Mahomet-Seymour Board of Education Meeting 10-18-21

001all right i'd like to welcome everybody this is the regular monthly business meeting the bahamas seymour board of education it is 701 pm on monday october 18th this time i'd like to ask your guest to make sure you've signed in i'd like to ask everyone to silence their cell phones and i'd like to remind our visitors in order to facilitate an effective meeting anyone who's comments to the board can check the guidelines outside and complete [Music] sorry public participation is only allowed in public participation portions of me other than those times and needs are not interactive with those in attendance forgot to ask mr lin are we up on the left all right perfect thank you we have roll call please don liam here here henry here here nick murray here hennessy mccomb cheer i

002might add that miss hennessey is on her way she anticipates she'll be here about 20 minutes and meantime she's going to listen in on webex i believe okay can you stand for the pledge please [Applause] i pledge allegiance to the fight of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice very good thank you everyone board members you have seen the agenda for tonight's meeting um i would entertain the motion to approve the agenda we've got a motion to do that is there a second i'm sorry [Music] are there any questions on the agenda okay all the favor approving the general signifier by saying aye aye opposed curious uh next consent agenda will remember if you've had a chance to review the

003consent agenda there are minutes of previous meetings there are bills to pay there's a treasurer's report personnel changes there's press 107 with the exception of policy to surplus items and an overnight trip report is there a motion first of all i don't like to remove anything from the consent agenda for further discussion motion appearing prove the consent agenda is there a second second discussion no yes um and just um announcement i guess so everyone's aware october is national principles month october 25th through 29th it's principal's week and principal's day is october 29th so we certainly want to wish all of our building leaders a happy principal's month and uh i'm sure you've got some special things planned as unfold uh donations dr hall thank you uh we've 500 donation uh cash for mom's pantry from

004the grace church deacon fund a uh eleven hundred dollar eleven hundred seventy dollar and fifty cent donation from exelon women in nuclear to middletown prairie for supplies for steam experiences and 500 donations to tracy wade's classroom from the jaclyn park memorial fund for a total of 2170 and 50 cents and we thank everybody for those donations and for supporting various causes in our school district thank you thank you thank you awesome is there a motion to approve the donations so luke is is there a discussion on donations i think it's great we certainly appreciate each and every one of them can we have a roll call vote on the relations please hendrix yes hennessy yes schultz yes mcmurray yes lamb yes keith yes macomb yes it is not communication time is there anyone here tonight

005for the pto um she can't be here she asked me if she could i could read this i suppose uh so she said the dog box celebrations were a great success lincoln trails was september 24th and they walked around the junior high track and middletown prairies was october 1st of the school both schools also had dance parties and the principals were flying on those days prices are slowly coming in but due to coca delays not everything will be in until around december uh she also says that book fairs are going on at each school this week books can be purchased by parents on wednesday afternoon or thursday evening during fan teacher conferences and they are also the pto is also working hard to coordinate a pasta dinner for staff during thursday evening conferences that's it

006okay well let her know we appreciate that reporting we're very appreciative of the fact that even though she wasn't here she was able to get reported msca anyone here from the msca foundation i have a foundation update all right uh at the last meeting the foundation had they let everyone know that the foundation batch has been set for april 8th in the spring and it will be at carmen's event venue in champaign from 6 to 11 p.m with the usual food drinks and auction entertainment this year will be by felix and fingers dueling pianos they are accepting sponsorships for this event to help get everything set up and paid for they'll also be kicking off their annual fundraising campaign in november this year and an easy way for anybody who shops on amazon you can

007go to www.smile.amazon.com and if you go to your settings and select um your favorite charity because there's a spot where you can go to select your favorite charity and if you type in bahamas school foundations for extra for educational excellence you can set that up and then anytime you shop on amazon portion of your purchases will go to that so that's an easy way to support the foundation and that's all i have for this month where are they doing it it's [Music] thank the foundation for their report visitors we have some visitors who've asked tonight reminders and you've got uh five minutes i will if you start to run we'll have a clock run if you start to run close to your time i will do my best to give you some warning um sometimes

008easier to do than others we'll do our best to do that uh you just feel free to use a podium if you'd like to remove a mask while you're sweeping you can do that you can do that too like to remind everyone that um this isn't interactive we want to hear your comments but we will not engage in discussion but i would also like to remind everybody that we don't want to call we want to be respectful of everybody we don't want to do anything to cause disrespect uh to employ the staff anyone in the community board members anyone like that um the other piece is that um we don't want to call we need to keep matters with district employees and with district students private so there's no naming of district employees or students

009um or specific events that would leave everyone to know who those people would be okay so with that we've got three tonight i think that has to speak and the first is nicole fryden my name is nicole freidman and i'm the director of operations for uniting pride of champaign county and i'm here to read a statement about incidents that took place at muhammad seymour high school during their recent spirit week everyone wants students to be safe at school in today's world we unfortunately have to be concerned about student safety and that includes safety from bullying and intimidation from tears suicide is the second leading cause of death for young people in this country and both lack of social support and lack of acceptance are risk factors behind that sad and alarming statistic connection to at

010least one caring adult is a significant protective factor that lowers the likelihood of youth suicide and poor mental health we know all of you care about the well-being of students and want to see them successful and well supported throughout their education and beyond and that's why representatives from our organization are here tonight who identify as lesbian gay bisexual transgender or queer are four times more likely than their heterosexual cisgender peers to seriously consider suicide make a plan and attempted four times more likely and in illinois specifically gay lesbian and bisexual high school students are almost twice as likely as heterosexual students to experience bullying at school lgbtq plus youth are deserving of support in schools and support means students know that the adults in their school will create an environment where they're not going to

011be subjected to bullying or harassment but that if it happens it will be acknowledged and appropriately addressed rather than ignored accepted dismissed or justified by their teachers and school administrators policies and more importantly practices that prohibit and address bullying are suicide prevention they literally save lives i am here as a representative from the uniting part of champaign county an organization that supports the well-being of lgbtq plus people of all ages in our community we offer weekly support groups for youth family and adults as well as training for organizations to learn best practices to support lgbtq plus people our organizational leadership collectively prepared this statement as a genuine invitation to engage with us we have received concerns from students and parents of students from muhammad seymour high school that lgbtq plus students do not feel safe

012and so we ask you what has your response been to the events that happened during spirit week what is your current policy regarding bullying what training do you require for teachers administrators and other staff about lgbtq plus topics related to students and about bullying and lastly will you let us help you create stronger support for lgbtq plus students we ask because once again this kind of work and support literally saves children's lives we come to you with this statement and these questions because we know that you are concerned about student well-being and safety but because we also know that the school district can do them we ask that you respond to our questions by phone email or with a virtual or in-person meeting work with us please all we want is to help students in

013our community all of the students in our community to feel safe supported and protected thank you um uh [Music] advice for the board but tonight i just have questions as my friends and i talk maybe we just simply don't know the answers to these simple questions the first thing i would like to do is congratulate dr schultz she brought up a point at the last meeting and it was about giving authority to the superintendent and she brought up various points of view so the next morning this was the headline in the paper so i thought thank you for thinking ahead okay my question starts the three parcels of land and makeup center of was originally appraised for 2.2 million dollars and it was sold for 750 000 in 2015. we know that the schools were

014overflowing 10 years ago did no one see that sangam could have been the answer to the overcrowding since that structure was built to be a school now the schools are wanting to give away to the village of mohammed the parcel where middletown was located are we not hearing the complaints about parking during track leads and soccer games could then land not be put to better use serving the schools thirteen acres has also come up for discussion to be given to the village and the school is made responsible for a water drainage problem how many of our students practice cycle and track on this field 13 acres has long been the community center during soccer games during the early years in my experience how will this incredible resource be replaced who is the appraiser that appraises

015his schoolman is not very salable or valuable when a porter lots and mohammed sell for fifty to seventy five thousand dollars how is all the school land not in the middle of the town not very valuable is this board committed to give away assets that are valuable to the schools if expansion continues at the rate that it has been the last five years and lastly can citizens of muhammad afford a referendum of about a hundred million dollars mrs hennessey has figured the cost from her home and she will be paying 1600 000 more a year in taxes the federal government wants more money for its projects so is the state and so does the county will you be able to afford living in the college thank you and lindsay i'm going to give you a

016copy of my speech so that there is no misunderstanding about what i've said thank you next up is mark thompson good evening my name is mark thompson and uh last month i was here and there was adult talk about curriculum and he was dead on he was good so i thought i'd give you guys an education the history of curriculum i'm going to just start about 1970 when bill ayers was a revolutionary activist out of chicago with weather underground a subsidiary of the sds students for democratic society they lost he went on the run for 10 years and somehow he comes back into illinois and he becomes a professor at the university of illinois they launched his career in education by the way all these weather underground people were in the school of education at

017columbia and a couple other schools so they were already invested in education because they know what lennon said and that was give me a generation and i'll change the world lincoln said the philosophy in the school room of one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next orwell said truth is treason and an empire of lies and you folks are living in an empire of lies everywhere you look it's lies upon lies upon lies my kids went to muhammad schools they did well but that was before common core that was before critical race theory which by the way critical race theory may as well be social justice and diversity it's been thrust upon us for years now and now it's finally getting called out ayers rose to the highest level in curriculum studies

018as the vice president of curriculum studies and american education research association he was teaching teachers the far left socialist mentality he brainwashed teachers teachers then brainwashed other teachers and then they work on those young impressionable minds and they pervert them i call them political pedophiles because that's what they do it's not about education it's about indoctrination today that's where it's at that's what we're seeing the layers said education is the motor force of revolution the schools are the engine that drives the revolution in this country the socialist revolution that we're seeing [Music] the reality is revolution i know what revolutionary things are we've seen revolutionary things in our lifetime great things but changing this country to a socialist nation is not revolutionary it doesn't work and yet this room right here is indicative of thousands

019of others that propagate what's going on in our society today and we see it everywhere the world's upside down inside out and now they're getting ready to implement a sex education bill well they did didn't they but you haven't implemented it here yet but you will and you're going to teach kids children kindergartners about sex second graders about sex fifth graders have to be able to describe what oral sex is have to be able to describe what masturbation is it's pathetic what's coming down the pipe and it's coming down the pipe if it's not already here i'm a christian and the school took god out of schools and that was huge that's the biggest thing you've ever done is take god out of schools look at where we are today as a society mark you're

020done about 30 seconds thank you the moral base of this nation has gone south with a hundred different genera genders now it's insane i don't care if you're gay sonomites homosexuals whatever you want to be you can call yourself i know that pride comes before the fall i know when i was watching a homecoming parade three or four years ago and oh my god here comes the lgbtq ps wtf club walking down in the park in the parade i'm like what there's teachers with them are the teachers gay this is disrespectful no no it's not because what's happening is [Music] [Applause] but i will say put it bluntly in earlier times it was easier to control one million people and physically kill one million people today it is infinitely easier to kill one million people

021than to control it and you're allowing this jab to happen to your children it's going to be horrible in the future guys and i really don't care what you do and i don't judge you all right we're back okay um board members you've had a chance to look at building reports and um open it up for more communication at this point um and meegan are you still with us i am but i'd like to go at the end please okay um we'll go with uh we'll start here we'll go with a camera uh i've got no report justin i have nothing tonight okay sorry um i actually just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are happening in our world right now um first i want to thank our high school cross country boys

022team i spent saturday surrounded by runners and those boys had a day off and they decided to come out and support our junior running team and i just think that she shows a lot of class so thank you to them um i want to also thank all of the community members we live in a great place where people came out to welcome back that bus as it was coming back to town standing on the lawn i was waving at people honking it was great it was great to see um i also want to say a huge thank you and i see you to our teachers who are preparing for student cure for parents or conferences including um this is a hard time of the year for our teachers and i just want them to know

023that we appreciate them we value them and we okay megan we're back to you um i you know i think it's this is an idea i'll wait until next month but thank you okay all right well the only thing i will add is um you know we had a pretty good weekend around here cross country team did well banned it outstanding um football won again and uh we seemed to have a lot of students involved a lot of things and it's just good to see that so i will just comment on that and leave that all right there for now um financial update teller yes uh as you can probably see from the reports our revenue online it does look like our debt service transportation and capital projects and toward are over but it's just

024due to timing and payments we paid some bonds this month we paid lease payments for transportation we've moved to money um to pay our debt certificates out of capital projects and we've paid our liability and workers comp premiums already at the beginning of the year out of torque so that's just just due to large payments due at the beginning of the year um i just kind of wanted to give a little bit of a timeline for the tax living um the next the november board meeting i will be asking to put it on display which is proposing the current levy as you know it's always just to keep the rate flat have a hearing and approval of the levy at the december board meeting it has to be filed by the last tuesday in december

025with the county clerk and i have no idea where they came up with that time um and then in january we'll come back to abate the taxes for the alternative revenue bonds um that will also pay out of capital projects just kind of want to give that and i just wanted to kind of whether you know my opinion on 13 acres um just so you guys know um 13 acres being the money person is going to have a substantial like 600 000 worth of drainage issues and unfortunately um that's going to be very expensive to repair so joining in with the um joining him with i think is a great deal because not only the school district will get test supports for the students and for the public but also we would not have to

026pay that 600 000 for the drainage issues which by the way i don't know where that would come from so that that is um something i just kind of wanted to touch upon and as for and no amounts have been decided on um on the buildings or whatnot but i encourage everybody the community engagement i've never been part of something so wonderful in a community i mean i'm newer to this community but i i mean it's just getting the community's input and to come and see what you get for your money and how much it would actually cost um for a house or what not because i know davey was going to create a calculator as well but um it just it's just really interesting to go see and learn more that's all i have

027thank you heather are there questions for heather on the financial report okay christine northrup i don't have anything further to add than what's contained in the report for this month unless you have questions on how to entertain those any questions for christine dr roman christine i don't have anything to add but i'm happy to answer any questions any questions for dr rome senior written report okay back to hall thank you um first of all i'm not on my superintendent's report is we want to welcome back jeremy roark as our new director new slash returning um old director returning and we're very glad to welcome him today it's his first day and we wish nick york the best of luck in his future endeavors also um as president mcconnell mentioned earlier next week is national principles

028week and just want to thank our amazing and outstanding principals and assistant principals ryan martin dustin dang megan hunter ted martin nathan mills doug fisher chad benedict pat bailey marissa franks and matt hensley they do an outstanding job and appreciate their hard work and dedication to our kids and um i'm gonna defer or give away i guess uh the rest of my time to our three co-chairs for hold on blueprint they have an update so please welcome jim risley jamie grove and jennifer sutherland sorry okay [Music] good evening the statement that i am about to read was developed by the bulldog blueprint facilitating group the mohamed seymour school board directed superintendent hall on november 2nd 2020 to form a broad-based committee of community members and staff with five charge directives charge number two was related

029to gathering community input to that end bldd was contracted to help with this directive a group of over 20 community members and professional advisors agreed to make a committee and community engagement initiative known as bulldog from blueprint group jayla rodolution jennifer sutherland and myself were appointed to be co-chairs for future meetings discussions planning and making presentations as representatives of this committee the process of communication starts with the in-house gatherings to help create venues to advance the charge of gathering community input questions arose about the appeal of this approach to community members as a result a virtual zoom offering was created to help facilitate even more community involvement recently an asynchronous approach of communication has been added to help provide another venue of communication for individuals that feel more comfortable watching presentations and then having an

030option to ask questions of their own time from the first community engagement meeting to the presence it's been a learning experience for all of us we have truly tried to be transparent forthcoming accessible and most importantly honest in our presentations and we will continue to work on the process as we move forward jennifer jama and i have no personal gains or rewards other than knowing along with the vast jordan of this wonderful community that we will be creating the best possible educational experience that can be afforded for the students of mohamed seymour now and into the foreseeable future we strongly urge interested community members to seek out knowledgeable and accurate information by submitting questions to a bulldog blueprint representative or by going to our website submitting your questions through the ask your question location on

031the website www.blue.opened [Music] through these venues of communication the bulldog blueprint committee hopes to gain the communities trustworthy each ces session is helped give direction to the bbc so that we will be able to present to the school board a recommendation that resists represents an overall consensus of the people that have participated in the end there are three important dates the final report to the school board on february 7th the final scenario the board approves february 27th and then ultimately the election taxpayers vote on june 28th i wish the school board the best in this endeavor it is hard difficult and yes at times contentious work but if we all work together in the end it will be well worth it because it's for our kids and for the future of our great our great

032school district thank you for your time and your attention good luck just one quick note to add um i have just been extremely excited and i am re-energized um by going to these community engagement sessions and being involved with the blog blueprint i think it's just a it's been an awesome learning process for us as part of the facilitating team but also as contributing community members um i leave every one of those discussions just you know i i feel optimistic and i feel hopeful because i think that the discussions are so fruitful and just the amount of energy and time that our community members are willing to devote to this i i think it speaks volumes about us so i'm just so appreciative to be a part of the process and yeah just excited to

033continue and the only thing that i would like to add is that we're really accessible we'd love to have these conversations we're deeply rooted in this community um i've known you people forever we have we all have connections to education and that's why we're really passionate and why we volunteered to serve we're connecting with the teachers and want to give them the best resources they're amazing teachers but you know we want to get them better resources so that they can even do a more fantastic job with our kids and we look at the end of the thing we love the kids and we want the best for them [Laughter] um i want to offer an apology to our guests this evening we offer a venue here for public comment and we hear a variety of

034opinions every month but what you heard tonight crossed the line and i'm sorry that that happened in this space okay um [Music] we are the new business folks and first up is policy two colon 130 doctor home okay um this uh policy to colon 130 is part of the press 107 update and our meeting in september dr schultz had suggested some revisions and um so we pulled it out and the um revisions dr schultz has proposed are in the board packet as well as the press 107 update um so i don't know if there's any remaining questions my recommendation is to approve what's in press 107 but again we're just um handling this as a separate policy update since there were recommended changes i don't know colleen if you want to speak more to the

035changes you recommend well i mean i when i read the costing i just um felt as though the wording where they shortened it up changed the meaning and took away um and there's no reason not to put the words in if press feels like we have to put the policy in we should put the policy in but delegating our authority to operate the district to the superintendent seems to go above and beyond what the law says um i actually would be happy to just move that we not update policy to 130. there's no obligation to do that it was not as a result of a law change it was just some people in springfield in chicago got together and thought we should change this rule and if it is contentious about how it might be

036changed then i move we keep policy to 130 as is so do we have the original reading [Music] it just looks like 2 130 without the first sentence on it without the green if you just take the green away that would be the original three that's new the second attempt yeah so that green was added in and doesn't need to be edited there was no change in law there was nothing it was just a recommendation and so i would be happy to leave in this are you presenting that as a motion yes so i just i move that we need policy to 130 as i will second that i agree i think it's important when we look at how we translate policy from law i want to thank you colleen first of all for taking

037the time to actually do the reading as detailed as you did do um because i think what we do is we often assume that's what's coming uh in these press policies is um has not been manipulated in any way and i think without uh someone going and actually looking at what our policy with the policy suggestion says versus what the law actually reads uh i would be certainly taking a much more in-depth look as a result of this policy because there's no question in my mind that what is presented in the updated policy is very different than what is presented in the law and you can't just drop words off the end of a sentence because meanings change when you do that so i'm also in favor of not making a change at this time

038and thank you for uh taking all the time that it took to do your due diligence on this policy i just have a question about the proposal that you have in the board packet it actually eliminates a sentence from the policy are you saying that you no longer want to eliminate that sentence either and the mutual oh did you not intend to do that the red is written in detail in the green above the red says the board considers the recommendation of the superintendent but above it says the board considers the recommendation of the student attendant concerning the budget the building plans the locations like that's the law and so um i'm not i don't recall specifically doing that maybe i did but it's just redundant so look at line three of the green okay

039so it lists out it says above we'll consider the recommendations so to stay in the bottom paragraph we'll consider the recommendations it's just kind of going duplicate writing okay thank you but otherwise this is just the actual loss of the first paragraph so let me clear your motion is to move forward to the next that decide to not act on it [Music] i guess at this time i'd like to just review the policy in our policy right is there any um are there any disadvantages to another watching the press update like we're not doing anything we shouldn't be i don't see that as it can stay from my standpoint i'm fine with that recommendation just to not do anything okay thanks so the current politicians are talking about they'll gain authority to operate and provide

040the leadership of the staff i mean we do expect some of those things but we've been expecting some of those things well it still says the superintendent is responsible for the operation of the district i mean policy has worked for many years any other discussion on that we've got a motion a second just leaving the same and take no action we never broke up all the videos now that we're all here in person i think so yes murray yes keith yes hennessy yes hendrix yes macomb yes so let's move on to workplace experience dr jerome already on our way to the room party movement yes i have uh to visit with me this evening [Applause] all right so this comes um a long time coming i guess something we've been working on for a while

041so talk a little bit about workplace experiences and how it relates to college and career readiness so um i think you've heard i'm going to just kind of do a quick review of maybe some programs that we've addressed to the board before the first is competency-based education which is we formed a competency-based education team pre-code and when we start looking at educational experiences outside of what the traditional model is we were one of the pilot schools in illinois for this program and then buildings kind of happened and we we didn't give up on it obviously things slowed down a little bit if you remember we did some site visits um just in different schools that implemented a blended learning program that included a couple different classes um like that that fell in line with counseling-based

042education as well um and kind of lo and behold uh when code happened you saw a lot of blended learning right with the online piece and so on um and then now we're at um the state is now requiring what they call the ccri indicators and we have to track that for all our students and turn that in the college and career readiness indicators and so this is something that we've kind of been um working towards for a long time uh with a vision there are many facets to it but we really wanted to get to an idea we could have a workplace learning experience for our students um what drove this we're seeing a lot of students now with scheduling they get a lot of requests for students to leave and go to work

043in the afternoon um they want to go to work because on one they want the experience of having a job in the field they're maybe interested in for two quite frankly we have a lot of students that need to be at work um they're helping support their families and themselves and so they have the needs to do so um you're well aware of our of our increase in the ecca program at parkland uh we've that's tripled here uh recently in the last couple years and so i think that's an indicator that our students are wanting more and we want to kind of build and expand on that um and then we are receiving a lot of requests um it's no secret what the workforce is what the workforce needs right now in the community um

044and we have a lot of requests from communities a lot of great businesses wanting to partner uh and bring people in and train and give students opportunities and have students have really good paying jobs when they leave high school from their experiences so where are we going um we've kind of been we've been we've been building around this idea of college and career pathways and career clusters we've looked at a lot of other schools we've done a couple site visits but what we want to do is we want to align all our courses and experiences uh college and career clusters and that's that's everything from ap courses to bringing in some more dual credit opportunities um expanding our cte courses and then taking our clubs and activities and kind of streamlining that process for our

045students so when somebody moves from a scene where they can look at our look at our our career pathways and say yeah this is these are the things we want to encourage them to get to we have all these things right we have a lot of these things right now but it's streamlining the process and we do feel like the next piece of the puzzle is creating workplace learning experience that and this and dr rummel is going to speak more of this but this is where students will get actual high school credit for going and getting real life child experience so one of the key pieces is that this workplace experience is supervised supported and structured for our kids um this is just we just added in here so you would know what the different

046clear uh sydney college and career clusters were um but this workplace experience that we're talking about is a combination of work but there's also a course piece that's tied to it and so this course would be in the middle of the day allowing students to go to ecca in the morning then they would saw an opportunity remaining graduation requirements that they had they take this course and then they could leave in the afternoon for their workplace experience or students could do their workplace experience in the morning and then come in the day take the course and then finish up whatever graduation requirements they have so what we're looking at you can see here are some some of the areas that will be covered one of the benefits to this class is that it would meet

047the requirements for consumer ed so while kids would need that that's a graduation requirement that can be met through this course it also covers many of the uh items that are covered in what is our current english business communications course so a lot of those things like resume writing cover letter job applications there it is so what types of workplace experiences so trying to keep a little bit uh making this a little doable or manageable for the first year so kind of starting with a few opportunities and then listing some potential opportunities down the road so this practical work experience can be paid or unpaid and it focuses on really employment and employment skills for students the student-led enterprises is a year long or it could be a semester-long opportunity for students to either individually

048or in a small group participate in different entrepreneurial activities under the guidance of a field expert and so these individuals within the students would go through the process of developing a hypothesis building a business or concept testing it adapting and continually learning and improving and that could be centered around activities or services and then the other is what some may um be familiar with is uh sae as it's abbreviated and this is your long paid or unpaid but typically ties to um coursework that students have taken previously in their ad courses and is targeted specifically towards an ag experience that students might want um and then i just listed up some other opportunities that are available those three are not the only three additional opportunities available through the workplace experience isb has put together a

049whole list of different ways that this can be tailored or modified to meet student and community needs moving forward so the actual proposal is that we would um create a three-hour course so kids get credit uh three of credit hours for this and could be released for up to four class periods a day um in talking with other schools it's not recommended that it's broken out by classroom and work but it's all combined for one grade and there are a lot of different reasons for that one is to actually get them to come to class and do the coursework for the class um students would receive elective credit and our recommendation due to staffing is that we start with just seniors first as we kind of kick this off there is a cost we are

050looking at having one staff member in the cte department we are already um i don't want to say a little understaffed in cte but we've definitely had to make some shuffles in cte and move some classes from one staff member to another staff member combined maybe where we've had a section like a level one in a level two class and combining those classes together to kind of make the schedule work and continue to offer all of our offerings so by adding this person not only would they be able to supervise the workplace experience but they would also teach that course and still have an opportunity to teach at least two if not more sections i think two to four it's two class periods that cce courses are typically semester long so that would be four

051classes over the course of the year um this individual that's uh supervising would need access to a district vehicle at times to do the site visits ideally students would be supervised on their site weekly and then uh there's a cost for books or materials to get the course up and running and that 5000 would be able to come from title one as a expansion i would be able to pay for it out of that but i also was at roe this morning and looking at some other possibilities for funding uh that initial kickoff so um it's something we've been working on for a while we definitely have a need um both in the community within our student body so we are bringing that to you this evening questions can you say a little more about

052what the purpose of the workplace supervision and what will that look like yeah so the and we're gonna create a time at any time but so what we find and what we hear is sometimes kids go younger kids you know 16 17 18 they're going into the workplace and they don't necessarily have all of the skills they need um and so the supervisor goes in make sure they're showing up to work they're showing up on time um helps them maybe communicate with their boss if they have requests i know it sounds simple for you and i but just simple things like how to request time off how to ask for additional opportunities and experiences within the workplace um how to uh deal with conflict in the workplace right so if you're not getting along with

053a colleague and so the idea that you have this um support from the from the high school to support the student in that workplace and to deal with some of these issues that arise that they may not have the experience or the knowledge to address i might add too that i think we see it as two different ways the workplace supervisor one we have a lot of students who are already employed they don't want to say they may been at a job and they're kind of climbing the ladder where they're at so they're going to work with that employer and go through that partnership that needs to be formed with the school's school district as far as liability and things like that working through that we'll have students that don't have employment and then so

054that that person is going to help find the right fit for that student in the prospective jobs that are out there i'll just say that i'm very excited for this program to get kicked off um it's something that i've worked with as a business owner i've worked with surrounding schools before and had the opportunity to have some students come into my business um it went really well and i look forward for our students to have this opportunity so thank you and i will reapprove the workplace experience course and program yes nick murray yes tennessee yes hendricks yes schultz yes lamb yes macomb yes thank you very much thank you thank you thank you so much nicole all right i'm here to talk about substitute teacher pay um it's been about three years since we have

055updated our pay for substitute teachers and so i've included in there what current surrounding districts are paying our previous uh pay was 100 a day for teachers and 95 a day for aids um the recommendation or what i'm proposing is that we would increase that to 125 a day on the 16th day substituting for us within a given school year the substitute would be moved to 150 a day um and then that would kind of put us a little bit closer to maybe where rantoul and gibson city are they do have some bonuses that they uh put in place for their teachers as well um pay would remain at step 191 for long-term substitute pay and and we would continue then if an individual did one long-term subpay they would not have to do the

05616 days they would automatically on that second long-term subpay they go right back in at lane one step um so that is what i bring to you tonight this is that recommends the board approved when you pay for some teachers effective november 1 2021 is your motion to do that so when i look at this i think we probably all fundamentally understand that the problem with not having substitutes is not likely that there's a lot of people with a reservation wage between 100 and 125 right so they're not sitting at home saying well they're only paying 100 but if they'd only paid 125 i would be happy to go work there i mean there might be some but that's not the primary driver it seems to me that our one of our goals in increasing

057stuff that you pay would be to think about people whose reservation wage to substitute teach is 140 or below right in other words they're willing to sum but to incentivize them to sub for us rather than the other schools which i know doesn't seem very nice to the other schools but um if we just raise our subpay to 125 we're only capturing people who wouldn't work at 100 but we'll work at 125. if we would raise our sub rate from the beginning to 150 then if people are saying i'm a person who wants to sub and this is in my wheelhouse now i have to decide this morning am i going to suffer rantoul or am i going to stop for muhammad am i going to suffer for champagne or i'm going to suffer mohammed

058the reason to raise the subpay would be to capture those people and incentivize them to come to our school and so let's say i'm certified let's not capture anybody sorry those are the words so incentivize people to cut right yes um and so it would be my proposal that we would just raise it to 150 to start instead of going 16 days not at 150 we could incentivize people to come for those 16 days as well um especially because there's other bonuses on other schools that we might actually make a difference in our subpay rather or our stuff numbers i appreciate that thank you for the those thoughts i i just want to put out there that um we and whatever the board wants to raise it to um i'm good with as long as

059heather is but um we we knew in bringing this forward like this is not the answer um and so thank you for bringing that up there there just seems to be there's just not people um so we hope that this would uh just at least give people thought to i mean we don't want to be the lowest um it could definitely help to be one of the highest if not the highest but just know that we're having trouble filling all positions and um it's i don't know that it just seems like we're not in a position anywhere just throwing money at it at any problem is what brings people in but um so i just want to recognize that we weren't thinking like this yeah this is it i was just saying we're trying to

060do something yeah because we're desperate and i'm just thinking what we're trying to do would be more effective if we could incentivize a different group of people so i i just have a couple questions i'm in favor of colleen's proposal but um it used to be okay so first of all colleen are you thinking only increase to pay for teachers but not for aids with the aide pay at a day or would you be in favor of increasing value i would be happy to increase it so okay no please yeah that's what i want to talk about because yeah how do we understand that we have to be very careful with the age pay because we cannot pay our aid substitutes more than we pay our leadership that are employed by us okay we can't

061do that because i'm just asking i mean that's my question becomes what if you are um if you really need an aide yeah but this person is licensed to be a question teach yourself yeah why would they suffer so we do have that's a great question we do have um both aid and uh paraprofessional physicians that are left open on it on a daily basis um right now i think it was i think you're looking typically at two different pools of people so to sub for a teacher you have to have a bachelor's degree but i think but that changes that changes yeah okay you have a bachelor's degree or you have those 60 college hours and then you get 60 college hours you can sub on a short term teacher license and that means

062no more than five consecutive days in the same classroom whereas somebody with a regular license can do some of these long term positions if we're not able to find a certified staff member to fill that perfect okay a paraprofessional you can get your paraprofessional license or sub license with 60 college hours or by taking the para exam right so you can actually do that with a high school diploma having passed the test and so last month we offer no yes we're still not good so last month in september we offered a class and we had seven individuals that went through that um to help study for the math portions and do some test taking skills with hopes and that they would go and take the paraprofessional exam and pass up so i'm happy to offer

063well i'm happy to reach out to the individual that supported us with that to see if they would be willing to offer that again maybe in the spring um and try to capture more individuals that that are interested in serving turf professionals um it's really hard when we've been out of school for a long time and i thought of going back and taking a standardized test can be overwhelming um so happy to support community parents um and staff that are serving in other roles and taking that exam do you think we i'm sorry i was just gonna say but we did accept the resignations of three paraprofessionals just tonight so like we have to adjust i mean yeah we have to figure out what we can do even short term but okay i was kind

064of on that on that line do you feel like you'll be open to you know following negotiations after the next contract could we revisit this big pay yeah we can revisit it as often yeah absolutely um so under the original proposal yes where we started at 125 and if you were here for 16 times where was the we were going to retroactively count the because what i like colleen's ideas the one thing i do like about that idea that also there's some incentive to choose behind right because if you choose a modern enough time um you're gonna go there for five days get a hundred dollar bonus go there for another five days get a hundred dollar bonus right now four times down here i i agree i don't know that there's a right answer

065in that case i'm probably behind if it's a limited labor force you have to give the people who are your labor force a reason to pick you over other people and without doing that um i mean in this case i think right now the only shot we have is to do that monetarily so if we are not going to up this to the point where we actually become an option that people want to choose over all of the other options i don't think that we're going to find any traction i think colleen is right that if you want to actually grab a limited labor pool you have to incentivize them to pick you over everybody else and right now it seems like the only thing that that would you know the only way that would

066take place is for us to just offer the most money right out of the game and fresh warm krispy kreme i mean everybody loves the donuts i mean i'm not under the decision that's going to solve your problem right it's just incrementally you might want to uh 50 increase would be 119.95 i mean i think i would love to be in the position where we have so many subs that it's overflowing that we have to revisit this and make a different decision yeah i think right now we definitely have gaps so and we have days where banking money because we're happy what does it cost to have classrooms uncovered the difference between the proposal here and starting at 150 is four hundred dollars first so right you know it's paying 400 bonuses per year so

067i mean if that's what it's going to take if we give you an extra 400 you'll stop here instead of there i'll second the amendment so we remembered the motion to go right to the 1 50 mark and not do the 16 day yes so after 60 days it would just stay in the moment i mean in this area we're all pulling from the same pool i'll be honest people would rather stuff here than rental yeah so there are some people i'm sure there's some people rather um while we're on the subject i know you're all racking your brains anything else we can come up with i think we would probably consider if it's reasonable i know we've talked before about hiring one additional full-time teacher every building that will become a daily sub somewhere

068i don't know if there's many days we'd have to worry about where that person would go and what we would do with them on this motion all right so we've amended the motion to go to 150 a day no tracking no no bump after any day yes so we have to take one more vote now right let's go to amend the motion okay so now the vote to approve the motionism yes schultz yes nick murray yes tennessee yes yes number four mou with me msda regarding some internal coverage so as i mentioned there is a limited polar substitute teacher this is requiring our teachers to fill in on plan periods or change their teaching duties as a sign on given days so in talking with the msca feel like an increase in pay coverage for

069a period for 20 30 more lines they're typically for out of work outside of work tasks that they complete we're paid 30 an hour um and so requesting that that rate right now just temporary until we get your contract negotiations would increase from twenty dollars a period to thirty dollars a period and then for commercial periods twenty five minutes or less that would increase from fifteen dollars an occurrence to twenty dollars in occurrence um and then the mou also accounts um leaves in the other pieces as they related to elementary coverage can you say more about that because they don't have periods at all so at the elementary level um and we have this let's say we have to split up a classroom so we split up a fifth grade classroom you get five you

070get five you get five you get five it's five dollars a kid for the day for each child that you take on um if you are a um let's say i'm a pe teacher and our teacher's out so i take her kids too that counts as just like a junior high in high school so for each period that you would cover um you would receive coverage and then um so that's just some examples of the way that we cover that emotionally second can you come back and bring us the stats of how often this type of stuff is happening um if we're spending classes and five students i mean oh okay i just like to understand the stats of how often like i just like to see the stats of what we're doing right now

071we've not split a class um but what we have had is a lot of internal coverage so we have full likelihood of intervention or an instructional approach um to cover the class uh for the day yeah and like if you can bring all that data or just put it in the packet next month to see what the tracking of that is i'd like to see that i would do my best i don't know because some of them have been updated and some teachers don't request payment but i can do it for those that request payment okay sure so i'm just saying if somebody volunteers and they do it they don't submit a page i don't have a record of it it was just i guess my question though is if it's an interventionist i'm sure

072we must be tracking that because then we have kids not getting minutes if they're being pulled in a different direction so i would assume we have tracking on that when we do that sometimes okay yeah any any data would be great any questions on the yes macomb yes number five request for new school psychologists i believe that we approve an additional psychologist second any further discussion on that how are we paying for that how do we have fun we do so we do have some positions that we had anticipated filling this year that are not filled um but this is also a situation where there are legal timelines that potentially could be in jeopardy because of taiwan's related to special ed evaluations and the number of children that need that and this puts one psychologist

073in each building then and so we also eliminate some travel time as well so we'll help we can find this person maybe a december graduate um but this is pretty crucial you know nine weeks or ten weeks into school we realized that um this is this is something that is pretty critical oh yeah i think by the time that that would be ideal as they start in early january so just need to um get it posted right away us not looking to fill those next year or will this be a new position on top of what our current plan is for next year right now that's a great question right now i would anticipate trying to fill continue to look for the positions that we were not able to fill this year two of them

074are instructional coaches and one is a behavior coach all of which we feel at this point into the school year would be really valuable um how are we on special ed i think you still have yes so um we just filmed the special education position of high school last week offered that so she will she's a december grad we'll start in january so that will fill that position that's gone for over a year um and that leads us to positions now those aren't those aren't new those have just been not filled for like two to three years but we'll we'll reassess this but um i mean we really the instructional coaches and behavior coach it's something that i would recommend that we still continue to the jobs are still posted so we would invite applicants

075if they're out there make some of us feel about i heard some stats recently on how many jobs are unfilled a couple of the larger districts in the county as today could we use the federal covenant dollars to pay for this position for this year and until that was and that's probably more of an in-depth discussion um but you know this is something that's not going to go away like we we're growing to the point of a fourth school psychologist is our our needs really necessitate that so eventually that's going to have to come you know onto us through the headphones so it's kind of pain now or pay later in that regard but we can we can look at extra money for the remainder of this year keeping in mind you know this is

076we'd be paying approximately 50 percent of the regular salary at this point sure thanks for the questions any other questions yes hennessy yes schultz yes murray yes liam yes he yes macomb yes thank you i just want to say thank you for supporting those items and we hope that they have the intended effect so appreciate that okay number six chromebook purchase yes so i'm gonna stay over here okay um we have the opportunity to uh work through the federal government which is uh approximately 296 of your own books uh utilizing federal funds through the fcc they have a program called the emergency activities fund um they they primarily appear in these course devices or towards students uh who not necessarily have a device at home or at school um we are utilizing these to replace

077296 chromebooks that um are inserted into white um they're not we're not replacing or adding devices to cases who don't have us one of the ones there all of our students have devices what we're doing is we're replacing old devices uh and the federal government uh is fully funding this so there's zero dollars out of our pocket uh we will submit a purchase order to uh binding devices and then within a couple days after we receive invoice we build the federal government and then like three days later we get paid so it's pretty much a wash for us what's the leak now um that's what they told me last week so probably now is january so the replacement follows guidelines yes yes and i did i did confirm that with our uh hearing people as

078to whether or not that would be completely allowed um and we were well within our guidelines for that okay i'm going to approve the chromebook purchases second we'll see that a second further discussion and questions yes yes murray yes keith yes tennessee yes henry yes nicole yes number seven mou with the university of illinois yes dr rachel rogman from the university of illinois she's program coordinator that oversees the principal and superintendent preparation programs at the university of illinois reached out to me requesting that muhammad seymour consider being the partner district in those preparation programs the participation can be as little or as much as the school district wants the minimum requirement is to attend one uh yearly meeting but they're open to more in terms of especially since we have a lot of students that

079get their principal endorsement or superintendent or program looking for feedback and input on how to strengthen those programs so it's a great opportunity for us to provide input on what we'd like to see with future principals and superintendents so this seems to have more um obligations from the district or participation right we'll assign the representative to assist they're going to join the work to assure this happens meetings so i think so when i talked with rachel this is kind of the busy uh document that they kind of send out in the mou that's put together um i can just share with you the conversation that rachel and i have sure i mean i believe you i just you know it says you're going to meet regularly you're going to receive the survey meet regularly i

080mean i just my concern is that we have so much work we have to do right we're trying to have a written curriculum we have all these other things to do but i don't want to pull us away to do something for the university when we have things we need to do here especially we don't have enough people without being you know i don't want us to add something else to our plate when we have work to do actually i think this helps us um from the standpoint that just as there's a teacher shortage and paraprofessional shortage and substitute shortage that the candidates for principal and superintendent are dwindling as well and this up this gives us an opportunity to be at the table it gives us an opportunity to give input on what their

081principal superintendent preparation program looks like and also um potentially it has a linkage to candidates down you know for the for the future um i appreciate that we don't want to put any more on our plate but i also think that um this is just an opportunity to partner and kind of give back to the profession and have a chance to impact future the profession as well do you know who the representative would be you know yeah so we can determine i think rachel recaps me because we already have a relationship um but it doesn't have to be like there's not like a specific requirement like it needs to be administered or it could be flimsy i think it definitely should be somebody at the level to provide feedback on the administrative it's to earn

082a superintendent's license or principal's license um for the for the principal's licensure generally that that that results also in a master's degree in leadership and then the superintendents um endorsement can come with what's called a specialist degree or more often from the university of illinois and edd or phd so it's the it's the program by which you attend grad school and then meet the course requirements and then take the appropriate licensure test and then you are in the candidate pool to become an administrator so are we then required to um place or post interns is that part of the well well we already we already occasionally do that because we have some of our teachers who are earning their degrees not only at the university of illinois but a lot of our teachers do go

083to the university of illinois because of the physical proximity but also because they receive tuition waivers because we host student teachers and student observers so we already have students who've done our teachers who are grad students who complete their internship with an administrator um that's already going on so i don't know this doesn't necessarily increase that uh but but in order to complete the requirements of the degree and the licensure you do have to do a year-long internship for both principal and for superintendent you know we are in a situation where good people are getting increasingly harder to it's not going to get better anytime soon um i think anything that gives us a leg up can help help us establish relationships um and it says to kind of be more a premiere employer you

084can work with i think is advantageous to us i share colleen's concern you know here tonight some concerns about us adequately uh enforcing policies to protect students i feel like every time i go on facebook i hear another incident where some of our students are compromised and jeopardized uh or someone's uh expressing that they don't have access to the curriculum i think until we get the core competencies of this district uh ironed out and and available i would like to see the administration working uh 100 on that and then when we have accomplished that we can free up to do some of these other things other thoughts crimes let's stop getting more information before we i don't know i feel like this i mean i read through this but i'm not sure i completely understand

085what our commitment is and what's the tangible benefit for us um i don't feel like if i knew those things a little bit more clearly it would be easier to support but i'm sorry would you like me to bring dr next month to answer some of your questions sure yeah okay we've got a merchant table coming small i got a discussion yes murray yes tennessee yes hendrix yes yes land yes macaulay yes we've been uh at this for 90 minutes it's a good spot for us to take a customary break so we're going to do that and we'll start up again in just a few minutes [Applause] [Music] thank everybody for being here [Music] are what is required to transfer 13 acres middletown park and the parcel on the northeast corner of division in maine

086to the village of the comet um this has been discussed at length at two other board meetings and so these are the documents that the board needs to vote on in order to approve that transfer of the property okay so we kind of recommend supporting this case to approve the attach resolution [Music] can discussion tell me where this ten dollars came from because this is the first time i've ever seen a dollar amount associated with this if you've had all of these discussions i'm actually kind of surprised that in this document there's new information that i've never seen before the ten dollars and when they go for a level so that is the deal in this case but i just i have to say i do not in any way shape or form to support

087this i don't see how this is anything other than a tax increase to the uh residents of muhammad we are giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets and then in june we're going to turn around and ask them to increase their taxes to support our building i read in some of the emails that we have decided that there's no value to this land i don't know who he is and i don't know when that decision was made this board has never voted to say that um i haven't been involved in any discussions where we came to that consensus i hear people throw it around like it has no value um i totally disagree with that i have heard we don't know what else we can do with that land well then we haven't

088had a meeting and thought hard enough because i could probably rattle off 16 things right now on the top of my head that we could use this land for and finally we are in the middle of an assessment of what we are going to do to move the district forward and to suggest that we will not need land uh when we move forward i think is ludicrous and i keep keep hearing that it can't be this land but i haven't ever heard why um and it's a significant value to not having to purchase lands to build on and so it's probably not any surprise to anyone because this has been my stance on this all along but i cannot and will not vote for this tonight um because i can't look these taxpayers in the

089eye and not call this what it is which is a tax increase [Applause] all right in the comments discussion is there anything sorry go ahead okay is there anything in the agreement with the village and i see sean's on maybe he can speak to this as well is there anything in the agreement that addresses um some kind of a commitment from them to do what they promised you know i i believe when they say in the meeting that they're going to build a tennis court what makes me nervous is they are speaking for themselves at this point in time for a public body public bodies change funding changes pipes burst money is needed elsewhere what assurances do we have that what we've said will happen with this property will happen yeah that's a good question

090ken i know we sent that back to brian crowley he really looked at that and beefed it up with some more language um originally we had i think was added to the warehouse clause explain this is why we're going to do it um and of course the village has spoken publicly about this and i think if they were to kind of backtrack on the deal at this point there would be a lot of outcry from the community but beyond that there is language in their states you know this is the intent this is what it's for that's what they need to do and if they were to violate that then you know if we wanted to take action against them we could so here's a real question how do we take action against them for

091not doing something on land that they didn't own because that was a condition where is that it's not in the contract that it's conditioned they don't give the land back if they don't build the tennis courts in their bank account sitting there shot you there yeah i'm here uh to answer uh ken's question earlier so basically the intent of the grant we have to be very clear with uh with these basically springfield what we're using them great money for has to be approved and we've done all that due diligence at this point and it's for obviously tennis facilities shared his facilities uh has the money been released to my knowledge the answer is no so we'll be waiting for a grant to come through uh probably very similar to what happened with the uh the

092field house you know we're not gonna wait necessary for being a bank we'll move forward with our plans uh accordingly and have the hopefully the money uh coming and so if that grant doesn't get released what's going on how will the village um keep its commitment to put in six tennis courts if the if the money does not get released from the state because i know there's other situations where money is not being released despite the fact that it's been promised and awarded well unless we have a donor that comes forward to say we're going to build tennis courts and here village here's a bunch of money the answer would be delay hence the reason why we have a grant and we're trying to work out a deal here to move the community forward with

093tennis that is my problem as i sit in this seat i understand why the village of muhammad wants this deal i just don't understand as a board member for the school board and the school district's best interest what is it what's in it for us there is nothing in it for us there's no guarantee we've just essentially given this land the way and we've given more away than just the tennis courts are going to sit on with no idea of how that is going to benefit us in the long term for me six tennis courts is not worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in assets while we're trying to decide how we move this district forward there are question marks i'm told because we haven't we don't have a plan in place and i just

094can't believe that we're going to say that land that we own has no value to us during this process um i just it does have values it's worth some time splits but then 13 acres should be off the table because the tennis courts aren't going on 13 acres so if we want to just talk middletown park i would be much more comfortable with that discussion the drainage cost to 13 acres is more expensive than that it may be if and when we go to develop it which would probably be under a referendum with the current building and planning that we would do so at that point in time we would go through the normal avenues of building and figure out where the funding is for that too but until we do something on that land

095those drainage costs are not affecting us you know we talked about this a couple weeks ago we are going to disagree on it yes i think so so if we don't do this we're looking at paying for our own tennis courts at some point down the road which will be several hundred thousand dollars yes and putting in branches how soon do you expect to receive these funds sean can i i can answer that i don't have any control over that other than spin let's see identify those remember money through senator rosa's office and then basically uh we're in the application process right now so it's been i guess awarded to the village muhammad now we have to basically produce the application and project to uh secure them to me but timing i i don't have

096an answer to that think it is because it's tonight same kind of grant basically i had to show them that i paid the money for the field house and then they sent the money right away that's how it worked with that so that's how it'll work with this village you'll cut the check for the tax courts and then the money will come so does the village have the money to cut the check now i'm gonna go on a limb here and say no well that shouldn't dissuade our progress here i mean it's not a it's not a linear process here in my opinion okay so wait a second from what heather said the way these funds work is you pay for it up front and then get reimbursed but no i want i have to

097offer clarification there um our grant for the field house got completely hung up in covet and budgetary delays because of the because of the pandemic so that that impacted how we received the grant uh so i i can't speak to that you know i can't speak to the money that the village is getting i just want to be clear about that the 400 000 was greatly delayed for us because of the pandemic sean do you understand it as the village would put out the money and then be reimbursed later or do you understand it that the money would come in and then you would i'm assuming once expenses are incurred and this is again going back to the application process once it's been approved but i'm assuming once expenses have been incurred payment will happen

098fairly quickly after that um if not they'll be deposited you know into you know the villagers accounts but as far as timing again these are all questions that i don't have answers to these are springfield grants and they're all the mercy of the the governor's office correct i mean and just as a point of reference they do sit on another board and we have similar situations and uh just because you have money that's been approved and budgeted for and appropriated does not mean that you get those funds released in our experience and so just because they say you have the money does not mean that a check arrives that has not been the experience that we have had in different situations with the same pool of money and so again i still would like to

099understand as a school district what is the incentive and how does this benefit the district to do this i think we've discussed it and you disagree with the answer i think there's wisdom in tabling it until the break comes through right once the village gets the money and it's sitting in their account to build the tennis courts then we can reassess this for them to build it because right now they can't commit to even building to this course in addition we should think about the fact that a community member offered us 200 000 for 13 acres last month are they going to build the spence courts though but the 13 acres and the tennis boards are two separate things all part of the deal the way i say it is that's how we're tagging the

100tennis courts up but are we giving the land in middletown park for the tennis courts i mean i understand they want both but we're acting as though we have to incentivize them to do this if they have a grant from the state to put tennis courts somewhere right like so they have the money or the grant to build tennis courts but no land we have land but no grant for tennis clubs so both of us have something it's not like the village has all this great stuff and we are nothing if we're coming together then if we provide land we're doing them a favor by giving them a place to put their tennis courts that they're going to use for their village which without our land they don't have anywhere to put with them or

101any money to buy them so they're great of course that's right right so it's immune so it's a mutual thing but we don't have to then give another piece of land that's not involved in this this is not about incentivizing this is about two parts of local government trying to do something good that benefits both parties and the community because we are then going to turn around and ask people to increase their taxes because we didn't get any money for a piece of land that has value if we went to auction we could get more money than ten dollars for that piece of land and so every dollar we don't get for an asset that we have is a dollar we have to then go ask somebody to give us in their taxes buying a

102taxes right so we can sell 13 acres for a couple hundred thousand and then run and ask for about five hundred thousand more because we still have to build tennis works we don't have the money to do it well but we're having a planning period where i think we're going to ask them for a lot of money to build many different things and so why are we not holding tennis like it's kind of it's not lost on me that we're doing bulldog blueprint knowing we needed tennis courts and i haven't seen tennis courts in any plan or any suggestion anywhere it's like this thing that we absolutely have to have is not involved in anywhere in the discussion of how we move this district forward because quite honestly we could do it ourselves we are

103undertaking a big planning project where we're going to go ask for hundreds of millions of dollars likely and tennis courts could be a part of that plan and so it concerns me that something that i keep hearing we need so desperately is not even on a list for future planning because this is not our only option for any tennis courts we absolutely could pull tennis courts into one of the plans at the bulldog blueprint and quite frankly put it on the land that you already know and it would go in the same place i didn't spend more of the taxpayers money to do it right are you saying it's going to somehow cost less if we roll it in the bulldog scenario i'm not saying it's going to cost less but what we're what's being

104said tonight is that this is our only option for getting tennis courts and what i'm saying is that's not true i think what's being said is that this is a good opportunity for us to get tennis courts without having to go back to the taxpayers and say hey we would like to put in these half a million dollar tennis courts can you please give us some more money and if they were asking just for middletown park i would be much more likely to agree with you but we are also being asked throw in a piece of land that has nothing to do with tennis courts and has a value independent of the land that we would be putting the tennis courts on so this bundling is what is highly problematic for me and we had

105this discussion a year ago and the village told us if you don't give us 13 acres and listen to their village meeting but they don't give it to us in 30 days it's off the table and we're not coming back and i would like to work with the village but not an expense to the school district because this is the seat that i sit in here which is as a school board member so the decisions that i make in this seat have to be with the sole interest of the district in mind and if we're going to talk about something mutually beneficial then it has to be actually mutually beneficial where we give a piece of land they bring the money on that particular piece of land and we do that deal and it doesn't

106have all of this support superfluous giving them additional land away so yeah that's that's what we're not going to agree because i see this as a financial win but if we were to build tennis courts at middletown park and sell 13 acres we could have tennis courts and the two hundred thousand dollars correct right and that would be better for how are you gonna pay for the taxes give the give the land for the tennis courts make a deal with the village we'll put up the land you put up the tennis courts we make a deal then we sell for teenagers although one of the issues i have is that this document says the school district has reviewed the status of the property and determined that the property is no longer needed for school district

107purposes but we use this land you know we're celebrating the cross country team that's where the cross-country team practices we use this land so it's just just like right now they play but small baseball sure regardless of whether they're going to practice or not the statement the school district has reviewed the status of the property and determined it is no longer needed for school purposes is not true so i like to let my yes be yes and let me know we know it is not true that we don't use this link i don't know why this is in this document it didn't need to be in this document but it's not a true statement so i can't say yes to something that is not true charlotte counts sean would the village entertain what colleen suggested

108uh separating 13 acres in middletown park and just focus on the middletown park park we'll bring the land no the reason why is is when we're looking at uh projects and what we can do is we're trying to figure out a way to get uh tennis to the community as well as pickleball uh they both can't fit at 13 acres with all the other uses out there plus future parking detention needs everything else so it's kind of a combination deal um as far as bringing pickleball and tennis to the community um i want to go back a little bit here just real quick on the actual grants and the question can we table this and just wait for the money the money will not come unless we have eligible expenses to get reimbursed for so

109i believe heather was corrected earlier as far as going expenses to get the money so you don't just get a check deposit in your account before anything's built so in this case then the village would be basically playing bank um until the money's reimbursed the difference is that because of what dr hall said earlier you think of this um the reason i we got the 400 000 reimburse all at once is because it was so late in the game so once you start having expenses it would be like with any other grant so it wouldn't be like they would have to put up 700 000 right away they would get reimbursed slowly as it progressed so when does the village intend to break ground on this assuming we'd improve it tonight our goal is to

110offer tennis next year and i think that fell in place with uh mr henley's plans too as far as offering the high school girls tennis home court for next year so 20 22. so sean would you break ground even without possession of the grant money well i don't think it's going to be that much of a delay it sounds like it sounds like a reverse for eligible expenses so they have to have an expense in order to get reverse yeah yeah i think the first the first expense we're going to incur is obviously professional services for the actual design of the facility um so that would be the first opportunity probably for an eligible expense so you're not going to be breaking ground before you test the waters with uh with the grant and the

111village hasn't approved their side of this agreement yet correct we're waiting for this body to to act before we do how do you think they would feel about a clause in here about the property coming back to us if the the tennis courts aren't built in say three years i don't have the agreement in front of me but i believe the agreement addresses the the tennis being the commitment so that is the commitment we're dealing with tonight it says uh whereas the village's commitment to construct and maintain tennis courts and allow the district to utilize the tennis courts for student tennis program is a primary reason for the district's agreement to convey the property to village in accordance with the terms of disagreement so is that enough can or do you want more of uh

112if not than this says we are giving this to them because they say they're going to do that i understand and that's why i'm asking at some point we have to trust people well but you the reason you have contracts is because you want to put that in to write right if we just trusted people we wouldn't have to do anything right so that's why we have a contract write it down so sean going back to ken's question do you feel that the village would entertain an idea or a proposal to put something in there about a commitment a further commitment to tennis courts can you probably be better at what language yeah just like i said i think the start of this discussion i hope i didn't imagine that but my my concern is

113not that sean wagner is going to double process or something my concern is that things happen and he's representing one public body we're representing another and we don't we can't tell what's going to happen in the future and to colleen's point putting the terms into a contract is is safer for everyone involved um and if we want something that 13 acres is tied to could we do something where after the completion of the tennis courts they have we can revisit 13 acres and we won't sell it to anybody else because at one of the meetings i believe and i didn't have time to bring it with me tonight but it was said that they have not even looked at the design work for 13 acres because they won't even do a design concept until they

114own the land so we talk about pickleball but that statement kind of contradicts that premise that 13 acres is the only place that we can put pickleball so i feel like we're tying two pieces of land together unnecessarily and it just increases the risk for the school district to a point that i don't think we need to be entertaining at this point in time since the tennis courts are the only actual tangible build we're talking about right now think the districts the village has been clear with their intention to continue to develop 13 acres as an asset for the community and they're going to spend money hopefully most of the grant money that we would never spend to make that a better asset for the community and i think that's a huge piece of that

115here that we don't want to overlook sorry go ahead no sorry i'm sorry i thought we were finished um but in one of the meetings they said they have no plans for 13 acres for the next five to ten years unless they put the mark there i must say what unless they put the mark there the recreation building that was in one of the minutes of an old meeting um i think it was before they bought that before they bought property that was our original plan um and vision however we moved on beyond that based on the last uh um meeting we had as a joint joint joint body you know as far as the claw back clause i think again that's where you're going to i mean honestly we thought from the iga perspective

116it locked us into building you know obviously the tennis court that's the vision you know that's that's what our collective thoughts were as far as a win-win for the community win-win for the village in the school district you know we have no ideas or thoughts about middletown park other than some kind of paddle facility tennis whatever but you know if you want to put in some something tonight and show that good faith we're moving forward that's fine i would just caution as far as the timeline we don't know as far as inflation or even bidding environment how successful will be i mean our goal is to obviously get it done but uh we've seen some crazy things happening with bids right now so hopefully by the time we get out to this project it will

117be settled back down but i'd be hesitant to put something as far as a short timeline because it may take a little bit longer to get it done but from the perspective though we talked about it we talked about it in public we talked about in our joint meetings we're committed we want to bring tennis to the facility we need four courts you need six it's a win-win for us and you and you're talking about light tennis courts is that is that correct yes it'll be a full functioning facility well that's what i was suggesting by three years i figured three years is a lot of wiggle room just to make sure it happens just to be sure right i would be fine with that i would say five yeah that makes me think you're

118not gonna more son right i mean five years then why are we giving you the land today especially when our bulldog blueprint is done in february right i mean with all due respect we're doing bulldozers but the action of voting this through was saying we've already made the decisions so five years is a really long time and especially when you're so confident the money is going to be there i just said with all due respect i'm just being conservative saying five i hope it's only a year and again that's our goal to be playing tennis there next year i'm uh okay with a clause that would say the agreement would be avoided if escorts were not completed in three years i agree i hope we tabled this and let the lawyers rewrite up a document

119that includes that and bring it back to the next month's meeting shall we if we want a three-year clause we need a tablet or we can improve it subject to that clause well i think you can approve it's up to that clause can you hear me yeah yeah i think that you likely can i prefer to kind of get brian's input since he's the one who worked on this which i can certainly do and ask him that if you want to come back into open after closed and take action on at that time or i can try to get a hold of him while you finish your other business i really want to take action on that be honest before close session because after closed session we probably won't have youtube wrong what would she

120say we could go into closed session right now no she was thinking about you can also modify the agenda to have a closed session now as well if you think you need to in order to address this from the legal perspective that we're discussing i will not go for it until it's written into the document um you won't call brian while we move on with other agenda items and then maybe if you get an answer and come back before we if there's a reason we have to go in the closed session for that no i can probably find out what i need to find out can you be really specific as to what i'm asking him since i wasn't involved in the drafting of the contract we would want to insert a clause in there

121that if at the end of three years the tenor scores aren't built then the property transfers back sean is that your understanding how we want that to read that's what i heard i think it also needs to conclude that they can't do any development until the property actually transfers like again i can't understand why we would put a document this why does the rush here i don't understand the rush [Music] we can't have they can't build the task force on property okay so let's separate out little town park and just take the property that they actually need do we get an assessment or a what do you call it appraisal of middletown heartland we have never to my knowledge unless rick did gotten praise on little town park because we needed middletown park because the

122plan has always been for that to become village property because we didn't want to maintain hey sean it was my understanding that if this land deal didn't go through you were not going to use this grant money for tennis courts you were going to do something else with it correct we went through a series of different options um the original intent of the of the money which was essentially was land acquisition if you can remember back in the timing of all this the grant was actually thought about for the mark facility and to acquire land uh but when the money came around we've already we've already moved forward with that option so we can certainly apply for and ask for different uses for the grant but the spirit and the idea behind the grant and

123again senator rose talked about this at our joint meeting was to try to find a collaborative project that basically is a win-win for both the district and the village and we felt after evaluating different ideas and options that this was the one that rose to the top that we could support and we thought was that win-win again we could apply for the grant money to basically do other things and and not bring anything new to the new community but we think that would be you know not the best idea based on the the original intent of trying to find that win-win so um i hope that answers your questions or not yeah thank you so i i've confirmed that we could add a reverter clause to the contract but it's something that we would definitely

124want to talk about with the board and i'm assuming that the village wants to see it as well before they committed to anything so and if you want to make that sort of substantive change i think we can't act on it as it is currently written so you broke up there a little bit you're saying brian would want to insert that clause before we voted out yeah i think that we'd have to we should have a discussion about what that looks like in the implications of that if you want to add that substantive change to what we kindly have and is that something we could do tonight or are you saying you need more time brian needs more time i can certainly ask him to do it this evening i was just speaking to him

125but i think that it's something you should probably discuss in closed session not an open session and you can then decide whether to take action on an open i'm sorry sean one's just coming to the trustees this month okay last tuesday of the month 26th we have some time there's no urgency it's not like they're gonna start building tennis courts this week i think we've determined throughout the course of the evening that they have to build the tennis courts and then apply for the money it's a reimbursement process what i'm saying is between now and our november meeting they're not going to build tennis balls so if we wait for november but it is going to the trustees and it means you need to have design services under contracts surveys all the stuff that gets

126get done before the winner comes if that doesn't happen gets delayed nothing will happen over the entire winter time design services wouldn't start until the spring at the earliest of which would then push us out a whole other year probably as far as actually being a sport in the town here for at least for the girls high school there's the urgency i guess i moved to table this until november so we can get some language in proper legal review before we do anything [Music] um does the board wish to go under closed session with charlene talk more about this i'll make a motion to do that i was under the impression shelley that the open meetings act only allows for the setting of a price if you're selling land getting rid of land when i

127took the open meeting exact training it was very specific that only the setting of a price is eligible to be talked about in position you're muted shall we i'm sorry about that there are a number of kind of implications to this colleen that i think that we could properly discuss in closed session i believe you've discussed it in closed before is that correct on two other occasions what was your last sentence i'm sorry have you not discussed this and closed already the specifics of this we did in august yeah we didn't honestly i did not discuss any specifics at all max came and said the village would like to have our that's what we talked about in closed session so i don't know that that's an open session topic what we talked about though is

128not if shelley believes when you talk about this in closed session i am inclined to go with our attorney's advice and uh so we're going to motion a second we're going to close that session is there any discussion on that sorry but right so right now we've got three motions on the date we got a motion to approve it we got our motion to table it and we got a motion to go into closed session we're made in that order the motion to table takes preference precedence shall we how do we how do we navigate through those three motions shall we you can't do the motion to table initially and see if that passes if it does not you can do the motion to approve as written i'm sure after that we do the what

129the emotionally go to close yeah agreement as written and presented what about going to closed session you could do that you could do that between the two or we can do it initially you can do it first all right which order i want to do i'm chilling um why don't we go into closed moment why don't we do a motion to go into close and we can talk about a little bit more and then we can decide how to handle it coming out that was the third motion and a lot of times we go in reverse order so i'm fine with that is there any discussion on the motion to go into closed session we have to do the tabling one first correct and then yes mcmurray yes macomb yes all right so if we

130can clear the room you can shut down the feed folks on youtube we'll be back um is where that's something going great thank you um before we win a noble session there was a motion a table on the floor based on discussion token closed session uh we need to deal with that that was motioned and seconded um so if we're going to do the amendment we put together we would need to vote back down um so we have a roll call vote on the motion to table okay nick murray no hendrick no no hennessy yes so now we've got the original motion back on the table to approve this and i believe we want to approve it with um well i think we want to substitute a replacement motion right um so i would entertain

131updating the original motion emotion that made the original motion so i make a motion to amend the original to state that the board of education will approve the resolution of the intergovernmental agreements for the transfer of certain school district property and a facility use agreement related to the property and additional village and school district property subject to applause being added to the agreement requiring the village to revert the transfer property back to the school district if the village does not complete tennis courts on the transfer property by december 1st of 2024 unless an extension has been agreed upon by the parties such provision will be approved by the school district attorney and superintendent okay so that is the update the motion there's a second discussion on that um yeah i would like my uh comments

132to be verbatim please i'll have to i just i'm just letting you know um i am against these agreements i will be voting no because in my opinion there is no way to look at this other than a tax increase to the community by getting rid of assets that have value or no monetary compensation i don't believe that these two pieces of land need to be tied together and yet for some reason there's no way to negotiate this without tying it together and i'm having a hard time understanding how this is in the best interest of the school district i certainly understand that the village uh this is the best interest of the village but as a school board member i cannot vote for this because i do not believe it is the best interest

133of the school district i agree with everything he had said in addition section two is just not true so to vote yes to say that something's true that's not true for me is an integrity issue and i will not say something's true that's not true um and as an additional comment i find it interesting that we are so desperate and we act like things have to be so fast for elena deal and real estate deal that we heard about for the very first time 63 days ago and yet it's been seven years that people have been asking or maybe more for transparency and curriculum the addressing of curriculum the addressing of things that are happening in the school bullying all of these things that happen in the schools and it's years and years and years

134and we don't see any urgency for that but all of the sudden we can't even wait until our attorneys can draft up a document before we have to rush it through so it makes me wonder what exactly is happening that we're so desperate to push it through so fast any other discussion yes so that updated the motion right so we need to go back and go down the motion yes yes hendrix no nick murray yes tennessee no no yes all right brian did that the way we reverted back to that including okay so the next agenda item is number nine agreement with the village that basically takes um the agreement we've had with the village the last several years on joint use of facilities uh and of course flips then who owns 13 acres and

135the heart gives us the right to use those there's also a section there that spells out the times we will be able to use the test course that is blank right now because mr hensley and dan and welding have to get together on that get that worked out but they've already talked about how that's a principle gonna work and everybody is good with that she would have um more of education to prove that iga with the village um as outlined in need there's a motion to do that so is there a second second discussion on that agreement i also believe this is not in the best interest of the school district i believe we should fill out documents before we vote on that [Music] yes nicole yes number 10 dream solution brian thank you he's

136dumb he's gone here everybody we're good brian thank you all right thanks um okay next item is um the drainage on the west end of our campus here at middletown prairie we've talked about this at our previous meeting two weeks ago we have an obligation to complete the on-site underground storm sewer work on our campus here um there's a really nice uh historical kind of summary with some questions being answered that was supplied by kelly pfeiffer at the village and i don't know if there's any additional questions a lot of information has been provided including quite a few historical emails and so i'm not going to continue to review this we've had ample time to discuss it and look at it this is recommending that we reimburse darren peters the developer for 16 000 to

137extend and connect manholes and storm water pipe to the underground system in the new development and ten thousand dollars to effectively pay for half of the cost of sell removal from the affected area of the lake so remember when the board was just approved this yeah i make a motion to approve reimbursement of sixteen thousand dollars for the storm drain pieces okay i'll that's how it was phrased here i thought did i read that wrong his contractor is doing the work less expensive for us okay questions on the 16 000 to connect are we okay i guess we're gonna come back in about the ten thousand directions okay all right yes tennessee no i'm just so confused about what's going on nick murray yes yes okay now we have the issue with the ten thousand

138direction i will move that forward also i'll second that discussion on the ten thousand regression um i'm of the opinion that we let the property owners agree uh association handle that since they own that pawn let them manage the dredging i'm a little worried about the president it sets that we would be um stepping into paying for dredging like that upon so yeah and we're part of that association so we're still paying our part it's just we're not paying the majority of yourselves like didn't wasn't there some kind of agreement on the west end of our property that was our original plan and we changed it so because the village or somebody asked us to well we changed the part until we saved money we changed the apartments to save money we also changed it

139apart because from the beginning all the interested parties wanted the water to bond but it allowed us to retain i think these kind of situations are the problems that get caused when people don't write things down right and it doesn't come before boards they don't vote on them because if all these agreements that everyone says are made were actually made as agreements we would have no questions but now we have a bunch of different people telling us a bunch of different stories and everyone's recollection for things that happened years and years and years ago which is just it highlights the need to actually do things right so what's the cost to us for through the poa do we know with them yeah on the board um so actually this actually got some other things come

140to life as well in the original agreement we're supposed to pay our proportionate share for any lake maintenance in the past they have not been charging us for that and because like as you said when people change positions and everything so that actually came to light through all these questions is that the the poa has not been charging the district they've only been charging us about 2 000 per year um so what we would have to pay is right now we have 88 votes out of 215 or whatnot so you know it would be that proportionate now i don't know what's going to happen though because darren um decided to actually take the hoa's portion because he has asked for some leniency in the covenants so for his new his new development so um so

141yeah i mean we would probably i think we're so 88 out of 214 so that would be the proportion of share that we would oh absolutely so approximately 40 yeah then it's gonna be twenty thousand dollars you know it would be higher and frankly we've saved a lot of money by over the past several years rather than paying 40 percent of someone another number because honestly the hoa again just all brought this to life um they paid the full amount did not charge the district district to proportion them out the other side of the lake which they could have according to the original agreement so why did we get into an hoa to start with well it's a poa and it's because this property is on that and it all depends on where your water

142i'm learning a lot by the way but for your water drains and we are part of that so it is actually a beneficial deal to the school district and again i'm getting all this recap through it was awesome it was a good learning experience for all of us on the board because we weren't there at the time but um basically because otherwise we were going to have to do our own drainage system so that's why it kind of all came together so there wouldn't have to be two different drainage systems so we'd be having to do this anyways all on our own so because we have we would have to find a way to drain our water [Music] yes that's uh i am 11 policy seven one five doctor i would uh move to table

14311 and 12 to november first at [Music] tennessee yes um i have 13 legal fees for dr jerry hammonds my recommendation and that's based on input from virtually the entire board that we reimbursed dr hendricks for the expenses of what occurred in the official electric role as one of our board members um i believe we've got a copy i i just have a statement to me about this um on the morning of august 21st i was approached by dr schultz to review a statement regarding the charges for audience doctor the statement had been crafted by dr schultz in partnership with mrs hennessy at the time i reviewed the statement i was in complete agreement with what these two ladies interacted i told dr schultz i had nothing to add i felt it was well written

144and i thanked you for composing it however i can no longer fully support the previously released statement in its entirety while dr henrich has my full and complete support i have concerns with the sentence that it reads quote we are also aware that within hours of the news breaking some of our board members were accused of being the individuals who reported dr hedrick's these accusations are untrue and quote due to some recent confidential developments involving one of my children and based on what i have personally experienced i'm worried that this line communicates a sense of unity and a level of trust that is non-existent on this board i would also like the record to reflect that the statement drafted by schultz and a specific line that reads that board members should be allowed to participate

145as a board member without the threat of coercion or the fear or duress or of duress or retaliation and quote because of this statement i feel comfortable sharing this with them before therefore along with full support of dr hendricks and the rest of this statement i would like the record to please reflect that i no longer support the statement we released to the press while we did not go back in time to edit the statement or pull it from publication i feel it is important to note my objection as we move forward another conversation on the twenty five hundred dollars okay can i vote on the link ram yes so man [Music] there's a desire to discuss that well i think that that's something that's come up in the past that that i think that

146our school district needs to be more in the education business than in the health care business and i think the contact racing and quarantine needs to be turned back over to the county health department [Applause] so um i'll just read what's in the current idph guidelines about contact tracing and the school board can discuss after that pursuant to 77 element illinois administrative code 690.361 districts and schools are required to investigate the occurrence of cases in suspect cases in schools and identified close contacts for the purposes of determining whether students or school personnel must be excluded from school premises extracurricular events or any other event organized by school districts and schools as well as students and families must work with local health departments to facilitate contact tracing of infectious students teacher staff and consistent implementation regarding

147isolation cases and foreign but this to jeremy's point it just still needs to work with the local health department they don't think we're suggesting that we don't work with local health departments it's who takes the lead on testing and quarantine and whether we do that in house so i don't understand in my opinion that moving it back to the health department actually still fulfills what's written here the first line though is a little confusing where it says districts and schools are required to investigate the occurrence of cases and identify close contacts to me that sounds like it's this school's yeah the second paragraph sounds less stringent the first paragraph sounds more expensive um lindsay or nida what are other districts in the county doing right now well also in the september 23rd is the iuph

148newest guidance it also says as part of the executive order that schools are required to contact tracy and that's what other districts are doing as well they actually put out a form they mirror art form once again they utilize some of the things that we've been doing um to provide to the health department to help department that follows up and at that point then they concur with dates that they establish they talk with families and they they do their part or matter but we are required and i got another email today that we're required to let them know of cases and of exposures and then they they take that from there so but we also are doing that testing as well right so and that's something that takes me in power for us to be

149able to do that and testing could be done elsewhere and then not and not sorry we didn't need to interrupt that but i mean testing could be done elsewhere and allow for the county to i mean they can they can contact us and say hey they're sitting next to so and so such and such class or whatever but you know it it seems like we're having to take on more and more labor to do this in time to test and trace and there are healthcare facilities that can do this for us there are so many county health departments understand that this is um you know this code i don't know exactly where this is from but the guidance from disney is just that it's guidance um so i i i'm still i feel like we're

150we're veering off course there are those that are in the business of care if i may after a year and a half or almost two years into this we've been doing this for a long time so at this point we're not doing anything differently than we've been doing for a year and a half and we're using less step than we did last year so we tear down the staff and we have the ability to know by virtue of what other schools now have started doing what we are doing so we are not at all for a fact that other school boards are considering this because i've talked to other school board members right and i'm talking to the nurses right so i know that right now they're doing the testing what i also know is

151a lot of the tests we don't get results right away so if the the advantage that we have and that we have done for this past year and a half is assuming an advantage there what we have found is that we have we've been able to identify positive cases and consequently not have those students in school right away and not and not have to go back and do further contact tracing later because we already are identifying and taking care of the problem at the front of it we right now thankfully cases seem to be declining i hope that continues but the way that we started this year wasn't that way and i mean so i'm not sure why you're changing course well yeah at some point we have to change course that there is there

152isn't into it at some point and and so i think that that's what i feel like we're we continue to dig a deeper hole of how are we going to get out of this and you know we get a clia waiver to do these tests but i mean there's other clearway tests that we can do too we're going to start adding on those things eventually so we have a whole other arm of our our school system providing health care that i just i mean i've lived in illinois long enough that i know what happens after a period of time that it just becomes a sinkhole for money and resources and fun because they realize well if someone else can do it might do it so i i just don't see a distinct advantage of continuing

153to do this at our expense well actually one of the things i will say as far as there are some other districts that are doing some other testing you're right that those will cost us money we're not going to do that we don't have a clinic like urbana does or some of the other schools do they have a health clinic we don't um right now we've been able to keep our students in school than other districts weren't so there are some things that we've been able to do and other districts are calling us and asking how we're doing things and how are we getting it done so i mean obviously you all can make whatever decision you're going to make i'm not sure at this point it's time to change that we don't have any

154other i have a webinar tomorrow one of the questions i have is is there a plan and what is the metric for when we stop you know when the cases go down is there a metric for when they say okay schools were good we would like to hear the answer i know i'm asking that question the problem is we get observational data which is in fact useless because you can get observational data if you don't have a control sample to see well how are other people doing this within a controlled you know say an environment that has say we're not testing we're not we're not contact tracing we're not quarantining then what's the difference so if you don't have a control arm with this we have the observational data that makes the assumption that says

155that what we're doing is a good thing but we really can't make that assumption without a control arm to make that assessment to make it real valid information and data so that's the problem is that we're in we can continue to move and make decisions on observational data which fine if that's what we're going to do i'm just saying if at some point this isn't our job and i think um on top of that i think we're only testing kids who are symptomatic and it's my understanding that the policy is if you're symptomatic you have to go home and i've heard multiple stories about kids for instance and i sent an email on this and never got a response vomiting in the classroom being sent down taking i'm just connected i just am telling you

156that the stories of what people are saying is happening vomiting in the classroom being tested for covid the covent test was negative and the kid was sent back to the classroom but we have a policy that says if you vomit you go home and so we are getting such blurred lines here and if we were testing kids as they walked in the door every single day symptomatic or not i might have a different opinion but we're really only testing symptomatic kids and we have a policy in place for symptomatic people and kids who are sick right now kids who are sick should not be in the building we are not just testing symptomatic kids we are actually doing screening testing which is one of the things that they have found to be very effective we

157have a drive-through testing every single morning anybody can take advantage of that so we have people who come through we are doing screening testing and so when you do that serially it has found been bound to be very effective yes we do also test some symptomatic kids yes there are other situations that particular situation you heard about was not exactly the way that happened so i didn't send an email and asked for info and never got it so i don't know but i can't answer to the situation so so we do different triage in the offices it depends on what happens when the kid comes in there are lots of factors that go into that but it's not i mean we're not wasting time like i said i've paired down on 30 people so we

158now are using staff that are are going to be at work anyway so i'm not charging the district extra money to do this it's not like we're doing extra things but we have been found i feel like that's one of the reasons we're still here we haven't closed our schools other districts have so i i mean i i like to want this to be done as fast as possible i've been doing this for a long time and i'm not sure that us turning everything over saying we're not going to do anything anymore is the right way to go because then it's like okay we have an outbreak in town so then they can shut us down so we're looking to try to get the kids back into sports we're trying to get back into all

159the different things so i think we have to continue to move forward and work with the health department and try to continue to be the trendsetter and not fall back and everybody else is like what are we doing they're trying to mirror what we're doing and instead we're saying now we're going to not do any of it i i don't know that that makes sense i think it takes us backwards and not forwards if we get any effect this year or any shutdowns with like marching band sports teams big student activity type stuff we lost 10 soccer players okay question peter than we do and they've got a goal of having a nurse in every building um i don't think they have nurses in their building because it's like everybody else that can't fill all

160their positions okay if we weren't doing contract tracing and our own contract in our performance would you still need help eops in every building are they doing other stuff to talk to us about that are those positions we could just like go away those positions went away i'm sure we could use most of those the thing is is that the code stuff is that's just an additional layer of what because we're in a regular school year we have all the kids back those offices are full all day every day of kids who have stuff that they need whether it's ice band-aids medicine all the things that happen in school office have magnified coven's just a layer on top of it and i can assure you that nobody would be sad if you didn't have to

161do that so the but the the positions themselves are so you're saying that even when the pandemic ends you expect the district to hang on to all these years and did we just add a second eop or an eop assistance in every building i had back back in the winter i had some code with people who are specifically doing code there's nobody there there's nobody and i only utilize people one hour if we're doing weekly testing so that's the other thing is that we've often that we've offered what we are doing for some families they want their kids just completely for doing that if they want that done so right now i've used an extra person that i have that we had approved last january like an hour a week so it's like i mean

162minimally yes so we've approved several people for covenant testing in the past but we have to keep every year because it's a new year because we started we were so crazy and we were using some people for for a few weeks but as as things weighing and if we're not going to meet them i don't those are hourly a little bit here and there so we still have to have them on your roster because we have every year every school year you have to rehire people so those are the same people doing state reporting doing things that we have done the whole time but we have park park so i have about a quarter of the staff that we did before most of the staff that are doing this now are already being paid every

163day they they're doing it as far as their regular job so we have one nurse how many eops do we have in the district health healthy have four children and do we how many assistants are additional none we've got seven coded testing like i said there are several of those people that that we have paid a few hours that we hired last winter that we had to put them back on the list this year because of the new school year and as things change we need to utilize them only when we need them so they're really not i mean i would say we just we put this on the next board meeting as a action item um that's something we talked about in the past too that we had a discussion about in september and

164i i just want to clarify testing or what just be the contact tracing quarantining and testing and we could consider them separately if we wanted to that is an action item so in terms of testing we currently are testing kids who are in the test to stay option and if we're going to tell families hey you've got to go somewhere else and test every other day the kids aren't going to be in school and you saw it well that means something for us to vote on okay i mean yeah i fully understand it's the vote of the board i just want to put out there that what we're doing is keeping kids in school which has been a goal all along i mean last year kids were not at school as much as anybody wanted

165them to be now we have the option to keep them in school but you know the convenience it is convenient to have them tested on school property every other day when they're in that test to stay period otherwise you've got to go somewhere else and get a test may or may not be a binax test have to wait for results to come back and in the meantime you're not back in school right and there weren't 10 kids quarantined from the one player and so if there weren't even though would it be better if we didn't quarantine the kids that were exposed and like dr hall so what i can say is that we we've had like three less than ten i don't know if it was ten or not but it was it was quite

166a few it wasn't ten so what i can tell you is that the test to stay option of 671 people that have been exposed this year since the first day of school 253 of them have been able to stay in school because we're tested how many terms how many turn positives [Music] right i think the point is we're putting the burden on burden well the state's putting burden on it's not about us so our governor we did say that we would revisit this in october i didn't have to put that be on here tonight as an action item but that was not an approved request so i guess i will back up jeremy's request and colleen's request that we do actually have this next month for action please anything else before you do the closed

167session i was wondering if you could add numbers one eight nine ten and eleven number one eight good closed captioning not available or specific volunteers of the public body or legal counsel including here in testimony on a complaint lodged against employees with speaking individual services at the contractor and park recreation reservation setting glory volunteer however the meaning to increase to consider an increase in compensation specifically employ the public body that is not subject to the government waste transparency act may not be closed and shall be opened and posted and how the [Music] number eight security procedures building safety and security and using personnel equipment to respond to an export threatened a reasonable potential danger the safety of employees student staff public or public property nine students learn cases eleven litigation one action effector on behalf

168of the public body has been filed and is pending before a court return administrative tribunal or when the public body finds that action is probably imminent in which case the basis for funding should be recorded in the events of a closed meeting it was 911 the placement of individuals in the special education program and other matters related to individual students thank you there's a motion to go into closed session for those reasons so is there a second second keep real cultural please fair discussion please murray hendrix yes graham yes tennessee yes keith yes schultz yes no we passed yes all right very good we'll take a five minute break and we'll be back in close session