School Board Meeting 6/14/21

001good evening everybody good evening thank you for your patience with us we appreciate it welcome to the june 14th board of education regular meeting can i have a roll call please livingston here here parsons here here here here thank you the first item on the agenda is written communication dr davis do we have any written communication uh yes we do we have the certificate of elections uh from uh karen yarborough the county clerk for the cook county and i'm just going to give these to the elected officials thank you all right the next item on the agenda is items for information the first item is an update on the 2021 summer school and we have a bill farmer here uh he is uh the director of our summer school uh how many years now have

002you been doing this bill um i can't remember five six i'm gonna say i was thinking at least five and six it could be six uh but uh he literally had to adjust to what was even possible last year with the pandemic and then he had to be the trailblazer this year uh as we start to emerge uh from from what we dealt with a year ago and so uh normally bill will will come in the fall and give you a whole update on kind of a summary of summer school but we've asked him to come now at the beginning of summer school because we know how important it is and we know that there's a high interest in what we're offering and what students are being able to take advantage of so uh also

003science teacher extraordinaire uh but the director of summer school bill farmer and you can take your mask off and talk building thank you um so i just wanted to give you a brief update i know i connected with you all on zoom um maybe two months ago as i was in the midst of uh trying to figure out exactly how we were moving forward but um i'm happy to kind of report that summer school is already into its third week we just finished the eighth day of summer school today out of the 26 day programming and for the first time in a long time there's over 800 students in the building every day in the halls and and most of our classes are kind of at what we would consider a safe capacity of students

004who are able to sit in spaces of three feet apart everybody's wearing masks and it was slow to kind of see the transition of students kind of starting to interact with each other but as i've been roaming through the halls you can hear more robust conversations and laughter and especially now that we did kind of wait to welcome the class of 2025 into the halls for a few days and they've been in the school now on their second week and they're running around doing scavenger hunts trying to learn their way around the building a lot of our current ninth grade are the students who are ninth graders this year are in the school also learning their way around the building for the first time as some of them have entered the building and are attending

005an elective course just kind of to move forward so in total the total enrollment for summer school is a little bit higher than we normally have we're expecting over 1200 students and of those 1200 students 600 of them are members of the class of 2025 and so they're kind of coming in in cycles so we have about 200 of them in the building for these two weeks and then we'll have another 200 start next week and then on the towards the end of our programming we'll have about 160 coming in with some participating remotely we are offering remote options for summer school for the students that have requested that primarily based on medical reasons for the most part for them to recover credit so we've been adapting and adjusting and you know we have noticed

006that as we support and welcome students there has been an emphasis on kind of building community and just spending time connecting and not just jumping straight into the academics even if they're in a recovery course i know the teachers that were really excited and thoughtful about being able to actually like kind of get to know their students so they're also taking their students out and about on campus and taking advantage of days like today where they can go into a courtyard and and kind of socialize and do some of their learning in spaces outside of the classroom as well so that's kind of where we're at it's been going relatively well we had a few you know getting used to just still some of the students are getting used to like an 8 a.m start

007which is a little early you know so we've been trying to be flexible with attendance and tardiness and and we've worked through all the kinks of the self-certification students kind of learned pretty quickly that it's much faster if they self-certify before they come and then wait in the line and so we're just kind of continuing to support that adjustment as we move forward so i'm happy to address any questions that the board may have at this time it's exciting to see the school or hear about the school like revving up again so that that must be great hearing those voices and just the rumble of the students in the hall yeah board any questions all right well thank you very much bill yeah you're welcome always good to see you thanks bill okay next we

008have a report on the band programming so lonnie is here to talk to him so lonnie stonech is the uh is your title executive director or or tsar of a fan lonnie but uh lonnie herself is is a little bit of a iconic figure locally she's been doing fan for a long time but one of the most serendipitous things that dr campbell and i ever did was sit down with lonnie several summers ago now six maybe eight how time flies but we we have said to each other many times uh one of the best moves we made uh was for eths to invest in and get fully engaged with fans so lonnie it's great to have you here and we look forward to this update uh everybody reminded that uh we get to be part

009of and take advantage of what lonnie is going to share with us okay so hi everyone so nice to see all of the top halves of your faces it's very nice to be in person thank you so much again also to the board pat for miss savage williams for extending the invitation to appear i very much appreciate it it's always a fun time you'll be reassured to see that i have a powerpoint that's on autoplay so you don't have to worry like how long will she talk about each of those 86 slides there really are 86 but they're only three seconds per slide so i'm gonna time out in under five minutes then i have six bullet points that'll take me approximately 90 seconds and so i think if it would set your watch is

010about seven minutes she's amazing that's how we go and i would say go ahead [Applause] in chronological order from when you last saw me this is also all fan programming not just the programs at eths um so uh so so okay that's it okay so that was the yeah i know crazy isn't it it's just crazy uh so that's as you probably maybe recall usually i come here about this time every year but because of covid last year we did not do a fan recap so i just basically brought you all up to speed from where from about two years ago so you could just see the the bulk of everything that happened so i tried to just keep it quick so a couple side notes just of particularly focused on eths dr campbell was

011a conversation partner for ibram kendy in 2019 robin d'angelo in and that youtube video currently has 107 views and tens of thousands of it watched live it was our second zoom event ever angie thomas was also a conversation partner in 2021 and on thursday he will be in conversation with dax devlin ross for his incredible new book letters to my white male friends we did a series of book giveaways um in the same time period that i'm reporting on the water dancer by tanacy coates we give away 800 copies of the book year of the monkey with patty smith we gave away 800 copies of that book the purpose of power alicia garza we arranged for 500 copies to go to cps schools in chicago concrete rose angie thomas gave away 500 publicly and 500

012privately and the some of us heather mcgee same thing 500 public 500 private by private i mean all of the event sponsors were offered books if they wish to have them and so then they grabbed a couple other notes eths alum megan tui was interviewed by eths alum sarah parisian eths alum gia clark interviewed julie litka aims for us in 2021 we also offered two free screenings of brian stevenson's the movie about brian stevenson's book just mercy we did two free screenings of those at the century 12 evanston theater in right before kovitz shutdown and alicia garza we helped arrange for her to keynote the 2021 black summit here at eths so that's the truly just the absolute highlights of the highlights there's so much is i'm sure you can imagine so much i could

013say about programming but i'll leave it right there and happy to answer any questions that anyone might have i know it's a bit of a fire hose just even watch it i'm like okay i got like i feel the wonder i think sort of tired right now but a lot of programs a lot of amazing programs thank you so i i guess i'll start by just saying thank you for doing what you have done for our community and you know i i think the world of this community but you are so much a part of of this community and what you've done and how you've have brought all these amazing speakers here and um and just raised all of our consciousness and i i don't know about other people but as i watched that i

014was thinking okay i saw that i missed that one so um so my first question is is it are they all available on the website so we can find them um 100 of the events that we did on zoom are all on our youtube channel for free public viewing there was there are none that are not there as you may recall from in person events sometimes for example a good example is ibrahim candy does not allow for videos to be taken of him and then posted so we don't have recordings of either the two appearances of dr candy um so i would say probably 85 percent of the in-person events are also available on our youtube channel okay but not a hundred percent okay that's that's that's very that's that's pretty good yeah it's great

015it's so we probably i think we have close to about a hundred and thirty hundred and forty videos there at this point yeah and some of them just have tens of thousands of views it's just it's it's it's the covet has really and i don't want to take much more time but covet has completely transformed fan's model in a bunch of different ways oh i can imagine yeah all right if i could also just say one thing i want to just thank dr witherspoon and dr campbell very much for your thought leadership and partnership with fan it's been such a true pleasure and an honor to be able to work with two such great leaders people have so much insight and just allows for so much latitude and flexibility to fan we're grateful the support

016staff here everybody that we work with is just from from top to bottom just the most welcoming and supportive and just everything from logistics every single detail always just perfect and so we're just really honored and grateful to have the support of district 202. other questions comments from the board i just want to make one notation you have brought uh by no means exclusively this kind of programming but but a lot of the uh finest authors and finance thinking on issues around racial justice social justice equity and i i just want to really um uh celebrate that i think that the fan has that the fact that you have brought this world-class programming around issues that are so important to this school into this community uh is is very special well thank you so much

017appreciate that we do you know as you might imagine it's a it's been an interesting past four or five years and we've taken some heat for some of that programming there's been not everyone maybe shares your exact point of view so we are grateful to hear and to have that support thank you so much i did leave out a couple things that are coming in the fall that are really big headlines but i gotta wait and see well i was gonna ask because usually you do a recap if you do uh also there was coming up next yeah well there was a whole series of the ones that were coming up next it was right after the big cherry pie oh yeah yeah so but you do drop a little little hints i give a

018fair number hits well there's yeah there's there's one person in particular i'm gonna probably get in a lot of trouble sorry say it again america on fire no that's not what we're bringing in nope nope i'm just gonna wait because it really it's you know it's we're just gonna we're just gonna wait okay we're just gonna wait do you want us do you want us to start guessing no i do not actually i don't have a very good poker face i'm afraid so i'm sure in yeah no we're just we're just going to hold off it tamps down and you know let's just we're good we're good it's gonna be a great year i look forward to it it's gonna be you know a stranger as you can imagine um coming up it's been a

019strange year um but i really look forward to it it's it could be one of the biggest years yet i think so wow thank you dr campbell there's a good tea circle a lot of great stuff but that's a heart i mean that's a big statement i mean there's been a lot of years anyway without no further ado unless there's anything else i'm gonna i'm gonna boogie on over that way so lonnie thank you again thank you all so much again for what you're doing for us it's been a pleasure thank you so much i hope all of you have safe and enjoyable and relaxing summers thank you we'll see you soon thanks lonnie thank you all right so our next report is report on transitioning students back to eths in the fall yes a

020big topic and you see taya kinsey is coming forward associate principal for uh student services and dr marcus campbell and uh there's just a lot to report to the board and to bring everybody up to date on so with that i'll turn this over to the two of you thank you dr witherspoon good evening board um we're very want to do some sort of i guess expectation setting tonight and do some vision casting for how we want to bring the students back in the fall there's been a i don't think it can be understated how difficult the past year was not just as it relates to covet but the racial trauma that was on display throughout our country as well as the economic impacts that many of our families in this nation faced there were

021just so many things and the loss that we experienced right here in our community time after time after time after time again which as i said can't be understated how difficult this year was for our students for our staff for our wildcat family and so as we think about our return we have our colleagues dr dr davidson it's going to be dr kinsey um doing some framing for how we um are framing our return and doing the work of bringing students back to eths this fall one of the things we want to do is to we've been talking about humanizing eths school outside of a pandemic can be a very dehumanizing experience right there's a lot of research a lot of data that shows that yes schools can be you know dehumanizing you look at

022the banking model of education and so many other things a lot of times students aren't given permission to be their full human selves in the academic space and with there being so much anxiety and so much trauma around the pandemic and so many other forms of our vulnerability as human beings in our own humanity we are prioritizing humanizing ourselves we're working to support the staff and humanizing themselves and making sure that our students also feel fully human when they come back to eths and what does that mean it means that returning to a school that centers radical love and empathy and support bell hooks on love says the moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination against oppression the moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom to act

023in ways that liberate ourselves and others that action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom and so i know it might sound counterintuitive to our academics selves and the pursuit of academic excellence but before we can get to any of that we have to build a foundation of love empathy and support in order for students to access the curriculum and access all of the wonderful things and the content that our teachers would want to share you know we have to let let them know that it's that we see them that it is okay to be who they are it is okay to to struggle to have challenge and we're going to be here to support you every step of the way so our process has been the following and this is a

024work in process as we seek to really talk about what does it mean to to humanize the school and to rehumanize the school so we're focusing on care and relationships because we know that those things heal and create new ways of being in community and that's one of the things that we're going to be focusing on and we will focus on as a as a school is how to be in community with one another uh and and really talk about and process what that what that means and with equity at the center the efforts towards social emotional learning are grounded in these tenants column and that is being proactive with our mental health and wellness programming our technical changes are creating opportunities where students can connect with one another create having nuanced thinking and that

025supports students enhancing accessibility information and investing in an imaginative process uh that is collaborative modeling that as leaders and with the staff as well as with students so um part of the plan is to re enter is to not reintegrate but to integrate more social emotional learning that is rooted in equity and that is taking the school-wide approach to sel which engages um many aspects of mindfulness um as a practice and mindfulness as a culture here at eths and i believe this is your slide type but you can pretty much engaging in mindfulness so we are creating space for every student at eths to engage in mindfulness practice as a tier one support it's important to slow down right it is important to pause and to breathe and to think and to feel before we

026jump into whatever it is that we're trying to do in a classroom bill farmer just mentioned at the other moment when he says you know in summer school we're there he's supporting teachers with not just getting to the content but getting kids reacclimated to being in the building and being in school many of which have not been in school that we look at august in 18 months and that's an adjustment that's going to take some time that's going to take some care it's going to take some thoughtfulness and it's going to require us to make sure that we have infrastructures in place and practice practice practices in place that are proactive and not reactive any additions to that slide tire i'll just add i think you spoke to it very well um as we think

027about that attunement we've been using that word a lot and we use empathy a lot because this is about skill development this is not about innate traits that each of us are supposed to be born with but seeing ourselves each one of us continuing to develop our skills for that as educators as people who care as students who care for each other too so that's a big piece of what we're looking at and it's the how we talk about this a lot it's the how we're doing what we're doing not just what we're doing and so that means embedding it as opposed to kind of a singular idea of programming and but in addition to that we are going to continue to develop programming in addition to all the ways that we want to embed

028and so thinking about that through partnerships with community organizations the way we've already been developing curricular development and doing progress monitoring even in around emotion regulation as we did this last year in rpe and wellness and we're going to continue to build those practices um one of the other ways that we're looking at our whole students and and our whole selves is through our medical advisory committee we were happy to have convened administrators staff evanson doctors really looking at best practices so the communication with families our overall health and safety but it also included some technical steps our mass vaccination events that we have collaborated with actually we've had a couple of them now and which have gone really well and one of the things that i really enjoyed about this group is that we've

029been focused on students but we've been focused on our whole community and what is going to increase comfort what is going to meet people where they're at in this moment so we're thinking about physical well-being but we're thinking about the emotional well-being and accessibility as well of our families of our students of our whole community as we think about all of these pieces within mtss and our larger kind of ecosystem of eths we want to keep a lot of structures that we've created i know we've all had a lot of conversations of lessons learned what are we going to continue to do that we did in remote or that we did in hybrid learning so we did hundreds and hundreds of home visits thousands of personalized phone calls our mindfulness coaches were new this year

030as was our virtual mindfulness studio which we're really happy doesn't have to be virtual this next year but our virtual calming room is a space that can continue to be accessed and we were literally just talking about it students were practicing it in prepths so you can do both and have all those different versions of access adding and enhancing supports over the summer we are excited to introduce our sophomore advisory study hall sash different than fash we're all going to really have to practice this it's going to be challenging we're continuing to build our counseling lessons and our resources as we really focus on social emotional learning and college and career access and continuing our family talk series and college and career evening events we're so pleased that the number is much like fan the

031numbers of accessibility to these evening events being able to do access it remotely has been phenomenal and so we plan to continue some of these pieces including as we help students reacclimate as we did in the in-person experiences and students could walk schedules that we've done as we've transitioned through the spring and then through summer and we're excited to welcome back all students but particularly when we think about students who've never been in the building in a formal way pre-pandemic class of welcoming them in august on the wednesday before school starts as well as our class of 2025 official orientation other ways that we are looking to be more human and being more empathetic as a culture here at eths and i say that intentionally is to cr havoc in creating this um tardy detention

032and social probation amnesty students who come back will not think about having to serve detentions as soon as they get back we're starting from scratch everybody at zero and um with the new block schedule and with the some of the other things that we've put in place we're really going to be looking at a number of indicators to really talk about like how do we make sure that students are at class on time and where they need to be we're focusing on restorative practices and discipline and let me emphasize and say this is not programmatic we're looking to establish restorative practice as a culture right not just as a one-off here in the dean's office there but engage in restorative practice as a culture as a as a habit of response here at eths there

033have been committees of educators and administrators uh advocates for reviewing our um contract with epd and you know the board you all are i think are in being updated on that process and that's your process and we are very much excited to be a part of that and we're looking at the um the role of sros in the school and um we are looking to you know encourage students and inspire students in a way that's not punitive and the way that also helps them to take responsibility for their own learning and we're also looking at reimagining the alternative learning center and that's usually where kids go if they uh have in-school suspension and things like that how can we create a more humanizing space in the alc and i'm going to turn this over to

034dr bavers who's going to talk uh about the academic portions of all of this thank you dr campbell uh yeah the academic portions go hand in hand with social emotional learning and well-being and belonging for our students we cannot put the trauma of the last school year in the rear view mirror and proceed as business as usual in our classrooms that's why our department chair team is focusing their planning on how to support teachers throughout the school year as they reintegrate into the building yes we're supporting adults we believe that it's critically important to support our adults so that they can be prepared to support our students so you'll see the second bullet is how do we coach and support our teachers to help students reintegrate into the building and thrive throughout the school year

035this isn't the first week of school programming that some of us are accustomed to with icebreakers this is ongoing support for our students this is the focus of every department meeting we're going to have with our faculty and finally how do we support our teachers so that we re-humanize the student experience in the classroom we have a block schedule now that's a lot of time to uh to plan it's a lot of time to utilize and more importantly it's a lot of time to reintegrate students it's a lot of time to spend on collaboration and meaningful experiences let me just give you one aside i've coached baseball for 25 years and i coach ebsa and this spring i coached a team of 7th and 8th graders who for the most part had been shut away

036in their homes they they didn't know how to reintegrate they didn't know how to go out and play and i spent the entire season working with those uh those kids and the joy of just taking the time we didn't really focus on the fundamentals the throwing that we focused on team building and skill building and it turned out that every kid on that team learned how to throw a ball better learned how to hit better and build confidence and you know i would just take that as a piece of the heart and to to hope that we can do that for every kid in the academic setting by privileging belonging well-being sel if you go to the next slide marcus that'd be super helpful thank you so what do we focus on when we get

037to the nitty-gritty well we're you know the chair team is rehumanized in the classroom they're centering on relationships and belonging and they're doing their homework they're studying this they're preparing their opening day typically an opening day at eths is slide deck driven with lots of technical information we're not going to overload our teachers that way we're going to make space and discuss how to do this with kids how do we reintegrate them how do we build community we're also going to work we have a social emotional learning handbook that was developed by teachers uh in in consult with uh with taya and her team it's it's a great handbook and we are familiarizing ourselves and going to implement those practices the audience for that is teachers and it's very concrete we're working on instructional planning

038what does it look like to plan in a block well you know what it looks like a little bit more time is what it looks like but an opportunity to reintegrate a lot of meaningful learning activities our goal overall is to increase student engagement you know and i'm not talking about a proxy of student attendance i'm talking about observational student engagement because we know if a student is engaged they're welcome they have a sense of well-being uh their their identity is honored in the classroom that they will engage at greater rates in the in the curricular experiences and finally we pledge ongoing responsive professional development not just throughout this year but in the years to come go ahead marcus and finally what did we learn what are we going to maintain this is a short

039list of what we're maintaining but we obviously are going to maintain our academic support system we're going to maintain our google classroom as our learning management system it took us i don't know i think like 25 years to get there to get to one learning management system and uh you know we got one so we're going to stick with it david chan said if you say one thing please say that so i just did we're going to use back channels for feedback we found that on zoom the back channels you know the chat function things like that we're going to replicate that in the classroom we think there's real opportunity uh to use those different back channels for feedback and teachers really see the value in that and that's not just academic back channels that

040social emotional well-being back channels as well and finally we pledge a full complement of course offerings we're offering a full slate of classes this year in all of our academic areas the block schedule there was a lot of fear i know that when we went to black schedule we would have to cut class you know we would cut down and not have the offerings we have we have a full complement of course offerings and finally there's something called the the democratic classroom which we've invested our teachers have invested heavily in over the last three four years and we just had our leadership our department chairs and members of our leadership team go through some democratic classroom training we're going to continue to do that because what that does is that really does build the culture

041and climate that we want in the classroom that honors student voice pushes students academically and really really pushes teachers to get out of that comfort zone that delivery that as we used to say the sage on stage or the big boss up front this decenters that right and puts a premium actually on students in the classroom and we find that teachers who are able to uh to use that technique actually reach more kids academically grades improve attendance improves and hey wait bottom line engagement improves and that's what we really want this school year oh me too i just keep going i love this this is the dr bavis show all right so you know what one of the things we're committed to doing is we're committed to evaluating these changes and we have been working

042with a a team of we have teachers administrators we have carrie levy dr levy and her office of research and evaluation and we have several research questions that we're we're we're honing uh a brief draft of those uh are what is the impact of structural changes on students mental health and well-being what's the impact of structural changes on students attendance and discipline patterns do students with a block schedule perform the same or better over time than previous cohorts of students who had daily nine-day period schedule and what does classroom instruction look like in a block schedule and how is that different from the daily nine period day we have several domains we're looking at we're looking at social emotional supports we're looking at an academic domain we're looking at a behavioral domain and what we're

043doing is we're developing different instruments that we can utilize to gauge growth in those areas or or you know just to evaluate whether we are in fact growing we're going to use a cohort approach where we will provide three years of cohort a three-year average cohort so we're not going to take this year's students because they went through the pandemic i just want to get that out of the way right now we're not going to take last year's students either so the three previous complete academic years of in-person instruction will make up that original cohort that we will baseline off of so that will be the baseline and then as we go through this process with cohort after cohort we will we will evaluate in those areas using that so that's a very robust draft

044anyway of of how we're going to do this interestingly enough carrie and her team are actually going to go into classrooms they're not evaluators okay they don't evaluate teachers what they do is they do programmatic evaluation and they've done this before years ago with freshman humanities carrie was trained to look at very specific things uh that were not teacher you know they were looking at the what students were doing how students were engaging how students were interacting with one another there being her and her team are being trained in that so then they can go out and do observations like that so we can aggregate that data and then see if we're really growing these things so that's a brief there'll be more to come and the board will be fully briefed on this once

045it's fleshed out but i wanted to say assessing our work is not something we we build as we go along we have concrete objectives and goals and ways of doing this and we started very early very early yeah i was going to add pete um you spoke to the fact that we're going to be really going into classrooms listening to students and i think that's one thing that i believe eths prides itself on which is listening to our students and to our student voices and i think that's another example of that we're also going to continue to both individualize we've been progress monitoring this year in a way we hadn't previously through our pe and wellness and that's another way that we're going to both look at it from a broad stroke as well as

046kind of student progress as we work on regulating emotions and what does that look like and identifying emotions and working together on that in all the different facets and not just pe and wellness or in student services but in all classroom environments and we're going to continue to really utilize our well-being survey information that we have expanded to you to really be implemented from a school-wide perspective and have shared that now with our leadership team so that we can think about the myriad ways that we're implementing and brainstorming because it's really taken a great team and different perspectives than we have previously thank you so another part of our plan is to with all of this considered like some what what other things are you going to do school-wide so we'll be offering opportunities for

047staff to process discuss and reconnect socially having 3 800 students back in this building with 600 staff members will feel very overwhelming to a lot of folks right and we're fully aware of that we're fully prepared to deal with that and to offer opportunities to to process that to understand that and we have to do that simultaneously by trying to reestablish community as a school that we have not been together for 18 months and so we will create opportunities for for students to be able to do that through a workshop series a welcome back picnic we started talking about the first day of school where the freshmen usually have a picnic like well the sophomores didn't get a chance to have their picnics so then the juniors and singers they need one too because it's

048just it's just how it goes and so we'll have our freshman freshman picnic there will be one part we've got 64 acres right the freshman will be in one part of campus the sophomores will be another part of the campus and juniors and singers will be at a different part of campus and we'll be creating more opportunities for kids to just to connect and to reacclimate as they start the school year another component to our transition back came up with a question from ms rolowitz of some board meetings ago on transition students of color how are we thinking about that and so i'll let you read the slide and i'll keep talking i begin to meet with all of our racial affinity caucuses our staff caucuses our black caucus our latino caucus our asian middle

049eastern caucus to really think about how how should we bring kids back right given that students of their com some compounding trauma around race in this country and what has happened even in this community and how are we doing that and these were just two quotes that came out of that conversation right and we also begin to brainstorm about what ways could our racial affinity caucuses support students of color their transition back to eths i also met with the parent racial affinity groups i met with our latino advisory committee i met with our with our e-band evanston black advocacy network and there were lots of common themes about students returning to school you know considering their social emotional health and mental health and coming back to a building full of microaggressions and what we plan

050to do about that and how do we plan to address the racial component of the lived experiences of students and staff of color back here at eths and so we begin to brainstorm that there are lots of plans and lots of things in the making to which you will hear about very soon and there's some opportunities that that each group is thinking about as they adopt a family and ways to really support families and as they attempt to reconnect and come back to school be it phone calls and home visits and going into the faith community this summer to really talk about what we're doing and how we're doing it and why we're doing it and the conversations went extremely well but you know we know that we have work to do this summer and

051and having many conversations about our return and the technical components of our return there's still lots of questions from parents about will we be contact tracing will there be um um all sorts of things that thank you self-certification i was looking for self-certification and so many other um procedures that we had to put in place and what they will look like in the fall a lot of that guidance as you know we're still waiting on from the illinois department of public health in the illinois board of education in cdc and when we get that we will comply but just to give you one example of how we are thinking about the return as part of our dress code the students can't wear masks right so we said ah that needs to come out right so

052because if there are there is no mask guidance from the state and students want to wear masks they can certainly wear masks when they return so those that we're thinking about every detail that we possibly can to make sure the students and staff feel comfortable uh being back to the building and this is uh just a little bit of what i've already shared about the bringing kids of color back and some information that came from our black advocacy network we did have one of our doctors dr sharon robinson who had actually attended the black advocacy conversation meeting and talking about vaccine hesitancy in in the black community and communities of color and that offer has also been extended to the latino advisory committee because there were there were questions about vaccines that came up and

053um you know so that information will be shared with them um as well um one other way that we're supporting kids coming back we have a a quite a bit of organizations and this is something that's going to take us well beyond next year and that is supporting our black boys and so we have a number of organizations reaching out for mentoring and so what i've done is i've pulled a council of which together with representatives from um the various organizations that's that's listed there uh omega sci-fi fraternity uh is also a part and they're like we have about quite a few partners trying to support blackboards and so we're now we're partnering with district 65 dr horton to create a cascading mentoring model where i believe in just a few years any black boy

054who is in public school in evanston can be connected to a mentor across both districts so we're creating the infrastructure now in place putting that infrastructure in place and everybody that was on that call is extraordinarily excited northwestern's also not listed there and they're supporting us in our work too and we're just very excited about about that work as we think about not just transitioning back from coven and so many other things but how do we transition back and how do we sustain the work um some of the outcomes is where we want to land is is to humanize our return right to build empathy trust and relationship um and we are doing that through a number of ways we're taking you know some of our covet funds and we're funding positions like hiring 504

055case managers we have two of those we're adding some staff in special education so we're really thinking about not only humanizing our return but actually having the infrastructure in place to support students mental health in that humanization and in that return because we know that students are going to need quite a bit of support and so will our staff and this is just the first of many conversations that um we'll be sharing with you about our return but we've thought that it would be a good idea to foreground our return before school year starts instead of giving this to you after the school year starts because there will be plenty more to share once once we get going in the fall but this is the framework for how we're building our return for next school

056year thank you very much wow there's lots that's a lot a lot of information amazing we're happy to take your questions if you have them questions from the board comments so this may apply mostly to the assessment piece that pete was talking about the i'm wondering at what point the board will be updated on the components of this return plan do for example do we is there a schedule in which we envision updating on particular components or might we receive a sort of a quarterly update on all of the components or some combination there i see marcus nodding so now i'll be quiet no go ahead pete jumping sounds like you're ready to answer yeah i'll jump in on the i mean when we're talking about evaluation we're talking about formal annual evaluations so what

057we will do is we will share the instruments the domains the questions with the board in the fall the very beginning of school probably the first board meeting i would say in september it's ready to it'll be ready to go at that point uh it's close now we also have a logic model that we'll share at that time and then if you well maybe one or two of you might remember how we did this but it'll actually list what outcomes we can measure what years so that we have a full uh evaluation over a three year period so we'll we'll report 21 22 22 23 23 24 we'll share that data right and you can see in our logic model what data will hap will occur uh in what in what sequence because some of

058the data will build right to a more fuller understanding uh but yeah there'll be there'll be schedules it'll be annual and uh we'll share the um not only the instruments and the layout and the plan but also the logic model with everybody and and we'll also be sharing the progress monitoring that we'll do uh throughout the school year so carrie and i dr levy and i all of us are in conversation about exactly what those time intervals are and what indicators we'll be looking at during that time great and so related to that are we you know obviously the the public can tune in and watch these board meetings from beginning to end to get all the details they need but let's say they don't want to do that i can't imagine why and are

059there plans to put together some sort of more digestible updates on this on this work dashboard kind of thing or just a um a more straightforward kind of visually digestible kind of report or and if not can i suggest that we do that absolutely the evaluation report annually will be a formal document yeah i'm not necessarily talk i mean that's fine and i'll you know i'll take the time to digest the formal report i think what i'm asking for or thinking about is something that's more accessible and digestible by the community you know parents students families and maybe people who are you know just interested in how our school is fairing post-pandemic who may not have children in the school that kind of thing where they don't have to go digging through you know they

060have to find the right board meeting and then they have to click on the attachments and they have to dig through the report and it turns out the report is like 20 pages long or something i'm sure we'll figure out a way how to share how things are going this goes to a recurring theme about trying to figure out how to convi how to how to share and convey information you know kind of a dashboard sorry ty i keep you're way over there okay thanks so can i jump in yes i just first want to say thank you that you have spent the time to figure out how to bring our students back into a space that they've been out of for so long that's you know i i just can't especially a person who

061works with our young people in the community every single day and it has been extremely traumatizing to some students coming back in a space that they've been used you know they were used to it in the beginning but we have to remember that there are 8th graders that are rising freshman that missed an entire school year and so they're coming into this space brand new no relationships no connections they haven't seen their classmates so i can only imagine right how that the anxiety that some of our students and parents must be feeling so i need to acknowledge that first and i think you know we will hear and see more things as as it unfolds but the first thing you had to do was reimagine right what the new district the new school will look

062like and there were some things that you said i wrote down a lot because i'm just trying to figure this out for the students in our community and many of them happen to be eths graduates or high school students but we have a lot of students in our community that are struggling with this um but i appreciate the the listening and modeling i think the modeling is critical in order for our staff to be vulnerable and show the feelings that they're feeling as well so that our students could feel like this is a place of belonging and that it's a place of comfort for them where they're not just being watched you know looked at like is he acting right is she you know whatever and then being talked about or talked to in a

063different way behind closed doors but they're being invited to share how they're truly feeling and the only way that i think some of our students can feel that sense of comfort after sitting at home in their living room or in their at their kitchen table learning for what 16 months you said to now coming back in the classroom and expecting to perform the way that they did prior to leaving is if the students and the adults or the adults and the teachers create an environment that's of comfort for them to feel like themselves so i appreciate the modeling that i'm hearing you talk about um the other point i want to highlight is there was like a a lot of generalization made about our students of color particularly black students everyone had an opinion about

064how black students were doing doing remote learning and i think there were some assumptions that they were all struggling that wasn't the case as you mentioned some students did very well and of course others did struggle but we need to figure out why those students did so well remotely and perhaps didn't do as well inside this building right so the only way we can do that and it sounds like i mean since you put it up there and i was like yes you captured that was to really figure out what their learning environment and experience was like during remote learning and what were the success markers that made them be successful that otherwise they might not have succeeded here during a regular day that's critical it's critical for them to feel comfortable enough to come

065back to eths and for parents to feel confident enough that their kids will be successful in a certain class with a certain teacher and so for you to acknowledge that and to lift that um speaks to me and i know that it will speak to a lot of the black families and the the latino families in the community because what you're saying is that we want to capture and keep whatever made you successful at home so that when you arrive here in the fall the expectation is the same so i mean there's so much i can unpack here but i can't tell you just as a you know a youth advocate someone that truly understands the impact that this has made on many of our families and our youth in our community to just to

066to just open as usual and not think about this would have done more detriment to our students than not so i i look forward to you know what's to come and i apologize for taking so much time but i could not you know let you give this presentation without acknowledging um i don't know i'll say it because i think eths is probably the best school in the world but without acknowledging the fact that you've done a lot of work to try to get fall right and so i'm i'm pleased to be a board member today that's supporting the future of what our school will look like especially for those students that need it the most thank you monique that's awesome pat um well first i want to say that i agree with everything monique just

067said and that's always a good thing to do but i i want to kind of step back a little bit um so first of all several of the educators in this room are old enough to remember when schools thought there's school over here there's education over here and then there's these people i think they're people that come every day and sit in our desks in our classrooms but near the two shall meet right it wasn't really that long ago that that was the norm and i've always been very proud of eths for busting that norm and working overtime to personalize to be more individual and certainly as i've had the you know privilege of serving on this board i even get to see it more both because i'm looking more closely and you're doing more

068so i want to acknowledge that this is a process you've been a road you've been on um but i i i just again like monique there i could go on for a very long time about all the things that i just heard but i i will pull just a couple things i think the yes this is about coming out of a worldwide pandemic we've never experienced and and yes it is about starting on the right foot come this fall but what i'm hearing is systemic change and what i'm hearing is a complete monique used the word reimagining that really blows out beyond all the horror that our students have been through and our staff and really thinks about this in in a way that will carry through and so you know the fact that pete's

069talking about evaluating in three years right that's not post pandemic that's how are we changing what we do and how we do business for the good and learning from horrific right learning from remote learning and social social emotional challenges and isolation um and and you know the anecdotes that you've shared pete's example about kids not remembering how to be together forget baseball like how do we hang out together and and you know maybe we're not all best friends but we can you know how do we hang out that's huge and and so i think acknowledging that looking at the perspective of all of our students looking at at kids of color and how you know they've had time to both step away from those microaggressions and to have their smashed in the face by what's

070happened in the last year so we have to really and and that the last year is you know that's when most white people noticed we understand that people of color of that's been generations of experience so i mean really getting at that is so so important and um i i just i i really i could literally get worked up because i can't express how happy i am that you're taking this by the reins and i think about some of the criticisms frankly we got over the last year and i know all of us are saying but that's not true that's not what they're doing they're really thinking about the kids and this is the example that to me really speaks to all the work we've been doing for a lot of years on equity on

071supporting kids as individuals and collectively and so i'm just so excited i'm so proud of all of you i i know you work so hard and then to think outside the box in a a business that's very boxy um is really really a big deal so um i i just sorry i've gone on a long time too but i just i can't thank you enough and i can't wait to see what this looks like in action and i do one thing i want to say i know gretchen gave some cautionaries just think ahead one thing i wanted to in the past when people make when and when we eths have made really big change there seems to be this zero-sum philosophy of well if you're doing all that how can you teach a math and

072history and i know that that's not what happens but let's be really proactive about the messaging around that you know pete alluded to it with um you know rigorous we have a phenomenal education here but i addressing people as people is only going to help so if i can give you one little tidbit of advice is please get out in front of that and talk about how what you're doing is supporting these kids to go further to learn more to dig deeper into their academics as well because that i know that's what's here but just talk about it from the minute you start talking about this so all right i'm gonna stop thank you thank you thank you so i um just agree with what my colleagues have said this has been an incredible presentation

073it's really exciting i'm really excited about the fall and um just the difference the different feeling i keep thinking eths can't get any better and then it then it just does and the the emphasis on um humanizing the school just recognizing that that to be we have to be intentional about that in order to bring students here and and have them have just a different experience here knowing the kind of year they've had knowing the kind of year and a half they've had is is probably the best thing we can do for the students and the staff recognizing as well i think pete talked about the department chair committee and um the the the intentionality of supporting the adults if we support the adults then the adults who are with the kids every day i

074mean these are the people who are standing in front of those kids in their classrooms every day we've got to make sure that they are supported as well so i really appreciate you thinking that thinking that through thinking about the students of color the the black and brown kids and the kind of experience they've had and their black and brown adults and what they've watched happen all around them this racial trauma in this country has been real and impacted us all it's impacted me and there were times when i i just had trouble getting going i just didn't know how to keep how to keep moving forward and so if that happens to me i can only imagine what kids are seeing and what kids are are talking about and not talking about among each

075other and their families so um i too took a lot of notes i wrote down things like restorative practice this cultural this culture this habit that we um we want to make a part of our our school um stuff that we've been talking about for years we've been talking about restorative practice and how long have we been talking about block scheduling at least 20 years yes and it took a pandemic but look at look at us now you know we're actually going to do it i'm just so excited about all these changes this back channels you know i'm not sure that i even understand all of it but i wrote it down because i like the way it sounds um democratic classrooms and just all this these these great supports that we're doing so so

076thank you so much for all this work and all this planning and i know it's not over i know you're gonna keep planning and keep tweaking and i agree with with pat to stay in front of oh yeah we are still in the top three percent of high schools in this country it's we gotta continue to remind people of that so um you are an amazing team and i know that there's a team behind all of you as well so um so thank you for all the work you're doing at this school thank you for for continuing to challenge us and and really getting out there and just doing the hard work making it real making it live because it is it is real it's life so thank you i just want to thank all

077of you for the very careful thought that went into this whole reopening plan um just hearing the word humanize is it means so much to me um i was thinking of my own high school experience which was so dehumanizing and being in a school environment where i knew that they didn't respect me as a person and i knew that they probably didn't even like me it was just this very dehumanizing experience and to hear you say that it almost brought tears to my eyes the fact that you understand that and that you want to humanize the classroom um and you give you gave great examples of the back channels for feedback and the democratic classroom that's exactly how you humanize the school and the education and i think that's wonderful and thank you again for

078the transitioning students of color slides you guys really thought of everything and and thanks for acknowledging the potential microaggressions that could occur for our black and brown students upon returning to the school and maybe maybe they felt safer and more comfortable at home and so knowing that that's something that you'll need to acknowledge and address as well so anyway just outstanding work thank you all so much more to come thank you again awesome all right okay dr davis the next um item is comments from the public okay we have uh five comments from the public uh this is a reminder that comments from the public are three minutes what i'll do is i'll um announce the name i'm going to try to read the handwriting if i get it wrong just correcting it from the

079podium is fine and then you'll have three minutes i will let you know i'll just put up i'll say you know two one and then when it time expires i'll fumble with my phone a little bit and i'll ask you to complete your last sentence that's that's how we do it in person uh so our first public comment our first public comment is uh i believe it's uh laurel o'sullivan and i turned the microphone on for you thank you okay to take my mask down nice soon okay good evening members of the board thank you for the opportunity to be here in person with you here tonight my name is laurel o'sullivan my son patrick is a rising senior and my sons dylan and eamon graduated in 2020 and 2019. i'm here tonight to comment

080on two topics the first is the request to establish clear consistent and two-way communications with parents as we head into the 2021 school year and the second is to comment on the decision to eliminate final exams going forward regarding communication if there's one thing we can all agree upon it's that the last 15 months of the school year have been extremely challenging and traumatic for everyone involved teachers parents and our children most especially and my request to the board and the administration is quite simple please please improve upon your communications going forward i really appreciate the last conversation and topic in which trust and empathy and humanizing were all mentioned because uh there are a lot of parents who really struggled this past year in the face of a lot of silence and a lot

081of questions regarding the month to month the day-to-day communications during the pandemic eths was notable for its failure to provide any opportunity for parents to participate in two-way dialogue with administrators during this time parents wrestled months at a time with many challenging questions in all manners of topic ranging from academics to the mental and social supports available for their kids who are struggling at home to the ever looming question of when would we return to school what were the metrics being used et cetera our only hope our only outlets since these meetings were not being held in person were to submit letters which many of us here today and many who are not here today have done in the hopes that they would be answered and most of the time i've submitted personally probably four

082to five and most of those respon letters were not responded to so i'd like to sum up my request by sharing a quote from leigh ellis on over communicating over communicating is the glue that holds a high performing team together and keeps them focused on the same direction and it circles back to clarity without good consistent communication you don't have clarity i really liked what i heard here today about the reopening but i would also echo what gretchen said which is to make that report accessible accessibility is another theme that's been very frustrating over the last 15 months so regarding exams i'm asking that you reconsider this decision final exams help kids prepare for college since the vast majority of students at eths do attend college you're doing a disservice by taking away one of

083the primary vehicles for gauging subject matter mastery i was struck by how passionately and articularly carmia beatty the outgoing student rep on this board expressed her opinion that she and her peers did not agree with the decision there's concern it will further dilute the quality of our kids education i've heard different things about how others some teachers will have projects and maybe some will have exams and some won't that's another area where consistent communication ongoing communication is really important and i would just say please err on the side of over communicating and i would request that at some point before school reopen there be a youtube meeting in which parents can have an opportunity to have their voice heard real-time dialogue thank you our next public comment is kara rudolph hi i'm kara rudolph i

084have a incoming junior and a senior that just graduated as a community member and parent of eths student and stakeholder i look to this board for guidance and communication around this fall's reopening it is time to employ timeliness and transparency to parents and students a reservoir of trust is key to building a communication action plan there's a lot of anxiety around reopening and is imperative that all stakeholders of eths especially the students receive up-to-date information on what school will look like come fall constant communication is an important commodity during these uncertain times students are worried about being masked all day long wondering if holding classes outside is a possibility other concerns around eating lunch socialization three feet or six feet distancing is certainly a challenge during a period passing mental health challenges will be at

085an ultimate high along with learning losses there is worry around student attention spans being stretched for the new black schedules increase class time two minutes please offer this community more communications and transparency today before i came my senior that's going off to school he received a handwritten letter from us from a teacher it was the most the kindest gesture ever it made our entire dinner spectacular at home and it just goes to show you good communication is a gift thank you our next uh speaker is i believe it's kelly gallagher i think they get it okay hello school board this is my first meeting ever this is really cool um i want to thank you for the opportunity um i am grateful to be in front of all of you and very grateful to have

086heard the presentation on the transitioning back to school hearing reading about it wouldn't have done it justice because hearing the passion behind the presenters and how hard they're working to make the school year a better place is really uplifting coming from the position i walked into being very concerned about the kids um i had the pleasure of listening in on a zoom the one of my students one of my kids last zoom calls at the end of the school year this year and the teacher asked the students if she they could evaluate or give any feedback on their experience from the school year there were five common themes anxiety stressful they hated it they were lonely and it broke my heart eths had been a business and those students true customers we wouldn't be here

087today because we would not have a school to reopen um i'm uplifted after hearing the words of the transition plan that these kids are going to be welcomed back and it's going to be a fun place for them to be again two minutes so i um thank you for doing that work and that was something that was a welcome surprise to help that i'm asking if you guys could speak to our legislators i know that there is a mask mandate in place but to help the kids transition back to help them feel a connection they need to see their teachers smiling faces they need to laugh with their friends they need to see their friends expressions so i'm asking that you could step in on their behalf and ask their state legislators and our governors

088to lift that mass mandate let it be accessible to kids who feel they need it and but as a whole let it not be a requirement okay next up i believe it's is it lauren they get it can say is it consiglio sorry gotcha so this is also my first board meeting so excited to be here and thank you very much for um all the information tonight it was super super informative my main reason for coming today was also mental health i have three teenagers at home two are here at uths and all three of them experience the pandemic and varying degrees of mental health catastrophes at one point or another and i uh agree with kelly in that it was needing to focus on what we're going to do in the fall to bring

089these kids back hearing my one of my children say last spring when the school was reopening was trying to get the kids to come back for the hybrid and this child of mine said i can't go back then my teacher is going to realize how dumb i am that child ended up getting straight a's but that child was so scared to come back to school it was painful to watch as a parent and i appreciate everything you're saying about the transition and coming back in the fall and that is heartwarming to hear i i see that and i agree with the communication i think what was said tonight needs to be screamed loud and clear because parents need to hear it parents need to know what's going to happen everybody's bringing their hands trying to

090figure out what's going on a lot of people have talked or people have left but to be able to get our kids back in make them feel welcome and i'm going to give a shout out because i think the young women are especially having a hard time with this pandemic the number of young women i know firsthand with eating disorders or mental health or anxiety is astronomical and those parents need help too because they are leaving their jobs to take care of their children who are home to watch them eat so again just a shout out thank you for keeping that all in mind but please make it transparent please make sure everybody knows what's going on and please help these kids back in school in the fall thank you uh our final comment is

091from kai sternstein hello board dr witherspoon dr campbell dr bavis i so appreciate your time and everything that you've done and i too really appreciate what i heard today and i'm going to be coming to every board meeting now shame on me you know i've got a junior going into his senior year here i've got a middle schooler and this is just phenomenal for me and i swear we did not plan this but one of the things that i wanted to come talk about was mental health i work at the american medical association i don't know if you're aware but there's a new cdc morbidity and mortality weekly report that just came out that looked at emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts among u.s adolescent girls ages 12 to 17 and during the pandemic

092those numbers rose over 50 percent i am close friends with pediatricians in this town mental health providers they've been screaming since last august about what they were expecting to see what they were seeing i was talking to one of my good friends in a pediatric practice just down the street she said every well visit everyone is a mental health visit now can you imagine what these pediatricians are going through and not just mental health visit for the children and the patients but their families so i always say that you know as parents we're only as happy as our least happy child and so recognizing the tremendous trauma that we've all been through i'm so heartened to hear about the humanizing return to school the radical love and the empathy that's going to be shown because

093these kids are going to need it and i'm so worried for the teachers and for all of you because you're going to be faced with this like tsunami of emotion um and and i'm just grateful to hear that you're planning this the details are so important devil's always in the details i urge you to communicate over communicate with families because thank you they're so concerned i'm so concerned that the supports aren't going to be here and with everything that we've all been through it's just heartening to hear and i and i thank you all for all the work that you've done and for keeping our children as we move forward at the center i know obviously the staff and the teachers are critical to all this but the children have to be at the center

094of our uh collective decision making and how we approach things so i thank you again and have a nice evening thank you that concludes public comment for this evening thank you thank you dr davis all right so our next item is foias i think there are five of them in our packets yes there's two from balon two from wilburn and one from hirsch for a total of five okay thank you all right um we are at board committee reports do we have any do we have any committee reports i don't think so okay all right so we are at one of my favorite items the student board report um barbara it's really good to see you welcome again thank you can you guys hear me okay yes um i do have some things to pass

095out if you guys could just pass these down i appreciate it um but i just wanted to start off i wasn't planning to say this but i think it's really important to note after what you guys were talking about um dr witherspoon i actually remember the first memory i have of you is i think november 4th 2016 where you made that speech about how like you support all of your students you everybody's human i don't know it's just that presentation brought me back to that time um that speech i was in seventh grade and i don't even know how it got to me i don't know how i remember that but i remember it and i think that um just words like that could even just like um increase like it just showed you cared

096and i think that um i just wanted to note that because i feel like we could use some of those speeches again um in the beginning of the school year okay so um moving on to what i plan to talk about um i just wanted to note about how we felt about this year this online school year and what we think we need next year um so i think it's very obvious that this school year the 2020 2021 school year introduced us to just a new way of learning that emphasized the value of our in-person interactions um since we were deprived of that um and we are also very grateful for the technology that eths has given us all of us have a personal chromebook which is not possible in a lot of areas around

097us so we do really appreciate that um one thing starting off with you know the positive side is just our teachers were really lenient and i know that comes from the administration and we really appreciate that that really helped us those late work policies took off so much stress that lower workload made us feel like you know we could stay um you know we could stay on track with our classes and just the aim support and office hours um i had one student tell me like they had never been to am support um their freshman year which was in person but you know in their sophomore year which was online they were always going there it just seemed easier i'm not sure exactly why i don't think i can describe like the main difference but

098um online did seem like an easier way to connect one-on-one with um teachers and um a student also told me that like this year it's like it felt like teachers really wanted to help as much as possible in a way that we hadn't felt teachers wanted to help as much as possible we were in person um i do think that they did really emphasize the way that they wanted to personalize each curriculum um we could email the teachers i mean for me personally i emailed my teachers way more than i ever did um freshman year um so we really do appreciate that from our teachers um and also just how eth has made the school year really stable um there was no flip-flop flip-flopping sorry from hybrid to online we knew that for most of

099the year we would be online we were not waiting for an announcement to go back in person we knew that our courses would stay on zoom until spring which was when everything you know kind of went in like an exponential jump from how it was before um and those who did choose hybrid and those who did choose online it felt really steady i was nervous um because i wasn't going to do hybrids so i was like oh maybe i'm going to miss out on stuff but it didn't feel like that at all so i want to assure you guys that i think that hybrid students and online school students got equal attention and equal education and also i think this was touched on by dr bavis even before i could say applications like google classroom

100were so helpful um that to do bar in google classroom literally creates an agenda for us google calendar literally puts in each of our due dates for us we do not have to write those down a lot of kids were presented with that little agenda i think i think we were given in our lunchrooms freshman year um but you know a lot of those get thrown away lost bottom of locker i don't even know where they go but you know this google calendar is is there it's in our chromebooks whether we use it or not all of our assignments are there it's really helpful and that zoom private chat i mean you know students don't have to hold back nervous like oh i don't understand this and i don't want to be the one to

101be like yeah i don't get what's going on that private chat really is helpful um so i'm really glad you guys realize that um it it really does create like that connectivity before between um teachers and students and also just the breaks that we were given each student had a lunch period as well as that little break in the middle of each day which we used to eat to sleep to relieve zoom fatigue i think that really helped us it just kind of i don't know i think that was a really good idea that you guys provided an extra break for us and we also of course there was a lot of negatives to this school year that i could you know go on and on about but um from a student's perspective we do

102understand that this year was like those negatives were almost impossible to you know um go by impossible to avoid given the circumstances that um we had to go through but i think the main thing that we learned as students this is a quote from my fellow student is just you know we're here at eths to learn we're at school to learn but one of the more important things is just that aspect of creating bonds from those interactions you're sitting at your english classroom and you're in a group of four and you're in a group of four for maybe a week or two those people might become one of your best friends um and even just not your best friends those people you know they can be strangers and they have no type of bias against

103you and you see them in the hallway you can wave you can get a smile those sort of interactions really help us and those were deprived from us last year but um we're excited to get back into that um and also another thing that i would like to point out this is more on like the academic side i feel like it was easier to earn higher grades but harder to absorb and get knowledge from the courses that we were being taught i think that can be a positive as in i think a lot of gpa has increased for a lot of students but that's also a negative from students who wanted to learn from a lot of the curriculum and you know couldn't get to just because the workload was really small and um which

104was accommodated i mean it needed to be like that but it was just you know it just wasn't the same as an in-person um rigorous course also we had internet which discouraged original work and ideas all of our tests were open book which i think made it really hard for the teachers i feel like i couldn't imagine being a teacher trying to evaluate what my class has learned without you know actually testing their knowledge and their memorization um but i know there was a lot of times where you were even if you never cheated before you were in on your chromebook and you were like okay i have a new tab open i can just go ahead and you know search the answer to this and get a good grade um and i don't think

105that um you know students needs to be punished for that for this last year i think that you guys need to understand that like you know you're it's really hard to step away from that opportunity when you do have that opportunity to cheat um also another student told me that they felt as if they had a choice every morning in the first five minutes that they woke up they had a choice to either get up clean themselves up get dressed like it was a normal day at school and sit at a desk or they had the choice to you know get up bring their chromebook to their bed sit down and lay in bed the whole day and i think that choice was really hard for us that messed up our routines and obviously motivation

106and everything was lowered from that um but i do think that it gave us like you know an importance of how important it is to wake up at 7 15 a.m have that travel time to get to eths be rushed to get ready um because when we weren't rest we weren't forced i don't think a lot of us did get ready in the morning um so yeah and that's just and as you guys said it's going to be a really big transition from um this school year to next school year so i think that a big thing i want to a stress stress sorry is that um we're scared about the increase in workload just um from these past couple of months and august because obviously in-person classes have way more workload than we ever

107experienced in online classes and we want to make sure that there is a transition on how to progress into that full incur in person course instead of just you know going back to normal um i think that includes assistance to teachers letting them know that like this is how we feel to take a little easy you know in the first couple weeks first maybe two months on that homework on those tests on those units because um it's just a huge change and a huge shift but we are really excited to come back a lot of people told me that you know even though eths did allow sports to go to happen and clubs to happen a lot of them a lot of students opted out because their families just didn't allow them to go and

108we're excited that you know with positivity rate going down and vaccine rates going up that um more people will be able to be involved just like normal we'll get out the house we'll meet our friends in our clubs that we haven't seen on zoom so we're just so excited like i can't wait to go back wonderful barbara thank you thank you so much thank you for the handout highlighter this is great thank you excellent all right dr witherspoon well first of all barbara thank you and and a a little bit on downside about you you really learned about the importance of the the personal touch or or the personal contact so so true but i think i love when you're saying next year your last bullet we are excited about getting out of the house

109every day and i thought profound and and well said so uh yeah a lot to look forward to next year and and and uh thank you for bringing that student perspective because um uh what what you described were were the challenges that a lot of adults were having too uh my wife has been working from home all this time too but she being an adult forced herself to get up get showered get in her work clothes every day knowing that she just had to keep that routine going and you're so right when you say and for for teenagers it wasn't always so easy to do that and but based on what we talked about tonight i i get pretty excited about what we'll all be able to do too to get that personal touch going

110get that humanizing going among us so thank you it really fit well with tonight's presentation too i don't have a lot to report because it's summertime and we did tell you about summer school already and we already talked to you about looking ahead to fall but i i will point out a couple of things we did have a vaccination clinic here on june 2nd we had also had one uh earlier than that with walgreens but for the june second one uh everybody who participated uh has appointments to come back on wednesday june 23rd for their second dose evanstonians have been marvelous about that i'm giving reports that young people have been marvelous about it but just a reminder second dose june 23rd uh we already heard about the fact that dr campbell is going to

111be um um uh hosting and and interviewing for the letters to my white male friends on thursday june 17th fan event and that will be a must see to say the least tomorrow evening we're hosting our annual lgbtq plus information session and we've already been in touch with the students and the families who are looking for those opportunities as they start to anticipate the new school year and and what the implications as well as the opportunities are for our lgbtq plus students so we're very uh excited and uh uh miss dr miss savage williams dr savage williams maybe but but having us attended that ourselves in the past we uh we know what a what a really fine event there it is so that's great and i just want to point out that on this

112wednesday evening june 16th will be the wild kids senior sports banquet and this is not a new event but we've got a big event planned at legere field and uh and another way to really cap off the year for our seniors who did miss a lot and and and did have to make probably the most sacrifices that any senior class let's hope uh in generations has had and will have to make uh but uh they were wonderful at graduation there have been several other events and uh we have a senior sports banquet coming up and that concludes my report tonight thank you thank you dr witherspoon so next on our agenda is the finance committee so the board is the committee of the finance committee and uh miss modino you're gonna lead us hello gloria

113i'm just gonna say a word before i could say this at the end of mary's presentation too um but like everything else in this district the financial challenges during a pandemic were beyond belief and as mary and i talked even this afternoon again you know one thing that that budgeting and and is about is is forecasting uh you know uh making predictions and and then uh administering in a way that you make a budget work out but but this year uh all the rules changed uh yeah you know we we didn't have past experience we could guess what might happen uh with lost fees we could guess what might happen uh with additional expenses for ppe and and other things we could guess what might happen if we weren't uh sending people weren't traveling to

114conferences as much or we weren't using as much paper yet all that but we had no no trend lines no past experience to build off of i mean everything and this sounds a little crazy since we're presenting the budget but was a guess we i'd like to say it was an educated guess but but it it was only educated to the uh uh as far as we could kind of assess what was going on and think that it was educated um so i will start by saying as mary talks about next year's budget and it is a balanced budget that we we will be ending this fiscal year in very good shape uh with all the unknowns we've been dealing with we're forecasting for next year which is what this budget really is um and

115uh and it's a great budget mary thank you uh and and and it is indeed balanced and even though we she will talk about additional threats that are there uh i i just want to tell you that i feel very confident about where we are budget wise and where we are financially and in fact our goal is next year to get another aaa rating when it's time to get rated again because we have tried very hard to manage financially at a level that we think that the the rating agencies will recognize not all entities were able to do during the pandemic so i'll start with kudos mary and uh turn it over to you thanks i agree with everything eric ditto um yeah i i do agree with the concepts it's been a tough year

116you know we i think when everything went remote i i felt like i was um the only board presentation person that wasn't canceled for a while right so so we talked in april we talked in june and september and so it has been a bit of a guessing game and i'm not really comfortable with saying that but but i'm thankful that we weren't sitting here trying to do this for a retail chain or a restaurant chain right like they who knows what they could have predicted at least with what we do we knew that there were some things that were going to be okay property taxes in the immediate future were going to be okay you know our state and federal revenues were pretty consistent so i think we're really fortunate in that respect we

117knew some things weren't going to be okay nutrition services revenues for example our rental revenues which are usually big things for us we knew that that was not going to be okay so i i last year if you remember we talked a little bit about how a lot of our future depends on how quick the recovery will be and what i do want to say to you it's not really in the presentation but i do want to say that you know the jury's still out on how quick all of the recovery will be but we do have some strong things that do help us our strong property tax collections they were a little later this year because the county relaxed some deadlines but they're still really strong and we had we had strong fee payments

118from families you know honestly we weren't really sure how that was going to work and we were prepared to be very understanding about that but we had also changed how we tried to remind families of amounts due particularly for seniors and so that went really well and we tried to be really generous with understanding and and hearing about extenuating circumstances and sometimes those go to marcus's office and then come to us but so i think overall we tried to be as responsive and responsible to all of our families and our students and from a financial perspective i you know as eric said the jury is still out on our um actuals for the 2021 fiscal year we'll be bringing those to you officially in december but i can tell you that starting in april i

119start going in and looking at numbers revenues expenses and we did have some expenses that were underspent and some revenues that were under collected if you will but i think overall we'll all be really pleased with the results and that'll help us going forward so that's a different meeting though so tonight we're going to talk about just an overview so a little bit about revenues and expenditures look at a couple of funds in particular and a plan the financial plan and some what ifs i have 27 slides i'm gonna move through them quickly because i know it's getting late but i'll just hit some of the highlights so we usually talk a little bit about the state budget some concerns and then an overview of this process and where we go from here so recently

120the governor proposed a state budget with what i understand will be level funding uh for schools there there were some additional contributions to evidence-based funding but we fall in a tier that will not earn us any additional money as far as i know so for us in my opinion the good news has always been that our state funding would remain flat we we knew that we were probably not eligible for a lot of additional state funding but we also didn't want them to take any of our funding away because we knew that would be a possibility so far that seems that that state funding that will be the state funding will be flat the two things in my opinion that could really change that would be if the state fails to meet their minimum commitment

121in future years or if enrollment would significantly decline we've not seen either of those things happen so i'm hopeful that they won't some of the things that are still on the table mostly because they haven't been resolved they also haven't really been talked about a lot lately but you know we've been in the middle of a pandemic those items would be property tax freezes and pension funding i think property tax freezes will probably i should say freeze it's not really plural i think that will come up sooner than pension funding will that's just my guess so the evidence-based funding replaced something that used to be called general state aid this is the fifth year of that funding and as i said the state has pledged level funding for our tier at least in the upcoming

122year and and our amount that we receive from the state is almost three million dollars so the corporate property replacement tax is this mysterious state-handled uh tax that replaced something that used to exist a long time ago and every year all my counterparts are are asking each other what have you heard what have you heard last year we tried to be really conservative and we estimated about a 25 percent cut in that tax it's about a 1.7 million dollar inflow for us and it turned out that it it remained stable so that was a nice surprise and everyone that i've talked to in my circles is budgeting this as a flat revenue so hopefully no cuts maybe they'll surprise us and give us a little bit more so that particular revenue stream from the state

123should be stable like i said again when we think about state budget threats we know that that they're oh it says property facts sorry about that little typo that should say property tax we always know that that could occur particularly since that graduated income tax didn't pass what was that a year i don't know i lose all sense of time in the pandemic but whenever that was that it didn't pass a year or so ago the pension cost shift and future um evidence-based funding so i think those are really the three things that could potentially cause us some trouble down the road so we talk about the consumer price index because it affects how our tax levy changes our property tax levy um so the levy for 2020 before all the pandemic hit was 2.3

124and then um that was that was um officially declared in december of 2019 for the following year so moving forward a year in december of that did go down we expected that but it's at 1.4 percent i've definitely seen it lower in the last seven eight years so it wasn't completely disappointing at least it was something it was over a percent so if there is a property tax freeze in the immediate future that could cancel out how our property taxes could increase by that consumer price index percentage so we do know that the late fees have been relaxed in cook county we saw the spring property taxes come in a little late but for us because we're a conservative district that doesn't really have cash flow issues as long as that money is collected in

125you know may it's fine and we're seeing that most of it did come in by may so for the new tentative budget the um so let me just issue my disclaimer before we go through some of these slides some of the percentages that you're going to see are going to look higher than than they normally do when we come talk about this twice a year so just remember two things last year when we came to you for the final budget we went back and really made some reductions where we could that's not to say that the fiscal 21 budget was actually less than fiscal 20 but the normal increases that we see were small they were smaller than a normal increase that we'd see so some of the numbers you're going to see now are

126going to be a little higher mainly because of two things we were working with a somewhat smaller increase last year and then the second thing is is there's a portion of the recovery funds that have been issued by the federal government within this budget those recovery funds can be spent over three years from any time from 2020 to june of 2023 and so i'll get to a slide later but we've we've put a portion of those funds and plan to spend a portion of those funds in the upcoming school or fiscal year so i don't want you to have any sticker shock when you see the increase in percentages it's a really a very moderate increase in all areas so the overall 95.9 million dollar budget is a 4.8 percent overall increase in the 2021

127budget this includes all the funds which are some of the ones that are not what we call operating funds like our debt service imrf and capital funds so we primarily talk about operating funds because that's how we up what money we use to operate that includes our education fund our operations and maintenance fund our transportation fund so those funds actually have a 7.4 percent increase but those are the funds that do include that federal recovery money in a total amount of 1.5 million dollars so the i'm sorry 1.5 in the education fund 800 000 in the operations for a total of 2.3 million in that second bullet so and there were some modest increases as we always have in personnel cost due to the contractual obligations so the revenue estimates are conservative we're looking at

128you know how do we anticipate what our food service revenue will be next year we don't really know if kids will be bringing their own lunch you know so we had to be really conservative we do know that the federal government has allowed for free lunch and breakfast for all students for the upcoming year so we'll be working on that with our nutrition services department and kim minestra to provide as much food as we can to as many students and then we get reimbursed for those meals but overall even though that's a big revenue for us we wanted to be very conservative with it our evidence-based funding again we are expecting that to remain flat as well as our categorical state aid which isn't really a lot anymore it's it's some of the specific types

129of aid like a transportation reimbursement or a special ed room and board reimbursement and those are generally related to how we spend and so if our spending is flat our reimbursements are typically flat our federal aid as well like our title one title 2 should remain flat there is an increase in the budget but that does include that one-time recovery aid that we talked about so the property taxes as i mentioned in cook county they're a blend of two levee years so the 2.3 and the 1.4 sorry there's a typo one of those is 20 20 and the other is 20 21. so anyway the point is it's a blend of two different rates and later payment dates will affect timing and we still haven't heard much but don't know much about potential freeze like

130i said the corporate property replacement tax we expect to be flat but we never know so getting a little more local and looking at revenues we are not expecting any increases in student fees those do come to the board if we ever did them but we don't have any plan to bring to you no increase in parking fees and many summer school courses were free or are free this summer and we don't have a planned increase for summer of 22 courses federal aid can be used to subsidize any summer school program so i think if we were going to increase offerings we'd probably that'd be a good way to use some of that federal aid so this is just a chart that we show you every year it doesn't change more than a percent or

131two either way but when we look at revenues the important thing is you see that huge piece of the pie is brought to us by property taxes and then other local revenues which is the next largest as well as federal federal aid is a little bigger this year than normal but the two of those things are barely just over 10 percent so the the point is we know that our biggest revenues come from property taxes and those have been really stable so we always talk about values based budgeting because we try to avoid anything that affects the classroom so you know for example as students come back to in-person learning we wanted to make sure that we held the classroom supply budget lines and all the departments steady and we did do that but wherever

132we can in any of the non-classroom areas we try to maintain or reduce levels for contractual services supplies and materials so when we look at expenditures we always know that the biggest parts of the pie will be for salaries and fringe benefits and those are the two greenish colors so that's about 76 percent of our overall spending and that's consistent with how we spend money every year so overall salaries are increasing about 5.69 but i do want to remind you that that includes not only moderate employment contract increases but last year we we did have safety staff members who were laid off we reduced the final budget for that amount we knew that our some of our nutrition service workers would not be working full time many of them worked many less hours for a

133good part of the year we gave them as many hours as we had to give so that's why those increases in salary numbers are larger normally we would come to about a three percent increase but because we're sort of building back in some things that we had cut the last year that's why you see a higher percentage fringe benefits really didn't increase by much we're able to with the help of our hr department they are able to keep the cost down on our medical and dental benefits also the the number for supply and materials are increasing by about 25 percent but that's because we were able to make significant expected cuts last year when we came back to the final budget the administrative group in particular really went back to their departments and made as

134many cuts as we could but i can assure you that there are very stable there have been very stable supply and material budgets in the academic departments for last year as well as this year purchase services again really this is kind of just restoring back to where we were in the expected fiscal 20 level so there's no big increases in any purchase services other than what we normally would have the capital outlay and i'm just talking about capital items as it relates to the education and operations fund so really building operations and education that is increasing by 70 percent because honestly it's normally not much it's maybe 500 000 between the two funds in a 90 million dollar budget but because we are planning to use some of that federal aid that's why that number

135looks very large tuition that's really what we pay for outside room and board primarily for special ed or safe school that is increasing by about five percent but the numbers were pretty stable last year so i'm not really surprised by that increasing a little bit so the education fund as a whole um is about a 6.7 percent increase over last year and that really is regarding reinstating those cuts that were made in the final budget of last year as well as some of the federal aid operations and maintenance fund again a little higher than normal increase that fund also has eight hundred thousand dollars in scheduled um financial aid primarily for construction projects throughout the building that will improve airflow you know hvac type things and then salary increases in cost of supplies in the

136operations and maintenance fund so as i mentioned instruction is always a top priority i was very conscious of not reducing any supply budgets for any of the academic areas because some of the money wasn't fully used this year and normally i would go in and try to take from here or there but i wanted to be really fair when everyone's back in person and not assume that because something wasn't used this year that it wasn't needed so we always try to maintain reasonable student teacher ratios you guys know all that and we really um i think this past year was really the first time this third bullet point came up for me here anyway is avoiding personnel layoffs wherever possible and i i've never seen an organization redeploy people in a way that we did

137this year and i'm not taking any of the credit for that because i didn't do any of it but you know to be able to continue to provide employment for people and and have people really um rise to the occasion and you know you're normally a safety staff member and now you're organizing books for book distribution i mean that certainly wasn't what they signed up for but it was pretty amazing so we weren't you know we couldn't avoid every layoff but i would say for an organization our size they were really minimal and everyone was brought back who wanted to come back so our financial strategies as usual are monitoring the state's financial condition continuing a robust capital program that reduces operating costs we're installing a lot of new windows this summer we want to

138revamp some our hvac system in the auditorium so that it can handle air for high capacity space we plan to continue our wellness strategies which is working to contain our health care costs and as we've shown since the 1920 school year we just reorganized as needed i say we but like i said i didn't really do it um if the state does end up reducing the evidence-based funding we have to talk we'll have to figure out some cuts and and where we can shift some things around property tax freeze we'd have to talk also and we're always we always have those plan b things in the back of our mind but we've been really fortunate so far so about this is about the end of the presentation i think just one or two more slides

139what happens now is we publish a budget hearing notice so the budget that you approve tonight is really to get things started we know that we're going to fine-tune some of the numbers by september so we come back in september with some numbers that have been a little better adjusted for anything that we don't know now and will know by then and we'll have a budget hearing we'll do we'll take a look again at property taxes by then we'll know what new property might be coming on the tax rolls and we'll adjust any revenues accordingly and we will produce the final budget document in september which will be balanced we'll have updated property taxes and it will also include some additional sections in the back of the digital book that you got which includes a

140lot of operational and analysis information that we give you every year and that's it sorry that was a lot of slides i don't know how to really shorten that though [Laughter] if you want to give me suggestions i'm totally fine with that i think you do a really good job mary it was 27. it wasn't as fast as i could it's you know i don't want to i don't want to downplay it or too much because it's 90 million dollars but i realize it's a lot of numbers and i should apologize in advance to someone who doesn't like numbers but that was the best i could do i don't think you should apologize and i think i think it is important for us i would feel guilty if i did less on the presentation to

141be honest well we wouldn't want that thank you okay thank you questions gretchen i'm gonna apologize because my chair is slowly sinking to the ground here i'm having so many difficulties with my chair tonight it's obviously you know welcome back to being here in person um my back is killing me and i'm just dying in this thing my question is when when you come back to the board with your updates at that time we're gonna by then we should have our allocated money pandemic money and a better sense of where it's going and i think it's important because there are some parameters around the use of that those funds and for us it's going to be i think over 3 million right and there are some parameters around how we use that money and um

142priorities are you know students and and helping them through this time and making up for any any lost learning so you know this sort of relates to what marcus and his team were talking about earlier as well and i don't know the best way to convey convey and confer with the board on those on how we're going to prioritize the spending of those funds but i think we need to hear more about it um you know if the money is over three million dollars where what where is it going for sure what are you going to do with it um so you know i think there's some obvious places that it would be going but probably some less obvious places as well um and i think it's important to talk about that you know in

143this in this setting so that we're all part of the conversation um and and so that our community understands and knows um that that we're gonna benefit from this influx of money but we're also having to make up for losses over the course of the pandemic so it's it's really not so much a question on your presentation tonight other than to maybe make a make a note of that and figure out you know in your in the various reporting where the and you know obviously i think when we're back in the fall that's a logical time because at that point we're going to know you know the money because it comes through the state so there's a little bit of this waiting game right now probably don't want to spend all the money before we

144get it just saying no but i will say they've been they've been very generous in allowing some of the expenses to um kind of be a look back which has never been the case with grant money but um the first round of funding that we got everything has been effective back to like march 17th so that was helpful and um i i think even some of the things that were mentioned tonight when tayo was here marcus and pete were speaking um they certainly have some ideas for some of the um i don't know if i'd even call it low-hanging fruit but i think it's obvious and i don't want to speak for them but we've been talking about things like the the social emotional aspects right the mental health aspects the summer school the right

145the um enrichment programs and so they definitely you know they know that i'm going to be looking to them before i can incorporate anything in right to any kind of plan to say here's how much we have and of course there's technology and some of the things we've been doing this spring with you know outfitting all the classrooms with these the awesome stuff yeah so um we definitely have a plan to collaborate and and talk about um yeah something needs i think sharing that with us would be great i'm just going to stand up and try and lift my seat here so yeah i want to agree and i think we have to pull it out right and really hone in on how it's being used so i just want definitely want to highlight that

146because i think it's important i think it's important for us to know i think it's important for the community to know and so yeah however you do that in the fall and i will say it seems like a lot of money when you talk about it but of the major institutions in evanston we definitely are getting the least and it's um [Music] you know it's about depending on what you look at like our overall budget it's about three percent of an annual overall budget for us i i welcome every penny of it and i know these guys do too um but it there's definitely going to be some prioritization right that's going to be needed so i think everyone will be thoughtful and open and definitely take input because i think they're already getting it

147yeah and you know what and i don't want to give input on how you think it should be spent that's not the point it's the um and i know it's like a drop you know in comparison in the bucket but we definitely will take it um it's more of the perception and the transparency of because everybody knows we're getting this money i mean it's been blasted schools are getting the money the city's giving the money you know um it's like all over so um it's just us sharing exactly what you presented in terms of the things we couldn't do right and what we had to pull back on because we didn't know and then now how are we covering that as well as providing this atmosphere for kids returning and it's the whole story right

148it's the complete story getting and so that needs to be that needs to be highlighted and it just needs to be shared but no i don't want to get into details i just want to be transparent and how we're you know doing what we need to do that's it okay you know relatedly and i don't mean to interrupt at all but very related to all of this is that um you know while we're getting this money the state continues to pass unfunded mandate after unfunded mandate after unfunded mandate and there are i just said that three times there are at least three that i can think of off the top of my head that just passed in this last legislative session that are and some of which are going to impose some really significant costs

149on school districts so you know it all it's not that it's a wash but it's just that you know we're we're constantly playing catch up on trying to trying to deal with some of those unfunded mandates so and to put a perspective because we're thrilled to get 3.7 million or whatever no question about it but that's 40 million dollars less than the city's getting so so yeah you know not all entities are getting 43 million dollars and and i just want to point that out not because we aren't appreciative for the reasons you guys stated to get it but but you know we're not getting this huge amount of money that some entities in the state are getting exactly right i know that that people are hearing though about this this um money because it's

150been it's been talked about and and i agree there that it it makes sense to talk it it makes sense to have a plan in terms of of how we would use this money and be be vocal and transparent about that plan um you know we're the school board so we're not going to tell you exactly you know what what to do with it but it is important to be mindful i love how you talk about values based budgeting and recognizing that we don't want to take anything away from the instruction of our students that's a that's a priority and and however we can support that and the well-being of our students just as we heard in this earlier report to help students transition back in a way that that humanizes them and and cares

151for their social emotional learning you know that that to me is it would be an incredible use of of those those funds i agree oh i'm sorry no you're fine you're fine mary i do want to push back a little bit on the guessing that you just were guessing i i mean i know that you were working from a very in difficult position of not having had these things but i do remember an excel spreadsheet from early in the pandemic where we had five different the recovery yeah it was everything from locations that's not a big deal too literally the world cra crate caves in on itself so i do think that your long-term planning ability and that you've done this for so long is what allowed us to be in a position to to

152have this budget and to get through this last year so i want to always raise that up i know we always tease you but you know we are just so grateful because um most excuse me many many many school districts around the country are not in this position at all they're like can we open the doors can we have you know enough teachers to teach our kids right so thank you thank you thank you and so i i really want to say that you scared me when you said you were going to push back um real quick i know it's late but there were a few things in the executive summary that i really was interested in and i don't know mary if this is you or marcus or eric but um equity training to

153a more uh to be more deliberate anti-racist agenda implementing honors challenge courses in all departments asset-based strategies to address blackmail achievement and multiple measures a new multi-variable assessment system aligned to eths predictors excuse me to more precisely identify and monitor each student's career readiness i i i'm just maybe we don't have to talk about if you could talk about them for like 30 seconds great if you want to get back to us later but i think those are some really interesting things that tie into your earlier presentation so i'm i'm curious about do you want it it was from eric's letter do you want to do you want to see what she just read apologies they kind of are all together got them i got page two yeah it's on page ten of the rooms

154yeah well i'm looking at page two well it might be different number one yeah okay sorry those bullet points you really could do this each of those bullets could be its own presentation i know so maybe you want to just get back to us yeah we can get back to you really i'm totally fine with that but i just want to raise up that there's innovation we will incorporate that into several reports yeah because for example portrait of a graduate is one of the things that's actually referenced there yeah and we're going to bring a full report to the board uh very early in the fall because that's going to be how we're going to report uh student outcomes uh when we come back to you in november so uh so yeah some of those

155are an entire no i know and i didn't mean to say but i do want to raise up that there's innovation in here in a time when there is other people are hoping to open the doors there is okay thank you i look forward to that thank you pat anybody else i just want to say in response to what you said about the lovely excel spreadsheet that i loved so much i wanted to bring you back an update but to be honest it's it's still a little too soon so far everything has been sort of in the stable recovery category i would say but i think it's a little soon so it's not something that i just pushed aside but i don't think it's something that we can quite update yet so we we will

156definitely talk about it maybe in the mid-year budget review or with the actuals for the financials as they come out over the winter so mary i just think you just have such a great gift of making it understandable so it's not it's not easy it's cut it's complicated and and these threats still loom above us of course um but it just sounds less scary when you say it so thank you i appreciate that that's a wonderful compliment it's a little scary but i think you know i think we touched on this i want to say we just talked about this for some reason in one of the meetings and i don't remember why but you know the board has been really supportive and conservative and has has understood why administration has asked for you know

157healthy fund balances not not over the top we're not sitting on 80 million dollars like some districts i know to the north but um but enough so that we don't have to panic when something happens and for me like i don't want to stay awake at night and panic over this stuff and i'm sure none of you do either so i think that that there's a lot to be said about um you know trust and conservatism as it relates to to spending and so i knew that whatever happened even if we had a really bad year that we'd get through it we'd have to make adjustments that might be more painful than where we're sitting right now because i feel like we're okay but i knew that we'd get through it and we'd just have

158to go from there but thank you that was a very nice compliment all right thank you let's move on um we are at our action items and the first action item is approval of the tentative um fiscal year 2122 budget that our mary referenced could i have motion for approval please some move second roll [Music] yes the next item is approval of emergency expenditure funds formation masonry masonry and roofing work north elevation of beersly gymnasium sorry some of second i just have a quick question before we vote okay those pictures look kind of scary do we how did we uh how did we find this part how did we find this problem and is there some sort of inspection that we do on a regular basis there is although i don't mean to you know

159get too much i can make it quick um the outside part the roofs are generally um are generally inspected once a year as the weather gets nice we are going to look into to make sure we're going to talk to our insurance company to see if there you know we have there's a lot of ice damning and stuff this year that even homeowners experienced so that could have had something to do with it but it may not be significant enough to be an insurance claim because you can't prove it but the inside you'd be surprised i mean ripples and things pop up all the time here and so the bleachers hadn't been used much because the kids weren't here and so someone started seeing some leaks in the bleachers and then it just sort of

160escalated to some back areas so probably more than you wanted to know but it's not that rare here to be honest this was just a big one okay but there's a motion on the table we'll call please do we have a motion in second second yes yeah okay thank you yes parsons yes yes yes yes the next is approval of the lgbtq resolution and monique is going to read that for us okay lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer pride month 2021 whereas the uprisings at the stonewall inn in june 1969 sparked a liberation movement a call to action that continues to inspire us to live up to our nation's promise of equity liberty and justice for all whereas pride is a time to recall the trials the lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer community has

161endured and to rejoice in the triumphs of trailblazing individuals who have bravely fought and continue to fight for full equality whereas the lgbtq plus community in america has achieved remarkable progress since stonewall sorry this computer pause whereas historic supreme court rulings in recent years have struck down regressive laws affirmed the right to marriage equality and secured workplace protection for lgbtq plus individuals in every state and territory whereas for all of our progress there are many states in which lgbtq plus individuals still lack protection for fundamental rights and dignity in hospitals schools public accommodations and other spaces whereas our nation continues to witness a tragic spike in violence against transgender women of color lgbtq plus individuals especially youth who defy sex or gender norms face bully and bullying and harassment in educational settings and are at

162a disproportionate risk of self-harm and death by suicide whereas we recognize the resilience and determination of the many individuals who are fighting to live freely and authentically whereas whereas we recognize i'm sorry whereas we affirm our obligation to uphold the dignity of all people and dedicate ourselves to protecting the most vulnerable among us again this computer on now thereby be it resolved that the board of education of evanston township high school district recognizes the month of june 2021 as lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer pride month and celebrates the achievements of the lgbtq plus community and the great diversity of all american people can i finish it yes that's it thank you mommy could we have a motion for acceptance please so moved second local carson yes yes yes yes yes yes next item is

163the consent agenda which consists of approval of iasb membership approval of minutes from may 3rd 2021 closed session meeting may 3rd 2021 regular meeting and may 27 2021 special meeting approval of bills treasurer's reports for march 2021 in april of 2021 personnel agenda appointments to staff support staff summer school and interns change in status support staff 10 to 12 month employment stipends leaves of absence from certified maternity safety paternity and support staff resignation certified and support staff and other salvi approval of administrations administrators and exempt staff and there is an addendum to the personnel agenda appointments to staff exempt and negotiated agreement service employees international union local number 73 custodians maintenance so second vocal please yes yes living stuff yes yes yes yes okay we are at old and new business does anybody have old

164or new business to present hearing none can i have a motion for adjournment please tell me all in favor say aye aye eyes have it we are adjourned you