Mahomet-Seymour Board of Education Meeting 2-22-22

001all right the uh feed is live and we're streaming and uh this time i'd like to call to order the regular meeting of the mohamed shiva board of education is 7 pm on tuesday february 22nd i'd like to remind everyone of the designer please sign in if you're a guest like remind everyone to silence your cell phones and remind visitors in order to facilitate an effective meeting if you wish to make comments to the board to read the visitor guidelines outside and complete the public participation form and get those to dawn here just in the next minute or two public participation while only their participation portions of the meeting other than those time board meetings are not interactive with those in attendance do we have roll call please land here here murray here hennessy here

002and the phone of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god and indivisible with literacy and justice for all thank you everyone board members you've had a chance to review the agenda for tonight's recruiting agenda say aye aye anyone opposed motion cares board members you've also had an opportunity to review the consent agenda the confederate agenda includes minutes of previous meetings bills to pay prejudice report personnel changes a surplus item issue and the minecraft research request would anyone like to take anything out of the consent agenda for an additional discussion hearing none is there a motion to approve the consent agenda is presented kind of that we go into closed session before we vote on the consent agenda i should say i'd vote we go into

003closed session okay i have a hint just to let the topic for a second that's we okay okay in your roll called vote i used to go into closed session hennessy yes schultz yes key yes lamb yes hendrix yes murray macomb yes all right we clear the room just real quickly i'm assuming this thing all right welcome back the live stream welcome back those in the room thank you for uh indulging us here for a couple minutes as we move on to the consent agenda under the personnel change as part of the consent agenda there is a personnel action for jeffrey moller who is a baseball assistant baseball coach from junior high uh based on some clarifications i would move that we re-categorize that personal action to a non-renewal of his coaching contract to that

004second discussion on that piece okay um so i need a role called vote um that changed the percentage yes vic murray yes tennessee yes and ricks yes schultz yes liam yes nicole yeah so we're back to the uh approval of consent agenda with that change of the re-categorization of personnel actions um is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as amended second discussion yes no henry yes schultz no mcmurray yes hennessy no nicole yes all right donations dr hall we have two donations this month both to the junior high wrestling program one is from sunset landscaping and trees for five hundred dollars and the other is from chris and dan casius for seven hundred dollars for a total of twelve hundred dollars to our junior high wrestling team so thank you very much accept

005donations donations just have a second discussion on donations thank you yeah thank you we appreciate those really great yeah nick murray yes hendricks yes liam yes hennessey yes keith yes shoals yes home yes it's communication time is there anyone here from a pto i have some announcements all right um okay crown pto number one coin wars is going on this week at both schools middletown and lincoln trial to raise money for classroom teachers to purchase books um during the vote fair for their classroom libraries pto is accepting donations online to help provide book fair books for students who may not be able to buy one otherwise um they suggested seeing the mspto facebook page for links to donate the book fair will occur the week of march 7th and if anybody wants to volunteer they

006can they can do some volunteers with reviews and sales um the pto is providing food for staff during your teacher conferences again if you're interested in donating items check the facebook page um the pto is looking for volunteers to sit on their board next year and um dog walk funds went to support bringing an author and i know this everyone anitra rose schulte to middletown to speak to students in january thank you to pto for all they do to support what we have going on here in our district uh msca cnn upstairs yeah i have uh that the cash bash is scheduled to be held on april 8th entertainment will be felix's fingers and dinner will be provided by voters ticket sales are now live and they can be purchased on the mohamed senior education

007foundation's facebook page or website and the annual campaign continues thank you to everyone who has already donated we cannot support our schools educators without the generosity of our donors thanks it just did financially eighteen thousand five hundred and seventy five dollars awesome perfect thanks yeah thank you okay and visitor is done we have visitors okay we have two visitors that have asked to speak tonight and uh the first one is mark thompson let's remind all the visitors about five minutes that they need it and no personal attacks number of things to talk about i was really happy to hear that 600 schools decided to ignore pritzker's maths mass mandate that was an awesome thing i'd like to see 600 to 1200 school ignore the curriculum that you're being told that you have to teach common

008core has been proven to be detrimental to the kids growth it's horrible there's a reason we're number 30 or less in math in the world it's common course played into that heavily in recent years now we're talking about critical race theory another attack on these young children dividing them in kindergarten i was reading about a bunch of little kindergartners told to walk around the school carrying black lives matter signs that's sickening white kids having to do that absolutely appalling and yet that's the type of thing that's coming down the pike similar things already happening um and then we get into the new sex education stuff a lot of you people don't know about this but they're actually going to mandate that fifth graders be able to explain in writing what oral sex is and what

009masturbation is in fifth grade can you imagine that makes me sick makes me sick but i'm not surprised because our schools have been taken over by a communist entity and it is communism because communists know well bill ayers major communist in education highest position uh curriculum studies in the united states education is voter force revolution and we're seeing that you're doing it and schools like this across the country are doing it you're you're communists do you not understand that are you watching the world come to a crash right now it's crashing why well because our population is stupid and i use that very generally but the kids come out of school can't think critically that's horrible and you guys and when i say you guys you have your own responsibilities here but it's a nationwide

010issue so if we can get 600 schools to reject the mass mandate why can't we get 600 to reject the the dictates of the state when it comes to education needs to be done somebody needs to grow some to get this done i think it's pathetic that the comments are closed on this video that you produce from this this hour or two hours or three hours and the students can't comment or the parents can comment on what they see you have 1600 people look at a video but they can't comment what they think about it that's what failure that's censorship it needs to stop and how many people here are willing to fight and make that happen it has to happen this is muhammad you're censoring what this the parents want to speak about and

011respond to did you know bill gates was one of the major movers on common core same got behind the uh mrna gene therapy by the way have you seen the adverse effects from that yet military showing a thousand times the neurological problems that they had in previous years i'm sorry i said my throat um thank you um there's a frustration level when it comes to what i'm seeing coming out of the schools and it really has to stop what good does it do to have a 130 million dollar new school when in fact what you're doing is you're brainwashing the kids and indoctrinating them i want to see 130 million dollars spent on a school for this purpose and it will be 130 when you include overrides and inflation maggie it's just starting point and

012you could actually build a wing on every school you got a really nice big win you don't have to have all new administrators you don't have to buy the property you work within your means as a business man i work within my means all my life you just can't go spend a bunch of money or it'll catch up with you but wait a second one of the tenets of communism is waste the taxpayers money because americans are extremely affluent they're prosperous they get things done so what do they do they take it from you who does it the state and who's controlling what you do the state and your communist union good evening i just wanted to start out by thanking each and every one of you all seven of you uh your time not

013only tonight but all the time that you've put in uh over the past uh two sometimes what is it three four years some of you i've got a great deal of respect for anybody that uh contributes as much time and energy as you all have um my name is jordan rock i'm a 2013 graduate of mohammed seymour high school and i have also owned a house in muhammad for the past two and a half years um i attended all you know all grades kindergarten through 12th grade in muhammad and chose to uh to settle down here as well i am i am a bulldog through and through and i'm proud of that at the risk of sounding self-indulgent i volunteer weekly at the junior high mentor a junior high student volunteer with mohamed rotary every

014week around town and for the past year have given some time on bulldog blueprints as well um and since i think my mom might be watching i also eat my vegetables and brush my teeth every day so add that add that to the list it may sound like i'm you know reading for my dating profile but um there's a reason i bring this up and again the risk of sounding self-indulgence um i believe that i'm a product not only of my own merits and the way that my parents brought me up um but as a result of i think i'm a result of um my past teachers and coaches and family friends that have spent a great deal of time and poured a great deal of passion into me and my friends um i say

015this because uh you have a vote in front of you tonight um to ensure that future students have the opportunity to be as lucky as i can call myself for having gone through the school districts um it took a tour of the junior high last it was a summer i think and um it was not what i remember it as um granted that that smell is uh there to stay um so that definitely that was the same but um you know i go into classrooms that used to be full classrooms and now are divided into two and have the same number of students on each side i see the teachers lounge being used as a classroom i see our guidance counselor working out of a closet and it's sat it's not becoming of the premier

016district in this area so i hope you'll take this into consideration um in supporting the vote that you have before you and again hopeful that um as a result of this and and i forgot to say i believe i'm a product of decisions that are made as well decisions to hire staff and administrators and coaches and um in decisions to add onto buildings and and make them um get them up to status quo um for for what i think this district is is so deserving of so again thank you for your time and uh looking forward to the work ahead thank you thank you board members you guys need to look at dollar reports let's go around the room we'll start with dr schultz okay um well last meeting i made a request during board

017communication that we add something to tonight's agenda to discuss diversity and inclusion it's not on the agenda i'm disappointed but not surprised since my last request i have had parents staff and students reach out to me about incidents in the district incidents surrounding racial discrimination lgbtq matters and so i'm going to renew my request that next month we actually have an agenda item on the agenda so that this board can discuss these issues um i'm anxious for the time when this board will actually uh take the time to discuss these important issues that our students are facing and create a space where conversation around the pain that our students are going through and the discrimination that is being felt in this district have a voice and a platform and i don't think it's too much

018to ask that this board create that space we create spaces for other committees like bulldog blueprint i think this is an issue that requires and deserves just as much time and attention so i will renew my request to have this added to the agenda and i'll cross my fingers and hope that it's there next month um i have a huge thank you to give to our community um and to our administrators on the trail um to zero key at the high school to cynthia johnson who's a social worker at women's one of the half side layer in the community is to be a adult troop leader and about a week and a half ago our fourth graders and some of their little sisters were involved in a situation at marketplace mall that was um incredibly

019um disturbing when put in lightly and these girls came out of that with um a lot of nightmares and a lot of unanswered questions just talking about um why they have to run or barricade doing something as simple as selling girl scout cookies and that saturday afternoon when i got home and i processed through a couple things i reached out to megan hunter at lincoln trail and um she was wonderful she wrote back right away reached out right away and said we will have therapy dogs and we can trail for the girls social workers were there our girls were able to just process things and i can honestly say that with the incredible support of the lincoln trail staff our girls have kind of been able to process through this together um and so i

020just i want to acknowledge the fact that you know there are a lot of unsung heroes in our schools and there are also a lot of unsung heroes in our community um and for those of you a lot of you reached out um for those of you who are able to let the girls try to bounce back from that on saturday we saw a lot of you at the open room um so thank you for that thank you for all the incredibly kind messages um our girls are are doing better moms are having a hard time with it but we won't get through that um but thank you so thank you to all of you and um mrs hunter and mrs johnson and this is eric and our therapy dog okay doctor okay um i

021just want to say there's been a lot of great things going on in our schools recently especially with extracurriculars one of the programs that's close to me is the wrestling program we have five individuals taken to the same wrestling tournament this past weekend and three of those five placed in the top six at state so that was pretty exciting and i just got word a little bit ago that understand our varsity wrestling team won the sectional tonight so they're advancing the state so congrats to them they're very good reporting i i just want to say i don't appreciate those that made the effort to be here tonight there's a lot going on tonight the the wrestling going on we've got a concert going on somewhere i think at the high school we've got uh the

022girls basketball sectional going on and we've got a new door tracking going on i think that's all just advisable and there's other stuff so folks that it's time to be here with us tonight i appreciate that and we look forward for working to our agenda tonight um good evening um as you probably saw on the financial report and the red flag report we're running consistently with the budget our revenues are going to lag behind of our expenses because of the grant because we actually have to spend it before we get it back but i've looked at everything and everything is running consistently like it should uh we paid the majority of our bonds you'll see that's why that percentage is a little bit higher um so everything looks good are there any questions about anything

023you saw or i had a question for your constituent um this past year we were we in a deficit or a surplus or a balanced budget we had a balanced budget that's right yes and um actually and we ended up in financial review so it's the same thing it's one step down from financial recognition um so and that's consistently where you know the school head district has been um obviously this isn't the time but eventually you know it's something we can work on but not as we're growing because we're as everybody knows we always get paid in a lag so we get paid for the number of students we had for the previous year and as we keep growing we were just a little bit behind so once we stable out you know that would

024be a definitely a goal for me maybe not everybody else but is to get our reserves up but not something we can do right now any other questions for help thank you how much does it cost to train therapy now can we get more that that's another discussion okay it's a big time commitment it's a huge time them and not to just get them certified then to maintain that certification to maintain the hours they have to have to um to have that file every year um to stay certified so it's a huge commitment and what rhonda does for the district with her dog is far above and beyond what i'm able to do with mine but um rhonda's dogs are in the district working every day very grateful well we know that's a when we

025talk about staffing one of the things that you mentioned last year is that we don't fill some of the positions we have open we're going to have a hard time uh meeting kids needs in terms of minutes yeah uh we have a lot of positions open right now and so i'm a little bit concerned about how we're able to meet the needs of the students and deliver to deliver those minutes and um i guess i see my the role of the board is to figure out how to get some of those positions filled and so maybe we need to be taking a look at compensation levels and those types of things so i guess i was just looking for a little bit of insight to you as to how we're doing with addressing minutes and

026are we meeting the kids needs and we have legal implications there so great question so this year we're in pretty good shape and that's because we've just done some things a little bit outside the box so one of the things is that we um we were short a staff position um i have a handful of kids who need some homebound instruction um we have i have an older group of kids that can do some virtual instruction so instead of hiring a full-time in-person teacher i hired a full-time virtual teacher and she instructs a lot of our kids that need homebound services or have home boundings that need to be met intermittently across the school year for a variety of reasons and then she's also working with some of our other kids during her study hall

027um she's co-teaching a reading class at the high school with sarah eaton um just a wide variety of things and she's been able to plug her into some holes that we had that we were able to do with um you know in person caseman that kinds of things we just kind of had to get very creative about which kids would that work for what time of day would that work for so um really commencer even in the high school english teachers are using her as a co-teacher in their classroom and she's facilitating a guiding breeding group with sarah when she's teaching english in high school so that's been fantastic so um with that and with shuffling some kids and um other personal around but this year we're fine and we're being his needs it's stretched

028it's hard it's been hard for lots of reasons but yeah we've got positions to fill for next year and um trying doing some interviewing right now trying to get really creative with how we're going to use or fill some of those positions moving forward um having discussions about looking at um you know where are we in comparison with other districts in terms of the specialty areas school psychology speech and language services those kinds of things um and you know of course teacher pays on topics and when we had sub issues and we've had a lot of coverage needs um i've had communication from staff and from parents about um aids and things being pulled to cover some of those what's our process for tracking minutes that are missed when we pull someone from their typical

029job of you know assisting kids and then how do we make those minutes happen what's our process for ensuring kids are covered so unless this is this might be a bit of a linking explanation for students that have individual eight minutes on their iep those are the students for which we provide eight minutes first those are mandated improvements the rest of the time there's there are generally flexible minutes in there that can be met by a paraprofessional that can be met by the cross categorical teacher and and we will shuffle those kids and those people around that staff around so for instance when we had some shortages coming back from christmas a lot of a lot of folks that were all due to coping we also had a lot of students that were out with

030coven um so when that happened we were every day marissa hill and i we're looking at vacancies across the district and shuffling people around we have some paraprofessionals that have teacher certification so we would move those from a paraprofessional position to being a substitute teacher for the day and then we would have specific classrooms that were down then we would pull paraprofessionals or other staff from that classroom and move those to let's say a town or classroom here at middletown that was understaffed i'll just be honest myself marissa a couple of other folks that work across the district will go in and serve as paraprofessionals as classroom teachers i said as a bus monitor um on a friday morning so it's been all hands on deck um and and sometimes i mean whether it's culvert

031or not whether it's this year or not and that there have just been peaks and valleys like that that have been going on since i took this job in 2008 so that's i mean it's this has been definitely the hardest year no doubt but um people are coming together and those kids are getting covered so yeah now i will say again um the other thing we'll do is if you have a student that has a lot of significant needs and you cross train people we will pull someone who's been cross-trained to work with that child so that another child might be working with a paraprofessional they're not familiar with but they may have just not just but their needs are more instructional academic and not medical you know daily living kinds of support that student

032needs and we cross-train people for that purpose so yeah there have been some kids who spend some time with substitute paraprofessionals or teachers this year for sure thank you anything else for christine the writing data taken a couple of months to get it all in but this is the last of the winter uh report on that and we'll be into the end of the year and we'll get the end of your writing information to you when that's there i'm happy to answer any questions thank you any other questions for dr ryan well i just wanted to highlight some of the um neat upcoming events in our district and as some other people alluded to just have a lot going on at all times i do want to congratulate our girls basketball team winning the regional

033championship friday night for the first time in 18 years so just a great season and they're playing right now in the first game of the sectional um so good luck to everybody um at the jazz band dinner dance is the saturday the macy auction and the main fundraiser for that organization is saturday march 5th at the hive hotel we have a very robust partnership with macy and we serve the same students so we encourage folks to support uh support macy and then our annual ffa dinner and dessert auction is sunday march 6th at 4 30 at the high school and just a quick shout out to um our school resolution officer officer paulie alfonso school resource officer appreciation day was last tuesday and we're just very very very fortunate to have a wonderful relationship with

034the village of muhammad so that we can share officer alfonso and have him in our schools during the school year he does a fantastic job thank you questions for dr hall okay uh we'll move into regular business the first item of business is um the next step following up to the february 7th presentation a little over two weeks ago i provided some background information there on the board bar um but i guess this is the time i guess for comment and then moving ahead with this next step damien schmidt is here as well as jim revolution one of our co-chairs if there's any questions um that are lingering and uh rod right kevin hines here's as well so i have some concerns about direction that we're taking and i'm concerned about our view from the

035short term or from the long term that we are in such uh uh as people have said value position right now that we are trying to solve our current problem and maybe at the expense of looking at sort of our global problem and it seems to be a pattern you know we've received emails from some of the prominent people in town that talk about how the sense of urgency that we have right now uh might be stopping us from making a long-term vision plan and so it is certainly the case that the junior high is might be say splitting at the seams right in terms of you have way too many students for the space that we have we've known that for 15 years right we have been two that that building has had a

036over population problem lincoln trail has now joined where every day they're canceling this classroom to make this a classroom and and they are also bursting at the scenes and and so i'm i'm fearful that we're so much want to solve the problem that we're not thinking about how can we take action today to solve our immediate problem and then also be working on our long-term problem because this is just going to keep happening to us or is likely to keep happening to us and so as i think about how we can solve this problem we need more space there's no getting around that the the principles would be here telling you we need more space don't suggest we don't need more space but i wonder when we look at the long-term growth and when i

037look at the data that i have i think about what i hear from the village which is uh seems to be a commitment towards growth of the village um you know patrick has told the news gazette that we are probably gonna need another census in 2526 because we're going to grow we look at the housing that's been approved and we look at how it increases 70 something 80 something um i believe they said there's going to be 98 extra lots that are just going to come online this spring here on top of the 96 that are already available we're adding in thornwood we're adding in hunter's ridge we're adding in vision south has been re-planted harvest edge just got maybe approved i know maybe sean wasn't approved tonight i wasn't there so um approved to

038replant that where we have all of this growth coming and when i asked about this growth i was told no we didn't plan for the unknown we didn't consider any any growth that happened after march of 21. and i'm worried that we are going to run out of space much sooner than we actually anticipate will run out of space if we look at the demographic report that was made in march of 21 it estimated our school enrollment for the 21-22 school year the one we're in right now and if you look at those numbers the number of students we actually have right now are what's listed as what should be our enrollment in the 24-25 school year so we're already three years off six months into the demographic study and so i i worry that

039there's a possibility that if we keep growing at this pace which you know we're building a new road we're having new growth we're trying to get more commercial these are things that i hear the village talk about and be committed to and i fear that we as a school district need to really look hard at what we're going to do in sort of the longer term if we solve a problem today but then run out of space in 10 years we have to think about what we're going to do in 10 years when we're out of space and this has happened recently we've had um board members write to us board board members write to us uh merle came and talked to us about planning the story was the idea 10 years ago that we

040needed to do something about this space but we built this building and didn't actually require taxes to be raised so that was okay and now ten years later were or even this building hasn't even been open for five years we're out of space here and but we're not so upset that we're still paying 20 years more on the mortgage for this building but if we didn't take our mortgage for this building in terms of raising taxes but now we're asking the public to raise their taxes which could actually in itself solve our problem right i mean this i might not be right because we've been viewing prop the tax burden as inelastic right and it might indeed be elastic so if this referendum were to go through the median taxpayer in muhammad is going to

041pay more than four thousand dollars a year just to the schools in taxes whereas in every other school district in champaign county they'll be paying less than 3 000 for the negan voter so we're really raising the taxes a lot so there's a possibility that we will price people out of the market right but if the if the tax burden is actually inelastic we'll keep with this growth if the way the village is predicting we'll keep with growth and we it would be a bad idea to run out of space before we even paid off that you know we're going to have and so it makes me concerned that we should consider what the long-term solution actually is here and i've heard many people in the community suggest that the long-term solution here is actually

042to build a high school that if we keep up with this growth even if we look at the demographic growth we have plus the extra growth that we need to move we need to look in the future towards a high school not today we we probably can't have a big enough referendum today and solve our problem quick enough today it's like we're out in the middle of the ocean on a boat that's it's breaking apart we can't get a ship built in time to get everybody off on the ship but we need to think about what the smartest idea is for the lifeboat that we need to build to get us there and and so if we want to look to the future vision and and maybe how we might solve something in the future

043then it might be that our solution today would look different and it might look like building in elementary school because we could do that for half the referendum we have now build an elementary school here split the kids up in the other schools to be able to look forward and start the process of figuring out how we might solve our problem long term whereas if we build a junior high i mean sorry if we built an elementary school then we could think of a plan or a vision ten years down the road to build a high school and then move the junior high students to the high school but if we have a brand new high school and then we build a new brand new junior high and we build a high school then who's

044going to which students are going to go into high school camp with the kindergartners in the high school building and so i just feel as though we should consider that there might be a better way there might be a better way to solve our current problem that helps us grow as the village grows um and so i i just would like a sentence we're doing this outside of discussion around motion recommendations presented on february discussion i i and i think the bulldog different folks looked at those options and i mean that's one of the things we asked them to do you know long term plan well long-term plan is kind of nebulous terminology right we who wouldn't love to have a 50-year plan and just know what it's going to be but we don't know

045what's going to happen the the demographic folks you know they feel pretty good about looking out five years they feel kind of fuzzy about looking at another five to go to ten and after that it starts to get real blurry really fast um i don't know right now that to look at anything beyond that is really very we have had a history of growth in mohammed i i think we all believe that that's going to continue to some degree and for some amount of time how much and how long i i hate this i don't know this lies the bank on the fact that we're going to see growth the next 40 years like we have the last 40 years we're in illinois people are not lined up to come to illinois maybe that'll change

046too i don't know there's a lot of fundamentals about the way our states run that would have to change for that to happen and i don't see those spinning out of that so i i think we need to understand that for folks that are here there's a there's a desire to come to muhammad if you're in illinois um and we need to take that into account but i don't think we can count down a 50-year i i don't i don't want to bank taxpayers money but we need to build something so we're ready for 50 years this kind of growth i think that's unwise yes so i'm i'm very comfortable with the duration of the plan and what they put together other thoughts reminders companies so i'll go next we're going to just go around

047when i've talked about the plan that blueprint team put together with people people in this room and a lot of people outside this room it seems to me that i want to say almost everyone feels like building a junior high is the most we can achieve right now that's the most we can achieve right now but it's not the best option what they usually say is i really want to go to high school but we can't get the voters behind that and i think they're right it's too big a price tag to get voters behind it right now so i think that there's been this compromise that individuals have made with themselves that well this is about as far as we can get probably from the voters and it's referendum and if we stop and

048ask yourself what is it about the high school that we can't do right now why can't we do it why is the price tag so high we have to look at things like our current outstanding debt um we have i think you had said 20 years we have 10 years left today with our sales tax funds well i've been 20 years on the oh on this one yesterday you're right yeah so we have all our sales tax dollars and almost all our sales tax dollars tied up right now paying off this building for another 10 years if we were to wait and build a high school in 10 years we would have access to those funds we would have access to the continued growth in our eav we would have access to the funds that

049we will get from this tif district out here that's going to expire in 10 years that's going to be substantial for the first time in like 27 years we're gonna get all the taxes we're supposed to be getting from mcdonald's for example uh we've never you know they came in after the tif formed so we're gonna have quite a bit of revenue show up in 10 years if we were to do nothing right now in 10 years we're gonna have quite a bit of revenue and then when we went to the voters to say let's build a high school the impact will not be nearly as high the problem with that of course is what do we do about the capacity problem now you're totally right junior high was over capacity 10 years ago and

050all four of our buildings right now are over capacity we also have the problem that uh lego trail i think is 70 years old the high school is 80 or 40 years old right now where are we going to be with those so in my opinion what we need to do is focus on capacity issue now what can we do as a i like that analogy by the way what can we do as a lifeboat now and then execute the actual solution the best choice in 10 years when those funds open up and we can do it and we can prepare for that in 10 years we built a new high school the junior high moves to the old high school and the lifeboat of building elementary school now lincoln trail will be replaced so

051if we execute that plan again to summarize build an elementary now in 10 years go for high school then in 10 years we will have replaced the three old buildings in our district to the three overcrowded buildings in our district that to me is a better choice that to me is more of the right choice rather than the best we can do in the immediate circumstances one of the biggest things that stands out to me is i think jama mentioned it recently about the cost to get the junior high up to speed um the way it sits right now it means a lot of repairs it needs a lot of updates and you can find that on bulldog we printed details about that but obviously our immediate needs do point to the junior high and

052if we did build the lincoln trail elementary school for third fourth and fifth we'd be looking to spend a lot of money in the junior high to get it up to speed so i mean i don't know what the numbers would be exactly but that's something to keep in mind with how much money you're going to be needing to get that up to speed we're just simply going down the road yeah um i don't know i've i've wrestled with this and um there's not a perfect solution um i'd like for there to be a perfect solution i like the idea of building a high school um i don't have a great reason to vote no for this i don't have a great reason to vote yes honestly i'm pretty squarely on the fence um and

053i think it's it for that reason i think you know making it um the choice of our community they all get to vote on this and decide what they want to do and if they go for it i'm fine with that if they don't then we'll go back to the drawing i'm honestly okay with either and um we are definitely in dire streets in the the junior high um and um [Music] it's just for many years of not being able to upgrade facilities uh um has kind of put us into this scenario which is not ideal um i do like i mentioned and i i wish we had um you know a little longer than 15 years to kind of reach that capacity again we might be building back up but um again i don't

054know that there's a scenario where we could do that perfectly and say hey we've got 25 years worth of space and we're okay good so um i can live with imperfect or less than ideal as long as we are able to accomplish what we need to for our students so um i mean i just don't know when we're gonna have a discussion about some of the um i mean maybe it's not this discussion it's a future discussion about the sort of some of the details like you know this plan says that we're going to add six classrooms to lincoln trail um if we look at the board targets for class sizes and we think about the fact that the union president just asked us last meeting to address class size issues and we look at

055when we're in a strong fiscal position which we either are or might be right we're giving away land we've given away money to the tip district we um we you know we hear that we're in a good fiscal position if we were in a strong fiscal position to meet board targets right now today with today's enrollment we'd have to add five classrooms to lincoln trail in order to have the more target enrollment but we're planning on adding six classrooms so then we're going to run a space um we also have the issue that when we look at the survey results that we have and we look at the data that we have from ebola blueprint one of the lowest priorities the community has had has been to return uh the fields that is consistently come

056out as the lowest whereas classroom space and learning space came out as the highest more than 50 percent of the people taking the survey ranked classroom space as seven their highest priority um and um 42 of the people ranked turf as their lowest priority right but yet i see turf on the plane and i don't see the science classrooms the science classrooms are pushed off to later but chirp is there so it's really hard for me to believe that we're hearing a plan that is the reflection of community feedback when we take some of their feedback and we say oh this is what the community thinks and we take their other feedback and say well they just don't know what they're talking about or we're going to do it anyway even though the community has

057clearly spoken and so i think we need to have a discussion about if we're going to ask the community for 98 million dollars what are we gonna do with that 98 million dollars are we gonna spend one million of it knocking down the whole year high or should that be pushed off to a future phase while we get science classrooms or whether we put in air conditioning or whatever i mean there's all these options that we have that we need to discuss what we're going to use to spend money what the highest priority for the board is going to be and how that looks so i think those are discussions we need to have as forward before we ask people for money oh i don't want to be redundant so i agree with a lot

058of the things that i've already said um part of my concern this entire time as we continue to get feedback from the community that says i don't feel like you're listening to what we're saying we had people who joined the blue dog full plant bulldog blueprint can't say that bulldog blueprint who then followed up with us and said it's clear to me that this is not actually to gain community input it is to push a plan that has already been put together we've heard several people board members community members say for 10 years we know we need to replace the junior high we've been talking about it so this idea that we've worked trying to build a new junior high i think is just not true and i think the community knows that there's been

059enough discussion up until now that it's clear that this community understands that that was where we were going uh merle came in and gave us a little bit of insight last meeting about why we bought this piece of land that we're sitting on we bought this piece of land when we did because he said oh paraphrasing he's sitting here i'm wrong uh it was an island uh it was not landlocked it had a lot of growth potential um and when we bought that that was true today as we sit in this room most of those reasons don't hold we are talking about a 3 000 car a day road going through the middle of this property now so we're no longer an island and we certainly um you know have traffic issues that were what

060we were trying to avoid um we aren't landlocked and if you look at the village plans commerce is going to build all around this piece of land and some of it's already in progress and then some of it is just being cleaned um we're about to put a junior high school in between a 3 000 a car a day road and a railroad track and when i asked the question what safety discussions have we had in the meetings the answer was we didn't have it i have a real problem with that we're talking about 11 12 and 13 year olds whose parental cortexes are not developed and it's the first building that we have where kids run out unsupervised the junior high they just go they don't have teachers watching and so to not have

061thought about the impact of putting this building in a place that no longer has all of the values associated with it that we purchased it for i think is not in our best interest um so when the community says you're not listening to us uh i think that that's important because i keep hearing no we've given the community time to have input and yet when people who were on the committee come to us and say it's clear to me that you're not listening so i'm not going to give you my time anymore and we just say but we gave you a chance to talk to us that doesn't get people to go into the voting booth and give you their money because it's not actually listening it's pushing an idea and i don't think that

062they're comfortable with that for a lot of reasons one of them being that my concern is that um you know we talked about uh classroom sizes and some of the numbers that damien was kind enough to share is you know we say we say 21 students but that's really only for kindergarten if we actually look at junior high high school we're talking 30 students per class and that's our approximate class sizes and that's our target and so i balance that with that's what we're shooting for in the new buildings we can't accomplish that right now in the junior highways high school in some cases we have high school parents who reach out to me and say are you aware that there's so many kids in my kids class that there are students sitting on the

063floor because there's not enough room for desks that's today we're not even addressing those class sizes and so if our target is to add classrooms that the best we can do is get down to 25 students per class for the next 20 years worth of money we're going to be at that 25 benchmark as soon as the door's open and i don't feel like i can say to the taxpayer it was really hard for us to plan out 20 years but we're going to ask you to pay for 20 years and in 10 years when we're out of space we're going to have to come back and ask you for more i i can't ask that of the taxpayer um and i won't vote for that as a taxpayer because um i just don't think

064that that's how you manage your money um so we we have a truth and a trust issue right now and i think it is the role of this board to be honest and if we are really going to ask the community for their input we have to actually listen and take it i don't feel like this process did that i think that it attempted to i think the desire to do that was there but i don't think that it was set up in a way that we accomplished that goal so i can't vote for this plan tonight because i don't feel like it solved the long-term issue and it has to solve the long-term issue because we're asking people for long-term money and if we want to ask for a shorter term solution then i

065think we need to go back to the drawing board and figure out a shorter term money solution that goes with that and they are on the table they're not as flashy as a brand new junior high it's adding to buildings that should have been added on to and maybe need a little bit more maintenance because the decisions that have been made up until this point was don't put any money into that building we don't want to keep it but that only is okay if replacing that single building solved your space issue and it doesn't because we are at capacity in every single one of our buildings so i mean i have a few other things to say but that's kind of it in a nutshell um so i can't i appreciate all the work that

066went into this um but i do not feel like this plan solves the issue that we need to solve and it asks for years of money and i feel like we're sitting in the building right now that we still have to pay for for 10 more years that's too small and has already been added onto once i don't want to make that mistake again with a 98 million dollar price day um i was not part of this board when you all voted to hire a firm to look into what the next steps would be however being a part of this board means that i have the luxury and the privilege of being able to sit up here and vote so i felt it is absolutely my responsibility to be involved in every aspect of this

067entire process as much as i could be i went to every single bulldog blueprint meeting i've had multiple phone calls dating i took um the chairs up on their offer to sit down and ask a lot of questions which i did um thank you um part of the issue with the junior high is not just the capacity issues i don't know if you were here in this district vegan when the oatmeal town was here and if you had kids going through old middletown but it it was bad it was bad i did and after middletown then the next worst building in the district is junior high it's in bad shape so coming to your analogy we can build uh oh my god sure but i guarantee you kids are gonna drown we have been sitting

068here putting this off and putting this off and putting this off we're not gonna build the news in your high because that's what that's what they said we were going to build when they get home so it's been fixed if you were worried that it wasn't been fixed and it had been fixed i wish you would have been development because one of the biggest things that i have heard this year just this year is that i'm not being heard i'm not being heard i'm not being hurt but you know what it's not about buildings it's about math it's about blessing it's about clothing it's about class sizes the reality is we hear all of that we hear it all but not getting what you were hoping for and not being heard are two different things

069if you have a situation where there are conflicting opportunities like mass optional versus mass required just because one person gets that decision and they agree with it somebody else gets a different decision and they disagree with it doesn't mean that the person who disagrees with that decision wasn't hurt it doesn't mean that their input wasn't valued it doesn't mean that their opinion doesn't matter it very much does it very much does and i think that's one of the things that was really obvious in this entire process i didn't take part in the table conversations because i'm on this board but i walked around and listened to people talk i stand in breakout rooms with people and listen to people talk i thought it was incredibly worthwhile to hear what people had to say i wish

070you would have joined for me ken i disagree with you that if that a high school is actually a better option i don't think so i actually believe that a junior high is 100 the best option i'm not a middle childhood educator i do not know and nor do i ever wish to find out what it's like to teach you right now i'm sorry but how do you really feel about that adolescence is a very hard time for kids i don't know how many of you in this room think about teaching your high and faith those are some of the toughest years of my life for me i would say junior high is some of the toughest years of my life you are trying to figure out who you are you think everybody's looking at

071you and judging you and everybody else is thinking that you're looking at them and judging them you don't know which way to go or what to do or which way is up or how to dress or what to wear or what to say how many times have we actually prioritized adolescent development like i think this is a great opportunity for us to say hey adolescent kids 11 12 13 14 year old kids you're not the big kids at the high school who get all the attention and all the all the sweat you're not the little kids at the elementary school that everybody comes in and they're like oh look at all these great opportunities here are these kids who are stuck in the middle and this is an opportunity for us to actually highlight their

072development and give them what they need to grow as into the people we want them to become anyway i i do think that junior high actually is 100 the right decision um another key point of the fact that we can't build a high school is because financially it's not just a high school it's a piece of land as well so i'm hearing two different things and colleen i appreciated your perspective on a lot of this i'm hearing two different things i'm hearing for me the junior high is 100 the right decision right now as is a longer range plan to look and see where do we want to be for our next step in this process so right now i want to see exactly what is pulled forward i think i would like to hear

073from damian like how much flexibility do we have in this money situation you know if we if we say we would like to prioritize these science classrooms and not prioritize her how much how much flexibility do we have enough because i agree i i mean i love each other fields but i i love my students more and i want to know that our students have what they need in the classroom no offense to for long soccer players but i would rather have side questions in her fields so if we're going to prioritize money do we have that flexibility can we answer whatever yes i'm actually going to defer that question to kevin because that'll be illegal but i wanted to clarify something with the enrollment and the historical piece um just to give some clarity

074i live in this town whatever decision we make as a part of this i'm gonna be the one answering to that planning so i did not take that lightly in the configuration of figures and numbers the figures that i send out to the board as far as class size targets those are agreed upon by the board and union as a designer i can't change those i can plan buildings around whatever number i want the reality is there's an agreement in place so those numbers is 28 30 kids in a class that's what it agreed upon today if you look at that chart that i shared last time that's the red line that's where we get back to these targets so jeremy your comment if we keep our current class size and we don't try to

075reduce anything we're looking at 2046 with actually increased enrollment before we hit our numbers and that grain line that i was showing that was where as a designer at schools we might try to target to get to a point where we could support those smaller classes so as we're talking about that flexibility between those two numbers i want to make sure that's clear is that we could support in what's planned are hypothetical best case class sizes that is outside of tonight's discussion of meeting it will say oh the union is going to agree to that and we're going to find an extra five teachers per grade and all those other things so i just want to make sure that's clear that red line then is beyond that 16. it's as close as we can get

076to a 20-year outlook but that would be keeping with today's class so that's i just wanted to clarify that's where the difference comes in and that's why i referenced that email me again the variation three or five hits because that's how that happens that's right as far as the question the flexibility yeah but we do actually have a chart with class sizes in k5 that has three levels so 28 is for n35 is when we're in dire financial strains if we're in a balanced fiscal position the board agreed numbers are 25 kids per classroom in that building and if we're in a strong fiscal position the board agreed numbers are 23. and those are all figures again where we are today with our class sizes versus where we're targeting and getting to i'm not determined

077of when we shift over to how many teachers we're going to have i mean it's not it's not just 28 it's not a three it's actually 25 yeah it varies by grade all the way down high school junior high and at the elementary levels of keeping various years here so i completely understand what you're saying i'm just what i'm trying to say is that when we look at those figures and the ones that i quoted were are if you will demonstrate because i believe that's where we're currently in with our agreements with with those classes that until we hit those thresholds that's when we start to see red flags uh the question on the the flexibility you know it really comes out of the question uh having to probably speak a little bit more directly

078to how detailed we need to be and the flexibility of that right um in most cases you're not going to be detailed to five classroom management six classroom edition because you don't have this you don't know what the classroom is going to cost if you say build five classrooms and the bids come in low and you could build six you can't okay so normally the way the bond attorneys would suggest that you word questions like that would be build an equipment addition to alter repair and improve the site of whatever building or the number of buildings that you're going to make those kinds of improvements to it's not going to say add turf unless you really feel that's politically something you want to add or make sure we do the science classrooms the board will

079have that flexibility then when it comes time to working with the architect to design the actual project you've not paid for design to the point of actually being able to you know do anything other than a broad brush of estimates okay and then i want to speak out daniel's language here but but again we don't know what the bids will be um and you're not going to get bids you're not going to pay the architect their fee to design it and get bids before the referendum i mean i think that the public will be consensus that's an awful lot of money and if they say we didn't want to build that and you wouldn't spend x million dollars on design and bidding work so the normal process is the board approves the question the question

080is rather broad brushed intentionally because again you want that flexibility as a board to when it comes time to actually doing the design work letting the bids you get the bids in you decide which alternates you take and which alternates you don't take do we take an alternate for an extra classroom or two and for goal attorneys do we take an alternate for science and forego turf uh do we have bids good enough that we can get all that we want you know you just don't know until you actually let the bids and so you want to work the question broadly enough that it allows you as a board the flexibility then to decide exactly where you can spend the money based on the bids that you get in does that make sense will the

081referendum question um identify the term of bonds that we will know the record in question does not identify the term the legal limit is 20 years unless you get a legislative exception you can possibly go to 25. but that's 20 years from the date of ishmael's okay um and in reality again if you remember my discussion on the previous capital project you have to spend the money within three years so in all likelihood you have to at least have a reasonable expectation of spending money within three years in all likelihood a building project of this size is not going to be one single bond issue it might be a bond issue shortly after the referendum to cover the first construction costs and the bidding and architectural costs and all that and then in 22 there

082might be a second legion's bond issue so there could be different times that start the 20-year time period this it's based on when the bonds are actually issued um and so do all the bonds have to be issued within those three years no a referendum requires it can be issued up to five years the authority for the referendum is good for five years the the irs is the rule if you issue taxes and bonds you have to have a reasonable expectation and damian's firm will prepare an estimated drawdown schedule we call it showing how this money is anticipated to be spent within three years and that doesn't mean that every project always gets done within three years and in light of the last couple of years you can imagine why projects have been delayed you

083know labor issues with sickness and illness and supply issues with steel and materials and so forth so it's not not to say that every issue gets done with interviews which you have to have a reasonable expectation okay and and again you may send it quicker than two years you may spend a little bit longer than depending on how the project actually works out you know whether labor all kinds of things can delay approaching so yeah i want to go back to something you said i want to make sure we understand that if we if we were to go forward with a high school option that wouldn't be us ignoring the junior high the junior high when they moved into the old high school would have a remarkable facility for a junior high no i don't

084know of any junior highs that have a field house i don't know most other guys don't have a nice auditorium like we do at the high school okay cte facilities a very nice library that was just remodeled i agree we would not be ignoring the junior high we would be giving them an excellent facility that is not in middle school and until you have the high school equipped as a middle school to fit a middle school model that high school does not fit the needs of the middle school that's what a middle school model would be in addition you're talking much further down the road about high school we don't have landed on high school we can't build the high school on the land that we currently own so now you're talking about hiring lane

085surveyor which i have no problem doing for the next phase however you're then looking at how many years it's going to take to purchase land to get the infrastructure in to then make a plan for the high school so so again when we go back to the lifeboat analogy we're left with kids drowning i i personally i i like the idea of a high school but i am completely in favor of junior high 100 in favor of being here one of the problems we've got with the current junior highs under the middle school model that we do have is it wasn't built was built for high school and the spaces just don't flow and function well uh for middle school and and while we were converted from high school to a middle school we'd have

086tons of space we have cool field house a nice auditorium but we wouldn't have academic space that functions the way um the the function that we can design space to act as a middle school a couple other things i want to follow up on what we said you know 10 years from now high school would be more affordable maybe you know i i sold somebody a house last week that was not in muhammad it was listed at 200 000 firearms with a 206 for it i'm talking to the listing agent who i know very well and we both agreed three years ago that was a 179 house all day long all day every day and one reason they had a problem pricing it and we had a problem right the offer on it was the

087current market is just way different than what we had three years ago and and so i don't know what we can say in 10 years in high school is more affordable you can say in 10 years we have more time to plan for it but i don't know if that makes it more or less affordable um someone else kind of little they understand you know all the middle schools is compromised but we can't afford other stuff i i i don't buy that argument okay um we're taking care of these in other buildings as part of this plan and the middle school is not a compromise it's an opportunity to provide education for for another wide segment of our kids in a facility that has been designed for their needs and and their purposes and that's

088a group that has never had that it's always been a lot converted building survival and i think from some of the knives in the room that no further back that i i think i'm probably right when i say they've never been and i'll just throw that other comments i don't know i think you and justin were talking with some little did you get a rough estimate of like how long we're still just trying to get the firms an interview with them right now i mean no the answer is no we don't answer that um so the question that i have then if we move forward with this plan we're going to commit we're we're going to have a referendum 100 million 100 million referendum and it's going to be entirely borne by the voters in

089their property taxes when do you think that seymour is going to be able to replace the high school poorly controlled i love that question i mean i don't understand how we could do it earlier than 20 years from now because this is already a huge lift for our taxpayers they're not going to give us any more money for anything for 20 years that's a great question and i think my um my initial thought is you know we really want to be thoughtful about overbuilding because i mean there are districts around the state of illinois who have i don't know how many employees come on the empty buildings because they overbuilt thinking all you know build it and they will come and they didn't come and they've got all these central buildings um i think my

090answer to that my driving decision behind that would be you know we know from our last conversation that your your enrollment projections are really going to only be super accurate for about five to ten years um so i feel like if we can really i i want to make sure if we are going to actually build that we have the need to build it does that make sense so like right now we know that we're in pretty good shape for 30 years 20 years in in another five or seven years doing another projection to say okay where are we going to be in 10 to however many years i feel like that would be a good opportunity to say where whatever means how are our needs being met now that also though goes back to

091making sure that we are keeping up the facilities that we have because i don't know who said it come on who said you know we really need to like we haven't been upkeeping junior high we've that's not been a huge priority on our list so whatever buildings we do have right now we do need to make sure that they are going to last until we get to that point so i just want to make sure that the answer there is not for another 20 years to that original question about what are we going to be i think kevin speak to that yeah i don't think that's necessarily 100 true because you will as you know to have the sales tax revenues available pretty much in full in about another 10 years likewise the new bonds

092that will be issued would have call features probably in the 8 to 10 year range which is the opportunity then to restructure or blend in new money without increasing the burden on the taxpayer at that point in time um and who knows exactly how much that will be and how much the new building will cost they can't predict those things sure but it's not to say that you're not going to have access to potentially another project or even a high school at that point in time without impacting the tax revenue so in 10 years maybe you know this but the plan as it's been presented calls for committing those sales tax dollars in 10 years for a phase two so the sales tax dollars won't become available in 10 years called the opportunity just to

093just be clear that was identified as the opportunity to continue phase two we also directly spoke to it also gives us an opportunity for flexibility if we need to read regroup reassess so if at that point we need a second lincoln trail for instance we have the opportunity to do that that's part of the plan yes right now today what we know we're allocating it to the second phase of this however the board has the opportunity at that point to success growth goes off the charts i can see that we probably would be able to replace the new trail in 10 years i don't think we could do a high school in 10 years because we would have yet another 10 years of this referendum and i don't think we could ask the voters for

094more money in 10 years something i think we need to also think about considering long term like even longer than what we can see even in our linear productions is the size of school buildings middle schools and high schools you'll see across the state even really big distance will very typically have a single high school essentials they don't go to multiple middle schools and high schools until they get really big lots of kids because those kids are more able to be housed in larger quantities i don't i see if we can if we go past these projections at this 20-year point we're not going to design a 1200 student 35 billion that just doesn't work educationally we start to talk about how do we divide grade levels up to get back to tangible numbers i

095mean this conversation we talked about the five eight moments was how many kids are in that building in the fifth graders so that was one of the things that educators said that people in the meeting center has a lot of kids right so i think the high school the new high school i guess my question is why what's the need for the new high school well the other problem with not going with high school is it's landmarked now and in the next 20 years if we can't build on a new site for a new high school we're not going to be able to expand the high school that we have so in 20 years let's say we look down the road 20 years we in this plan we're demolishing the middle school site we're not

096selling it we're demolishing that to have a clear site if we were able to move let's say a stadium across the road in 20 years and free up the high school i mean those are the things that to rebuild a new high school when we have that kind of flexibility the most expensive building in the district i i think we're when we were looking through this planning there was one major thing that came out and i think it's your common classroom this plan is 98 of the dollars allocated are about classrooms and capacity is what this plan is about um and i think we can't lose sight of that um there was two options that really kind of percolated to the top of ways to get out of middle school because with that capacity everybody

097understood the middle school is the most overcast and is the worst performance two ideas came from that one was a new middle school the other was in new high school and move into most those were options at the engagement meetings people voted three to one in the middle school it's been apps yeah but did you see what the individual feedback was on those those people did you see what was the common thread they said i don't i'm choosing junior high because i don't think we can get a referendum passed on high school so i think to use the analogy for the third time now as far as a lifeboat if if we're we're at a point where the needs capacity-wise or across the district and we're willing to risk five years you said splitting up

098the junior high i mean that is a that's a major major shift to say that our sixth seventh and eighth graders have to split between two buildings with multiple administrators because we want to prioritize high school i mean that's that determination because we want to prioritize all the buildings instead of just one but you didn't just prioritize we prioritize a high school and threw half the occupants hanging off the boat this the plan that has been proposed as you said i mean it's there are concessions that need to be made we've entered this plan under occupied by 500 kids that's where we entered the plan we didn't enter the plan even where we get to just you know pick your pick your story we enter to the point where we have some major needs to

099pass you wise and i think as we look through it and solving what our biggest needs are capacity and the number one capacity building being the middle school as that first phase has has been what the community has talked about through this process um what we've studied with the figures and trying to plan towards that it's the most effective way to get like you said capacity at every vote so i understand your argument i would disagree and say that a high school option does a better job of addressing capacity issues because at the end of that plan you have new buildings for all four levels but you don't you have no school in high school you have the middle school in the high school yes you have that in a large yeah that is amazing

100to address the middle school model but the difference between even the junior high that you have playing in square footage is dramatically less than the square footage we currently have in high school before we do anything right that's why i'm saying the capacity is better addressed by a high school option in my opinion but i don't want to i don't want to get this horse if we've got a decision let's move forward with the decision how did you have something to say i just want to make something clear i'm when i say eight or ten years we get to the call feature of the bonds that means that at that point in time we can refinance and restructure and add new money for a new project without changing the levy and the tax rate it's

101like you know you're 10 years into your mortgage and you go to your banker and you want to put on a 25 000 addition to your home and go to the banker and say okay i want my bond my home alone mortgage payment to stay the same how many more years do i have to go to pay off as well it's that that's the concept okay so it's not like you know they don't have an opportunity for 20 years that's what i was just going to say is like when you get to that 10-year mark you're not only um going to have the new sales tax dollars but you've already paid off 10 years worth of the bonds so you're going to owe less money back so you can actually then extend it and you'll

102never change the tax rate duration you can issue new bonds now going up to 20 years refund the existing bonds up to 20 years yes you can in essence extend the duration of the existing and then districts do that all the time i let me address the point here you really think we're gonna ask the taxpayers for a hundred million dollars now and in ten years asked for 200 million dollars for high school i really think that's funny taxpayers are willing to raise their taxes to such a high amount to get this i mean a lot of people think that you know originally uh i did not vote to do this beloved blueprint and people thought that was because i didn't want to spend seventy thousand dollars of taxpayer money money for something that was

103performative which is part of it but the other part is that we now have spent 15 months we're now 15 months more down the line not moving forward to solving the problem that we directly need to solve in the junior high and in the betrayal and if we are to put this referendum on and the referendum doesn't pass now we're back at square one and we still haven't solved the space in the junior high we should be digging holes today not talking about what we're going to put on a referendum we should have done this a long time ago we haven't we need to move forward it makes me think that one of the things we should do if it because it sounds like there's support on the board to put a junior high 100

104million dollar referendum on the ballot perhaps we should put a junior high 100 million dollar referendum on the ballot and in elementary school for what would be half that amount on the ballot and let the taxpayers choose right let them choose in the ballot box where they're going to say this is the money i'm willing to give you right and if we let them choose then we'll know what we have if they want to pay for the junior high and that goes through great but if they don't we won't waste another six months with another process in another i mean i just feel like we're we have to take action and do something to solve this problem these teachers these students they are they need help now but you could vote yes on both right

105i'm willing to give money for either junior high or elementary school you can vote yes on both you don't have to take if i could follow up on what kevin was saying we've worked with a lot of growing districts over the years as people and kevin correct me if i'm wrong that one of the goals is to you know to know that you're going to be addressing growth in the long term not just in the short term so kind of the idea is to structure what may be the first election so you can have subsequent elections after that were that as kevin said the levy stays the same or the the tax rate for debt retirement stays the same and the reason that districts do that is if you can get the first one passed

106if it's great when you can stick a yard sign up in a yard that says tax rate remains the same the pass rate on those is is is sky high and so from my perspective at least as an outsider one of the advantages of this is that it gives the board sometimes eight to ten years down the road from now the capacity to look at what is going to be our next step what what do we need to do to to address continuing growth and have the knowledge that we made a decision now that allows you to make that no tax rate change decision 8 or 10 years from now at least that would be the long-term goal and that way you create a structure if you will for not just 10 years down the

107road but but 20 years down the road where people sitting in this board room 20 years down the road can look at a decision that was made now that gives them some really good options to look at and in my mind that's that's kind of how you look you know generation down the road where you're giving you know this sport's got a tough choice to make hopefully 10 years from now or 20 years from now it'll be a little bit easier of a choice to make because taxpayers don't have to pay more but that's my perspective on anything okay the important resentment need to offer the discussion uh i'm going to make the motion to amend it to offer both options uh two different reference questions one for a 50 million dollar in elementary the

108one for uh junior high motion a second so on for a second what's the 50 million base down we can by the next meeting we can have damien uh correct those figures i mean that's it is we're not actually looking for any questions right now we're i think it gets some options any other discussion on with elections and referenda what do you think about that idea well i know i'm putting you on the spot at risk of knowing that i have bias on this because i've been working on a long time i i said in all those meetings i walked the tables and i listened to what people said i i think the plan that the that the bulldog blueprint brought forward is is a strong plan it it's looking many years down the road

109it accommodates what the demographer is saying is going to be growth we know that can change there could be a recession where slope grows or growth slows there could be something that speeds it up what i really like about the plan a lot and the group looked at a more expensive planet uh if you remember in the process they started quite a bit higher than 98 million and came back down to that because they knew going to the community it was important to be conservative and ask for exactly what we need right now in terms of addressing capacity and it does that and that's a good message to take to the electorate but as i said what i like about this in particular i think it lays the groundwork for the district to look at

110what's going to be growth in the long run uh and and 10 years from now if a new elementary school is needed the way damian is talking so you don't get massive elementary schools if there's a solution that comes up that may involve a new high school all of those things can be on the table 10 years from now but you've laid a foundation right now for having the ability to make those decisions uh 10 years from now with with what i think is a very conservative path for moving forward and and you know voters get to decide on that there's a big difference between 98 million and a 148 million in terms of what it's going to cost people you're literally talking about another 50 increase in what they've got to get in their

111pockets for and and if they look at the demographic data and say why are we doing this now i don't think it's compelling for a new elementary school right now and there's a ton of data on the bulldog blueprint side right now that shows that 98 million will address capacity needs for a long time and and you know if i'm an opponent of 148 million i'm going to go to that website pull up the data and say your old process said that you had a 98 million dollar solution that that is a good solution and now you're asking for 148 million i don't think he was talking i guess but no i'm sorry you misunderstood that but the same issue applies i mean people are going to go to the website and pull up data

112and say this is not what we need why are we spending money on it the ammunition is on the website but people have already told us that they are concerned that what we have presented does not actually solve the space issue and we have classrooms right now that are over the capacity that we're even shooting for in buildings that we don't plan to address and we're talking right now about asking someone who is already paying thirty three hundred dollars a year just to the school district and this is if your house costs two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars as the median to now pay forty two hundred dollars a year for the next 20 and that in a presentation where the only significant changes that we see are one building and everything else is phased

113after the fact i just don't think the taxpayers are willing to give that significant an increase for what we have presented and i think we're we've backed ourselves into a big corner here the the capacity the capacity discussion is is a discussion that the proponents of this plan should welcome and data is data the report is there the demographer report is there i you know if i was living in this community wanted to go out and be a proponent of this plan that's the first thing i want to talk about and i would welcome somebody that wanted to engage in that discussion i wouldn't call the other uh upgrades and capacity to the other three buildings insignificant if they're meeting our needs um and well into the future as well um so i think that

114that's a misconception but if you do the math i i'm having trouble making that map actually work with six buildings six additional classrooms in lincoln trail you gave us six and i said that was a six classroom edition at the end yes and then we said how many classes there's also i think there's also several million dollars of major renovation to the interior one thing that you need to know within that building is there are current classroom spaces that are dedicated to specialists and special ed rooms those are not classrooms right now those cannot be general classrooms so by creating those spaces one of the really key points i was talking about was by creating those special spaces we free up existing classrooms to to allow us to have another fifth grade section or fourth

115grade section or whatever those are so that we looked at holistically and as rod said we looked at the number of kids we needed to house that building the whole child from special ed programs as we were talking about earlier tonight to classroom teachers so just because we're only adding six classrooms at that edition doesn't mean we're only gaining six classrooms of capacity within the facility but what you sent us i sent you the list of per-class targets those are agreed upon by the union that is the red line on my my projections versus green is looking at the better solutions looking at bringing that down right but when you bring it down what you said is we can bring it down another three to five students per class that only gets us to 25

116students that's an average i mean i understand averages because we have classes at the high school that have 40 kids in it so what i'm saying though is that if our target is to reduce class sizes across the district i don't think that this plan does that so that's all i'm saying okay the motion on the table has been seconded is they have a second offering of 50 million dollars there's two ballot proposals right one for 98 million and one for 50 million right one one only only votes now i'm injured what what happens if i pass vote for bubbles what if we'll have i i think we've asked you this question before you said that the board couldn't decide if the community passes a referendum that doesn't obligate us to use those funds well

117but i think that as kevin was saying i mean that elementary question would say build a new elementary school and the other would say a new middle school with additions renovation so actually by those two votes you would be obligated to build a middle school and a luncheon and they both pounds yeah right yeah now wait a second no we've been told that if a referendum passes that doesn't require us to use those funds is that incorrect no that's not what i said he said if you pass the referendum and it says building equipment edition two and alternate repair the site of xyz building you have to do something to xyz building and each building you say you're going to work on you have to bring that work and you have times it doesn't have

118to say how many classrooms it doesn't have to say how many square feet it doesn't have to say will it include turf or not include turf do you have to use all the funds not if you don't need them all to do the work you said you were going to do okay and the question well i think we can come up with a plan to improve now we can't do a referendum question where one question revolves around the passage of another question or the defeat of another question okay you can't do a question that says build a new elementary school so long as the larger question doesn't pass or vice versa because that's you know i'm not an attorney but i'm going to tell you what the attorneys will tell you that's log rolling but

119you can't have we have statues against log rolling in illinois so you can't so we really have 148 million you really end up with 140 million no we're advocating this intentionally and i don't appreciate it um who is going to actually draft up the referendum question catalan determines okay okay so we would ask those attorneys to make sure that we're okay in whatever language they use so that they're not dependent on each other right and if they're not dependent on each other and you pass both yeah then what do you do then we can choose whether or not to use those funds no no you just said you just said if you if they say something good it says we're going to use this money to build the new lincoln trail and people pass it

120we may not use all of that money but we still have to build a new making trade yeah then we can double check that with them but that's my opinion is they're going to say you have to ask any questions you need to do yeah before so i don't i would ask to happen i think the goal would like to quite more likely what will happen is that's my experience in 30 years okay they will both be yeah that's what i think too is you got to think about this logically there's a group of people here in the community that want to pick up the ball and drive it to the goal line passing a referendum and so i'm out there talking about why there's two proposals on the ballot one that i didn't recommend

121and someone asked me why why is it there i don't have a very good answer to be really as honest as i can that would reflect very well in the board of education and leadership of this district and what i'm going to say as a citizen is that community group came together we're working for a 98 million dollars for all the reasons why i don't know why they put the other one on the ballot it doesn't make sense to me because my job as a citizen is not to defend the board of education you know my job is to pass a referendum and i'm just being as blunt and open about that as i can and and and and in essence you can't ask the campaign committee to take on the baggage of the board

122of education for the way they put these proposals on the ballot and i'm not saying this to be mean or argumentative i'm saying it to be as clear as i can about what's going to happen uh i would also think the press would have a heyday with this to the degree that there's any media coverage if i'm a reporter this is my great story are you talking about i'm sorry i'm sorry what committee are you talking about that has accommodation for the referendum this passes the board and the bond question goes to the representative um there will be a committee of community members still yet to be determined to go out and recruit them in and that committee legally has nothing to do with anything that's going on in this building it is a legally

123established referendum committee with the state board of elections and and and what they do on what they say is entirely up to the leadership of that group obviously are you participating in that community if i'm asked i'll help yes if my boss left me okay so we've got this motion on the table for this adding a second question are we leaving that on the table yeah okay more discussion on that i just as a point of clarification it is impossible to put on a referendum you can either vote for 50 million dollars for 100 million dollars it is impossible to do that you can't you cannot order a question that way could you award a question we're going to have a 50 million referendum to increase capacity for our elementary school i they would want

124to see language exactly are you going to build you have to be more specific than just address 50 million to address space issues so i think we should let our attorneys work on it and see what they can do and what we can't do we can always revisit this at the next meeting if they come back and say you know what this is just legally impossible but i have a seeking suspicion that our attorneys are intelligent and they'll come up with a way to phrase both questions that will keep us in mind a lot okay so this is the motion to add a second question for 50 million dollars on that amendment hendricks no hennessey yes schultz yes nick murray no lamb nope keith yes no all right so we're back to the original motion

125which is a 97.9 million more discussion on that what is the priority to spend the money if the bids are higher than we expect across that bridge when we come to it just like we find out what we could maybe get of the bids coming lower there's a long process between now and as kevin mentioned alternate bits those are put into place not only to control bits but to give you the opportunity to expand your scope so we don't want to go to bid day kids come in low and we didn't take advantage of those funds you know science labs you know those those are alternate bid type devices where you design them there's 12 months of interpreting and prioritizing this to make sure what's in the base work first network um typically the alternate

126work is the lower of the priority items that you have to select and that's a control feature of any project because smith and i have worked together contingencies and things like that also so it seems to me that if we really are interested in addressing space issues we should start now figuring out what that's going to look like i mean a 80 or 10 edition classroom on this building i mean we already know what classrooms look like in this building i can't imagine that the process to design a 10 classroom addition to this building would be so substantial that it's going to take us another 16 months to start digging a hole i mean i just don't understand why we would not start addressing these needs if if this is going to go through and

127the idea is to go to junior high why would that start immediately gathering the feedback to what that's going to look like so that we could dig a hole in august and maybe get people in the building in because we're transferring money and design to a better them and then we can but then we're just spending money i'm aware that money's coming from at least as part of running is anything scientists yeah points of discussion the last thing i want to add is that megan mentioned that the community members that she's spoken with haven't been really in favor of this new junior high but i've heard from a lot of constituents as well and i've heard some people that are not in favor of this but mostly i've heard people that are really in favor

128of this in favor of those people that fire the majority of people i've talked to were ready to do this so like jeremy said we're putting this on the ballot and it's going to be up to the voters to decide whether okay yes okay so direct uh return to chapter question one question before we go on what is the estimated cost to design a 10 classroom edition uh we have budgeted in the project 5 million dollars to design it how to design it yeah uh i'm not even going to quote you a number right now because um there's a lot that goes into it there's a fee if it's part of a 94 million dollar project there's a completely different structure to that so i can't answer that okay i guess i was wondering if

129it was like five thousand or a hundred thousand oh yeah it's like a hundred thousand okay or board members we've got two other regular business items how long do you want to take them right now really anything you feel compelled to share yes yes i'll second what uh sunny said it sounds like a good decision for me um number three press 108. anything discussing professional educational sending or a volunteer public body or any legal counsel for the public library determines validity uh is there a motion to go into closed session is there excitement session