School Board Meeting 12/13/21

001meeting can we have a roll call please here here here thank you the first item on the agenda is written communication dr bavis do we have any written communication yes we do and um since resuming in-person meetings uh the board secretary no longer reads comments or written communication into the record as we did during remote meetings uh written communication however was received and forwarded to board members from anita bussio john kennedy farrell karen johnson erica thompson heather sweeney michelle lyle angela sangha gadsden abdul shakur abdel sari abdel paddy de la cruz don eddy and members of the math department paulo rocco mariano romano laurel o'sullivan kate mazur and betsy wilson okay thank you dr davis okay next item items for information i think we're going to move the superintendent's report up so that's going to

002be the next item that we will have thank you madam president um so uh at the last meeting uh our student board member barbara uh tomarazi uh uh uh really uh i thought uh did an uh a very effective and and eloquent if you will job of really explaining an issue and and about of students uh concerns about uh when when they have uneasiness and about reporting it and barbara and i have already talked once and so she knows how much i appreciate her bringing that forward and and how much uh it really did alert us to something that we needed to be alerted to i do also recall that the president uh savage williams you made a comment at the time that uh we would get back uh at this meeting and and so

003uh uh we are um and and and um uh barbara uh you you really followed through with what a what a board member uh student board members asked to do to speak to student issues and to speak uh to uh to give voice to student issues and uh and i just uh uh know that we all as president savage william said at the time greatly appreciate that um the issue that you brought up um was an issue with a staff member and i want to note that we cannot respond publicly to personnel allegations and barbara and i discussed that but i can speak uh to the process that was followed in that the the issues that were brought up were in the spring of 2021 we were still in the midst of the pandemic and

004there were allegations of misconduct against a former employee and indeed an investigation was completed at that time looking back we have found that the the complaintants students uh were interviewed and uh and and those uh were then uh involving not only the dean's office but also uh involving uh um our human resources office at that point um um the uh there wasn't determination made uh i can't go into all the personnel issues that were handled at that time but the the employee did return for um a summer camp uh in here on the property in the summer however in the fall uh in september of 2021 the district learned about other allegations involving this employee at a school in indiana and at that point uh literally uh at the moment that the the eths learned

005of it um this the employee was sent off of the property and subsequently uh the employee was placed on leave and has had no contact with our students since that time since that report in indiana became public knowledge um we have been reviewing and thank you barbara for the points that you brought up we are reviewing um that um how it was handled and we're reviewing what processes could be put in place to make sure that we modify or even improve how that was handled in my opinion i believe that eths could have done better and that's why we're looking at the processes to make sure that there are some additional things put in place but one of the points you made and you and i talked about it was the fact that that students

006want to know that they're safe and want to know that they can come forward uh in a few minutes dr kinsey is going to talk to us about student wellbeing and she will describe in more detail our acknowledged care tell protocols that we really do believe are very important here at eths and it's important for everybody to know that when they uh have any knowledge uh of anything that they that they believe that they're uneasy about or uncomfortable about uh they need to not only show care for the other person but to tell somebody who is in a position to initiate actions and we will hear more about that from dr kinsey but i think it's really important to know that our students just must be reassured of that because uh it is just vital

007for their protection and for everybody's protection in the school that we care for one another and that we know that if somebody tells something uh they and whoever is involved in that report are going to be cared for and so thank you for bringing it up thank you president savage williams for uh for wanting to make sure that we followed up on it and without going into all the personnel details i can just assure you that this is being closely re-examined and will have an impact on what we do going forward so thank you thank you thank you dr witherspoon i think looking forward to continuing to hear about student well-being i think dr kinsey is going to come up so good evening hi i'm taya kinsey associate principal for student services um it's good

008to be with you tonight we're gonna do a brief update in terms of wild kit well-being and thinking about our culture of care dr witherspoon already referenced a little bit of that but there are myriad facets to well-being that we know from the social emotional end to the physical end so we're going to address a variety of those let's see if i got this going here here we go so in terms of tonight in march we're going to do our annual board goal 2 well-being update or actually full report tonight will be our update so this is just an opportunity to provide a little bit of update as we reviewed quarter one this year thinking about last year thinking about pre-pandemic as well and reviewing our culture of care how we're really working to stay

009wild get strong the needs that have been arising and the services that are in place as well as the embedding of social emotional learning as we think about our journey to be wild kid strong i really want to take a moment to recognize tremendous need the tragedy with a shooting in our community that injured four youth three from eths and killed another young person and the loss of one of our recent graduates eths is not alone with significant needs of students weighing on staff and our families and our community and weighing on students our mental health needs have increased throughout our nation for adolescents and yet eths continues to be special in many ways and one of them is the ways we're committed to prevent intervene and support each other through crises our crisis care

010team and our entire school community continues to work together to support each other even when it feels like so much we name that and we keep supporting each other and students so we want to walk a little bit through services and needs increased needs these numbers are very startling and yet for some people they said they knew that there would be needs coming out of the pandemic and into in person while still in the pandemic so as we reflect on first quarter from fall 2019 pre-pandemic to fall 2021 this year one of the things we've seen is a significant increase in suicide risk assessments with an increase of a hundred percent one of the things that we're aware of is not only does the also increase psychiatric hospitalizations of 50 percent demonstrate significant needs and

011complicated situations for each individual student but it also reflects a commitment of our staff to quickly identify and get students the services they need in that moment as well as continue to support them through care even through psychiatric hospitalizations the coordination of care is one that this is not just a moment in time it means a commitment to students in an ongoing way which requires significant staffing and we've been really proud of the many ways our entire teams are supporting when we think about our journey one of the things that has been talked a lot about in terms of mental health is it is okay not to be okay and then we must tell someone we can't simply end it with it's okay to not be okay because you can't be alone through that um

012you know dr witherspoon often says it's a great day to be a wild kit and i agree that it is a great day to be a wow kit but i also recognize that sometimes for some students it doesn't feel like it and so we want to pay attention to that whether we are angry or sad or depressed or anxious or while kids might feel alone we know that as wild kids we're here to care for each other as an entire community and each of us has a next step to get help for ourselves or help for someone else our students do have done a tremendous job dr witherspoon mentioned acknowledge caretal one of the processes that we've engaged in is really messaging from a school-wide community perspective the process of acknowledge care tell which is

013hannah simply said acknowledging when there's a concern and we'll go into more detail about that showing that we care and telling someone so no one ever holds that as a burden to themselves it was done developed in concert with students to replace any mentality of either don't snitch or keeping secrets so when anyone has concerns about self-harm harm to others or incidents of having been harmed we want students to share that and barbara you did a great job of illustrating that lifting up we want to share when concerns arise so that they're not left unaddressed and that everyone can feel safe and supported the online incident reporting form is another way that we have created vehicles with student committees to find that opportunity to better access to reporting concerns including harassment or situations of potential

014harm as we think about the many ways that there are services and the response to needs and with families and students the steps we are taking are really in alignment with the surgeon general they many of you may have seen an article that just even came out as recently as last week from the surgeon general speaking to the devastated devastating impact that the pandemic has had on mental health for youth and they noted the myriad ways that schools can address this and we're really proud of the fact that there are so many ways of all those lists and different categories that eths is engaging in and yet that's not enough we're doing more so we're really working to make sure that we are attending to each student's needs that all the staff and not just

015the mental health providers are feeling supported in how can we help students through so here's a few examples and you can see everything from our family our student and family evening programs from cultivating resilience addressing bullying sexual assault and harassment and prevention our actually next family talk series is going to be in early january with another evening of suicide prevention discussion with students and families so there's a variety of ways that we're just working to engage students and families to address anxiety depression and the impact on mental health and on academics just another highlight of a few pieces of well-being services there are so many actions that are being taken our crisis care team unfortunately was busy a lot over the last several weeks including this weekend providing grief support planning out crisis support group

016and individual mental health services have continued and so those are some a few pieces and then we've continued to expand our mindfulness focus rebel human wasn't a group who's been supporting us for a while but we've also incorporated black brown and breathing both for families for students and for staff and continue to look at all the supports that we have in place so we want to continue to focus on how we can address them as we're thinking about embedding sel we've increased our resources and our focus on professional development one of the areas that even the surgeon general had noted in their 53 page report on mental health in the schools was the importance of embedding social emotional learning in the classrooms and that includes mindfulness but is not isolated simply to mindfulness so that's

017been an area that we've really continued to work on supporting staff with as well as including in our curriculum our pe and wellness emotion intervention for all students includes monitoring it also includes skill building and emotion and regulation because we want to be able to identify our emotions something i'm working on every day still as well as continue to regulate them all the time our signs of suicide prevention we're continuing to work on as well as thinking about social emotional learning and myriad ways that we touch students lives but including through fash and sash and one thing that we're doing is in addition to continuing our student well-being surveys both in the short term as well as our larger survey that we hold in the winter is a staff well-being survey and so we're continuing

018to look at that understanding that well-being also includes the physical wanted to give a brief update on our coveted responses and our steps taken you can see we have a link here to our covid response webpage because our staff and students definitely we all continue to follow our guidance idph isb cdc evanston health department as well as our medical advisory board and we really try not try we do provide transparency with our covid response page all right and that's what's linked here it details our processes our definitions of things including closed contacts and our weekly dashboard updates some people have asked are the dashboard updated daily no it's weekly so that we can focus on supporting our students but we also recognize that nationwide we've seen increases in covid and you can see that while

019our numbers on our dashboard are really amazingly low you can also see that and i should include evanston has a at least as of last week had a 1.85 positivity rate we have seen an increase at eths and covered positive numbers in the last week following travel and gatherings which you can see on our dashboard as we had updated on friday that's our regular update time we know that students and families and staff are definitely talking about these increases i've gotten inquiries if we've all been working but we're working to stay really in close communication with health experts and monitoring this daily is the focus of all of us want to continue to stay safe and there's many ways that we emphasize doing that one of them is staying home with any symptoms to keep

020all of us safe students staff all of us we also are always emphasizing our proper mask wearing and consistent mask wearing our sanitizing our covet testing through shield that we are continuing as part of our culture of care and as we think about covid testing we are continuing to revisit our kova testing strategy and we're going to continue to be adaptable as we just constantly revisit what are our next steps we also want to emphasize and you can see here that in terms of vaccination our proof of vaccination from students has increased to 93 percent and our staff are at 94 percent just as a reminder as we consider you know our whole community coming together we want to build connections we want to build resilience and we also know that sometimes we have to

021take action to ensure that everyone feels safe so acknowledge care tell us really about our entire community it's something we ask students to do but it's something we ask our staff and all members of our school community and i've been constantly impressed by how students come forward and families we get reach out from parents who are concerned about another student not even their own who reach out to say how can we help what can we do i'm concerned this is this has been said um so we get it's tremendous the way our entire community shows this care and we know that the culture of care is already strong but every day we have students who step forward whether it's about themselves or about caring for others whether that's around self-harm or areas of concern so

022we want to continue to practice that and i can't underestimate the importance of our hotlines and our lifelines so we really wanted to include a reminder to everyone make sure we get connected with supports for prevention and that includes through lifelines the national suicide prevention hotline lifeline our national sexual assault hotline and our trevor lifeline specifically the for crisis support for lgbtq youth that concludes our our brief update as we think about myriad ways we're working to support both the needs and all of our staff as well so thank you for allowing me to join you for a quick update and happy to take any questions you might have thank you questions pat thanks taya um always appreciate your your work and your presentations um some of this was embedded but can you talk a

023little bit more about the proactive um kinds of things that we're doing because i think what we're discovering i mean obviously certain students are raising or people are coming to this significant level of concern but i think there's a lot of bubbling you know under the surface and i'm just wondering what you're doing in that area and as i always ask do you need more help in doing that because i you know i feel like we can't have enough social workers and people with your training so maybe you can talk about both those things thank you sure thank you so as we think about kind of the prevention perspective there are so many ways that we're focused on prevention talking about embedding social emotional learning really takes us beyond some of the more kind of

024very focused curricular perspectives around skill building and helps us think about how am i learning in math to navigate problem solving or you know begin to engage in coping and problem solving that way so supporting teachers and thinking about their area of expertise but also embedding it and infusing it into daily interaction is something teachers at eths have already been doing in so many ways and yet are naming it now in different ways so many teachers are incorporating mindfulness into their classes are using some of the videos that have been made accessible whether that's through black brown and breathing or through rebel human utilizing opportunities for our mindfulness studio and so thinking about it that way within the classroom are just some examples our curricular perspectives specifically around in pe and wellness are for all

025students and that is really a tier one perspective and that's not a just this week we're talking about mental health that's throughout the school year and i just really have to say all of our teachers are amazing but our pe and wellness department has fully committed to this and so they've been working specifically with dr rozick who has been acting for our process of emotion identification and regulation and so many students have already given feedback of thank you for giving me the opportunity to practice these skills and then go back to them so this isn't uh oh we're just gonna address this in september welcome back to school this is how are you continuing to apply this so these are skill building opportunities throughout the year as well as checks for how are you using

026this and students have given some really amazing feedback even in in written form which i'd be happy to share with you probably in march but it's it's really a phenomenal opportunity for students when um it's a little bit more of a focused kind of curricular but embedding it again kind of within as opposed to just a one-stop shop or one mic drop moment so those are some of our examples but we spend time talking about this in the same way that we focus on equity and access and we center that all the time we've really worked to focus on how are we building in social emotional learning all the time not just as a i'm checking a box in the same way that we were really committed to equity and not on all of our

027conversations so the some of the ways that we have done that have to do with increasing that focus even in presentations even in evening events so we've as you can note from some of the themes but also how are we checking in with each other as staff members how are we pausing to do that even in a meeting so we're working on improving the mirroring from a positive parallel process as well those are a few examples other questions yeah i think thank you talia for this um before i jump into my question um your report is so important all the time so i i want to definitely thank you for that but pat definitely does ask the question do you need more so i guess my question is um how have we leveled up you

028know your first slide shared the assessment the risk assessment and so again how are we prepared to meet our students where they're at and where they need us to be so that we can support them in all the ways that you just outline this is my i guess it's my expectation that we're doing i know we're doing things differently but how have we prepared for that and what have we done thank you so i one of the ways that the board and the school has supported the focus on mental health is by two years ago adding social work to social work positions honestly not certain how we would have gotten through this fall without the additional social work positions and even with the additional social work positions staff are stretched and and that and i

029know that eths is no exception right i talk to every other school nearby um and and friends nationwide in schools we know that we're consistent in that experience and we often talk about how can we be on this marathon for the entire year at the pace and the level of need and so it is an ongoing conversation of how can we create sustainability for our staff and so we we're definitely continuing to assess what level of need and how the level of care that is required and how can we sustain that that's my best diplomatic answer of yep we're stretched [Laughter] dig deeper but yeah there's an intensity that has grown and that existed pre-pandemic right that has only increased so staff absolutely feel that and and mental health providers aren't alone in feeling that

030right um our our secretaries hold space for students our teachers hold space for students it's tremendous it's one of the things i love about this building that and this community of how we develop relationships and show care so it means that there is there are significant stressors um particularly for mental health providers but absolutely for others and so in answer to your question yes we are continuing to assess what is the level of need for our staffing but sincerely also for the sustainability of everyone well and ty i would just kind of jump back into this that i understand it's the middle of the year and i i you know i respect our budgeting and everything but i think i think i said this earlier if you need something at the wrong time you still

031need to ask for it and you still need to get it so i i think we're in a place and like you uh just the stories i hear from colleagues and friends around the country we are not alone but i think we are unique in that we've always this has been important to us for a long time and we've recognized it in a deeper way so let's not lose that now when i mean those numbers of a hundred percent increase in our suicide prevention and fifty percent increase in our hospitalizations that's they're telling these kids are telling us something so i i just want you to know that if you you need something at the wrong time don't worry about that we want you to get what you need and and get you what you

032need for your colleagues because we know how hard they're working and how their jobs have grown and changed so much in the last two years and they have their own stress when they leave here so really i don't i really want you to think about that and and you know come to us if that makes sense or whatever the process is but um this is really important and i know you know that but you've got i want you to know that i think i can speak for most of us here that you have our support to do what you need to do to you know do your work i just want to say thank you because as someone who really i feel like i advocate for a living around students right around staff needs and

033so just having the support sincerely mean so much even if i'm trying to be diplomatic at the same time so thank you sincerely i didn't want to cut anybody off thank you pat well well done um thanks again taya i love all the um support you're offering our students especially around the social emotional stuff but to get to the physical side of things and covet testing could you elaborate a little bit on shield testing and in particular for the that tiny little number of unvaccinated students and staff that we have um are they getting tested regularly and do the already vaccinated but still possibly subject to breakthrough cases people also have the opportunity to get tested if they so desire sure so um in terms of our current yes and it's a tiny number of

034um you know students now at this point including staff but in terms of our students who engage in shield testing i've been really impressed with the consistency of you know what turned out to be smaller numbers as you all recall even when i was here this fall we didn't have that level of proof of vaccination and our community has really come forward our nurses office and our new contact tracer our nurses office as you know is finally fully staffed amazing thank you um and and yet you know again feeling the pull from from every direction ty is glad she's not doing as much contact tracing though so in terms of contact tracing we are working with shield so should anything yield the additional information but our shield weekly testing is specifically at this time dedicated

035to our unvaccinated students for that consistency and i've been you know we've all gotten to know the students who come through and providing that support and we are looking at continuing to explore ways that we might expand that and and review what is our current position for shield testing and addressing both vaccinated and unvaccinated so so right now the field testing is ours our unvaccinated students are regularly using that is that pretty much all of that small small number um and then how about unvaccinated staff are they also doing the shield testing so our unvaccinated staff are able to utilize opportunities outside of the school at this time we're not providing that as an opportunity you had also asked about testing for vaccinated students and while shield at this time isn't providing that on our

036weekly we provide a lot of opportunities including through our school-based health center who's been an amazing partner throughout so we do a lot of collaboration in that way to ensure that there's that consistency of opportunity for students yeah i mean i know it's been a complaint about the united states in general that we don't do enough testing as compared to many of the european countries for example and so that's kind of allowing some of the breakthrough cases so it seems important um but i'm sorry just to get back to the staff and can i clarify that though a little bit miss livingston sure sure but uh unvaccinated staff is required they are required to get tested every week okay that's i just wasn't hearing that or anything and they give us proof of testing and

037then and and that's what i thought was happening they they're just not that was not not done correct and that's per the state requirement and we've been consistent with that okay good yeah thank you yeah there are plenty of places within the community where that can happen so i just want to um ask just very quickly just because i want to make sure people understand some of the terms you use like tier 1 intervention and black brown and breathing and you know just can you talk just very generally about some of these these interventions that are available for everybody and and how students can access them absolutely so when we talk about tier one interventions tier one are really opportunities for all students and that might be in classrooms such as right our emotion identification

038and regulation skill building opportunities and then assessment self-assessments for how are they doing that how is that working those are tier one opportunities because it means all students it encompasses everyone within a classroom setting and then we have other opportunities that kind of would be considered tier one where we invite all students to engage in um you know rebel human we still have even our virtual mindfulness we have online and so we have these different opportunities our mindfulness studio we have these myriad pieces and then we have black brown and breathing which is another amazing opportunity for really being present and engaging in mindfulness in a space where you know students have really gathered students of color have gathered together and the turnout has been phenomenal and so well received and so finding that opportunity

039has been really positive and hosting an evening event for staff as well as for families those so we've had multiple events throughout the fall thus far and so really the feedback i've heard is just such an opportunity for being with others and holding that space for others and supporting others but also feeling supported and understood so it's a great opportunity great thank you really important information very very uh key report and um we knew coming into this school year how important student well-being is and continues to be for for us so um so thank you for the report and and i just really um appreciate the update and um as pat said if you find that that there's more more resources than you have are needed come back and and let us know that because

040this is a priority thank you okay we have another report by dr davis is going to lead the next one it's going to be an update on our school report card and and while we're transitioning i'll just mention that the number one resource we could use is to clone dr kinsey yeah i i cannot begin to tell you everybody at eths season what what she is doing and her leadership and and her just constant work uh on these issues and uh taiya i want to be sure that i acknowledge that um and uh we need to be careful about your well-being yeah but thank you yep this always means staff as well as students all right dr levy and dr babies wow all right well as promised we are here with an update um and

041i have a new clicker so bear with me there we go we promised that we would come back when the report card score report card had its second release and the second release includes test data particularly sat state mandated testing so first thing i want to say is that we really have to put this in perspective especially at eths but around the state around the country but at eths it was unique this testing the state required sat test last school year our students took that under extremely difficult circumstances actually it was the first time our students returned in person to classrooms at eths during the instructional day that was the first time they had been in the building in over a year it was also the first day that our teachers and staff came in

042to support our students in that way those students attended class remotely for over a year it was also the first time that everyone had to experience our coveted safety protocols so experiencing covid safety protocols in a standardized testing environment is difficult enough having that be your first experience at the high school in over a year makes that doubly difficult this was not a typical standardized test administration that said 89 percent of our juniors tested and i just want to have one caveat here before i jump into the details the sat represents a single data point in this case it should not be used as a proxy for the impact of covet 19 the effectiveness of enhanced e-learning or really anything but a marker of where our students were in april of last school year the

043data in this report uses isb benchmark cut scores and not sat college readiness benchmarks isb benchmark cut scores are set at a higher threshold than sat college readiness benchmarks in illinois i've said this in the past but in illinois it is possible to be college ready but not meet state benchmarks to that we will not be reporting s.a.t calgary and spence marx in this report because that would be confusing uh as reported in the chicago tribune they ran this uh article and uh you'll find out that 33.4 percent of students in reading in a state of illinois met or exceeded the benchmark of three or four that's the state benchmark the meter exceeds in reading and in math it was 29.6 um i'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about scattergrams i

044know everyone's very excited to look at scattergrams but i think they do tell a story and what they do is and i have each of these blown up on a slide but what they're going to do is they're going to say they're really going to speak to how well eths students did relative to other schools in illinois we don't often compare ourselves to other schools we often look internally and we'll do that tonight but i think it's important to ground the conversation externally as well given the circumstances so here you see the english language arts meet succeeds comparisons and you see eths is that blue box and that blue box is on the orange line that orange line is the line that imagines if your 2019 sat results were the same as your 2021 sat

045results as a school and you will see that for english language arts we are right on that line that means that our students scored the same they met the same benchmark in the same proportion in 2019 as they did in 2021 they did not take the test in 2020. we were shut down the whole state was shut down you'll also notice that the vast majority of schools are underneath that orange line so again relative to other districts this top this tells us how uh how our how our school compares you'll notice in the upper right hand quadrant those schools are i de-identified the data for a reason but i was asked what are those schools uh four the first four are magnet schools uh and then you see then there are some other very extraordinarily

046well-resourced schools in illinois to the north of us i'm going to leave it at that but really if you look at that it really says that our students did comparable to previous years and very well compared to other schools in the state let's look at this is and these charts were not developed by me i can't take credit for them they were developed by the curriculum and assessment directors of cook county cadca they have a working group kerry is a member i'm a member and what they did was they looked at the entire state data set and developed these out so they're looking at the all schools in illinois and here you see it looks at the impact of income low income designations in terms of how well a school performs and the uh you'll

047see there's a regression line there and that that curve uh really tells us what what the line of like best fit so it's so it says essentially the less low-income students you have the better your test results and if you were all things being equal you would be on that line if you're above that curve then you're doing quite well and you see that eths is well represented in that chart not doing better than would be predicted here we see math this again looks at 2019 scores compared to 2021 scores you will notice that we are just below the orange line we are not on the orange line we are the blue box but relative to other schools we are far we are fairly close to that line which tells us that the quote-unquote learning

048loss or whatever we're measuring loss right from regular year to wherever we are now uh really tells us that we're very close to where we were for that group and again at the top you have the same designation of schools you have the magnet schools in chicago north side prep walter payton whitney young and then you have other well-resourced schools above that and here you see the same line which looks at low income and really says you know line of best fit for that and again we are above the curve in that regard this in no way talks about how well our students are doing here at eths this is simply a comparison point and should be taken as such that during a pandemic and let's call it what it is a pandemic here's where

049our students how well they performed so now there's a series of uh charts pulled from the school report card square report card is interactive i couldn't make it interactive on these charts but if you go in you can start clicking around and you'll see that 89 of juniors participated in the sat and you see the participation by subgroup what i did was i just set it up for subgroup and that's what it it put out carrie are there any observations around the percent of juniors tested it looks pretty consistent okay uh you have your ela results are consistent with 2019 and there's variation by subgroup again we're looking at the english language arts meet succeeds now we'll walk us through that information that's 53 of our students met or exceeded the standard the benchmark in

050ela comparable to 2019. we see variation by subgroup 77 percent of white students met or exceeded in english language arts nineteen percent of our black students met or exceeded 29 percent of our hispanic students met are exceeded these designations are state designations on the report card 19 percent of our low-income students met or exceeded students with ieps are broken out on the school report cards 17 percent met or exceeded and you see students with disabilities that means in state parliaments that is students with 504s 42 percent and and you can see on the chart that that's up uh in terms of the students that matter exceeded in that subgroup compared to 2019. math results show a slight decrease we saw that when we looked at the scattergram there is variation by subgroup 67 of white

051students met or exceeded standards last year sixteen percent of black students never exceeded standards our hispanic students thirty one percent their scores went up you can see on the chart it looks like they went up seventeen percent of low-income students men are exceeded in mathematics twelve percent of students with ieps thirty-four percent of students with disabilities again that's the 504 designation by the state and you see that that number is is up the percentage of students meeting exceeding compared to 2019. our teachers continue to rise to the challenge of the pandemic in educating our students and our current seniors performed well relative to their peers in other districts uh we are committed to monitoring student progress not just standardized test scores standardized test scores are helpful to a certain extent they give you a temperature

052check but really we're looking at other achievement data as well grade distributions we're looking at you know and talking to teachers the modifications that need to happen in the curriculum we know that teachers are spending more time this school year going back over concepts that in a typical year would have been taught the year before so we're spending time on that um but again we're looking at that kind of data that kind of information uh to make adjustments to curriculum instruction this year for the first time in a long time we're going to start building a data set the psat 89 for freshmen the psat 10 for sophomores and the sat for 11th graders this data set will be particularly important to monitor in the years to come as we really wrestle with the uh

053the impact of the pandemic on academic achievement it's one thing to say juniors right after they've had freshman year if they've had you know all the way through eighth grade they came to the high school as freshmen they had a full freshman year they had uh three quarters of a sophomore year uh and then they were out uh and then you know they then they came back you know now they're back they're seniors they did well it'll be interesting to monitor the students who had who did not have a traditional transition to the high school uh talking about current sophomores who weren't here at all freshman year and also looking at that current junior class but we're tracking all of it and we really really need to um i think i just have a couple

054more concluding comments to make um so again it's not a proxy for well-being please let's not confuse us with the proxy for the kids are all right that's not what this is i think it's accurate to say our teachers continue to rise to the occasion our seniors did well relative to others we're committed to monitoring progress and we're really going to dig down and address that variation by sub group because there are some some achievement disparities they've been exacerbated clearly uh using this marker which also could be a proxy for how you know cove would disproportionately impact different uh subgroups at evanston so open uh to questions concerns comments we have another update uh we'll have another update a few months from now when we have the thirds the third release end of april have

055the third release of the school report card and we'll have some more robust comparison data with the state at that point thank you thank you dr badis um questions from the board this is really interesting as you were talking i was imagining and thinking even about a year ago how stressed we all were as we were going to winter break and coming back from thanksgiving and the rising numbers we didn't have a vaccine at the time and and i just can't imagine coming back to school and the first thing you do is take this really heavy duty test i would like to acknowledge carrie and her team for orchestrating that uh that was a real heavy lift yes all of our teachers and staff contributed to that but carrie's team coordinated that it was the

056first time we used every pretty much every room in the school because of spacing constraints at the time were utilized along with all of the covered restrictions we had in place but our staff was amazing and everyone leaned in and got it done safely so great thank you and i i also am just remembering how weird things felt with all that social distancing and you know the hallways and and then so now then they they take a test in a room that's different with social distancing and it just um just wondering really what those numbers really mean so looking forward to the next iteration of scores see um board any other comments or questions all right thank you very much and now we have dr kinsey coming up and dr robinson good evening board i

057am keith robinson associate principal for educational services i have with me dr levy and dr kinsey as we're happy to report an update when our sro started student survey uh and just kind of the process sure so um i think we wanted to start by just kind of framing our beginnings of this process that actually has encompassed a year and i had the opportunity to support the discipline committee after you all you know helped us move forward with really considering the role of the sro at eths and i know while we're here specifically to talk about the sro survey we wanted to do a little framing of the experience in our process so our discipline committee is very large committee comprised of community members board members obviously administrators social workers psychologists teachers safety personnel deans

058etc so we're glad that we have such great representation and when we began to work with the discipline committee and really starting to ask ourselves some questions around what what questions exist right as we seek to understand sros and their role at eths what concerns exist and and specifically how do we gather the facts so that we can have the answers to some of these questions accurately how can we engage in an organic way what what specific information do we want to gather and how in the midst of all of this are we centering equity as we have these conversations and so we were really happy to have hard conversations meaningful conversations and a lot of this in our experience and i think dr robinson is going to walk us a little bit more down

059this timeline is as we discovered this was not going to be a one or two committee conversation for us to really dig deep and so we then decided we are going to break off into a subcommittee so that we could continue to address the majority of the actual discipline committee chose to be part of the subcommittee and that was the high level of commitment that existed it meant for robust conversations it meant that we were on zoom doing breakouts of how we're identifying all of the impact and the consideration so we really appreciated it as an organic process that grew both in terms of our desire to gather survey information gather qualitative information but understand it from each other as well yeah thanks dr kenzie and she did a great job with beginning to frame

060you know the why uh that we're doing this and i gotta say it was a it was a pretty intense exercise i think it was a uh an exercise that we needed to do and it was a very collaborative one and extremely transparent dr kinsey mentioned the teachers community members uh representation from the board staff members safety department who really were critical with providing uh information meaningful information to really understand uh just what was needed to really get a better understanding of the impact uh in the intent of our sr our our role program so so we met initially and then we met again and again and again and uh what was interesting is there were a lot of people really leaning in that were interested in the topic and designing what we thought would

061be the best way to get the most information to gather for you to determine next steps so part of that was really coming up and creating a survey for students for staff guardians and parents and another piece was really bringing in multiple perspectives of sros both looking at the local and national levels we also invited community partners the moran center who did an amazing well-researched presentation we also had the chief police chief cook who gave us a great presentation and finally the missing voice was our own voice of our own local sro mr loy spells who really gave an update with our local way that we had the sros so what you're going to here tonight is a synthesis of all of that effort from the survey data to the voices of our our sro

062the voices of our community which is synthesizing this data and we're happy to to have dr levy here to walk us through a lot of them uh in the end we're happy to answer any question about the process and any information that you'll see in the report all right so i'm going to provide highlights from the surveys so timeline of the surveys in may 2021 spring so we were hybrid we did a start student survey and we had 69 of our students completed this survey and then we shared findings with the the committee and then when the school year started this year we had talked about the committee had talked about the need to survey staff and get feedback from parent guardians just at the time of the year there was no time to do

063it so we picked back up in the fall and i will say i appreciate the committee and all the feedback and the collaboration from the committee members in looking at and helping develop the survey and helping guide the questions that were really important for them so we send it in october we had staff about a quarter of staff took the survey 146 staff member responses and then we sent it out to the parent guardians at that time too and we have 189 responses so when i present the results for you know for the next several slides and i talk about the parent guardians i will refer to it as the parent guardians that chose to respond to the survey so this is not generalizable it represents the equivalent of about five percent of our school

064population so it's a very low response rate it's not generalizable but it is a voice and that we're sharing of those that took the the survey so i just provided some context compared to our opening of school enrollment numbers figuring the year the students that responded by grade and of the parent guardians that responded so pretty much equally distributed across grades and then by uh raised ethnicity so our students it's pretty uh since we had such a large response for our students about two-thirds it's fairly close in alignment to our student population the parent guardian again 189 parent guardians that responded and it's 60 percent white so it's a majority white so it's not equally distributed across our it is not it's not aligned with our overall population our demographic population and then our staff

065we sent out to all staff so two-thirds mostly our licensed staff and about of our non-licensed staff and then administration took it so we asked some of the questions from the highlights were one of the first questions is before taking the survey how aware were you of the role of eths sro so we had a scale of 0 to 100 where 0 is not at all aware and 100 is extremely aware it was like a sliding scale and so this is the the mean where our um responses lied so our staff most aware students were kind of in the middle and as they go through and i'll mention as we go through as we look through the survey and what we learned from the student responses and from the opening comments is they really had

066a hard time pulling apart the safety staff and the sro even though in the very beginning of the student survey we clearly explained the difference between sro and safety that they're not part of safety some history of it um these these surveys were ministered through their pe wellness they were they you know read that introduction and explanation too and one of the things we learned is they just had a hard time pulling that apart not all of them but there was a lot of confusion between safety and sro and i think there's just an important point as we kind of look through some of these um so we had a question that asked to what extent do you think gonna start to protect from an internal threat and then the next flight will have an

067external threat my glasses are fogging so it's hard to read that far but about half just over half reported uh frequently or almost always that they felt an srm would protect from an internal and external um and then i'm from an internal and then for the external it's pretty similar responses for about half slightly under for our students and those parent guardians that responded said frankly almost always and then over a third said once in a while sometimes and then we had some questions asking around kind of a general feelings towards the sro so we students asked how they felt when they saw sro inside eths and we did a word cloud with the word so the larger the word the more frequently it was cited in the student responses again they are saying their

068large words are like say find a different nervous secure comp but as we had several open-ended comments it really was clear that some of these were having a hard time in pulling apart safety versus the two sros in the building um staff we asked staff the same question how do you feel when you saw sros in the building and these are their responses the most frequently decided one was safe and then we can see others and then we have a scenarios that we asked how they would feel towards the sro so we asked them would how would you feel at if the sros at eths wore a police uniform and so we asked and this this question is in all of the three different surveys um so staff are uh majority about 40 percent are

069sort of neutral across the board staff students are mostly neutral another 40 percent of students that somewhat or much more uncomfortable and then um the the parent guards that responded it's kind of distributed across the grade so i'm just going to add for this one and the next several it was important for the committee to really think engage what if there was some changes you know what would that look like um and this was one of the questions what if they wore police uniforms and you'll see some of the other ones i just wanted to provide that context thank you yeah like wiki saying like i was saying what if they were traditional plain clothes um right and so again there's a half just on a half to say neutral not at all they wouldn't

070feel at all different and then this one is kind of sort of balanced on the ends between somewhat uncomfortable versus comfortable another question was how would you feel if they concealed their weapon um and we have uh about a quarter to a third saying more comfortable um about 15 under 20 say more uncomfortable and then a third a little over a third with staying neutral and how would you feel if they made their weapon more visible students over half said they would be more uncomfortable staff a higher portion than say more uncomfortable same with the parent guardians that responded and then about a quarter a little over a quarter staying neutral and then a smaller 10 percent a little over saying more comfortable and then we asked how would you feel if they were not

071present in the building so uncomfortable more uncomfortable about 47 percent of staff reported that a third of the students said they would be more uncomfortable and a little over half of the parent guardians that responded so they would be more uncomfortable half about 45 of the students were neutral to that and then about 10 12 uh across the board across the groups we're saying 15 are more comfortable and then how would you feel if they were present in the building more often and so half of the students reported neutral and then it was sort of split between the two um ends comfortable versus uncomfortable um a third again of staff are neutral and the third or more comfortable and then with the parent guardians that responded them just under half 46 were saying would be

072they are reporting they would be more comfortable and then i think this was the last one on this series was how would you feel if they were more visible outside on campus grounds before after and during the school day the level of comfort so students again half are neutral that a third or would be more comfortable with the staff about 40 would be more comfortable and just over a quarter are neutral and then with those parent guardians that responded just over half would be more comfortable and we have some questions asked about their relationship with the sro have we asked students have you personally had any interaction with an sro at eths um students and staff and 50 of staff said yes majority of the students almost 75 percent said no and then we asked

073how would you relate you really rate your relationship with sros in the building staff 42 percent almost said posit had a positive vary to somewhat positive and then just over a third reported neutral no relationship with students it was 73 percent almost that reported neutral to no relationship and we had a question about what do you think the role of an sro eth should be for staff and the parent guardians so staff primarily say to protect students and staff from internal external threats and then two-thirds also reported participating community programs we had response for students support students from mentoring programs that was over half and over half of the staff that took the survey um uh participate in restorative justice methods and then the responses are for the parent guardians that took the survey and

074then our at the end of the surveys we had a question about the likelihood of dangerous events so we asked them on a scale of 0 to 100 with zero being very unlikely and 100 being very likely how likely do you think the following is a dangerous violent event in the evanston community so staff and parent the parents that responded to the survey and the staff their responses are very similar to both of these an event in the community or event at eths and then so they're on the higher end and then the students with a lower half are just you know kind of the middle for an event at eths but then the students are lower for both of these compared to the staff and those parents that responded and then we had uh

075in the event we have an active shooter at each hhs how safe would you feel again on the scale of zero to 100 it was a sliding scale they could report not at all safe to very safe and and staff and those parent guardians that responded were similar in uh kind of around the 69 to 72 percent range that there was um on the safe to safety scale and then lower if there was no uniform sro on site to respond this question was different when we asked students it was an open-ended question and this the student survey was the one that was given first so we had asked the students and we used their words and it made a word cloud so in the event we have an active shooter eths how would you feel

076if there was no uniform sro on site to respond and this was the response from the students when we looked at the survey when the committee looked at the survey in the fall that's when we changed it to a scale instead of from this open ended for students so just some of the challenges that had made analyzing interpreting these responses a little difficult is the students definitely based on the analysis of the open-ended comments and for the 25 over 2500 students that responded a large portion provided open-ended feedback they really took the survey and they um responded with their thoughts so from looking through those it's clear that there were many that were confused the safety staff at eths with the sro so that made it difficult to make any generalizations out of it some

077of the findings and then the parent guardians was just an extremely small number so just with caution about how those responses are interpreted and used they are not generalizable to a larger parent guardian population so i just encouraged not to say parents said this the parents did not say this the parents that took the survey stated this the researcher in me is cautious okay so any questions um okay thank you thank you for presenting all that information okay board questions pat thanks carrie um so i know that the confusion is a big part of kind of understanding or not understanding but i'm wondering we did have a good number of students respond and while not perfectly aligned to our population by broken down by race um it wasn't bad like 22.5 percent of black respondents

078and 17 percent latino so we're in the in the zone so i'm wondering if you disaggregated the data and if those numbers that suggest comfort or discomfort would be different if we could see the subgroups and how they reported so i have to think back to the summer because we did disaggregate it and we did look at it we looked at the open-ended comments all of it desegregated by race and gender and i and i do not recall seeing any differences but i also haven't looked at that at that level since this past spring when i first presented that to the committee so i could go back if you if you need more information yeah i mean i think it would be helpful because i mean maybe you're right maybe it's exactly aligned with the

079general number but i just wonder if our black students or our female students have different perspectives buried in there and i realized there's this other confusion that makes even if there isn't that that confusion could have changed the results but it'd just be interesting to see if there's anything there thanks carrie yeah i'd be interested in that too um because i think that that um i'll just speak for myself that's on my mind wondering how black students would would respond what their experience is like what their if they've had interaction what that would be i'm just interested i'm not even saying or predicting i'm just wondering what that would be yeah i can go back and look i know we did like how many talk about it yes but i feel like that was a

080lifetime ago so i'm happy to go back and revisit that and um and and look at that information again okay thank you thank you other questions mira that was mine as well i just feel like part of the reason why we're considering if there is a presence of an sro continuing on comes after the wake of our summers and looking at violence on black bodies and so i couldn't begin to really i don't even you know make a judgment call or support or step forward without understanding how our students are experiencing sros based on identity specifically looking at race um and even looking at the word clouds which i thought were interesting numerically the majority will have if they you know feel similarly we'll dominate that space and so it was interesting but it didn't

081tell me what i believe is really the kernel that started a lot of this dialogue to begin with the world keeps changing and events keep happening and i know we personalize all of that and just wonder you know so what if it were our town so it's just really hard to unpack all of that this was a very very engaged committee right and and probably one of the uh i would say the best commute committees i've been on that had such a diverse cross-section of engagement from community to partners right and we knew that we were missing the student voice um and so which is why of course we wanted to get that information and to um to go deeper in into the data um i do recall that question being lifted right we talked

082about that and i think there are so many assumptions that can be made behind the responses you know what does neutral mean like i don't care i choose not to answer um you know we don't know we don't know and we don't know who's making the neutral or you you have the information we can find out but um so that that's very interesting to me we we also had a conversation around if i'm the group the targeted group then i'm not as comfortable and won't be as revealing in completing the survey right even as a parent i'm not going to bring that trauma um into my space and you know i was this open during the during the committee so so there's no secret that you know that i'm expressing this but i'm not going

083to invite that unnecessary trauma right so i choose not to do the survey um and and i would say what some of my colleagues have already said after receiving the report from epd having engagement from the moran center that targeted on uh they gave us the information we didn't want to hear you know and and some new information but um that targeted a certain group it would make sense to receive impact or feedback from that group so that we can make the decision that's necessary or completely look at it through an equity lens and you know so i i think we still have some some work to do in terms of getting that information but there are a lot of things that we already know and you know and and and there are a lot

084of things if you don't know there's a lot of information out there to inform to be informed and i say that you know to my colleagues so there's information out there even if you don't have it readily at hand but i i do want to thank you all for engaging in this conversation it was not easy it hasn't been comfortable it's probably one of the most uncomfortable conversations to have and and i understood that and i respect you know you getting uncomfortable as we're starting to to try to figure out how to unpack this um so you know i want to acknowledge that but also say that we don't have all the information we need and and we need to get a little bit more deeper so that we can clearly make some sort of

085progress in a decision or towards a decision thank you we didn't expect to take action or come to any conclusion or decision tonight we're just just looking at the survey the results of the survey just kind of having this broad discussion and i just think the information from the survey is really helpful even putting putting it together which i know the committee spent a lot of time and hours developing these questions selecting these questions has really been that had to be quite a process that in and of itself so i appreciate that um so it does give us some information um and we just have to keep thinking about what are what are what are the appropriate next steps for for us so i can go back to the student survey since that's really the

086most robust robust data too um and look back at where we were at the end of the school year in may when i shared it with the committee yeah i feel like i impact some of it but there's still more to unpack so let me go back and look what we did and see what more i can um disaggregate for you to help inform your decisions okay wonderful this one was like kind of a big picture across all of the surveys together i was just going to add to if there was anything else that you can think of that could provide more context and information for you you know we'd love to to get that as well so that we can give you what you need thank you my final ad was the tremendous work

087of the committee you know leaders were amazing and our staff spent countless hours i mean you spoke to it already but it was really phenomenal this isn't a committee that meets during the school day right this meets in the evening after school just inordinate amounts of time their personal time because it was such a personal commit and getting vulnerable and exploring racial identity and the relevance to their own experiences and my own experiences and thinking about the sros as well and while the three of us are up here i just wanted to give a shout out to alex brown who is the co-chair and you know one of our teachers including on teachers council who was a fantastic teacher leader throughout and spent way more time with me when keith happened to need to be

088out for a period of time than we ever anticipated organizing all of this so the commit of our school is pretty impressive thank you thank you for that all right other questions board okay we'll keep talking thank you so much okay the next item oh i guess that's me okay yes i'm just gonna do a quick update on the superintendent's search and just i haven't had the opportunity to speak publicly about this we we've had a process and our board has selected the alma advisory group to help us engage in the executive search process and we are really excited about this this this group understands the significance of selecting the next superintendent it is the most important thing that we will do um so we are very um um serious and and i want to

089make sure that we carry this out but we also understand how important it is for the board to engage in the authentic community engagement process so that we can understand the community's priorities and aspirations for our high schools so we are really looking forward to this process and selected this group pretty much because they are um very much about engage in community engagement and just making sure that that approach will happen so we will through this process take time to listen to what the community members and that includes parents and students and staff community members educators that includes really keem key members of our community monique parsons and i will be working very closely with them and we will work as a board together we're going to spend a lot of time together board um

090[Music] get ready um and and um well um we we had hoped to um be able to um have a survey ready prior to winter break i'm not sure if that's going to happen i'm i just feel like the time is getting away from us but we will at least have a draft for the board to review prior to that time and then in january we'll be able to to send a survey and start multiple focus groups and launch launch communication to all of our stakeholders so that will happen in probably late january and um we'll be able to really look for that feedback and just as important is sharing the information that we get so we'll have all the information that we'll share and be able to report findings as we go along one

091of my one thing that i'm really excited about is this group will either develop a website connected that will be linked to our district or they'll develop a process within our district so that community members will be able to go on the website and check our progress so that's going to be helpful as well so i just wanted to get that out did i leave anything out i will try to give updates on a regular basis also at board meetings in addition to the website so really excited about this this is going to be good all right so the next item um there are a few foyers listed uh dr davis you have anything you'd like to add yes we've received uh we have two foias from agnew one from cortez one from sb three

092from hirsch one from irvine six from meadows one for toward torelli and one for wilson and those responses are in your packet okay thank you all right next item is comments from the public dr davis how many comments do we have yes we have 11 comments from the public and let me just uh remind everybody this is our introduction to comments from the public speakers who signed up for public comment will be invited in the order they signed up to address the board for up to three minutes i will keep time i will sign you and there's uh i'll do a two minutes left one minute left and then i'll fumble with my phone when it goes off um in the event that becomes necessary i always struggle to turn it off so just so

093you know speakers are asked to come forward and speak at the lectern up here i'll make sure that the button is turned on public comments generally pertain to school district matters but comments about any individuals are expressly prohibited please understand that the school board does not respond to public comments but will listen carefully and will follow up as the board deems appropriate our first public comment this evening is david soglin thank you and good evening my name is david soglin i'm an evanstonian and a pediatrician with an interest in the intersection of health education and the impact of trauma and toxic stress on the well-being and development of children and youth the recent tragic events in our own city and at oxford high school in michigan highlights both the very real risk and the psychological

094impact of violence and the threat of violence trauma does not have to be directly experienced to cause negative effects in children and i know as dr kinsey reported that eths has our students mental health and best interests at heart and while it may seem logical that having police officers in a school would improve safety there is simply no evidence that school violence is reduced or mitigated by the presence of school resource officers there is however ample evidence regarding the negative impact sros have on some students particularly at risk our black latinx and lgbtq students as well as those with disabilities a recent pediatric article reviewed 29 studies looking at exposure to police and adolescent health too the authors concluded that trivial that i quote trivial police contact or the fear of contact may be detrimental

095to the health of black youth end quote those most negatively impacted by police in schools are those who've had negative interactions with law enforcement in the past and those who have experienced toxic stress childhood toxic stress is a significant risk factor for many negative outcomes including educational attainment job performance mental health and adult longevity toxic stress disrupts neurodevelopment and rewires children's brains reducing their ability to engage in executive level functions or control their impulses and behavior all essential for academic excess success in fight or flight survival mode commonly triggered in children with high exposure to toxic stress the brain is physiologically unable to take in new knowledge problem solve or lay down short-term memory one minute having police officers at eths is undoubtedly reassuring to many students and faculty especially right now but we must

096be guided by facts the data is clear on three things first school violence is not reduced by the presence of armed police officers second police in the building increases the risk that student misbehavior ends in and third for some adolescents especially youth of color the presence of armed law enforcement is anxiety provoking and pose a significant risk for their long-term well-being for this group of students having police in the school decreases their feelings of safety increases their experience of toxic stress and disrupts or diminishes their ability to learn is this subset of youth who are harmed by the mere presence of sros in the building and they are most at risk for getting pulled into the school-to-prison pipeline eths has expressed a sincere desire to become a trauma-informed school with an interest in the mental

097health of all its students as an important step in this direction i encourage you to eliminate the sros thank you time thank you next up we have john kennedy farrell good evening board members as an eths teacher and an evanston parent 1503 washington street i am ready to ask that as the board composes its five-year goals it includes specific goals to increase the recruitment and retention of black licensed educators at eths study after study including one completed by the university of north carolina researchers in 2017 has confirmed what seems to be common sense that students have a higher level of success in school when they have even one teacher who shares their own racial and or ethnic identity students benefit when they are able to see their own identity mirrored in front of the classroom

098however since the licensed staff at eths is currently 68 white it is much more likely that a white student will benefit from this educational boost than a black student or latinx student only 17 percent of licensed educators are black six percent black males and only seven percent of licensed educators are latinx two in addition as a white educator i believe that all staff members at eths would benefit from a diversity that more closely matches the diversity of our student body dr witherspoon has said numerous times and rightly so that until we have succeeded in correcting the deficits in our system that have disadvantaged black males then every year at eths should be the year of the black male setting a goal to raise the percentage of black male licensed educators far past the current six

099percent would be consistent with this vision and i think it should actually go much farther than that considering that many uh black students come into eths having had only one or or or no educators that matched their their race and identity and gender identity as well to be clear a high percentage of non-licensed black educated professionals have been doing this work in hhs's doors for a long time and been holding space for young people been building character and supporting students but i think that we can do even better increased encroachment of licensed black educators should go hand in hand with intentional programs that help retain black educators and help make sure that the atmosphere at eths is one that supports and forms all educators to be actively anti-racist and confronting the systems that promote racial

100disparity wherever those systems may exist thank you very much for your consideration of these thoughts and please know of my regards for you as you search for a new superintendent and prepare for the next five years there are big shoes to fill and big goals to set thank you next i'm going to need a little help because my vision is not very good i think i have meg ella and claire but if you could come up and say your last names into the microphone for the record that way i'll have it yes meg houseworth ella ing claire gover thank you so it's three minutes total yes okay good evening district 202 board we are three eths juniors urging for the removal of the two armed school resource officers on campus with the recent school shooting

101in oxford michigan we acknowledge the emotional closeness of this topic while school resource officers can provide peace of mind we believe it is within the best interest of the school well-being that sros are removed from campus we believe a majority of in-school altercations can be de-escalated by unarmed safety officers mental health professionals and trauma-informed staff who have the better capacity to understand student behavior responses for a significant portion of our student body the president of armed law enforcement can be anxiety invoking and triggering especially given the violent history of police brutality within the country some students may feel peace of mind with sros but evidence from the eths's five essentials data indicates that many students feel significantly less safe in the presence of an armed officer quote on a scale of one to one hundred

102with a hundred being the safest and two and one being the least safe white students at eths averaged a score of 59 for safety while latinx students on average rank their feelings of safety at 49 and black students at 42. in addition quote students with individualized education plans averaged a score of 47 for school safety while students without iep scored school safety at 53 on the whole the sro's ability to arrest accelerates the school-to-prison pipeline especially for students of color and students with disabilities according to the moran center quote black students at eths comprise approximately 25 percent of the school population but made up 77 of the arrests from january 2017 until december of 2019. nationwide students with disabilities comprise 12 percent of the school's populations but represent 25 percent of school-based arrests and referrals

103to law enforcement end quote one minute in july of 2020 this board met on the subject of sros so we asked you today on december 13 2021 to please consider our revisions in order to create a more racially equitable and restorative school community we want to make clear that we aren't attacking individuals but rather the historically punitive system they belong to the ways in which edhs is making strides towards more restorative practices like including alternative interventions to address behavior should be incorporated in the discussion to remove sros we are currently working with four other eths students to conduct research about student sro experience and are more than happy to work side along you all in this process to reimagine school safety thank you for your time thank you thank you next we have lily aaron

104good evening board and minute sorry good evening board members and administration my name is lily aaron and i'm a senior at eths the hub coordinator of etown sunrise and i had the privilege of attending cop26 with a program called it's our future i would like to prefer preface my comments tonight by acknowledging that there is no climate justice without racial justice sros have absolutely no place at eths and it is the obligation of this board to ensure school safety in a way that honors the well-being of black and brown students the climate crisis is yet another injustice upheld by white supremacy instituting inequity across the board to address this injustice we must equip each and every eths student with the resources and knowledge needed to combat the crisis we are set to inherit we must

105develop a comprehensive climate curriculum not just for ap environmental students but for every student that delves into the intersectionality of what is at hand i thank dr bavis for his willingness to create a committee dedicated to climate literacy and dr campbell for his commitment to earth month programming but we must be going faster additionally eths must hire a full-time sustainability coordinator to craft and implement a climate action plan in line with the city's climate action resilience plan district 65 has committed to hiring one part time this year and transitioning to a full-time position next year two clearly they understand the urgency of this issue and that there is no time to waste over sixty percent of young people suffer from climate anxiety due to an adult in action you are in a unique position to

106do something about it the intergovernmental panel on climate change says that in order to prevent the gravest impacts of the climate crisis from being irreversible we must limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees coming out of cop we are on track to reach 2.7 degrees celsius globally although true global climate action may be difficult to push forward we have the power to act at this level eths sorry eths cannot continue to hide behind vague mission statements we must do something now dr witherspoon i thank you so much for the decades worth of commitment to student well-being as we are already seeing increased tornadoes floods food and food insecurity and more i invite you to make true climate action a part of your legacy meanwhile eths students will continue to push for more rigorous climate policy

107one minute whether change amounts from the sport or not again we ask that you develop a comprehensive climate action plan the development of climate curriculum and higher sustainability coordinator we ask that you all actively participate in addressing the issue as intergenerational as this one thank you thank you next up we have abdel shakur hello uh my name is abdel shakur i'm a teacher at eths current chair of the black caucus at eths when the great rodney lowe retired in 2018 i became the only black male english teacher at evanston township high school that matters because i am a part of rodney lowe's legacy and i know that because he told me so he actually held the door open for me he let me know when i was doing good and that my and he modeled

108how to show up for students every day and that mattered a lot because despite being a veteran teacher when i came here my first couple years at eths were a bumpy ride new curriculum new evaluation systems new parents new dynamics of race and power i struggled and it mattered having an older brother out there looking out for me and there were other black teachers tish my mentor reminded me that everything glittery ain't gold tammy who visited my class and cheered my practice deshauna or totally lette they all took time to lend me an encouragement and a resource and of course it wasn't just black teachers that supported me too but feeling a part of that community gave extra weight to everything that we did and there were black folks in different roles from custodial to

109safety to admin that helped lighten my load but that network didn't come from nowhere the legacy of black teaching stretches generations at eths black teachers have been resisting white supremacy refining our craft and loving our children the best we can for a long long time at 1600 dodge but and now and though there's been progress the bare fact remains that at a school where 25 percent of the students are black only 17 percent of the licensed staff is black 20 percent of the students are latinx but only eight eight percent of the licensed staff is latinx with all the work we've done around serving black male students only six percent of our licensed staff is black male and our last licensed staff is 68 percent white this matters because the research is clear students have

110who have even one black male teacher we have one black teacher during elementary are more likely to graduate high school and consider college having a teacher that reflects your racial identity is affirming and shows that you have a place i'm here today because you may not know this but our black teaching staff is getting older a lot of folks been here for a long time and they're getting ready to retire they deserve it and we're not getting the fresh uh core of teachers to come in to support and rebuild that community so what i'm asking today is without an intentional vision that cultivates black teaching and community for our children all of our children will lose an essential resource our board you all has to incorporate the recruitment and retention of teachers of color particularly

111black teachers in our five-year goals for this to happen we need it to be accountable we need a vision that we can all buy into because if that won't happen then i'm not sure who the next rodney low will be at this school thank you next i'm going to need a little help with the signature but it's mary i think it's rosinski is it mary r mary r okay william royster uh hello thank you for allowing me this time to speak with you today i'm william royster and i'm a member of student union but i'm not here on their behalf i'm here as a senior of eths with a simple solution to an important problem i was a facilitator at the weather belt forum about a week ago and have been pouring through the responses

112since then over and over and over again the same issue and the same sentiment appeared students i'm sorry the 85-minute block schedule is simply too long for our students they're getting bored they're checking out mentally and they're losing focus in class this idea sprung forth in countless different ways and countless different times some called for no blocks at all numerous students called for 60 or 7-minute blocks many wrote 85 minutes too long simply and plainly students not just didn't just bring their complaints they brought solutions we are not even halfway done collecting our responses and shifting and sifting through the responses but we have seen dozens dozens and dozens and dozens the students say saying they would just like simply a blo a break in the middle of their periods many teachers throughout eths have

113had the wisdom and the foresight to do this already giving students a short pause in the lesson plans i suggest that eths mandate this for all of our classes here the benefit of this is that it gets the the first advantage of this proposal is that it adjusts the issue head-on students are growing disengaged more and more with their class periods after 60 minutes of consecutive writing work and note taking they're putting their heads on the desk they're watching the clock and they're doing everything else besides the actual classwork this is not why we have students in the building at all by introducing a break students can refocus reorganize and re-energize this students can enjoy their classes more but more importantly it allows teachers to fill their classes with more actual learning where students are

114engaged and involved with the lesson plans one minute furthermore furthermore this proposal recognizes that every class is different and gives teachers through discretion to place their breaks wherever they like in the class that fits naturally with their lesson plans so we can keep moving with the class i believe that i believe that if this administration takes the time to listen to these concerns being put forth by students we can create them we can create a much-needed five-minute break for students as soon as they start a second semester i look forward to hearing your input and i hope we can make progress together thank you next up is sarah bogan hi and thank you for allowing me to speak today my name is sarah bogan i graduated from eths in 2016 and i am currently a

115member of evanston fight for black lives and i'm here on their behalf evanson fight for black lives strongly acknowledges that the system of policing is inherently racist and more often than not harms black and brown communities no matter how kind or patient officers might be as people they work for a dangerous system that causes fear mistrust and anxiety in a place of learning that is supposed to be welcoming for all students there is no place for sros in evanston township high school when officers interact with students they automatically escalate the situation in part because of their lethal weapon and the power of the law behind them for example a fight that could be broken up by eths is trained and unarmed safe safety officers has the potential to become an aggravated battery charge a felony

116offense alternatives to police in schools require a larger investment in social and emotional learning transformative and restorative justice violence prevention programming more social workers and better de-escalation intervention training police do not solve the behavioral and emotional route of a transgression if you are looking for a model of effective alternative programming look to high schools like north shore academy and highland park that do not use police while having to deal with lots of threats of violence it is our understanding that dr campbell and dr witherspoon's reasoning for having sros in the school is for a faster response time in the case of a school shooting or a bomb threat we argue that officers do not need to be present in the building or interacting with students to be prepared to respond to one of these threats

117in a timely manner manner we encourage the school board to explore alternative models like the ones stated above to find ways to protect all students without harming our marginalized communities i'd also like to encourage the board to include students clearly there are very bright kids who go here currently who could help get better data from the kids who go here now and how they are being impacted by sros i would specifically like to hear more from the students who have been harmed by the sros who work here and who are still here yeah and i'm grateful for the work and the data you did collect but i think it is imperative for to be accurate that the students who are taking it know that sros are not the safety department because that really makes that

118interpretation confusing and i just also like to point out that the word bubbles yes safe was the biggest word but the second biggest were uncomfortable and anxious thank you for your time thank you next we have dawn eddie good evening my name is don eddy and i'm from the math department and i am here to read there was a letter that was submitted to you guys and i was supposed to read it as a math department we would like to express our concern about the hiring and retention of black teachers in our school and in our department this statement is in response to conversations we have had both across our department and in racial affinity groups we believe that in order to better to best serve our diverse student body it is important that we

119have black teachers there are currently five black teachers in the math department the mean and median age of our black math teachers is approximately 50 but i'm not 50 yet okay which makes this matter even more urgent because many of them are nearing the end of their teaching careers we believe the school board must include goals to address the recruitment and retention of black teachers in its five-year goals thank you for your consideration sincerely members of the math uths math department and signed by 30 math teachers okay i am also here to represent um a smaller subset of the math teachers the black math teacher affinity group and two minutes thank you a quote taken from a time magazine article entitled want to support black students invest in black teachers the quote says if we

120take c wait if we take seriously the call to reimagine and restructure our schools in ways that recognize the value of black lives then a much larger focus on the recruitment and retainment of black teachers is non-negotiable our presence is very impactful to many black students that is not to say we are the only ones who should educate black children but we know our worth and our value to black students as well as non-black students one student reported i don't feel like i have to prove that i am worthy or smart to everyone in the room i just felt as though i could just be my true self and my teacher saw the best in me unquote in the math department black teachers are underrepresented and addressing the issues surrounding representation and retainment is long

121overdue we have all individually addressed concerns and various issues pertaining to underrepresentation and lack of retention within our department for over the last 13 years and we feel that it's time to collectively utilize our voices and energies to engage the school to address the issues one minute yeah the last african-american male hired and tenured um was hired in 2008 and is currently our only black math teacher the last african-american female that was hired and tenure was hired in 2002. so as was stated in the letter from the majority of our department we would like to have a board goal that addresses the recruitment and retainment of black teachers we are open to offer dialogue and suggestions to help that happen and it's imperative thank you thank you next we have jennifer karlovitz hi i wasn't

122sure i was going to speak but when i heard the talk about social emotional learning and culture of care and i didn't hear much about conflict resolution and so i came to speak i i really don't want the sr sros to remain in the schools but i appreciate the speakers who spoke so eloquently i guess the one other thing is the city of evanston tells me that you guys pay a hundred thousand per year for the sros i'm not sure if that's true but if it is i would certainly like that to go to social workers thank you that concludes public comment for this evening thank you to all who spoke um [Music] okay i'm gonna just keep going here the next item on the agenda is board committee reports are there any board committee

123reports to share if not i have just very quickly i attended the joint conference in november november 19th through 21st and and i served as a school board delegate to vote on resolutions so i just would encourage i know that the board members received this and anybody interested in the public to look at the 23 proposals that the delegate assembly looked at and lots of information i'm not going to go through all of them it's way too much but if you're interested it would be easy to find it on the illinois association of school board website okay um so now we're at student board report uh barbara okay so um this month earlier we had the witherball forum which was a great success and thank you to all the administrators who were there especially dr

124witherspoon you were there the whole day so we really do appreciate that and so do all the students that showed up we had like about 500 students in and out the whole day so a lot of people talking to each other a lot of notes a lot of opinions and student union is just working on kind of sifting through those and were not close to being done so i can't really conclude on what opinions we've and feedback we've gone back from that but we're trying to decide like which of those opinions are like quick fixes like that can get fixed within a meeting or two with dr witherspoon and dr campbell and then things that should be brought to the board which are more serious and timely and also regarding the public comments there were

125a lot of comments about sros as well as teachers of color at our school so i can't really say anything about that yet because we have not gotten through all of those responses but um we have kind of collected um a good amount of opinion and yet again thank you so much to everybody all the administrators that showed up and all the teachers that signed their classes up it was really great and i think that you know for years to come the weatherbuff forum should be seen as such like a great space for our students our administrators our teachers and just the school as a whole so that'll be it for today thank you thank you barbara and while i don't have i've already given my report i just want to compliment barbara the student

126union william uh that the students really organized but more importantly facilitated a really amazing day and so you were giving credit to everybody who came and and credit to the teachers but i want i i and i've shared this with with you already the student facilitators and these were out of the student union were unbelievable i thought wow there are a lot of adults who couldn't facilitate a meeting and conversations that well uh with years of experience so uh kudos thank you all right so we are at the audit committee um it's 9 30 of course we are yes we didn't want you to get used to coming too early hello kendra i saw her come in [Laughter] they're all watching the whole city so good evening board um as you can see kendra williams

127our assistant cfo is here with me tonight this process has really become her baby and i was happy to turn it over to her i'm sure we will mistakenly call this the kaffir this is our comprehensive annual financial report and the governing body changed the name this year to akfur still says the same thing just two of the words are flip-flopped so right so it's now an act fur um so we do have you have the clicker yeah so we have a little um we have 27 slides you don't mind right just kidding we have like seven so kendra's going to start just kind of summarizing you have the document as well as the accompanying letters from our auditors in your packet and a memo from me that shows um similar points that kendra's going

128to highlight on some of the slides so i'll turn it over to her all right so uh regarding the ack for still getting used to that acronym like mary mentioned but we did hold our audit committee meeting on december 6th to go over the details of it or the highlights more so and we were able to just discuss the important information that's held in there fortunately we had a positive audit opinion we had a positive audit opinion which is great no significant deficiencies or material weaknesses were found and so just to go into that a little bit more when we say no significant deficiencies or material weaknesses when the auditors come they're not just considering the financial pieces right that when we say we have a million dollars in the bank that we have a

129million dollars in the bank but they're also looking at that in addition to internal controls right so if something were to go wrong financially would the business office be able to identify those weaknesses are there any internal control deficiencies things of that nature and so they uh found that we were holding everything down well thankfully and they offered the only point that they did offer which is something that they offer to all of their clients just given the time that we're in now is to just be mindful uh as we make advances with technology just making sure that we are staying up on data security risk because we know that people are constantly trying to do cyber attacks and we have neighboring districts that have been affected by this um and so they gave tips

130on what we could be doing to improve fortunately our iit department has implemented a number of the items that were on their list and then it just gives us some more things that we can build on for the coming year so that's the feedback that we received from the auditors but things were positive we're happy to say so as far as finances there were moderate increases in revenues and expenses this fiscal year in comparison to the previous one we did complete a 1.5 million plan transfer and then there was also an increase in state and federal aid and reductions in some expenditures due to cova 19 so this allowed for us to have a surplus of 4.2 million also just in considering the different funds i know that we've gone over these before when we

131for example discuss the budget so with the general fund that includes the education fund tort fund and the working cash fund and so that increased by about 300 000 and uh and i already mentioned that we did that plan transfer to the capital improvement funds that also considers it the uh transfer to the debt service fund and so after that transfer that happened the education fund in particular which is our largest fund had a surplus of 35 000 and then marriage can you go back to the slide i just want to make sure um oh right general fun versus education okay okay yes okay um so i just i wanted to um make one point on one of the points that uh kendra brought out that when we talk about that 1.5 million dollar plan

132transfer you might remember that a few probably three years ago we talked about the fact that we really needed to address some capital needs and we're going to get to some capital info just a little bit on on the next slide but i just wanted to go back a little bit we discussed with the board a few years ago just needing to really do some capital maintenance to the building and also wanting to be very conservative with issuing debt and so that's why we started issuing so we do bonds every four years and then in between we do what's called a debt certificate which has a much shorter payback and so as long as the district could afford it we talked about the plan of not issuing um as many bonds as we could although

133our debt our debt ceiling is not huge so it's not like there's a lot of room there to issue debt but because we had started receiving some additional revenues from the closing of the washington national tiff we talked about kind of pledging some of that money towards capital needs as long as the district could afford it and so that's really what that one and a half million dollars is about a good portion of that 900 000 goes into the capital fund directly as a funding source when we come to you in the fall and talk about the funding sources for capital that's the 900 000 that we show on that funding schedule and then the other 600 000 does go to pay for our debt certificates so so um on the subject of debt uh

134because we're subject to debt ceilings like i said i think the district has tried to be pretty conservative in using long-term debt as a tool you can go out up to 20 years which is fine when you're building a an improvement that's probably going to last between 30 and 50. but i'm really proud of the fact that we've been able to really shorten that payback schedule in a lot of cases and so this year again as we did last year the district reduced long-term debt by almost 2.6 million in debt service and then other liabilities like imrf which we don't really control the imrf and trs liabilities that the state really the governing bodies make us list on our financials but i think it's still an accomplishment that we really have reduced those numbers in

135the last couple of years and i think that's important especially because our capital needs always outpace the availability of the funds here our depreciation this year was something like 3.8 million and so really if you think about it as an accountant you want to try to keep up with what how your assets and your building improvements are depreciating but the truth is it's difficult for this district to afford 3.8 to 4 million dollars in capital improvements every year we've done a good job but that's partly because of the third bullet here which is how we've been transferring money from [Music] excess in the educational fund or in this case it was actually working cash which is part of general fund and then in 2021 we transferred that 1.5 million that we were just talking about

136so we have been able to transfer some money which has really allowed us to do closer to maybe 5 million a year in capital projects and that seems like a lot but i'll tell you this summer we're about to do the second phase of the window project on in east school on dodge really just first second third floor that's it front front of the building and the second half of the girls locker room those two projects just the half that we're doing this summer um is about 2.4 to 2.5 million dollars so really if we didn't do these other kind of creative savings and and kind of keeping our money available for capital we'd only be able to do like those two projects in a year and those are big projects so that would be

137tough to do anything else that's really needed in the building not to mention tuck pointing and roofs and things that are super important to keeping the building going so i just want to kind of give you that background on on debt and capital i think we have one more slide on capital yeah i feel like the capital and debt all that something yeah i kind of just went off topic a little bit but they they are sometimes related because we use debt to finance the capital so as i mentioned we have a lar had a large amount of capital spending in this budget i mean this um ekfor as we have in the past few years the projects finished between july of 2020 and june of 2021 included the boys locker room which was another

138giant one in two phases and the outdoor track resurfacing which turned out beautifully but as you know everything's expensive these days and the projects that we just finished uh included the literacy lab which was 100 funded by the eths foundation thankfully the auditorium upgrades which was another 2 million multi-year project and we really just scratched the surface we could have done a lot more in the auditorium due to its size and age and i don't know if you've noticed but our band tower is now in place as of last week december 8th they came and installed that thing we've we were told i think it would probably be in an april so that was a classic example of how everything just got kicked down the road because of supply shortages for covid that's another project

139that was fully paid for by the foundation it's at the corner of um laken dodge so if you haven't seen it don't go see it now it's dark but it's pretty cool and very safe so i feel like a broken record sometimes because i feel like i talk to you about a lot of the same things at budget time and financial time so um just wanted to remind you that we still don't fully understand the recovery period of the pandemic at least financially and in many other ways of course the good thing is we had some revenue streams that were pretty positive we didn't know how some things like the corporate property replacement tax would be affected we were pleasantly surprised that that was actually over budget and it's completely out of our control i

140haven't heard anything in a while about property tax of property tax freeze but we know that's always a possibility there is some new legislation that's just coming about to help districts re-coop the money that can be lost during property tax appeal so i'll have some more information for you that really soon about that really soon i think that it could be a positive flow to the district as early as i think it's probably going to be fall of 22 so i don't think it will be in this budget year because the spring property tax payments are really a percentage of a previous year so and then the last thing is the continued unknowns of trs and the amount the amount we could be required to contribute towards pensions in the future i think that's it

141yep any questions i'd i'd like to say something uh to kind of frame this first of all uh to both of you mary and kendra to your whole department and to all of the people in the district who have uh responsibilities for budgeting their areas and administering their budgets uh i really want to give an extra shout out uh i can tell you as you saw um we ended this year with with the best audit we could have wanted if we had written it ourselves it would not have been a better audit and believe we would have written it well but uh you know every year we try so hard and we do have a good audit every year we've had one now for i could attest to 16 years in a row but as

142mary and i uh for sitting in on our last audit that we will do here it was really um extra special uh to really uh hear from the auditors that it was a completely clean audit and uh and and that we really are in a very sound financial position i think it's especially important when mary mentions that we've even transferred the last couple of years money into the capital improvement projects because we just simply can't raise enough revenue to do all the structural things that this building needs but what's so important about that we're not only keeping a good budget keeping good financial records doing things properly in the way that they need to be done but we're also not mortgaging the future we know that this building needs a lot of special care and

143and and instead of just kind of putting things off uh for somebody else to address in future years we're actually investing more money into the structural and capital improvements in this building so that this beautiful building uh will will be maintained the way it needs to be maintained for decades to come so to you to every and it's a a team effort there are a lot of people with budget responsibilities and they all have to keep their area within budget and uh and to all of you um it's really um rewarding for me uh to see that uh on the 16th and final audit that i sat down and had responsibility for uh we we continued to get the kind of feedback that we got so thank you thank you and i think just to

144expand on that real quickly eric i i do think that without the open conversations about trying to use some of those transfers in a creative way from working cash from you know some of that washington national tiff money i think that we would really have had to ask you to choose between redoing the boys girls locker rooms and auditorium and keeping you know replacing roofs and doing the major masonry projects that we did on the front of the school with the windows and windows might seem kind of silly sometimes but when you look at some of the windows that are in some of the wings of the building that are you know they're 50 years old and they literally leak and they leak onto carpets and they leak into hallways and so unfortunately well fortunately

145we didn't have to choose between those things but i do think that if it were not for this kind of process of using money as long as we could afford to use it on the board being agreeable to that i i think we would have chosen between projects that we really needed and projects that we not only needed but really wanted to do and so thank you for allowing us the flexibility to kind of build that into the plans and present that to you and thank you for the foresight to be able to say to us you know here's some here's some creative suggestions there's here's looking ahead into the future and and this is what we need and coming down pike and really just really um just getting ahead of it all and staying

146ahead of it all so i agree with dr witherspoon i think your department has been superb in making sure that um even with those threats and you said you sound like a broken record every time i see that list or think about those threats you know i i just wonder so is this gonna be the year is this gonna is it gonna happen with the pension uh this year i don't we don't know and and and i i feel like we've really been able to um uh dodge a lot of bullets because we've just been thinking so much about what could happen planning for that and um and and that's you know i i give you so much you and your department so many kudos for that so thank you and i see that that

147financial report and all those awards that you know we've actually kind of come to take for granted you know you we still get these amazing awards that are just not prov not given to most districts and you know very high honors so thank you it's clear you've done some amazing work and they don't just give us a pass because you've gotten it before kendra has to work for those awards every year and reprove herself so but we were really happy at how smooth this audit went and um i've i've been happy to be able to step away for the last few years and i think we have a good rhythm going on it's great thank you other questions board all right thank you thank you again both of you all right so we are at

148action items uh the first item is acceptance of fiscal 2021 audit report could i have a motion please so moved a second did you get that lisa okay well call please yes the next item is adoption of 2021 levy so moved second world cup place yes the next item is the resolution declaring the intention to to issue not to exceed six million dollars a lot of zeros i know uh six million dollars working cash fund bonds for the purpose of increasing the district's working cash fund and directing that notice of such intention to be published in a manner provided by the law so move second we'll call please yes the next item is approval of the alma advisory group contract so moved second low call please yes the next item is approval of board of

149education code of conduct and board agreements so moved second we'll call please yes the next item is the consent agenda which consists of approval of minutes from november 6 2021 special meeting november 6th 26th november 6 2021 closed session meeting november 8th 2021 regular meeting november 8 2021 closed session meeting november 16 2021 special meeting november 16 2021 closed session meeting december 1st 2021 special meeting and december 1st closed session meeting also approval of bills treasurer's report from october 2021 and personnel agenda which consists of appointments to staff support staff operations change in status stipends leave of absence maternity certified resignation state safety and other and support staff mou could i have a motion please so moved second workout please yes okay next item is old and new business does anybody have anything you'd like

150to bring up all right closing polling of the board i'll just say that i was able to get to yama and i saw liz there and it was really amazing very talented group of students so fun it's really great way to spend an evening and i think one more weekend right this coming weekend you're going friday okay good you'll love it anything else it's not okay i'm sorry i just wanted to say since it's a little ways off for them but um i just wish all of our students and our wonderful staff a really well deserved winter break i hope everyone really unplugs and and enjoys themselves because i know it's lots going on and it's been challenging and we don't get a lot of chance to say thank you and and take care to

151all of you but um i think this is a good time for you to do that so thank you great thank you yes happy happy holidays to all of you could i have a motion for adjournment so i was really trying to give it to somebody else in the spirit of the holidays sympathizing with williams comments about an 85-minute block schedule right now william you have no idea how long it can go on all in favor aye aye opposed motion carries thank you it's 10 o'clock you