lunch I've seen this and they've had to like have just like vegetables and bread um and there are hardly any non-meat options which could impact vegetarians Hindus vegans and Buddhists and many students have to bring home food have to bring food from home and then use um classroom microwaves to heat up their food because there's no gluten-free options

045and so they were trying to find a way to put a microwave in the cafeteria because they don't have enough options at lunch um does any does anyone have any idea what is on the bottom of this fruit does anyone have any ideas price price so okay um so a student showed me this picture and we were wondering like is this food still good to eat and what's on the bottom of it and they were like very concerned about it and this is from Quest um utility and maintenance of the Urbana High School um I put out a question asking students what they wished for and almost every single student talked about the bathrooms and the temperature in classes students have been asking for sinks that work normally they work for like maybe two seconds

046and then they just stop working and water stops flowing and um the toilets don't always flush and they overflow a lot and the doors are not big enough so when students go to the bathroom sometimes you can see students using the bathroom um the temperature um the air conditioning and the heating are not well students have been complaining about how they're freezing in one class but they're really hot in another so like I've seen students Fanning themselves one time we had to go in the theater because it was too hot in our classroom and then um lots of people are wearing jackets in class and one time people were sitting on the floor in front of the heater instead of at their desks just so they could get warm um on a brighter note um

047congratulations to the Urbana Tigers there have been a high school marching band attended a competition last weekend and performed very well the Urbana High School football team played their first home game and scored two touchdowns although they ultimately lost Urbana High School swims team and dive dive and swim team placed 11th at their last competition and Urbana High School's marching band performed at a football game for their first time this year at the home game thank you for your time and attention thank you very very much okay well you will and they're actually coming I think on October 3rd to give a presentation about vegan and vegetarian options and an update on food service and how it's gone for the first couple months so that'll be a really good leading it's timely uh so it's

048now time for administrative reports uh first up is our USD 116 budget discussion from Katie all right yes oh okay thanks thanks all right so I was able to get the budget sent out a day early on Thursday to everybody hopefully you had a chance to look it over I'm going to go through this presentation to just highlight the most major changes year over year the big the largest budget items so if you have specific questions I'll try to answer them tonight otherwise I'll certainly be able to respond and answer in the next day or two is that right okay okay is this working okay all right so I'm gonna walk through um first of all just before I get into the budget I was just going to briefly review the performance of the education

049fund which is our largest fund for the current fiscal year that just ended you'll be receiving the audited financial statements for last fiscal year at the October board meeting so this is kind of a preliminary review of The Ed Fund performance then we'll go through the budget assumptions document and highlight some budget changes year over year and um and then finally I'll go over the fund balances of our major funds so for the education fund We performed fairly well we had budgeted 53 million in revenues and we fell short of that by about two million dollars we brought in 51 million dollars in Revenue the primary reason for that is because the June property tax payments were held back by the County Treasurer and we didn't receive them until July actually until August so there

050was a big chunk that we normally would have received in June that didn't come and about two over two million of that was supposed to come to the Ed fund for expenditures we also performed well we had budgeted expenditures of 53 million dollars and our actual expenditures were around 49 million dollars and there was a last year the main reason for our performance for expenditures was due to unfilled vacancies and that was still a major factor but there were several other smaller factors as well but I was just highlighting the most major factor at least half of this number was due to unfilled vacancies that we had budgeted that were never filled for the year and so in the end although we had budgeted a surplus for the Ed fund of two hundred thousand dollars

051we wound up with a surplus of 1.9 million which will be good going into the next couple of years that where we have more uncertainty so first of all I'd like to talk about the revenue assumptions that are on in the fy24 budget so the document that I'll be talking about is the one that says budget assumptions at the top and on page one bullet point number one property tax revenues are our largest source of revenue for the district they make up about 70 percent of our revenues and our property tax revenues are expected to increase year over year from last year about 9.9 percent and so some of that is actual known Revenue amounts because the levy is split in half between two years we receive half of the levy from the 22 Levy

052and then we receive the other half from the 23 Levy based on the fiscal year ending in June um property tax or Property Owners make tax payments in June and September and so all the payments that are made in June we receive in the prior fiscal year and then the payments that we receive in September are in the next fiscal year so they're always split in half based on that Levy's cycle so we know how much we're planning on getting for the current Levy that we're in right now for the payments that are being made in September and then we estimate how much we believe we will receive in June of next year which is still FY 24. and so with those changes we know that for the current year we had a lot of

053new property come on to the board to the roles in the equalize assessed values because of the new apartment complex that was built along University in Lincoln and then also because Tiff 2 expired and that brought another 20 million into eav as well and new property for the property tax levy is a one-time bump to our Levy that we can accept in the year that it's added but then going forward because we're under tax caps the only other new Revenue we received from property taxes is the change in the Consumer Price Index which is given to us every January and so we know we had a five percent change in consumer price index in the current year and we've already it's been released that it'll be five percent again next year so we do have

054some way to estimate what next year's Levy will be and so in total we're estimating property tax revenue growth of 9.9 percent bottom of page one also discusses evidence-based funding actually Lori would you mind helping distribute that and we um Jennifer found this lovely one pager about evidence-based funding that's very colorful that is being put out and I just thought we'd hand that out as another visual but we were really fortunate to find out in late August that we were we received tier one funding for evidence-based funding so rather than ever since evidence fund based funding was began in 2018 or I think it was 2018. we've always been in tier two and we've received between 300 and 350 000 in new revenues each year and then the following year that 300 000 becomes part

055of the base and then you get another new tier allocation each year and so the goal would be that state funding helps offset and equalize the differences in property tax funding amongst the districts throughout the entire state so um this is all done through what's called an adequacy Target calculation and we consistently for every year of of uh evidence-based funding had an adequacy Target of 73 percent and that did not change this year but the factors the tier levels of how they're setting who fell into tier one and who fell into tier two as the districts have gotten better funded they're raising that Target so last year the target was anybody under 70 percent well this year it's anybody under 77. so we are 73 so we wound up in tier one because they keep

056raising that Target to help bring the districts that are lower adequacy Target funded up so we were really lucky because instead of 300 000 we got 1.2 1.3 million in new tier funding this year and now going forward that'll be part of our base funding for next year even if our tier funding goes back to tier two so some of that has to do with how much money is available in the state for tier funding each year as well so there's a lot of factors it's a very complex system for evidence-based funding but I feel really fortunate that we were able to qualify for tier one this year um okay so next I'm going to talk at the top of page two another large Revenue source for the district is Corporate personal property replacement tax

057and in the last couple of years this Revenue Source has been very unpredictable and it seems to have leveled out now post covid and we received an announcement that um they were actually going to be reducing allocations for corporate personal property replacement tax due to reconciliation of estimated tax payments to what they actually received and then we received an estimate an estimate from the state that that amount of reduction was going to be around eight hundred thousand dollars for this year so even though we got new ebf funding we got less cpprt but ultimately the ebf stays consistent and we'll add to our base and that's really fortunate and the cpprt May ebb and flow so and who knows because they've put these estimates out for cpprt and then they're just not right and we

058wind up with more anyway so I went ahead and budgeted what they estimated but in the end we'll just kind of see what winds up happening yeah please do you mind to explain what is CP PRT yes it's a tax revenue that's received by the state from corporations um it's it's part of the Corporate filing of their taxes that they a portion of that comes back to local governments thank you with the dark closure potentially affect that well it's it's actually locally baked I think it's like Statewide and then they allocate it out and I'm not totally sure exactly how they do that so but I can research that a little bit more I'll get back to you okay moving on to some expenditure assumptions on the next page oh next slide sorry all right

059so when we take a look at all salary increases in the district year over year we're looking at about 8.3 million dollars in total costs for salary increases a total of 3.2 million in the Ed fund for next year and the breakdown of those percentages increases to different classes of employees and types of employees is provided at the bottom of page two of the budget assumptions document so some of those were part of the negotiations for the contract for certified and support staff and some of that was part of the decisions that the board made in May regarding non-union support staff and administrator raises in addition District contributions to health insurance premiums increased by 14 percent or 660 thousand dollars which also included some additional contributions towards family insurance premiums and employer HSA contributions I

060mentioned in the tentative budget that we are expecting a decrease in our energy budgets we found out in April and May that the capacity charges had been very high last year and caused a huge increase and unpredictability in our energy budgets and in fact when I was working on the budget last year they told me to budget a 200 percent increase like budget double and I wound up budgeting 150 percent and we wound up coming in right about where I budgeted which was good but now this year the estimates are that we can decrease that now going back down to still higher than historical levels but a lot less than last year so that we're looking at a reduction in total energy budgets around two hundred and forty thousand dollars and that's in bullet point

06111 of the assumptions document talks a little bit more about that and lastly there was quite a few changes and budgets for food service on the revenue side and the expenditure side a lot of those are based on meal participation rates that are being estimated by what our contractor thinks that they'll be able to increase our program by and so we've budgeted based on those estimates those were provided as part of that contract approval that we did last April was it in April and so we're looking at increase in contractual food service costs of around 750 000 and we also budgeted for some increase in food service equipment due to the demands of trying to get all of our equipment up to speed and up to par with what our contractor expects but also 45

062000 of that was a food service equipment grant that we received from the state so that's included in expenditures and also in revenues on bullet point 20 I discussed that the Indoor Aquatic Center lost contribution for this coming fiscal year is 266 thousand dollars so we have a new agreement with the Indoor Aquatic Center for 2023 to 2027 and the first year of that agreement is very similar to previous agreements where at the end of the year we look at all the revenues that the facility brought in from memberships and we look at all or you know daily admissions to the pool or parties or whatever Revenue sources the pool brings in and then we look at all the costs of Staffing the facility and keeping the lights on and the pumps running and anything

063that isn't covered by those revenues the two districts split 50 50 the park district and the school district so this year it will be much the same we'll split any loss that's it always has a loss by the way always it does not make money at all it never has and that loss has continued to grow over the years but um we will split that loss 50 50 this coming year and then for the remaining years of the agreement in order to help the park district with some of their needs and to keep this partnership we decided to tier that split more towards the school district so the following year it'll be um instead of 50 50 it'll be 45 55 and then it winds up being 60 40. for the remaining two years of

064the agreement um and then similarly we also will be splitting the um contribution towards any Capital Improvements we'll start to tier more towards the school district we do own that facility and the park district is our operating partner and so um for Capital Improvements there's a list of items in the new agreement that we were trying to get done more sooner than later it was things that we already knew were outstanding items and so that list of items we committed to splitting 50 50 and then any items that happen after that will be tiered similarly to the split in these following years and so I budgeted an amount for some Capital Improvements that are planned that we have been discussing doing in the next year or so in the current budget as well is it

065time to move on no I'm not thanks John this is the one I was talking about sorry okay and now the following the last three bullet points on this slide are all part of bullet point number four 24 of the budget assumptions document and they talk about capital projects So currently in the budget I have four million dollars budgeted for the completion of the Thomas Paine project and most of that occurred in August there's a few punch list items well July and August few punch list items I'm sure that Randy's still working through to close out that contract and then at that point we'll pay out the remaining retainage on the project and it'll be done and then I do have two large placeholders for Bond proceeds I've been discussing with stifel and they'll actually

066be here on October 3rd as well to lead a discussion with the board about issuing bonds so for now in the fy24 budget I have a placeholder for 20 million in bond proceeds to be issued in the spring and then I also have our usual three-year rolling bond issue the 3 million that we issue every three years for summer working working cash Bond projects that Randy uses and Technology funds for instructional technology that John uses so that those two Bond proceed placeholders are in the budget so that and I also have a about 10 million of the 20 is budgeted right now as an extended on the expenditure side to be appropriated for spending on projects that we issue the bonds for just big placeholders so okay and then this slide is the second to

067last page of the budget assumptions document there's a um budget summary sorry it's like this and this has all of the district's funds so a couple highlights I wanted to make on this and firstly you can see that the education fund has a positive Surplus end of year adding about 220 000 to fund balance and you can see that in the current year Surplus column on the second to the right and then also I'm also pleased that I'll be working on I'm talked about this briefly but a couple of our funds have negative fund balance the operation and maintenance fund and the tort fund and I'm working slowly you can't really do it overnight because you kind of have to adjust your Levy slowly but I am working on trying to get those a little

068bit more positive this year so briefly highlighting the um major sources of revenue in the education fund like I said 70 percent of our funds come from local sources which is primarily property taxes and then 23 percent comes from State sources and seven percent from federal sources which are primarily state and federal grants that we receive through isbe and this is the breakdown of the different categories that we have on the expenditure side you can see 70 percent of our expenditures are for salaries 11 are for employee benefits so most of our budget is going towards Staffing costs and then small percentages go towards Services supplies a small amount for Capital outlay and then other costs such as the the most the largest portion of it is for tuition for special education and a quick

069snippet at those fund balances this is just a chart depicting those fund balances um and so you can see that operations and maintenance and the tort fund have small negative fund balances that we're working to increase and all of the other funds are positive this is projected ending fund balances at the end of the fiscal year if you know the budgeted projections were to end this way so this is where we will be at the end of this coming fiscal year and I think that was it so any other questions that I can answer for you or go back on any slides and review board members any comments or questions for Katie I know it's a lot he's going to help me help me good so um I don't need these okay no you can

070just so um [Music] ES [Music] is so the question is she notices that the majority of the budget goes to salaries and Staffing how does the district plan to work for the budget regarding um the remodeling of like the Sixth Grade Center Wiley where does that money come from how does that fit into the budget that's a really good question so the page this slide that I was sharing is only the education fund so this fund is where this is the largest fund that we have in the district however the construction projects come from a different fund and that would be on this slide which is also this page and if you look at the one that's called fund number 60 which is called construction from bonds and also funds 65 which is facilities sales

071tax proceeds those two funds fund our construction projects so you can see that in the current year for fiscal year 24 we're budgeting for 23 million in new revenues in that fund 60. and so that would be the 20 million of bond proceeds if we were to do an alternate Revenue Source bond in the spring and the 3 million would be the summer working cash projects that Randy uses for projects throughout the district and then on the expenditure side we're budgeting to spend 15 million which I said 10 million of that is just a budget placeholder for whatever projects would offset the 20 million in bond proceeds and the other five is the remainder of the bonds that we haven't spent yet from the 2021 bond issue and then a portion of the 3 million

072that we will issue in the spring is are the funds constant or do they change how and how do they change yeah that's a good question too so the education fund is more consistent that's going to be the same every year but the construction funds are more like Ebbs and flows based on the projects that you plan and the bond issue and says that you can afford to take out so we can't always afford so we will use sales tax revenues to make the bond payments for that 20 million Bond and that's probably a bond that will be repaid over 10 to 15 years so that will be an amount of time that we probably won't be able to afford issuing bonds again in that amount until those bonds are paid off and then we

073can take more bonds out again to pay overtime is Central so do we have a sufficient money at this time for the remodeling of Wiley and if we have a sufficient or additional fundings because could it be considered to look at it building a new building or another building for more information yeah if we need it right so the 20 million is about where we can probably the estimates that we will get from Anne so um we have our bond Consultants will be here in two weeks on the third and they'll talk more about that and those will be good questions for them um but we can issue somewhere between 12 million and 25 million that's all kind of still up in the air as to how much we need because until we know what

074the project is going to cost we won't issue the bonds because we'll issue the amount that we actually need the estimates that our Architects have given us for Wiley have been 20 million or less and so that would be a reasonable amount that we would need to issue but if we issue that then no we won't have another 20 million to build a new building or to do anything else until we pay those bonds off thank you see okay thank you just clarifying it's like a mortgage yep yep loans for public entities yes thank you both thank you that worked really well Joe thank you one way to look at it is we have income we can spend on building projects right now from our one percent sales tax at around four to four and

075a half million dollars you know if we want to spend more than that in one year we have to borrow from the future and that means that you know we couldn't take on another project for five or six years if it's if it's 20 million dollars for example yeah that was that was my concern like in case we decide to go to the Sixth Grade Center and then in two or three years four years we find out that we actually the capacity of the remained schools is low that we have to have another building so how we're going to play with numbers where they want to go to government we have some saving or is going to be like up in the air again yeah if we would have to go to the voters and

076ask for them to to raise their taxes for us to have more income to build to build more that's what we have to do from okay technical technology um I have a question you would talk about the education fund being the same every year and this must have been brought up before the contract was voted on but how do you prepare for the increases in in salaries Etc um for the next couple years of the contract yeah um that's a really good question we did some projections and I mean one thing is we do know we knew had a pretty good idea what our new tax base would be we knew we were going to have five percent CPI and then again we just found out we're going to have another five percent CPI so

077we had some idea of what those Revenue sources that do grow that education funds annually would be but then from there you know we have to make commitments that are agreeable to both sides of the party and then make it work so um I don't know what the future will hold for the remaining two years of the contract other than my conservative estimates but I told Dr Ivory Tatum that as soon as this budget's done I'm starting to do some real projections of fy25 to try to get a better idea of what that looks like um so and and so many things are up in the air too that are big moves that make a big difference but the contract you know I do know what estimates the total contract will cost over the three

078years and then figuring out what other Revenue sources and other costs the districts District may have over those years it's pretty hard to do multi-year projections in local government so you know we kind of do all of our budgeting one year at a time if you really were to get into a pinch where you had a deficit you know you'd probably just move forward with that deficit and use that year to plan how you're going to not have a deficit the following year and that's part of the reason we have fund balance is to be able to withstand one bad year while you're making those changes so along those lines on the Ed fund Surplus for this upcoming year it's 219 000. right so the number that I heard pantied about in February uh was

079that we would save a million dollars by closing Wiley for this current school year so then is it safe to say Wiley wasn't closed this year or Ed fund would have a deficit of like seven hundred eighty thousand yes all right then my next question is to get the surplus of 219 000 does that include an assumption of the rebates from the solar panel projects that were urgently approved inside May that is a good question no it it doesn't because I because I've learned quite a bit about project has to be fully completed before we can apply for the rebates the IRS is releasing guidance on how to apply for the rebates in October but those solar panels aren't going to be completed the estimated completion date is something like fall or winter of 2024.

080so we won't even apply for those rebates until like January 2025 and so that will wind up being in the fy25 or even 26 budget so until we have a better idea of those timelines and estimates that is not in this budget okay and any of the questions Boardman versus ambassador all right all right um thank you thank you very much for your presentation Katie uh next up is a for administrator report is a discussion on the Urbana adult education budget Shawna Shearer all right thank you for having me so I want to start by doing a quick overview of our programs can you hear me okay it is on is that better sorry sorry I'll speak be closer um we have a number of programs at Adult Ed for those of you who don't

081know a lot about our programming we have an English language acquisition program for our English language Learners we have a high school diploma program and as part of that program we have a wioa youth Grant which is a Workforce Grant so we help support students finishing out their diploma and then moving on to employment or post-secondary education we also have the tap Grant which funds us as an optional education program and also helps fund the district's student engagement advocates for truancy we have our CNA program in partnership with OSF that's where our students do their clinicals and hopefully become employed and then that is also partially funded by the United Way we have a pre-cna program we've had it in the past but in the past couple years we haven't been able to run it

082due to staffing issues but we are very excited to re-initiate that program this year and it's scheduled for late October early November and that program is so basically any student that applies for our CNA program but doesn't yet have the academic skills to be successful in that program we offer a pre-cna to help get them ready for our CNA program um well you know our hope is that any student who goes through our CNA program can pass the state licensure exam so that's why we test students basically test their reading skills before we admit them to our CNA program and then we have a citizenship class which is a very small Grant in partnership with the university y to help our you know community members get their citizenship so in terms of the budget what

083you'll see for this year is that we have had a number of cuts um this is due for my I'm going to give you some reasons why that happened for the various grants so our major funding source is the Illinois Community College Board and we had a number of cuts for those grants not because of our performance necessarily a small portion maybe twenty thousand dollars of that differences because of performance the rest is just due to how they index our area of need and they take into account a report that comes out from SIUE every year that says what our unemployment rate is what our poverty rate is and things like that and that determines our area of need and then iccb distributes those funds accordingly so Parkland also is in our area and also

084received a cut um and then are we owe a grant a good portion of that funding is dedicated every year to student employment and we've had a hard time spending out those funds and so they cut that about 20 percent um for this year compared to last year our taeyop funds however went up and that was very exciting for us and for the district support of the sea positions United Way that original the twenty thousand two hundred fifty that was actually the amount we were allocated last year they came to us after the year started and said hey we have this extra money do you want it and I said sure of course I do so that's not actually a cut it's just back to the original amount our citizenship Grant um is just supports

085one teacher it's a very small program a very important program but a small program and we really didn't need the amount that they gave us last year we really couldn't even spend that Grant out because of what it has to go towards so it's more accurate this year in terms of what we actually need for that program and then you can see there that the district tap the funds dedicated to District te op and then also the other Revenue Source will be the district support that we get every year we basically have up to that amount the 75 000 if we need it um which we will for this year I anticipate but we haven't needed that whole amount in the last few years last year in fact we only needed about 3 000 of

086that amount but this year I have a feeling unless something changes given the the state of things we will probably need the whole amount sorry Katie and then we have some amount that Revenue that we get from for example we do an advanced ESL class for students who don't qualify they don't test low enough to qualify for our free classes but we still want to offer them the service so we offer a paid class that basically just covers the teacher's fee and maybe some class materials we also started a partnership last year with RPC and for any student or not students any adults that they want to enroll in their wioa services they have to take the same tests that we give to our students to qualify for our services and so they come and

087test in our assessment center and then we charge them like twenty dollars a student or something twenty five dollars a student so that's been a nice partnership because it's kind of a win-win for them we take care of all the management side of things and for a nominal amount for them because they're one of our area Partners but it does help us with a little bit of funding and then in terms of our expenses you can see those there I'll just highlight that like the district like every organization pretty much the biggest amount goes to salaries and benefits purchase Services that's mostly our utilities copier you know anything related to our facility and then our materials and supplies a lot of that is um the normal materials and supplies but then we also have a

088couple of subscriptions to online learning platforms so you can see there that there is a bit of a deficit as of right now for this year a couple of things about that um we know that we can't sustain that over time but there are a couple of there's actually three grants coming out that I'm pretty excited about one came to my attention through partners with iccb but it actually has to be a municipality that applies for it so we shared it with mayor Marlin who I think if I'm not mistaken Jennifer shared it with Dr Ivy Tatum shared it with champagne and they I think are going to apply for it and um are willing to have us partner with them through that that's for new immigrants so hopefully that will happen and then there's

089a couple of other grants that iccb is offering um for adult ed programs that one just came out that I plan to apply for that we've had in the past and I feel pretty confident hopefully that we will get some funding for that so I expect that that deficit will not be as great as it is when it's all said and done but we might still have somewhat of a deficit the other thing is that we do have a pretty healthy for our size of program a pretty healthy amount of reserves because you can see there are ending fund balance even with the deficit and so that's why we have those reserves those reserves are there exactly for this situation again I'm going to work real hard to try and not have to to dip

090into those reserves but worst case scenario we dip into it a little bit and then make decisions on how we're going to get to next get through next year and have a balanced budget which might mean we have to look at where we can make Cuts that'll be a little difficult for us in terms of Staffing because currently we only have um including myself 13 full-time staff members so we don't have a lot of cutting that we can do from salaries and benefits we're operating at one of our lowest levels that we have but there are creative things I think that we can do if we need to in the future to bring that down some but hopefully it won't be an issue all right I'm going to stop there just to see if there's

091questions about the budget before I talk about our program board members any questions yeah the performance money that you receive is that for several years back not just for the previous year is that correct so next year would be right it goes it's on like a my understanding of it is that it's on a three-year sort of cycle um so that you don't take a big cut if you have a bad year it doesn't show up right the next year so it's on a three-year sort of rolling average so it doesn't relate to how many students that you have and how many gains they have it is related to how many gains we have and how much um how much enrollment we have right so if enrollment continues to increase that means the next few

092years hopefully that yes my thank you for mentioning that because I actually had that in my notes and forgot to say it um we did take a little bit like I said a performance hit um largely due I mean we're you know we're still dealing with the the effects of covid as as every program is um and so we're hoping that as we get our outcomes in you know improved both with our enrollment and our attendance hours and our skill gains that we will see an increase in those performance dollars um can you speak more on the student employment fun cuts what what is that and what why are we losing money there or giving money back there yeah that's a great question so basically whatever amount of funding that we get from our wioa

093grant 20 of that has to be allocated to support student employment and we have had a really hard time finding students that can work as much as needed in order to spend out those funds and find Partnerships with uh lo you know local organizations that want to employ our students in a supported employment situation because that comes with you know a lot of support employers have to give a lot of support and with everything that has happened with covid and all of the things that was hard for us to to reach all those to reach the amount we needed to we do have plans in place though to to remedy that this year we have a on-the-job training we've gotten approval finally that's all gone through it's completely approved we've been working on it for

094a while with OSF so our CNA students can go right into employment with OSF and if OSF gives them a full-time job with benefits then for six months our funds will cover half of their salary which is really good for OSF and good for our students and good for us because we'll spend out those dollars much more quickly and much more efficiently than trying to place students in shorter term fewer hour employment positions does that make sense does that help okay thanks Amanda I'm not sure this is a budget collection or program question but I was wondering if you can tell me approximately like last year how many of the students in your high school diploma program were students that were expelled from the district that's a great question and I don't actually have that

095answer right now the number expelled in this presentation there are the number of high school age UHS students I think we had just a few that were expelled but I can get those numbers and and get back to you um one thing I want to be back off of your question um typically how long does it take for a high school diploma student who enrolls to finish and earn the high school diploma so of an expelled student would come senior year how long would it take for them to capture credits if they came regularly that's a great question and it goes right into my program information so if is it fun to move on to that if there are no other budget questions okay great so um we so it varies based on how many

096credits our students need so we look at whatever credits our students have had when they come to us we evaluate their transcript and we only have them make up the credits that they're missing so if a senior comes to us and they only need a handful of credits they are going to probably be able to graduate with their class if they do their part if a senior comes to us and they've only earned three out of the 45 required credits it's going to take them longer we in the past have had what I um a model where our high school diploma students enroll in its open enrollment they can enroll throughout the year and then when they come we evaluate their transcript we look at what credits they need and then they work sort of

097independently with support from the teacher on whatever credits they need so each teacher might have in their classroom a number of students working on different subject areas all at the same time and we were pretty flexible especially post covid um with when students came because our students were you know managing and balancing a lot of different things we have changed our structure this year so we're now doing five week sessions half of and students are with us for three hours a day four days a week and half of that three hour session is more of a direct instruction class so if a student needs an English credit they might be sitting in an English class at the end of that five weeks if they pass the final exam and they've done the work and met

098our attendance requirement they get the credit and then the other half is kind of the flex model that we've used in the past where students could be working at their own pace on the credits that they need students could complete zero credits during that Flex time if they're not really working much on what they need to do or they could complete I mean just had a student that's already our session first five week session ends actually Thursday and one student has already completed par some of the credits were partially from last year that had rolled over to finish up this year but he's on his fourth Flex credit so if students work hard and they do a lot of work outside of school they can move through their credits quickly if they're willing to put

099in the time they have to be willing to work outside of their three hours a day does that answer your question okay um so going back to the the slides here the student enrollment you can look at the Historical enrollment the really good news from this is that our population our enrollment numbers are starting to come back up you can see what they were um the year that covid hit in in March which that was a pretty accurate representation of the of what we've had in previous years and then how they dropped and how they're coming back up especially with our ESL students um we are very excited about those numbers I'm also um well let me go back up for one second I'm sorry if you see at the top it says 7.5 attendance

100hours our students have to pass basically four Gates in our outcome measures the first is to hit 7.5 hours that's when they're considered a student to be enrolled so we have students a lot more students than the number there that combat only maybe come to two classes and then leave so the 7.5 means they're actually counted as a student so you can kind of see the trends there and then you can see where we're at right now so um what's exciting about this is that our numbers for this year you can see the difference in four first quarter of last year compared to for ESL students the first week because we started our ESL classes a little bit later than we started our high school diploma classes high school diploma that was just the first

101month like I said our next session our first session ends on Thursday our next session starts on Monday we already have 70 new students that will be added to that so that's about 134 if you're comparing quarter to quarter assuming that the majority of those students make it to 7.5 hours and then you can see our CNA enrollment also has increased from last year and here's some information about the Urbana residence Paul you asked about expelled students which I can I can find that out but I did want you to see for the last couple years at least how many Urbana residents have enrolled with us that are in that age range of high school so we have the 16 to 18 year olds there and then 16 to 20 year olds and then high

102school diploma students of all ages that are a brand or residents and then all of our programs um and how many are Urbana residents just in case anyone's interested champagne is the next so that's about 53 of our students are Urbana residents and Champaign is the next largest which is to be expected at about 31 percent and then the remaining are small towns around in the area [Music] yes we do um students can come to us we have students from Rantoul Broadlands Muhammad Al talono all all over no sorry seven it just means they hit seven and a half hours so they're not considered we have as I said we have a lot more students than that if I just looked at any number of students that enrolled with us we'd probably be at that

103last year we would have been about at that 500 Mark but we don't count them as students until they hit 7.5 hours and then here's our outcome data from last year this is what Ms langadorf was talking about in terms of our performance dollars so in 2021 we didn't meet the iccb goal if you look at that their goal was 44.7 percent and we were at 39.91 of our students that made measurable skill gains and what that means is they either got a diploma they got their CNA license because that's the only license we offer right now or they gained a level on the post-test that we give to all of our students the students in this measure have to be at 12 hours so that's the second gate I told you we have four

104different Gates the first one they have to go through is a 7.5 that means they're a student 12 hours or more that means they have to be post-tested what we have seen historically is that we have a number of students that attend with us for 12 hours but never make it to the 40 hours required to take the post-test because they cannot post test until they've been with us for 40 hours so we are working really hard on retention and how to get students once they hit those 12 hours how to get them to the 40 to post-test with us because most of that most of the reason that we don't make the gains is because they don't get to the 40 hours they stop out before they get to the 40 hours because if

105you look down at the other row that says measurable skill gains that reflects all the students who took a post-test so that takes out all of those students who hit 12 hours but never hit 40. um so it's that says to me that we're doing better with our students who stay with us we still have room to grow of course but we are doing better for the students who stay with us and get to those 40 hours but we need to make sure we keep them eat and that's why they aren't doing the schooling or yes there are other factors that's a great question um yes we do survey the students sometimes it's hard to get in touch with them but because basically what happens is they stop coming and we you know we make

106phone calls and all of that we do get in touch with the majority of them send emails teachers try our counselors try I try and the majority that we get in touch with report exactly what you're saying they either have child care issues or they're taking care of other family members or they need to work to support themselves or their families and they don't have time for school or something else happens in their lives that's really challenging for them to balance and so but even with that we still want to work with them to help them get the support that they need to address those areas of of their lives and continue their education and what we see is that and what I find fascinating having been an adult ed now for five years is

107that we have students who come back so they might stop out for that year but I mean they they re-enroll then the next year it's it's really impactful to me how much they don't give up they keep coming back and then eventually they do finish I mean I know we've had students that started way before I was but then stopped out for a period of time and then came back and finished and that's I want them to I want us to be able to give them the support to get them to finish sooner but it is heartening that they come back and finish yeah it is our only method for the classes in person right now it is and that's a great question or it's not a question but uh well it is a question

108but that's a great thought because we are looking at we changed like I said earlier we changed the structure so significantly for this year that I didn't want to add one more major change but we are looking to start planning so next semester we'll start planning for a distance learning option to hopefully Implement in Fall of next year fall 24. and then here are our goals written into the work plan that I submit is basically the equivalent of like a school Improvement plan um just let you look at those if anybody has questions as we go through I don't want to I know we have a lot to get through tonight and then these are so those are kind of our database goals and then here are our program goals the things that we want

109to do as a program um in order to improve what we're offering to students and then here with what I would say are our celebrations we've had a lot of District support we you know we have the new building the district has been instrumental obviously it wouldn't have happened without the district support so thank you to everybody that's sitting around the table that made that happen we so far have increased attendance and enrollment because of the way we're structuring our classes we've seen a a huge increase in attendance and we've gotten reports from students that they're enjoying the new structure much more than they did the previous uh the previous structure that's not all students but the students that I've talked to informally are pretty excited about what's happening they're much more engaged and because

110of our change structure we're already seeing an increase in credit attainment and then of course the new building is a big celebration um I wanted to share with you some survey results that we that I did um thank you Miss langendorf for asking me to do it and giving me the idea to do this to get our you know our staff sort of tell me things but they tell me in different at different times and then sort of in pieces and so it was nice to have everything kind of written in one place we had 10 responses that's out of 12 full-time staff members because I didn't take the survey the reasons you can see there most of our staff eight out of ten agree or strongly agree that our building's clean and welcoming the

111one who strongly or who disagreed I didn't see any comments attached to that the neutral the person who said neutral commented that basically we're just still working on decorating the walls and things like that to make it more welcoming but overall it's much better than the previous building the new building feels safe this was interesting because I a lot of our I was surprised that so many of our staff are either neutral or um disagreed with it being safe I found the comments related to that had to do with Lighting in the parking lot we have night classes and they feel like the lighting needs to be better out here which is actually true I I agree with them I just hadn't really thought about it and then they would like an intercom so we

112can talk to the people at the front door before they we let them in which we've been working on diligently Randy has been hounding the people to get it installed and it's just not happening but that is not on the district at all and then we had cameras in our old building internally and they want us to put those back up which we can do so that will help with some of that the sufficient space this is by and large the most comments I've had from staff are being have been just it's been an adjustment for them they all have been very clear that they appreciate the new space they appreciate how much nicer it is but it is so much smaller than what we had and that has been hard a hard adjustment especially

113as we're looking to increase our enrollment um so that's you know I think that I don't really need to you can imagine what the comments were they're all related to sort of classroom size and things like that um I feel the building needs upgrades this one also surprised me a little bit but then when I read the comments I understood what they meant and these are all things that we're working on that the district folks are working on it had to do with our Wi-Fi and our Smart Boards not working quite right because our Wi-Fi isn't strong enough we're working on that our phones we're working on that and then the HVAC system which I know tiger Academy has also experienced it being really cool you know if there's extreme temperatures outside it's hard to

114regulate this because it's all up there and not easily accessible but um Randy and those folks have also been working on that so all those things are being worked on I'm just not quite there yet and then I just gave you some sort of highlights of the comments that sort of captured the themes throughout the survey mostly people were very happy and thankful and grateful to be here there are some things we need to work on and we'll continue working on with the support of the district but overall people are happy that this space is much better than our old space and students have been very positive and then here are needs it's it's pretty much what I what I said um even though our classes are smaller and we need to figure out some

115solutions to that that aren't necessarily obvious right at the moment we have it has been really nice we've worked out the schedule as much as we can and Dr weimel and I work very well together in terms of sharing space at the tiger Academy side of things in the evenings in particular when we have multiple classes and larger classes and need more space and it's not being used by Tiger Academy folks in the evening so that has been a big help and I think that's it any questions the board members any questions or comments sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry well I focus on English I focus on the microphone thank you so much because the program the adult education program that was the first program I reached when I came to the country and you

116guys helped me to speaks order English I'm still working on maybe I need to come back but uh thank you so much because I know it's a huge huge program that impacted a lot my life and a lot of my friends so thank you of that and I have a couple of questions I need to run to the bathroom I don't know you touched those topics you know but um I'm curious about the ASL program how many of the new arrivals are getting in I know one of the requirements is to have an ID um that was a long time ago now it's not no you mean to getting into class yes no we don't require um we don't require any sort of documentation for students to access our classes we do um want their

117name and all you know contact information but we don't ask for an official government-issued ID or anything like that we do for students who have it we ask for their social security number only if they have it it's not a requirement but one of our outcome measures has to do with employment and that is all run automatically through the state system then we can only get that information through Social Security numbers but we make it very clear when students enroll especially with our ESL students we don't we don't ask for that in front of a whole class or anything like that so anyone can enroll in our classes they don't have to have any sort of documentation in particular and then you mentioned about a new immigrant program the um the great are you talking

118about the Grant I mentioned the program maybe the citizenship um you say that you have one um new immigrant program something like that so I I talked about there being sorry what the city yes the grant so the I came across a grant that is getting ready to be that hopefully the city will apply for that we can partner with them and it's targeted for its purposes for new immigrants okay but that could help yes yes and when do you want to have news about it um I don't remember Dr ever Tatum do you remember when the city said they were releasing that it was just like a notice that it was going to be released but they didn't give us details yet and they hadn't had the bidders conference yet which is like where

119you go to get all the information and what kind of program is going to be that it honestly it'll basically be I don't know it depends on what the grant requires it'll be probably I would imagine expanding on some of the things we already do like maybe helping with employment helping with Community Services helping with transitions still providing maybe more English classes than we provide now um thank you any other comments or questions yes I just want to congratulate you Shawna for moving everybody here into study I know it was a lot of work and I certainly want to thank the administration for supporting adult education because you can see the benefits in their community on the school visits that I've gone around I see our graduates working with students in the other buildings and

120that really makes me feel wonderful and proud that we are helping our community that way yeah so thank you thank you I agree I think the work that we do is so important and it takes our team and all of you and your support to to allow us to continue to do what we do we're one of the few programs in the state like this and so I think it's a it's a it's a special it's a special program that I appreciate my team and I appreciate all the support you guys give us foreign anyone else I did just have one last question for the citizenship program do we take everyone that applies for that or is that they're a wait list with us opening having one teacher there's not a wait list in fact

121the the census for those classes have been smaller we'd like to recruit more students there's a lot of requirements to be a part of that class but we would like to have more students so so Shawna I look like I'm I'm Friday but I know we submitted a letter of intent with the city and the champagne and I think the refugee Center was also going to partner so we will have to follow up to make sure that um they actually submitted everything it's an idhs Grant so um kind of a state grant for Asylum Seekers thank you any other questions yeah all right thank you very much Shawna next up is our summer facilities update from last summer so um it's Randy hey good evening I just wanted to update you on uh some projects

122that we had done over the summer I guess just kind of since there's a few new board members kind of give you an idea what we do over the summer um at a lot of the buildings um for the adult ed building and tiger Academy we did some uh window clings we cleaned out the basement at the um Adult Ed side the old Domino's building to make it uh able to be used as storage and also for in case there was a storm or something like that they go down there we've also set a new HVAC unit on the roof I don't know that it's completely hooked up yet but we do have a unit up there ready to go um over the athletic complex we re-stripe the track this year and some that's not

123on the list as we uh had to work on the uh Press Box HVAC on the soccer side so that had to be replaced so it's like just a mini split but District right district-wide we seal code and striped a lot of the school parking lots did some concrete repairs sidewalk repairs we replaced two vehicles the two vehicles we replaced we um we have the have them getting ready to go on auction this winter um and uh so the money will go back towards the go back into my budget for that okay yeah um all the gym floors were uh screened and sealed this year and we also purchased three Auto scrubbers Martin Luther King we did some window clings uh we have a company that's interested in giving us some a couple thousand square

124feet of flooring to try and they're wanting to do it at uh Martin Luther King on the west entrance the flooring in there is kind of starting to break down a little bit so uh just working on scheduling for that to get that installed um we also did two classrooms at Martin Luther King about 75 of the corridors and uh the Dance Floor got sanded and sealed this year um Dr Preston Williams were you prepared to gas meter fence sometime this summer it got hit by a car and we had to repair that we did a little painting down there as well leel we had a um employee that spent pretty much the entire time cleaning up the basement at Leal so we could uh improve the storage and they just purged a bunch of

125uh stuff after we got board approval for it to be thrown away um repaired three walls in classrooms was done by Olympic Construction did some sealing of the brick on the west side of the building and then uh something that uh Dr hassanaka talked about a few weeks ago was the Birch Street play area and I've been working with the city on that waiting for approval to see if we can go in there and um put a top coat of some sort whether it's concrete or a black top but I talked to him this week and they talked like it shouldn't be an issue but uh still had to work out some stuff with the engineering department um Thomas Paine always had the construction renovation going on over there we redid the playgrounds and replaced

126that with some Ada upgrades as far as the surface playing surface and then uh some of the playground equipment as well um tiger Academy I think I mentioned the air conditioning and then we finally got to partition up but Joe's not here um in the big room on the east side of the building to make the one big space two spaces that they need to to hold like two classrooms or divide up into two different groups or ban high school and Health Center painted stairwells and walls we did some asphalt repair North student parking lot the entrance and exit um art rooms and Food Lab we had that air conditioner go out and I think that's what student ambassador was talking about when we had some uh heating issues over there um that we had

127to move some kids for a couple days but those were replaced as well we did the band room renovation um putting in a new chiller it's in place now and uh completion of that should be within about a month um I'm sorry John can you move the page forward thank you um along with that new Chiller we have the chiller rental it's also eaten up quite a bit of money we replace the flooring in the auto shop hallway Health Center offices um or the examining examination rooms were painted um replaced a couple condenser compressors for the gym and then in the uh throughout the whole school we replaced we put in a new clock system and uh what that uh with this new clock system it gives the kids uh um from the time the

128Bell Rings it gives them the four minute countdown and then I think at the one minute mark it gives you a bell and then uh at the zero minute Mark also gives you another Bell or warning I don't know if they're the same or if they're different but um I guess it's been a big Improvement uh getting the kids out of the hallways um they kind of lose track of time sometimes this kind of keeps them on schedule and then uh something's not on the list that uh board member of langendorf reached out to me about was the uh uh door one area she had a question about the um Ada there with the concrete and uh we I emailed her back and we've had a concrete company come out and uh look at the

129area and we're looking at hopefully grinding off um this lip like about an inch lip where the uh curbing has raised up is due to frost heave and uh due to the deterioration of some of the concrete it's probably not going to work so we're probably going to go in and try to level it off best we can with some additional concrete and then next summer maybe look at replacing that whole pad um Urbana Middle School we're uh doing chill replacement that is not in yet but it's scheduled completion of um end of December we did some the boiler retube and re-welding that's completed we painted about 10 or 12 doors and door frames in the building I've painted all the staircases step the sides of the steps and the railings at the middle school

130we also put a um door it's the door that leads into the middle school the number escapes me right now we replace all the flooring in that that gym entrance area um let's see uh Urbana Middle School and Aquatic Center we did some asphalt repair on the East entrance um warehouse and the first student building we're in a process right now of adding air conditioning to these two areas first student uses a window unit for room about half the size of this and then the warehouse we haven't had we've never had air conditioning in there and this summer it got a little unbearable um a little bit of stuff we've done at Wiley chimney tuck point and ceiling of the brick and then uh move out for a prep for construction and then at the

131Yankee Ridge we painted hallways sanded and sealed lunchroom floor and uh cleaned about 1 6 of the uh Daikin BRB units in the classrooms and those are the units that uh put out the heating and cooling you know something we tried this year I'll see if that could help us alleviate some of the problems we've been having and it did work so we're going to be looking at doing probably a little bit more of that we will be looking at doing more of that next summer any questions or any questions I I do I mean in terms of of like overall a budget the the things kind of come out uh basically according to plan or like expenditures with regards to these summer projects um sorry I should have sent this to you as you

132may prepare for the answer but you know in terms of like the overall I mean I don't know how much came out of life safety how much came out of um you know o m fund but basically were the the plan expenditures basically in line with with your estimates coming and coming to this project most of it was out of O M uh we didn't have much health Life Safety money for this year uh the last couple years I spent a lot I do a lot of repairs and upgrades any other comments questions all right all right thank you very much Randy uh next up is is our FAQ for the Sixth Grade Center okay so um you have two documents one that we're putting on the web but then one that John is going

133to display is more of a paragraph format I think board members have it at your seat is the one that kind of looks like a just a actual Google doc form that I'm going to kind of talk through so um hopefully some of the public comments from this evening and um some of the emails and things that the board have received regarding the Sixth Grade Center these are the frequently asked questions um of course this isn't comprehensive of every single question that someone might have I heard a few more tonight that we've not really talked about in this document but these are the questions that we're hearing most frequently that's why it's called a frequently asked questions document so John if you go back to the top so at the at the top I've just

134again linked the charge here um I know there were a lot of comments this evening about um people being surprised about us even talking about a Sixth Grade Center but it was a part of the original charge in March of 2023. and it was definitely something that was discussed when forming the district facilities planning committee um so again it is something that we didn't anticipate that we would be talking about when we initially brought forward the um the plan for Wiley but once we started getting into our data looking at our enrollments our flat enrollments looking at finances just all of the pieces it was an opportunity for us as an administrative team to really think about what would be the best or what would be another area in which Wiley might be able to

135really help serve our community and our students in a bigger way so the Sixth Grade Center charge was here from the very beginning so it isn't something that we just you know kind of just added here um in the last couple weeks is something that we've been talking about since March someone made a point tonight and I just wanted to reiterate that this document this document is in the public folder so hopefully some of the people who brought questions forward tonight will go back to the public folder and maybe look at this information I did link the ums Illinois school report card here because as has already been stated multiple times our Middle School averages between 950 students 9 to 950 and it sometimes upwards over a thousand students which is one of the largest

136middle schools in the state and when compared to just regionally in Central Illinois it is the largest Middle School in our area which is one of the reasons why we're talking about this I just wanted to point out that that link is there and hopefully people will go in and do a little digging around in the ums school report card so now I'm going to just kind of jump into the questions um I think it would be way easier to just as I as we talk about a topic if you have questions about that particular question we just stop and address it as we go instead of trying to answer all 13 at the very end does that sound okay with people okay so the first one is class size and I'm not going to

137read to you guys so I'm going to kind of paraphrase these as I go so a lot of discussion um this spring a lot of discussion during the facility planning committee meetings and Ben and said Lolly I know sit Lolly had to leave and be she was with family for a big chunk of the facilities committee but there at the beginning and I know Ben was our one of our other board members in attendance and I think all the board members have watched the presentations in our the slideshows and listen to recordings so you know please jump in um and I know our my team was there for all of the meetings as well so um but class sizes were I would say that's why this is the number one question um because the elementary

138group talked about this a lot um and this was one of the biggest concerns uh from everyone involved in the facilities planning committee um conversations we've already looked at our class count we've already talked about six day enrollment we've already talked about the fact that we have not seen a significant increase in elementary enrollment and yes do we agree that having very very small classes is the best way to increase student achievement I don't think anybody in this room will argue with that but one we don't have teachers to have classes that can be you know 14 15 students across the district and we don't have space for that either so right now our enrollment at elementary is not growing and our class sizes have not maxed out at um many of the levels I

139said this at our at one of our other discussions about class size um and unfortunately the person who came tonight from Leo who has a student with a in a class with 28 it's because that is the only monolingual class at that grade level and when you have some some of our English speakers and English dominant students who come unfortunately when you only have one place for them to go that is the nature of you know part of the issues that we see with class sizes at Leo but those are pretty normal so to say that we are seeing atypical growth or increases in class size growth we did move 230 students minus the students who like Dr Norton shared either went to Champaign or went to Holy Cross or went to all the private

140places we placed all the Wiley students and I I would say our class sizes we added a few classes and so that really helped with some of those bubble areas that we saw but we're not seeing a significant increase in class sizes so the discussions we were having at the facilities committee really were you know people were saying all of our Elementary classes were going to have 30 students or upwards we would be at the class cap for every grade and across the district and that just hasn't happened so I see people itching to get to their microphones so comments no okay people were kind of leaning in I was expecting some comments go share I just have a question when when um to follow up on some of the questions that were asked tonight

141as well when the students from Wiley were divided up I I know that that was very um planned very well as far as location so that they would be within a certain mileage from the school but did parents also have an option where they wanted to and because one of the speakers had said that they're on his on his home block there were three different children going from three different schools so was the parents sure or is that's the way that that they were chosen to go to different absolutely that's what happened I mean we did not separate students from one block to send to three different places so the Wiley students were given priority petitioning petitioning is something that we do in our district and it is is something that is a an Urbana

142it's a third band away right and we we continue to allow partitioning and the Wiley families received kind of priority petitioning and they were able to petition earlier so there are some families who are at Dr not Dr Williams who are at Thomas Payne and then their neighbor might be at Yankee Ridge but that was their choice um we did very intentionally move students closest to where they live to really keep the neighborhood keep blocks together and keep neighborhoods together so like the students who are a king right now from Wiley were all students who were in that kind of area together and those those families did have a choice because they had to be bust no matter what so we did give them a choice of and they got to self-select their choice we

143didn't assign them so the students who lived North by 74 who were Wily students who they don't get to walk anywhere anyway they have to get on the bus regardless they were given the choice to go to king or TP right John yeah and so it was basically up to them we gave them a Google form and we said hey what's your first choice and you know we gave them a certain deadline to let us know where they wanted to go and they were assigned based on those choices um so yes very good question sorry did you mentioned that because of the there is a crowd in the school especially in liorwin 28 kids because we don't have a space for them to go this is because Wiley was closed no this is because um

144because of the English dominant I don't know if Lupe or Joe would explain it better but at Leo we have a large number of dual language classrooms and then we have so so many classes that are English dominant which means we don't have enough um well Lupe's coming so we'll let her explain it so I had it has nothing to do with Wiley it basically is just the neighborhood enrollment at Leo okay so Leo has capacity for 21 classrooms currently 11 of them are being used for dual language one of the challenges of why you can't why there's only one kindergarten DL and one kindergarten monolingual is as I had explained in previous meetings that by having strand models in both Leo and Dr Williams it really removes the ability to balance classrooms across the

145Dual language program so for example at Leo right now our fifth grades are at 13 and 17 which combined is still a very large class but had we had the opportunity to combine all four of our DL classrooms between Dr Williams and Leal you would have potentially had two or three much smaller balanced classrooms which would have left an empty classroom be that for monolingual or for Gen Ed so having strand models really impacts not only dual language in the different build [Music] the Wiley okay Generations [Music] asking if right now the enrollment at Leo is the way that it is with the additional Wiley kids if we do not make it with the continuation over the years will the classrooms continue to grow and be at capacity if we only have five elementary buildings

146Cinco yeah that's a question for you all not for me so so pulled up the Elementary class count for Leo so as of today or maybe this is on yesterday at kindergarten first grade third grade and fourth grade there is only one English there's just one place for our English dominant students to go at those four grade levels so second grade and fifth grade as Lupe just said are the only two grades where we had enough English dominant students to have two classes um and then all the rest of the classes are dual language and that that has been the pattern for the last couple of years and um it based on what we're seeing um we'll probably continue to be the pattern until we redistrict and just to add to that just refreshing back

147to our presentation from six day there's only four Wiley students that went today yes thank you Kim thank you okay can I'm gonna go ahead to question two oh yeah Paulina um when I was in new language we did like 60 of the day in English and 40 of the day in Spanish at Leo is that still accurate or has things changed wait it's more of a 50 50. you wanted one of you just stay up there just grab a chair we'll let them explain that okay so our program has always been a 90 10 model up to this point so at kindergarten 90 of the day is in Spanish and 10 of the day is in English and that drops by 10 the Spanish flips over to English by ten percent every grade level

148until fourth grade where it switches to 50 50. now there was um conversation and recommendation both between the Center for Applied Linguistics evaluation as well as our work with the center for teaching for biliteracy to look at possibly changing that to an 80 20 model but that would still be starting kindergarten at 80 20 and dropping by 10 percent so the 50 50 would start at third grade instead of fourth grade thank you good question so going on to number two um we have received a lot of questions about this idea of what if the enrollment grows in the next five to ten years so just because we're experiencing flat growth right now at elementary that may not be the case in five years or ten years or 15 years we really can't predict that

149right now so we continuously monitor our classroom capacities we look at class sizes all the time and so if we need to make adjustments we make those adjustments um as soon as we can and when we have the Staffing to do so that is part of the the issue is right now with this severe Staffing shortage sometimes we post a position and we just we just never have any applicants that happens sometimes with the class size adjustment Tas um there are years where we post one and we just don't ever have anyone apply right now we were kind of piecemealing together some class size adjustment ta positions um through using our daily subs um that's what we're doing right now at the Leo for the the classroom that is at capacity there as we've been

150utilizing day-to-day subs and they've been great but we we need to hire someone who can be there consistently every day we also talked this question came up during the facilities committee while we had our architect there so Scott Walker who's been before the board many times was at many of our facilities meetings and this came up in the six to eight grade group is if we see a significant growth in the next few years can the Sixth Grade Center be adapted and remodeled to become an elementary Attendance Center if that if that is what the board desired to do in 5 10 15 years and yes with some minor adjustments to the space that is definitely something that we could do the things that we're adding or would add at a Sixth Grade Center are

151things that we would use in an elementary space as well so a new gym a new cafeteria Fine Arts spaces a new office so that is a possibility that we could do that question three um you have been hearing us talk a lot about Staffing and the regional and Statewide and National shortages um and um we have had a lot of conversations with individuals we talked about this during the facilities committee and it's been discussed here at the board level that we are very concerned as an administrative team that if we open Wiley again as a sixth Elementary that we will have a really hard time not just Staffing Wiley you know I do I think many of the Wiley teachers would be thrilled if we reopened that building and they might leave the places

152where they are right now and want to return to Wiley but then that is basically opening up a vacancy somewhere else so I know Dr Franklin I don't know if you want to speak to this but she put some great numbers in here um that for the board and the public to really understand the the seriousness of what we're talking about when we talk about the the Staffing shortages you want to add anything Dr Franklin I I'm happy to answer questions I don't necessarily have anything to add I shared at the last meeting um what we have going on I I shared about the Wiley teachers that left the district and there were not many we have many teachers that have relocated to other vacancies we had and we still have long-term Subs the majority

153of the the vacancies and long-term substitute positions are at ums my seventh grader my own kid at ums currently has two long-term subs and she's getting ready to have a third so I'm seeing it firsthand as a parent and also in my position so I'm happy to answer any questions you have so um it seems like one of the strongest reasons being pushed forth by the administration here on why not to reopen Wiley is both not having the bodies to hire or the money to pay them to fill those positions do you agree ment it's a comment I'm looking for someone to say I agree with that or is there some other reason that you think I think there are lots of reasons that would be one of our highest need areas is not having

154enough staff so I just asked when we're going back in time to why we were closing widely I don't ever remember hearing that being talked about and I was asking about is this a financial decision and I was told multiple times by multiple people that it was not that we didn't have any budgetary issues and that was not of concern and it was all about asbestos abatement happening in a timely fashion and I believe and all is the deciding vote on closing Wiley said it was always safety concern for her so is it still about asbestos or is it about the finances or why do we close Wiley specifically about I'm talking about five minutes ago when the words came out of my mouth I was talking about the staffing issues not money so that

155was February of 2022 it is September and we cannot anticipate the number of vacancies we we could not have anticipated in February that if we reopened Wiley we would have 55 vacancies I'll also comment that we put more money on our contract to recruit and retain teachers than we ever have it was a very solid negotiation session where a lot of money was put on the table and I don't know how that impacts Katie's budget and what she thought we would save or what we wouldn't say but we put more money forward than we thought we could also at that point in time we're making the decision we didn't have the the you know all the details with regards to the contract finalized either right no the contract wasn't finalized until after um the decision

156about Wiley and I guess that's why I'm saying it wasn't a finance what we're saying right now is what we're saying with numbers in front of us as of September 19th we weren't talking about this level of vacancies back in February because at that time we only had 19 unfilled vacancies that number has grown exponentially since February to September I'm just saying it's a easier pill to swallow for the community if this was the situation before you know that they would say they would hear we cannot afford to keep this building open and increase her teacher salaries uh with this current UA negotiations let me clarify something I said because I could tell that Paul um kind of went for some further clarification so you asked the question to Katie about the proposed Savings of

157being a million and how it the actual savings ended up being a little bit over 200 000 well those the the money that she's talking about that we had in Surplus we did not make those decisions until like the contract negotiations were not over until after that decision about Wiley was made and so those were not numbers that we anticipated like that was a larger amount and I mean we it wasn't just raises for staff we also put money towards Recruitment and Retention incentives for hard to fill positions we put money towards supervision stipends for teachers to be outside before and after school because currently our contract does not allow for that so those were additional I mean that's it was a hundred and twenty thousand dollars budget alone for supervision stipends the 50 000

158for hard to fill and the supplemental pay those are like four stipends for teachers for doing extra duties Coaching Club sponsors um all of that is an ad during negotiations rather than just the the raise and the average trees I think for a TA was 17 because we wanted to match what unit four was doing because the Tas was the really hard to fill position for us last year so those were all things that came after that Wiley decision address what running this way back in February of when we came forward we honestly came forward with the concern of we we've been talking and we're going to talk about this in the facilities update here in a few minutes it wasn't a surprise to hopefully anyone watching or anybody sitting at this table that when

159we were ready to remodel widely we were going to have to close it so that was what we brought forward due to the asbestos that is in the building and the significant remodeling needs that were there however as we started crunching numbers and talking about vacancies and talking about um do we really need a sixth Elementary based on our enrollment and had more and more conversations about that that the conversation did shift and that is the truth and if there are people out there who want to continue to say this was Dr Ivy Tatum's plan from the very beginning then it's just wrong and I'm saying that out loud right now and if people choose to believe what they want to believe then I'm not going to really argue about that anymore but I am

160saying point blank when we brought this forward we weren't even talking about a Sixth Grade Center at that point that came much later so questions comments well I guess I should probably chime in because I was participating in that vote back then um you know I I think I said this at the time but for me it really was the fact that you know while we we have neighborhood schools I'm passionate about neighborhood schools our neighborhood schools have been kind of broken in one area of town increasingly so for the past five years it got to the point where we were sending nearly 100 kids out of the DPW area it is in that part of a town it's a crisis if it were my neighborhood at Yankee Ridge had to ship 100 Kids to

161other other schools I would have gotten nothing but hate mail if it would have been Leal it would have been the same thing it just happened to be in a part of town where people don't really feel empowered to come to us and complain about it so it's it became imperative that we need to do redistricting but we can't do redistricting until Wiley had been abated and we make some really hard decisions with regards to whether or not we have five or six elementary schools and whether or not we have a single building deal model all those things have to happen in order to preserve our neighborhood School concept here in town because because right now it's broken significantly about this during the Dual language and I know Sherry asked me for these numbers and

162we don't have them tonight and I'm sorry Sherry we'll have to get them John I'll have to to pull that for you but when we had the Dual language conversations there's a lark that I think everyone who came here tonight talked about the neighborhood concept because in their neighborhood the majority of the students walk to school in most of our neighborhoods in the LA in the majority of our community that is not an option for a large number of our kids they they don't have a neighborhood School option they cannot walk to school no matter what and so I think that is kind of the secondary part of what Paul just said around the neighborhood School model being broken for the DPW neighborhood and the enrollment issues that are there but it is a significant

163number of our kids that just don't have that option so I know we continue to say that and and we have purposefully not removed the word neighborhood schools from our website if that's happened and unintentionally I don't know when that happened or if that is even true I'm going to look at that tomorrow but as we discovered when we talked about the number of students that walk and the number of students that get on a bus and go to a special program um they're they're they are not in the minority the kids that are not able to go to walk to school so I also want to add that I just recently heard that within last I don't know how many years Urbana has grown has doubled its size in square footage or but um

164square miles but the population has remained constant so that means our families are being dispersed in other places in the community and we see changes about more rental properties as well I think two-thirds of our of our homes apartments are rental so there's lots of mobility in our in our community as well so it's hard to have a neighborhood school when you have people that are on the outskirts and a lot of our homeowners who have choices and have the financial means to make other choices about where they want to send their kids someone said it tonight one of our people during public comment they are choosing not to send their kids to our public schools and the people that I'm talking to it's because of Urbana Middle School they're not and I think somebody

165came forward and said that this evening you know there are people who love our elementary schools and their students attended Elementary and then they find other options at the middle level many come back because our high school has some great offerings for kids that are college-bound and looking to go to college but we have a huge gap of folks in our community who are not sending their kids to ums and we need to really be thinking about why and I think that's why the conversations about the Sixth Grade Center are happening right now so in other words our our school our Middle School could be much larger if we would have better programming there you're absolutely right we did have 37 students that left the district from fifth grade to sixth grade last year and

166I can break that down for previous years as well with all the students that are calling from Wiley to the other schools well the other schools need to gather more people or more resources to help with like financial support or like mental and physical health support to these children because there's going to be a lot more children in other schools now so we already moved them Paulina they're already in the other schools right now and so in planning for that um this spring when Dr Franklin was meeting with the Wiley teachers we hired a few more uh positions we posted a diff a few extra positions like she mentioned because we anticipated that so we moved some of those resources to places like Thomas Paine in anticipation of those students being in those places and

167we we already did that this spring okay thank you it's a good question so let's talk about number four the transitions so I know board members have heard a lot of received a lot of emails regarding the Sixth Grade Center and the additional transition that it would cause um because students would leave and go to fifth to six and then have to have that extra transition going from six to seventh um and yes that that is a fact I mean there's no arguing that that will happen but our thought and I think the group a couple of the Middle School teachers who were part of the facilities committees six to eight group really spoke to this better than I can so I can't the comments that are in here actually came from one of the

168sixth grade teachers that were part of that group is they really feel that by having a very controlled um uh setting where we're able to really intentionally focus on students social emotional needs help them be more independent really pour into them and really just work with them so much more intentionally as sixth graders that that next transition is just going to be so much better for them in not just preparing them for seventh grade but preparing them to be ninth graders it also I know we're spending so much of our time talking about what this means for sixth grade but we have to also keep in mind if we take 300 students out of ums this seventh and 8th graders that are are still there will be able to have a much better more focused

169experience as well so we don't see the Sixth Grade Center as being a separate school we see it as being kind of a satellite and it will be still considered part of Urbana Middle School and be able to participate and do all the things that seventh and 8th graders do but just in a smaller setting in a more structured way okay number five again this addresses the ex Staffing shortages that we're seeing and and this question I don't think is mostly coming from parents or families or Community people this is a comment that we've been hearing more so actually from teachers from people in ums um I think Dr Wilma can speak to this a little bit too but I know um there is concern about the fact that by moving the sixth grade team

170and moving all the teachers and Specialists that work with our sixth graders away from ums when they have sub shortages when they are not able to cover classrooms on a day-to-day basis I think we have written in here and I think Dr Franklin has said this before ums is the building that is not only hardest to staff or hired vacancy positions it is also our most difficult building to get day-to-day Subs to go there it's also our most difficult building to get long-term Subs there so the people at ums really do kind of rally together because on a day-to-day basis especially on Mondays and Fridays um there are often classes not covered and so um this was a concern I think that has come from within ums and this is one of those we talk

171a lot we've been talking a lot with the ums teachers about the pros and cons there are a lot of Pros to having a Sixth Grade Center and this is definitely one of those cons however we really feel that by changing the narrative changing the way we can wrap around students the supports that students will receive we see that as potentially attracting people to ums and we're hoping and again I know there is no research but in Urbana we don't always have to rely on research because we have always been trendsetters and we feel we are setting a trend and that if we change the narrative ums we will have people wanting to teach there and wanting to be part of something that is different and unique so I don't know if there's anybody else

172wants to add anything to that but um okay questions about that um number six there have been lots of comments about the slide that we shared in um in August that had the uh the language about sharing teachers and sharing spaces um and I think that confused people a little bit when we when when Katie was even talking about the budget a little bit and said you know there's we're not going to have to replace a lot of people because we would be sharing them what we really meant was not that we will have sixth grade teachers that will have to go back and forth between the Sixth Grade Center and the middle in the seventh and eighth grade building we're not going to be shuffling social workers back and forth in clinical professionals and

173counselors we basically and this actually happened under Dr Wilma's leadership have created a model where we have a sixth grade each team has a dedicated team of teachers and a dedicated team of Specialists and so we would pick up all those people who work with them to the Sixth Grade Center so those positions so those positions would not be going back and forth we have you know we would have more than one coach instructional Coach position so that person we would just move on to the coaches over now there are positions that um are shared like the multilingual department and the Dual language teachers and that is something that we have been talking to that team about like what would that look like and how would we um how would we figure out who was

174going to be at the Sixth Grade Center and who's going to work with the seventh and 8th graders there would be some some limited amount of travel but that would probably mostly be for our elective and non-team teachers so like an art teacher might work half the time at the Sixth Grade Center and half the day at the seventh and eighth grade Center or the choir teacher might come to the Sixth Grade Center and teach two classes and then go back to the 7th and eighth grade Center and teach for the rest of the day so we just wanted to clarify that that we are not going to be sharing all of our staff back and forth um but there would be a small number of people who would be um going back and forth

175and that would probably be elective non-team teachers and maybe some of our specialized special ed or dual language folks okay number seven there have been questions about Administration so early on we were talking about this with the sixth through eighth grade team during the facilities planning conversations the original discussion really did center around Mr Cooper is going to remain the principal and because we are considering the sixth race Center as a satellite of ums we don't need two building principles however we do feel like we need additional administrative support so the original plan that was shared with the board in August we currently have a sixth grade administrator we have a seventh grade administrator we have an eighth grade administrator so the sixth grade administrator would then become the sixth grade administrator at the Sixth

176Grade Center we have a sixth grade student interventionist um there's a seventh grade one there's an eighth grade one and so the sixth grade student interventionist would come here in having more conversations at ums this has come up multiple times and we've really talked about uh we agree that there should be a third administrator now that school has started I think when we were talking about this in the summertime we thought oh great we can move an AP move an SI it'll be fine but now that the hustle and bustle of the day-to-day happens um when the assistant principal is by herself without a student intervention is is really really hard if the student interventionist is sick or not there that person is doing a lot and doing the work of two people so we've

177decided that we would be adding a third administrator we don't know what that would be if it would be a second student interventionist if it would be more of a dean-like position that could help with teacher evaluations but we would determine that um if and when the Sixth Grade Center were approved oh I added a line that maybe was not in here on Friday when this was posted so it's been updated and reposted to the website and that is the question about the third SRO um I've been with the Urbana police folks this week we've been doing our drills the Intruder drills and so we've had some conversations about would we be able to have a third SRO many people have asked about this um and that initially our thought was due to the Staffing

178um constraints and shortages that Urbana Police Department is also experiencing we really were not anticipating that we would get that third SRO position however we would definitely work with upd if they were willing to give us one or able to give us one we would figure out how we would be able to fund that but our second thought is we fully expect that our current SRO structure would be able to meet the needs of the sixth graders because most of the behaviors that our SRO has to intervene and I really do involve our seventh and 8th graders so things like you know vaping and just some of those higher level um drugs or any of those things that are happening that are a little more egregious where they might involve like a youth Assessment Center

179evaluation or even if we're calling the police or we're needing an invention those are happening mostly with 7th and 8th graders Joe you look like you were gonna say something okay okay so I I think the SRO question is to be determined I'm not quite sure what will happen with that but we have definitely made the decision that we will have three administrators at the Sixth Grade Center um number eight is also more of a question that we've been hearing from the staff at ums many of our staff members at ums have never ever stepped footing Wiley and as we've been having these conversations this summer through the facilities committee people were sitting in the room even parents were saying things like is this really possible can we really put middle schoolers in Elementary classes

180and I think people were really envisioning right like the small Elementary classes that they're used to and so this summer we took the committee on a tour to Wiley we opened up Wiley last week for ums teachers who had never been to Wiley and to the surprise of most people who have visited even though we've been saying the classes at Wiley purse where footage are larger than any of our other element other Elementary classrooms in the district and they basically are the largest um until people actually went over to Wiley and saw that for themselves I don't think they really were able to um grasp that sixth graders really could be in those classrooms Wednesday Randy and I actually you know and her response was wow this is bigger than the classroom I have right

181now at ums so I think they were a little surprised to see how large the actual classrooms were square footage wise so um that is more so about the existing building classes but the new spaces basically would meet all the needs of 300 students we're going to keep with our goal of 30 students or less on team classes in science labs exploratory classes and the conversations that the ums folks have been having with the architect the last few weeks have really um are really all doable in the space that we have at Wiley so they have a really a big footprint and um that's one of the reasons I know sit Lolly asked like well why Wiley why are we talking about doing this at Wiley and it's because they really do have the footprint

182there they have the space to really be able to add on um and do it in a really thoughtful way for the students to include all the things that we've listed there number eight number nine there have been a lot of questions received about special education programming and I did not include the answer here Beth Ladd in collaboration with the team at ums and with her director of special services miss elvir their intention and and they've added this here would be to really look at the placement of every student based on their special education services um we would not be making programmatic uh decisions around which program goes here if we're going to move life skills students or not because those conversations happen at the IEP Team level so those conversations would be had with

183the student with the parent with the team with the case manager um so to say we are not allowing you know students with a significant special needs or special services to be at the Sixth Grade Center if the team the students team determines that that student's needs would be better served at the Sixth Grade Center then that is where the student will go if the team determines that based on that student's special services they should be at the 7th and 8th Grade Center then that is what would happen to all of those conversations would happen on with the team with the parents and really thinking about what's the least restrictive environment to meet the needs of each child individually yes the team determined that the kid cannot go to the sixth grade where he's going

184to be they will go to the seventh and 8th Grade Center see when it's either six even say that if they're not sixth graders you mean [Music] so the question yeah is is it possible that a sixth grader would be better served at the seventh and eighth grade building and there may be individual situations where it would be um an example would be for students with more significant needs like um that would be in a life skills self-contained classroom for students with more significant special education needs the program might be better suited at the 7-8 building for a student that need that is in need of those more individualized services than what's offered at the Sixth Grade Center so there may be a case-by-case basis that the team decides to just go ahead and go

185to the seven eight building during their sixth grade year because most of their classes would be in a the most restrictive environment if we use special education language so it would they would be less served in the Sixth Grade Center in that particular case but it would be decided by team so so the question is what would happen if a sixth grader goes to seven eight are they still considered a sixth grader and I said yes they would still be considered a sixth grader served with other 7th and 8th graders and maybe others a small number of sixth graders as well there are students for example right now at Urbana Middle School that spend the majority of their day in a self-contained in one classroom for all but maybe two classes and those two classes

186that go out of that classroom for maybe art or another elective class that would be more of the general education setting and that type of setting might be better set up at one building instead of split across two I am yeah and for some of the students that Joel's uh referring to you know what grade they're in or how old they are is not as important as more so about what they need to be successful as an individual we serve our some of our special education students until they I mean they can stay in our schools until they're 22. so we have high school students who are with us Beyond whether they're 18 19 you know they're they're so that so the whole what grade they're in or how old they are is not as

187important as to what they need their IEP goals for their services yeah sometimes their IEP goals are very specific not so much related to the grade level curriculum there's it's it's a wide variety but yeah tan um one of the reasons Joe and Lupe are still here other than you know supporting sitlali they are also here to talk about this question about the needs in the multilingual and dual language programs address that sure as Dr every Tata mentioned there are um significant pros and there are some cons when we're thinking about specialized programming and having a Sixth Grade Center separate from seventh and eighth grade and so a lot of the pros are similar to The General uh Pros for the entire school and student body so a smaller learning environment with fewer total students

188the idea of a stronger culture and climate for Student Success benefits every student benefits to a language Learners and multilingual Learners we also struggle within our department for Teacher recruitment retention and in particular right now I think this is the most we've struggled this year in terms of retention Recruitment and Retention of dual language teachers at the middle school at the high school we're doing really well right now at the middle school we're struggling with recruit and retention so we believe that by being even though we would be splitting up the team into seven eight and sixth if teachers are more in tune and wanting to work in a building that's stronger in terms of culture and climate that's more responsive to the needs of the students that we'd be able to retain teachers better

189than we currently are we currently are struggling we're kind of in a crisis mode right now at the middle school level in regards to that piece there are also what we see a lot is when our dual language students go from fifth grade to ums we see it's a big jump in the linguistic expectations from our curriculum alignment and so when students leave fifth grade and go into sixth grade the rigor of Spanish expectations jumps quite a bit I see you nodding your head and so that's something we believe by going to a Sixth Grade Center we could really focus on a stronger and more responsive transition for sixth grade dual language students we see a lot of students that start having conversations about dropping from or unenrolling from language in sixth grade because it's

190such a huge jump and so that's a program issue that we need to be working on but this could help solve that in a more responsive way so there are legitimate concerns our biggest concern is like what Dr Robert Tatum said earlier our dual language team does wrap around and support each other and oftentimes teaches more than one grade level and so we would have to rethink our our scheduling of what our teachers are teaching and when and we would have to be really intentional about making sure we still maintain that team feel from sixth seventh and eighth grade but a lot of the conversation across every department is that it's still a science department that spans sixth seventh and eighth grade it's just in two buildings so the same idea would apply to dual

191language multilingual learning so overall we believe that there are more Pros than cons but there are significant cons that we would have to work through is that yeah you look like you want to add something okay um question 11. the other thing I forgot to mention is um thinking through newcomer students that are new to the country immigrant students oftentimes when they first if they're new and they in their first experience in in our schools are at ums it's a huge jump um to go into a school of 900 plus students with no English or very limited English and limited formal schooling and so by separating out sixth seventh and eighth we can be more focused on their cultural and linguistic needs for new immigrant students as well so that's another benefit that all of

192our staff agrees would be a huge benefit in this case okay now I'm done yeah good point um question 11 I'm going to let Dr Norton address we did hear a comment tonight about acceleration so I don't know if you want to add anything there Kim about accelerating students absolutely so again we would look at individual student needs after going through the acceleration process and carefully looking at data to see where students were academically and that could be a lot of variations it's not cookie cutter it's not one size fits all it's definitely individualized for students so it could be anywhere from going deeper within the curriculum it could be differentiating with supplementary resources it could be single subject acceleration and that would possibly meaning going to a different school we have students currently that

193are ums students they may take a math course at the high school but those are Services we would still provide Norton number 12 is specifically about Transportation you know do we know if and what it is exactly going to look like for MTD and first student no we don't at this point because we're talking you know a year and a half away um but Katie and I work really collaboratively with both of our partners MTD and first student and they are aware that this is being discussed and they would work with us one of the reasons we bring those contracts forward to the board is so we can make adjustments as needed and so we Willie will do whatever we can to work with MTD and first student to make sure that the transportation that

194is provided to the Sixth Grade Center mirrors or is even better than what we're able to do for the current ums structure saying for question 13 which is basically there's been a lot of questions about will ums students that our sixth graders get to participate in IESA Sports and all the extracurriculars and clubs and activities that we currently offer and the answer is yes there are lots of ways that you know middle schools are structured in different ways we have fifth and sixth grade centers I know in Champaign they have a pre-k-8 building and those students are able to be part of like a sister School model so they can participate in IESA Sports um so we would definitely ensure that our sixth graders are able to do that um it may be a little

195tricky with clubs we have been able to buy a couple of activity buses um so we've already kind of talked about some of those Zero Hour classes and some of those other things that happen during the winter time or during bad weather or just the fact that we have activity buses and and the schools are so close just a couple blocks away from each other we would be hopefully be able to utilize those for some of those other extracurricular activities and then the last one is about after school programming um I know there's a lot of concern right now this is more from a staffing perspective not so much from parents but we only have the splash Grant which is I can't remember how long we've had it since what 2006 or seven or something

196like that um and we have lost our 21st century funding they've just not so much that we lost it for anything that we did they are just funding other programs across the state because we've been so blessed to have this program for so many years and we don't know what Splash or what the after school programming will look like when this would start in 25-26 school year but we do know that whatever we offer to our seventh and eighth graders we would definitely make sure that we have an after school program for sixth graders as well can I tell you today what that's going to look like no but I will tell you that if we're able to fund or write a grant or whatever we're able to do to offer after school programming like

197Splash we will make sure that the sixth graders get to participate in that as well so those are the major questions that we've been Fielding um I think most of those were covered have also been going to board members so if there's something specific that we didn't address that board members want to to talk about this would be a good time to do that I guess one question I would have is if the public has any further questions how would they how would they direct them um you could email them to contact us at usc116.org I do have a question about another building about the academic point of view well yes [Music] um so the question was by moving sixth graders to a Sixth Grade Center would there be the potential of restructuring or redesigning

198academic programming and learning for sixth graders as to what their current in comparison to what they're currently getting question and I think we talked about this more so I didn't really talk about that tonight said Lolly because tonight was really about all those logistical things that people have been asking about and the person who came forward earlier and asked about academics of course one of the major reasons why we're doing this is we want to improve academic outcomes for again not just the sixth graders but also the seventh and 8th graders and this I know there's been a lot of questions about how this just impacts Middle School it doesn't because these 900 students are at the middle school are eventually going to be high schoolers and are eventually going to be going through our

199high school programs and so if we can change their trajectory as sixth graders and improve their academics and improve their independence skills and make them stronger and more resilient and just all the positive things that will come from being in a sixth grade space that's going to just make them a more um you know at a higher level as a seventh grader and that students just improve their outcomes as they transition to the high school and so yes the academics is a huge part of why we're doing this there have been a lot of really great conversations happening at ums I've participated in as many of them as I can I think we haven't made any real decisions yet about what the academic structure is going to look like because right now they're just waiting

200for you guys to make a decision they've come up with a with a lot of really great ideas I think we are planning what we know we need to have is we need to have core team things we need to have electives um we need to make sure we have special education programming and do a language programming but what that Service delivery is going to look like I think is going to take a lot more time to discuss with the ums folks um and I think they are at the point where they've put in as much time as they really want to put in I mean we've had after school meetings we've met during the day and until this board makes a decision about what's going to happen I can't really tell you what that

201is going to look like we've had some creative ideas about the schedule we've talked about what are some ways that we can offer interventions and supports and help those students that I've heard from many people about the fact that we need to focus all of our resources at elementary because we have fifth graders that leave fifth grade and can't read well guess what those kids leave fifth grade and can't read and they become sixth graders who can't read and seventh graders who can't read and eighth graders who can't read and so if we don't change that for them at the sixth grade letter level they're going to be ninth graders that can't read and so we have had a lot of really great conversations about this is an opportunity for us to do something different

202we're not trying to just pick up what we do at ums right now and just replicate it here at in this space and just say okay this is we're going to do the exact same same thing we're doing over there because guess what it's not been working so we don't want to just take what we've been doing there and just plop it in a new space and say we're just going to do the exact same thing and I think the ums folks really want to think outside the box but it takes a lot of time and effort and planning to do that and like we've said this is a multi-month I mean this takes a whole year to kind of plan all of this um and I think they're at the point where we've had

203as many conversations as we're going to have at the building level um until the board makes a decision about what they would like to do moving forward okay so you wanted to look like you wanted you hit you you said it DOC you got it all I would say what as my former principal hat would say also is that um in a school where you have six in middle school with sixth seventh and eighth grade altogether the master schedule how you design when classes are being offered at different grade levels and what when students takes electives versus their core classes gets really rigid and it's hard to be flexible when you have three grade levels that you're trying to plan just like in elementary school when you have K-5 and so on and so forth

204but if you have just a grade level in one building you don't have to worry about how it fits with seventh and eighth grade you can be very flexible and creative in a new way and that would be really exciting as a principal or and as as a teacher and to be able to say maybe we don't maybe 50-minute class periods we don't have to do that anymore maybe they're all 75-minute classes right or you can be much more flexible in how you operate which is exciting results [Music] um so the question was has there been any surveying of families regarding the Sixth Grade Center at this point nope because a lot of the questions that they were putting in were really about the space which is one of the reasons why we opened up

205the tour last week and did that so no we've not surveyed all of the parents um because we're really relying and we're going to talk about this with the facility planning is we pull together a group of stakeholders to kind of represent that group and they brought forward a recommendation to the board for a Sixth Grade Center so we want the board to address that and respond to it and that is where we're starting so thank you there have been um many emails coming to the board from from on parents and teachers so I would just encourage parents to speak up if that's something that they think is going to be good for their children or not so we encourage them to convey their their thoughts with us I would agree because right now I

206think board is the board is hearing from a very select group of voices we've heard from many of those people here through public comment we're not really hearing from people with sixth graders or with middle schoolers so if you feel strongly about this we would encourage you to let the board know how you feel so a good point Sherry can I add something else it would be also really helpful if we can heard the voices from the teachers yes and for the parents and especially for the students there is a way to involve the students because automatically this is for them and for the future so if we can get involved all the community that we are receiving all these emails mostly there are negative it will be really helpful for us to hurt because

207right now we only hurt you and administration saying why we need this by the way I'm normally saying I'm not hurting the community saying why do we need this so it will be good if the administration invests some time to make not only us but also the community that is against to her what is the possibilities and I'm really happy to hear you guys are kind of like I'm bored because about that golden Hall program I know it makes sense so that also gets me like okay well you know and they've done some internal surveys at ums I don't know that we those were designed to bring to the board level but they have put out some surveys to kids asking them things like if we had us what electives do you like and what

208electives would you like to see and what new electives so they've been getting some ideas that way from kids like okay here are the electives that we teach but what would you if we could just throw up any electives and if we could do any extra exploratory classes what would be some of the things that you'd like to learn more about or do and so they've been getting some interesting data from the students in that way but I just want to reiterate again you might be hearing me talking about this but I was not one of the people who voted in the committee and we had um many many people who spent their summer and gave up a lot of their time to bring forward a recommendation to the board about a Sixth Grade Center

209so I just want to say yes I'm doing the talking for that group because they're not here and it's 10 o'clock at night but um yeah so I just want to say that again okay um um I just want to let you guys know that I have to go now but thank you for having me really appreciate you being here and staying so late thank you and and we very much participate appreciate the fact that you come prepared that you come with questions and that you chime in we really participation I really appreciate you thank you thank you good night so with the permission of the board um just in the interest of time and since Joe and Lupe are still there we wanted to also talk to you about a couple of the time

210can I go to the next thing Paul unless people have unless I think it's all continued discussion because next I'm going to talk about facilities and next I'm going to talk about um the redistricting piece of it and of course I asked Joe and Lupe uh following our last discussion where there were comments about um that we were going to have to fast track a decision about dual language and do all of that in the next month or two so I invited them to come also to talk a little bit about so this document that you have um I am not going to in just in the interest of time um go through this it really was designed for our new board members and so I do want to thank I know Ben was out

211of town so um I offered a two on two session um with Sherry and Lola and Ben because they really didn't get to hear all of the background about how we ended up talking about um Wiley and the asbestos abatement and the capital Improvement plans from previous years um and so Lola participated in that and sit Lolly and Sherry um and we it was a great conversation I think they learned a lot about the um many many years that we've been talking about doing this so I'm not going to belabor that unless Ben has specific questions since we didn't get to meet with him um but this document was designed to just kind of let the public know and as well as our new board members know that Wiley has been something that has been

212at the Forefront of many many board conversations for many years so um in 2016 we were talking about is Urbana well served by the number size and location of our elementary schools so we were talking about that even back then in 2020 we were having conversations uh also again looking at Wiley when we had to make a decision about which Elementary School we were going to renovate next um so there were conversations about Wiley back then and then of course here we are 2023 really talking about what are we going to do with the committee's recommendations so the second part of this document was really just basically to say to the board um I heard you know things at our last meeting around you know we really don't think we can really vote for this

213and we really don't want to consider a Sixth Grade Center for all these reasons um and we're going to talk about this a little bit with redistricting here in a second when I shift gears but I just want to say publicly and I want to say on the record that the board asked us to put together a facility committee um we did exactly what you asked us to do we put the people on the committee in a very impartial and non-biased way we put the we we comprise the committee of the people you asked us to have there we ran the Committees basically the way the board asked us to and it was very difficult to have these be open meetings the recordings the minutes this just it was just a it was a difficult

214process which really slowed down the work we lost people at the very beginning who were very excited about being part of this committee who after coming to the first couple meetings it wasn't what they signed up for so the people who remained from April to August should be commended because they put in a significant amount of time they came to meetings all summer administrators gave up their Summers parents gave up their Summers we gave up our summer it was a lot of work and it was really intense and it was exhausting not just physically mentally it was hard and so when people from the committee hear the board saying we're we don't even think we're going to entertain a vote for this we're not going to talk about that maybe we can push that to

215further um people have said to me someone just said it to me this week if the board doesn't take this recommendation seriously there are people in this District who are never going to be on another district-wide committee ever we did this with dual language and we're doing the same thing so I would implore you on August 3rd when we talked about having a recommendation or something the Middle School folks are just waiting and so I think everyone deserves to hear from you and to say we just don't think we can talk about this now is it's just not okay and I I know I'm speaking for myself but hopefully all the people who were on the on the committee will also speak up and let board members know that this these are important decisions and

216like Paul said this is why you guys become board members it's not fun it's not easy and anything that we do is going to make somebody unhappy and I'd have to live with that every single day as superintendent and as board members you have to too and I know these are hard decisions but it's part of what you signed up for and the people who did this work deserve to hear from you so that's all I'm going to say about that and then um next I want to talk about redistricting a little bit and we had a lot of conversations about bringing in redistricting consultants and strategic planning but before we do that just based on the conversations we heard last time about dual language I thought it would make sense to have Joe and

217Lupe give a little bit of a timeline about how we ended up here so Ben I know you didn't get to hear this but Lola and Sherry and sit Lolly did I think it was helpful for them so we thought it would be helpful just for the public because even tonight I heard things that were just incorrect so I think just kind of reiterating how this process started why it started and how we ended up here in a brief way so if you would look at your timeline for dual language you've got a kind of colorful version and then you've got a really straightforward version so go for it are we able to project yes the timeline timeline do you have that job remember you have it John you need me to Allison yeah it

218was in the packet it's called Spanish dual language planning committee timeline so yeah so we'll go ahead and get started so just very quickly This was um an extension of a timeline that we actually shared previously at one of the community roundtables during this process oh not that one John it looks like this either one of those it's the same information one of them is just prettier um so back in December 2021 we Joe and I met with the board to talk about some challenges that we were seeing across our programs at the time the district and uh Joe and I formed a committee to look at how we can make improvements um over the course of the spring that committee which was made up of teachers parents Administration and teachers at every level looked

219at a variety of different challenges that they were having and some recommendations on how to improve the conversation at the elementary level led a lot to a conversation about being in strands versus being a strand model which is what we have now where we have great classrooms within a building as opposed to being in a whole building in May the committee leadership brought the team's recommendation to move to a whole school model the board requested for more information before voting at the time in may we did not necessarily recommend and which building we just said that being in one building would be very beneficial for the program for the for all of the stakeholders involved throughout the summer and um we continue to meet as a committee and continuing to do more opportunities for feedback

220throughout September and October as well that was meeting with faculty Roundtable discussions meeting with parents in different settings in October the DL committee brought forward an additional um more information that the board had requested regarding Budget Transportation impact on families as well as a recommended school at the time the committee had recommended Leal be the site for dual language I do want to be clear that at the time we were only looking at Dr Williams and Leal because that is where the Strand models were held so one of the things that the committee discussed was how do we do one school and only essentially disrupt half of the building whereas taking over an entire building that doesn't have dual language at all would have disrupted the entire building so that's why the conversation was focused

221on would a whole school be better at Dr Williams or at Leal um then in December we came to provide more additional information and the December 6 meeting the board members present decided to do a straw poll and decided that on the 13th they were not going to vote on the recommendation on the 13th Joe and I did come back to continue that conversation with the additional board members present at which point it was decided that the decision would be on pause um until the rest of the conversation around Wiley redistricting and all the other District initiatives were had so throughout the spring we continued we moved forward with a outside evaluator the center of Applied Linguistics to really look at our programs more thoroughly from a quantitative and qualitative perspective they came and did

222a presentation on May 16th at that point Joe and I also did a follow-up presentation to look at where our initial findings and challenges were and how they overlapped with the center of Applied Linguistics um so that's where we are today um I think the initial challenges that we discussed still continue that challenge for Teacher collaboration the inconsistency as far as classroom size and an ability to more balanced classrooms across building is still the same while we have you know some small classes at some grade levels we have some very large classes at the opposite building at grade levels which could could have been remedied had we been in one building the Staffing challenge as well could have been potentially remedied for example currently we have two long-term Subs at Dr Williams one of which

223that does not speak Spanish unfortunately had we been in one building and been able to more balanced classrooms we what could have been started the year fully staffed so these are challenges that are going to continue unfortunately due to hiring challenges and recruitment we do everything we can with HR the additional stipends we were able to offer for teachers but bilingual and special ed teachers are very hard to recruit right now they're very much in demand and you know we're just hoping that we can find a solution any questions or comments for Lupe and Joe yep so if you were to have a single do language school with strand size building would you need currently this year we are occupying 21 classrooms had we been in one building based on current enrollment numbers we could

224have been in 18. so does that mean you need a four-strand building or at the Reese Rand building [Music] second through fifth let me rephrase the question then which of the six current elementary schools could you put a dual Language School into because what the committee you need to tell us what you need because if it's up to me and I put you in a small shack of a building then you're going to be pissed off because the building just calm down a little bit if they need 18 classrooms the the buildings that currently have 18 classrooms would be DPW Thomas Paine Yankee Ridge and Leal everything but Wiley one of those for and if we need 18 we could even do 18 at King if we had to but sure at the upward level

225we've been looking at more like 20 or 21 so sure we wouldn't want to go to a building where we just barely fit um because that doesn't allow us to grow at all so and that's 18 core classrooms right currently yeah not counting any like specials or correct that's just so that would be every school except the current Wiley yeah I also brought this up before but I didn't um I was wondering with the committee did they ever discuss or what were the pros or cons for having a um like K through second grade and third fourth and fifth in another building if they split it up in buildings that way the the teachers could collaborate on the same grade yeah we did talk about a variety of different scenarios doing grade level centers which

226is um you know something I know that like Muhammad does where there's a K2 site and a three five site was discussed um there were a lot of challenges and I believe it is one in one of the presentation links um from December or January where they talked about why they didn't feel like that was appropriate um due to a lot of challenges with families that have kids at Early Childhood as well as the K2 as well as the 3-5 there were just a lot of reasons why the staff didn't think it was the appropriate choice you talked about other buildings too but like they do have schools where they have K through two or third then the fourth fifth three four and five together and then then the middle school so I mean it's

227done in other communities where they split up grades like that yeah I think they were there were Pros when those models were discussed that the pros were the ability to for the collaboration of all the kindergarten dual language all the first grade dual language together the cons based in my recollection from the committee conversations the cons outweighed the pros and that type of model when trying to I think it was um the whole school model in terms of the whole school buying into being the the pillar oops the pillars of dual language education would still be an issue because you'd still have monolingual classes in the same school that would still be the big issue that wouldn't be addressed that makes sense question okay I'm going to hop right to redistricting so I'm moving to

228this this and you guys say because you're part of one of the options sorry you don't get to leave yet and I am not going once again I'm not going to read to you so this is our history of Elementary redistricting and again I I really put this together for our new board members just to give them some historical perspective I think um for the public as well thinking about the redistricting processes that we've already been through so in 89.90 in 2001 2002 I really want to jump more so to 2016 when we first started really experiencing um the DPW enrollment issues so there was a committee that was put together so John it's the okay um a committee that was put together to address the enrollment concerns at DPW I was part of that

229as the deputy Superintendent at the time we started the enrollment cap in the school year 2017 2018 [Music] um one of the reasons we started doing this is we had a year at DPW and I don't know if Lupe and Joe even remember this where we had 120 kindergartners we had five kindergarten classrooms we probably could have put 600 kids there that year if we had not done the enrollment cap and that was back in 2016. So Flash Forward to 2023 and we're still talking about the same issues and we have not addressed them at all I think our our kind of self-imposed cap has helped but basically what it's done is we have sent two 300 students 300 right Kim in the last just since I've been superintendent we have um kind of de

230facto redistricted 300 kids that could be a DPW to other schools throughout the district and just the fact that we've been doing it now for five six years is um problematic and and people have been coming to this board people have been talking to me about redistricting for two years and to hear the comments made around maybe we just will wait and redistrict next year um in favor of a strategic plan I am 100 on board with strategic planning I I don't disagree with one person who has said that we need a strategic plan a couple people email me this week and said hey I'm looking for the Strategic plan and when I send it to them I'm embarrassed that our strategic plan is from 2011-12 is it addressing any of our current needs absolutely

231not and as the superintendent I 100 percent know that and agree with that however that if you flip to the next page the people who are talking about well we need a strategic plan so you can do some of these things guys I could throw 30 people in a room in the next week or two and we would come up with the exact same things that are on here we need to fix the DPW enrollment issues we need to increase student achievement for every single kid whether they're black brown white or purple we have Equity initiatives we did our Equity audit we know what our needs are we know we need more teachers we know we need more teachers of color we know we need the financial resources to support all of these things that's

232the Strategic plan it's not a secret it's not a surprise we can't write a strategic plan until this board makes some decisions I don't want to put people in a room I don't want to engage everyone all year around what should our strategic plan be and people give us all these great ideas that one made the maybe the board may or may not support them but our parents our teachers our students our stakeholders they can create a plan but they're not the decision makers you guys are so until we make some serious decisions around DPW around what we're going to do with Wiley around whether or not we're going to have a one school model it is is it's kind of pointless for us to to talk about strategic planning we need decisions so when

233you guys give us some information we can take those things and really write a robust Five-Year Plan right now if we wrote a strategic plan everything that we I just Mis listed would be part of it but with no decisions so I am coming back to you again to say I would like to explore working with some Consultants to help us address some of the issues that we've been talking about for the last two years on this page there are some if you go to the next Slide John options that we could explore again redistricting Consultants don't make the decisions the board does the board would determine what guiding principles you want the Consultants to prioritize the board would make decisions around every single school being racially balanced every single school is economically balanced do

234we want neighborhood schools or don't we want neighborhood schools but we need to start this process now or it will once again be another school year where we have a whole group of folks that we will continue to disenfranchise because their needs are not being met in their neighborhood in comparison to some other folks whose needs are clearly being met in their neighborhoods and it'll be one more year of not addressing the DPW enrollment issues and another year of us not addressing the issues that we've been talking about since what was the first day December of 2021 related to dual language so we're almost to two years of now talking about dual language and improving that program so I really want the board to give Administration some guidance my recommendation is at the top we

235recommend that we go out and I have a consultant group that I've been having lots of conversations with um and I would love to bring them to the board level and let you guys start talking with them the conversation that I have they watch the board meeting and so the conversation I had with them after our last meeting um was if we don't start this process soon we won't have anything by the end of this year even so we cannot keep pushing this to November or December or January um if we don't get someone in here and start working with us we won't be able to have decisions even at the end of this year and we'll be having this exact same conversation next year in August of 2024. so there are four options here

236I'm not asking you to choose one of these tonight I'm not saying these are the only four options I'm just saying these are four options that we could ask a consultant to come forward they make a lot of money to do all of this they will look at where every single kid lives they will look at where who's a walker who's a writer who's on the bus who's not on the bus if they're black if they're white if they speak Spanish if they speak French they will do all of that they will bring forward however many options you guys want these are the four that I've come up with to say based on the comp base to share with you based on the conversations that we've talked about if you want to have an option

237five and option six we could talk about that too um so they'll basically work with in whatever parameters we give them and I when I say we I mean you as the board you get to kind of set that and when they bring these options forward it will be after significant Community engagement so we've talked about doing Town Halls we've talked about doing surveys which just like us they've experienced the same thing surveys are of course not the best way to get engagement so we would have some in-person opportunities for people to talk about which option would be the one that they would um most align with in the community so I think the first thing we need to do is it would be great if I could say to igw and I could say

238to the Middle School folks hey we want to keep talking about a Sixth Grade Center we think this is something that's important to our community it will take months and months for igw to put together a schematic design and a program for Sixth Grade Center and it's going to take lots of meetings with ums folks to really design something that we think is Meaningful we're already talking about 25 26 because as Scott shared with the committee this summer just adding on the new part of what would be needed for a 16th Center is 18 months that's from sticking the first shovel on the ground to opening the school so we're talking about just just 18 months of building and the renovation process well not renovation the new part the current Wiley hopefully is going to

239have a lot of the renovations done this year um we can move a little bit faster while the building's closed there are all kinds of things that we can do when kids are not in the building versus when we have when we're having school so the fact that the building is closed helps us um but it again the clock is ticking and if we don't make some decisions pretty quickly about what we're going to do with Wiley we might be talking not even just 25 26 we might be looking at 26 27 before we're able to fill any benefits of doing anything in that space so I'm not asking you to straw poll or anything like that I know the Sixth Grade Center conversation hopefully will be back on the agenda for October 3rd but

240I am asking you to seriously look at these four options and give me the authority to go back to the consultants and say hey um come and have a conversation with the board about what a redistricting plan might look like for this year so I have two questions I guess from that would help I think the board gets time how it needs to make its decision so what you're asking for is to present the administration with a set of options either these four or potentially others some set of them to hand to a an external Company by when would these set of options need to be delivered to Administration so in my last conversation Consultants they only work with real data so they would wait until fall housing so ideally in my first calendar that

241I kind of created for our board topics it would have been great if we could have had the Consultants here in November to kind of do that first presentation so they could get started because it is it is pretty time intensive what they have to do but the last conversation that I had with them they said that even if they come to a board meeting in December having these options all laid out for us by April will be pushing it My Hope was that they would be able to bring forward options that the board could choose so then we could spend the end of the year doing strategic planning that was my original hope is we could we could start redistricting um we would be doing that all year and then by Springtime have several

242weeks of school left um and there's some things I think we could do simultaneously as well like I've said we we kind of already know what our big our big rock issues are um so that we could probably be doing some strategic planning engagements kind of side by side while the redistricting is happening um so we could hopefully end the year with a redistricting um model like this is what we're going to do this is the process this is when we're going to start it this is how we're going to roll it out this is whether we're going to do grandfathering or not do grandfathering all those things would have to be decided and then we have at least a couple months at the end of the year to start messaging that and talking about

243it so families can make decisions about what they want to do for the 24-25 school year and then at the same time we could be doing some strategic planning work at the end of the year so my hope would be November all right the other part of it is I mean uh when would the board need to make a decision with regards to Wiley to facilitate the the planning process for just for the construction and in the form of the building that's a these are two decisions sure yeah oh absolutely um I could have Scott come back um and talk about that but the conversations that I think he shared when we looked at the timeline and I could probably find that if my Wi-Fi is working and pull that timeline back up again um

244but the um like I said the building part is the 18 18 months I think our goal was to have bids done a design have all of that a contractor and everything lined up by February is that right Katie and Randy to um bring back to the board here is the scope of the building here is how much it's going to cost um here is basically the timeline of when it would be completed for the 25-26 school year so Scott has been have we've had lots of meetings at ums but again like I said earlier I think we've kind of reached that point where they can't do much more in terms of designing or um planning what the building will look like until the board actually kind of gives them an indication of yes this

245is something that we're interested in doing So reading listening between the lines here it sounds like you need a decision on that in October and decision on the set of options in November in order to meet the time frame you desire I and I think the committee was expecting the board to after the three public hearings weigh in on the Sixth Grade Center so I think that is what we would still like to hear for the October 3rd meeting okay thank you Paul that was a great way to kind of bring me back to bring it all back together I mean that's what we need to make our decisions yeah board members any questions or comments yeah I'm with you I'm with you Ravi it's that time of night listening everything that you said and

246how one thing was delayed in and the lighting and the lading it draw us to this mess and now it feels like there is a lot of decisions to do and it seems like it's really hard because they're really hard topics yes but we are learning Espanol okay the board really takes in consideration this and Act regardless of whatever direction we're going to go we cannot weigh more and really we have to act I mean I'm pretty new in here hurry 19 all the story like two years in the Duolingo program when these are need in the community why and now we're gonna wait another two years for the sixth grade why I mean doesn't make sense for me as a parent and doesn't make sense to me as a part of this team so

247I know it's a heavy decisions and I know people is going to get upset regardless of whatever we do but we are just thinking about the good of our kids and the community I think that's something we should do it like long time ago so wherever you you guys feel like with choices in there bringing somebody else who's going to tell us yes this isn't what you should do and then we're gonna ignore it again like we ignore the recommendation for the volume goal I honestly feel like at the moment we have a presentation the next meeting should be like yes we're gonna do this but here we are so come on guys let's work yeah so somebody was who sat here for 12 years I kind of almost feel the need to apologize to

248the this board to the public for the situation things are right now when we registered back in in 2011 2012 we didn't do anything really there was there was a lot of resistance to the proposals that came out of a committee that met for 18 months and as a result the board came to the public pressure and and basically did nothing and things slowly got worse and worse and worse over time it's kind of exponentially compounded and um that experience was so rough the prior board was push whenever the word redistricting came up we pushed back I mean oh we can't do that because it was so hard last time and and that you know that just it just made things worse it's like it's like having knowing you have a cavity and then not

249going to the dentist right well because we should have done this in 2016-17 when the very first year and I was Deputy superintendent so I was sitting at the table but not really um and we we had a very small conversation and I think what Paul said is exactly true that everybody was um just we can't live through that again and it was really hard and I was I was a principal on the redistricting committee when we did that in in 2011 and it was we had parents there and principals there and we met at the RPC every other week for 18 months and for the board to move 10 students was just deflating and so when we when we got here in 2016 and we saw what was happening in the DPW Prairie neighborhood

250we should have addressed it then and we didn't and I and Paul's exactly right I think it was the experience was so difficult um that no one wanted to do it again and so we put a Band-Aid on the problem and we've been band-aiding the problem since then and the the Band-Aid has burst several times and we just keep adding another Band-Aid on top and I feel like that's what will happen when the duolingual program came up some people in the Leo District say no and then we got the scare and then we put another one day and now some people from the Wiley district and it's my district that's my home says no and then we are 40 Monday but I one of the things I keep hearing and hearing is like be transparent

251be honest don't have double agendas don't have like pretending to have a committee and then just manipulate everything whatever who said I just don't see as a parent how we can't trust and something you know so I feel like this is a moment for the board to really read you say kind of this is the moment for the board to kind of redefine themselves put it in the table and just keep going yep right any any further questions or discussion thank you everybody I appreciate that I know that was a hard conversation it's and it's late at night and I'm sure things might come to you uh tomorrow or down the road but if if you if you need something to help you make these decisions you know reach out to Administration and and we

252can get it on an agenda so we can talk about it thank you guys first day and so late so the question today was that if we should go ahead and somebody to come next I would love yes so if I have a proposal I have it sitting right here in front of me actually with a cost proposal and a scope of work um from a company called RSP Associates they've worked with um Naperville and Aurora and some big cities like you know Memphis Tennessee I mean they've redistricted districts that have booming enrollment um and districts that have been three four five times our size so I've talked to other superintendents who have worked with them they're not local so we would have to do some zooming but they are committed to coming in person

253for some of these things and then some some things would be you know digital and virtual and we'll just kind of have to work with that because they're we don't we don't have an easy way to get here in Central Illinois um you know when depending on where you're located um but yes I'd love to be able to reach out to them this week and I'm sure they're probably watching this meeting from Kansas where they are and um get them get them here to have a conversation with you uh that first conversation would probably be virtual yeah I guess one additional questions I'm assuming that this organization has access or has demographers on staff that they can absolutely because that's one of the things that comes up repeatedly in Con in in conversations with constituents

254is how can we know without a demography study you know how to you know how to inform these decisions sure that's that's part of what they do but I would like to bring them forward so they can talk to you about what they do instead of me just kind of sharing it in this way they're the experts not me so the question is this yeah we just say yes yeah I mean I can put them on an agenda yeah I mean I work with them to see when they can come and do a virtual presentation probably I'm not going to fly them here to have that initial conversation but you know by policy the president and the superintendent jointly uh form agendas so I think you know say publicly that we would take in the

255direction of the port and and we will be putting this on a future agenda so because I was going to keep just moving on I appreciate you pausing and continuing that conversation okay uh now we can actually do our business or up to action items this is our consent agenda I'm going to read it off if anybody wishes to have something removed from the consent agenda and voted on individually please let me know 11.1 are our minutes from the August 22nd business meeting the August 29th District parent teacher advisory committee meeting the September 5th study session and September 11th executive session 11.2 we have bills and checks Ed funds the tune of seven hundred thousand dollars on own fund bills for 370 000 Transportation fund bills for five thousand seven hundred dollars uh working cash

256bonds for 124 000 school facility occupancy tax for 1.8 million dollars tort for 156 million 156 thousand dollars excuse me uh life safety Levy for a hundred and eighty thousand dollars payroll benefits for 3.3 million dollars a vandal education for 176 thousand dollars uh we have is typical for this time of year a long list of personal items um including some retirements that were announced I don't know if you want to say anything about those but um three three retirements right yeah um these three teachers were here when I started teaching in 2000 and they have put in for retirement um and 25 and 26 and so um that means that I keep getting older too but we are very excited for them and their Journey after their employment at Urbana schools but it'll still

257be a while and we have an administrative personal item so it's 11.4 is is an administrative Personnel item yes he is here so Peter would you like to come up thank you for Patiently Waiting oh yes I'm sorry Bridget Maloney who's at Leal excuse me Chuck kaplinski who's at ums and Don Barber who's also at ums and so they put in for the retirement under our new retirement enhancement from the last contract negotiations and so they're able to put in that up to four years to be able to get a little bit of a perk and then we're also able to try and plan for those vacancies go ahead and introduce our proposed a new administrator sure thanks for waiting okay in July 2023 the Director of Human Resources position became vacant as the former

258director took a similar position in her hometown the Director of Human Resources position was posted for six weeks before holding interviews two applicants held the proper certification and credentials to hold this administrative position UEA members clerical staff building administrators and District administrators joined the large level one interview committee on Thursday August 31st both candidates were found to be excellent in advance to level two interviews with Dr ever Tatum and the executive leadership team Mr Peter ferch was selected as the most outstanding candidate in the level 1 and level 2 interview committees Mr ferch was born and raised in Urbana-Champaign community in 2004 he earned his bachelor's degree in elementary education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Mr ferch began his teaching career in Champaign unit 4 District where he taught fifth grade for eight

259years during that time he returned to the University of Illinois and earned his master of education degree along with his state of Illinois administrative license in 2012 Mr ferch was hired as an assistant principal at Barksdale Elementary School and and later went on to be the school's principal Mr Peter furch has also served students families and staff through his work at the central office Administrative Building in Champaign unit 4. starting in 2018 Mr furch served as the Director of magnet schools serving overseeing a 9.6 million dollar Federal magnet schools Grant currently Mr furch serves as the Director of school Improvement where he supports all schools within the district throughout his educational career Mr Peter furch has had the Good Fortune to work with and learn from numerous talented colleagues Mr ferch says he's excited to

260support the Urbana school district and eager to help lead the human resources department and so with that we are recommending Mr Peter ferch to serve as the next director of Human Resources two more things on our agenda a resolution authorizing and interesting sales proposal of personal property these are desks file cabinets coffee thermos Chicken Kitchen racks whiteboard okay tired of talking and a variety of teacher student textbooks and 11.6 is the appointment of authorized appointment of appointment of authorized agent for imrf this is Shelby Smith payroll specialist the district's imrf authorized agent so that's our consent agenda for the evening does anybody wish to remove any of these individual items from the consent agenda uh hearing none uh the chair would entertain a motion to improve the to approve the entire consent agenda is there

261a second second uh roll call please member Baxley yes member hassanaka yes member Stanton yes member langendorf yes vice president Exum yes and president polowski yes congratulations and welcome to the district thank you so much um it's an honor to be here I'm excited to serve and lead in Urbana it is late at 10 30 but you are doing some great work it's great to hear on the awesome next steps where band is going to be taking I'm excited to help the well-oiled machine of the human resources department I'll continue their great work so again thank you for your confidence and support thank you all right moving on with our individual action items uh 12.1 our gifts uh health of the homeless U of I donated school supplies snacks and reusable water bottles Toledo Elementary

262School ufi Employees a credit union donated a variety of school supplies that were divided between Urbana Middle and High School Kenneth and Linda moritzi in Urbana donated 322 to purchase recorders for a King Elementary music classroom Atlas agency donated 300 to Trish Anton CU one-to-one mentoring coordinators program and Kanita Faye Urbana donated 100 to the Urbana High School winter guard to sponsor a regional competition entry is there a motion to accept these gifts and send out thank yous second any further discussion all in favor say aye aye any post uh 12.2 is a formal approval of the fiscal year 24 Urbana school district and adult education budget resolution is there a motion for the floor move for approval second any further comments or discussion uh roll call please and at the end of the meeting

263please come here to sign uh this register for your votes as required by the state um roll call please yes president Exum yes president polowski yes uh 12.3 is a Champaign Urbana Public Health contract agreement um because Katie can you provide us some context yeah the the two next action items I brought as drafts um to one of the August meetings and nothing's changed since those drafts so this is to fund the farm to school program for this coming year the Champaign Urbana Public Health District received two grants one from USDA and one from the city of Urbana youth services and those two grants are helping fund that program for this coming year to fund a portion of the farm to school coordinator salary the garden coordinator stipends and a couple of Pharma School interns

264and the Champaign-Urbana Public Health District drafted this language it's been reviewed by our attorneys and they've already approved it at their meeting and it's coming to us for counter approval very very thank you is there a motion for the floor a second any further comments or discussion uh roll call please remember Baxley yes member Stanton member hassanaka yes member langadorf yes vice president Exum yes president polowski yes 12.4 is a champagne Urbana Public Health subcontract agreement city of Urbana this is the other one that Katie mentioned um with CU PhD and for uh the school oh sorry to see you farm to school program um and uh the yeah and the new Services grant for the stampino public health district is there a motion uh for the floor I move for approval second any further

265comments or discussion roll call please yes there is no call for future special or executive meetings it's time for our superintendent's report so we kicked off Latin a heritage month and we got some great coverage on wcia for the parade at DPW and um we kicked off the month also well not the month but the activities that will run from September 15th to October 15th with a soccer match so it was Families versus staff so Papas versus maestros and of course the parents kind of beat them pretty badly Joe's not back there but it was great fun and it was a great match so there's a picture of that there um 40 under 40. we want to recognize one of our very own Thomas Paine principal yay Miss Andrea Jackson has been named a central

266Illinois business magazine 40 under 40 winner if you haven't seen the full list there are a lot of great folks on this list one of our city council members Chandra Bishop is on here so they really chose some great folks this year but we are very proud of Andrea and the fact that she is being honored in October um add-on on our very own board member uh sit Lolly urici Stanton was also honored this Saturday as um yay as an emergent leader award at the CU immigration Forum award ceremony so she was recognized for her work at the new American Welcome Center as in noted as an emergent leader in our community so congratulations to Lolly that was awesome yes it is homecoming week so Friday is the pep rally at 2 30 parade at

2673 30 for anyone who's watching this at home or watching it on YouTube later please come out I know as I mentioned in my update our football team is young but they are excited and eager and we're in a rebuilding year our coaches are dedicated so please come out and support our young people they are working really really hard and giving it their all are they going to win all their games no but we are just happy to have football back in Urbana so come back on Friday night at seven o'clock and watch the game and then the dance is Saturday at 7 30. um next week on Tuesday the 26th the CU marching showcase we've talked about that our our great tiger marching band will be hosting this year in Centennial and Central will

268be joining in so all proceeds will benefit all three programs so come out and support that do you want to talk about this one Sherry the Tiger Market food pantry yeah well we're excited we have a the market here is is is has full cabinets are full and ready for the students at the high school we have Miss Hernandez who is the staff a representative and she's working with student volunteers now to to unpack the food and to stock the shelves and to keep it organized we just need students to identify themselves or or social workers or teachers to identify families that might need food and we have plenty of food for them so I'm hoping every two weeks we'll have a distribution where students can find out more about the items at the pantry

269will be at the school before school during breakfast passing out food and students can come and take whatever they would like and they can also be able to order online and a student is going to develop that so if a student doesn't have time to come to the um to The Pantry or wants to order food and confidentially we will pack up the food for that student the student can pick it up so we're hoping to have distributions every other week so please let us know if you would like some food or if you know of somebody who would like some food would like to make sure that they have things in their home thank you can I have a question do you have the information in Spanish so we can share in the community

270yes it is going to be translated for sure can you send it to me a second absolutely absolutely I believe that um it was it's going to be down yeah Lucia I will distribute them too so Catherine's working with that yeah yeah thank you that was much better sharing than I would have um last week we hosted our first family and Community Cafe if you remember um Mrs Webster our director of family engagement came and shared this is one of our strands from our Equity action plan and we had our very first session um and this is just kind of showing we did more of a table talk model where it really wasn't talking to parents it was really just gathering information from people who came about how they would like to see the Community

271Cafe structured and what kinds of things they want to learn more about related to Urbana so um the next meeting is on November 28th upcoming dates um we've talked about all of these I think except for October 2nd is bring your family to school day and then October 4th is walk walk and roll to school day which is always very fun so my last slide is really I know it's late but I do need you guys to do a little more thinking just for another minute um at our last meeting we talked about I know Paul was really interested because we have four new board members and really having another board retreat I know we had one a couple years ago when Laura and Robbie and Brian joined the board um so say the name

272not Brian maybe okay [Music] thank you for correcting me yeah [Music] these are just the first semester dates he did have some additional dates in January but I kind of thought you guys would rather do this sooner rather than later so these are the available dates that he has the reason the ones on Tuesday are orange as we typically say we try to have things on Tuesdays since it's a night that you guys are usually busy with board meetings anyway um he did tell us that he does kind of need to know what our top three preferences are as soon as possible and then he'll let us know which of those three dates would work best for him I can um I can read off some of the January dates if you think you want

273to go that far out but um I didn't put them on the slide so what are you guys thinking well I guess my request would be that Laurie send out a doodle poll with all of these dates um to the whole whole board because lobo's not here and I I think we really want to have a date where all seven of us can can attend so can we can we can we do that instead of like talking about it right now I'm okay with that throw the January dates on there also it's not a boring board yeah so you put it on here just because you wouldn't want to want today yeah but yeah so yeah my only guidance to board members be to try to answer the doodle poll on a timely fashion so

274we can get back to Perry Hill if can we send the doodle poll out tomorrow and then maybe have people give it to us by Friday so we don't lose dates okay all right we will do that and then the last thing we'll need to know is kind of what the goal if Perry wanted to kind of know um are we wanting to just do like board relations or talking about the role of a board member I'm like what is really kind of what we want them to do something similar um as to what he did with us last time but Robbie Tori and Paul kind of already participated in that so should we put that on as a question as well we can make it kind of more of a survey and you guys

275can tell us what you or you want to talk about I think that'd be great to have had that feedback as well on that okay it's some but you guys feel like you need I think we can we can do that over over email okay we'll look we'll we'll take it out thanks and that is it for me four reports uh board reports does anybody have one quick I know there's there's no school on next Monday Yom Kippur starts on Sunday night and for the students who are in school might not be there on Monday of atonement I am going to start working with Lupe to tour sort of the schools especially the legal program um and then start gonna headings on some of the teachers from from legal especially if it's great um also

276is requesting to go and talk to the students are probably gonna do that how wonderful yeah and I don't and we didn't really talk about this at the beginning but it as you noticed tonight we were trying something different with interpreting um so moving forward to we weren't able to get an interpreter here tonight but and it was great that Joe and Lupe were already here so that worked out but moving forward we are going to be working with one of our staff members to try to have someone here regularly and we and I think what we did tonight worked they were what worked out really well so we'll just kind of um use this same model moving forward a request to make it a little more public that we're going to start having this

277sort of interpretation yeah so the Spanish Community can have access absolutely so we want this we talked about this during sit lollies Two on Two And we didn't really have enough time to put that on the well the agenda had already been noticed and but we'll make sure that we make it pretty well known we'll make our sure our Liaisons know that too I know Lucia was Lupe sent something out to all the Liaisons today too so they're aware so we'll start sharing that so thank you uh one last thing is uh we still need to read off our completed foia requests um Tom Schroeder's had any new records since my last prior request that provide evidence president Pulaski ever appointed any members to the 2023 District facilities committee to fulfill his official Duty regarding

278board committees and another from Smart procure a variety of vendor purchase option a variety of vendor purchase order information okay one last call for road reports hearing on the chair would greatly entertain a motion to adjourn your second all in favor say aye aye we're done for tonight thanks everybody