001welcome everyone to the february 22nd 2021 board of education meeting a joint meeting of district 65 and district 202 boards of education can we have a roll call of district 65 please yes um lindsey ryan here mendoza here kartha here hailpen here kim here hernandez here tanya booty here thank you can we have a roll call for 202 please well dave here livingston air mansell here parsons air roller woods here to terrance here savage williams here thank you all right so uh welcome all um so our first agenda item is board and superintendent's comments so um let's see i think it makes sense for 202 to start with um dr witherspoon would you like to start us well i i will and uh to the entire district 65 board and and staff welcome to eths
002i guess since we're hosting it's a little weird compared to normally i want to give a special hello to uh to dr horton uh i've just so enjoyed working with him since he came even even before he was official started starting way back many months ago but this is our first joint meeting together and we've been in a lot of other settings together but uh here we are and uh i just i really appreciate the chance for us to get together with all of you um i know that we're two separate districts and i know that we we have separate schools and we have separate um uh uh age groups even but it's all evanston skokie it's all the people who attend our schools and it's all the same families and and children and you
003have a lot of children in your district that we haven't seen yet but uh we know that they're headed our way and uh and we also know that we have a school already filled with what i'll call district 65 alums uh and uh and and uh believe me uh we love seeing how they just grow and flourish in the four years that we get to have them too so welcome and looking forward to a good meeting thank you thank you dr witherspoon and so i will um also extend a welcome it's it's just a it's an odd um way to to welcome you i wish we wish i could show you the school dr horton it's really a nice school um and our board meeting and our board room and all of that but um
004this is the best i can do um but welcome to this this uh board meeting and welcome to evanston i know you've been here a while um and it seems odd but i haven't really had a chance to to say that to you so i'm really glad you're here and um and to the other board members um some of you i've worked with for several years um i have not uh so it's really i'm really glad to see you and and officially meet you so welcome and um i just i look forward as well to the work that we will do together it's really important for our two districts and i know this is happening it's important for us to to talk together to articulate together various departments and i know that happens between uh
005various departments and this is the opportunity for the board to do that uh with with our our colleagues um not even across town but kind of around the corner when when we're together we're close so um so welcome i look forward to some really good discussion tonight all right yes you or me you can go ahead and i have some comments after you do all right all right thank you uh again um i've had a chance of course to work with eric quite a bit on a few things um and thanking you all for uh welcoming me uh to this to this chance for us to collaborate and i see nothing but opportunity for us in so many levels while we're here for the joint literacy i do know and i do believe that there
006are other um great ventures ahead as i've been talking with dr campbell and some of the in some of the environments uh around the equity work around our um colleges here readiness work like i'm i'm really excited to be able to adventure on that uh and then i would just like to say for our community we have um we have our we have children back in school uh and that feels so good you know and we know there's a difference between high school uh right now especially with what the data's saying uh and we have our elementary and middle schools uh about half of our students are back and i just want to you know say congratulations to everyone on our team and the community and our board for working with us to be able
007to make that happen uh and and uh there's a lot for me to continue to learn from uh dr witherspoon and his work and and from the board leaders at 65 as well as 202 and just excited to be here so thank you thank you dr horton and uh yeah an extension of gratitude as well from myself to 202 for hosting us tonight i think you know it's a critical value for us to not only name but actually put into action that it it truly takes a village to raise children and we are a part of that village and all of the the children of 65 and 202 are um you know important to all of us and our priority for all of us and taking the time to put that into action by having
008a joint literacy goal and then following through on discussing it and looking for those other opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other and work togeth together is critical for our own independent progress and learning as as separate institutions but also so critical for our community um so i thank you all for hosting us dr witherspoon and dr horton i thank you all for uh your collaboration and your humble leadership that allows for us to be able to um make the kind of progress and collaborating that we need to make on behalf of all the children of families of district 65 and 202 so beyond that i did also want to read a comment that is i think relevant to our district 65 community but also may feel relevant to our district 202 community um
009i'm going to read some language that i've shared with the number of folks who have reached out to our board about reopening schools and about re remote learning um one i want to say that i and many of us on our board approach this work as parents in in the district um and so i i have as a mother a working mother of three children two of whom were remote learning i understand the challenges that remote learning presents for children and families um as such it has consistently been the stance of the district 65 board and administration to monitor remote learning remote learning indicators engagement and progress and we have consistently been committed to reopening our schools with safety metrics that were established by scientific research idph guidance and the input of a medical advisory
010group that was established in december of 2020 and we in fact have re opened last week bringing back every elementary age child that indicated a preference for in person and all of the vulnerable middle school populations that indicated a preference for in person we were not able to bring back every middle school student despite the fact that we would have liked to because of space restrictions in our buildings um and while you know it would be lovely if kovid as a restriction disappeared and we could put everyone back in the building it is simply not safe for us to fill buildings with bodies right now and so we do need to maintain restrictions in terms of physical spacing and thankfully while maintaining those restrictions we have still been able to bring back all of the
011middle school populations who indicated that they were vulnerable according to the five categories of vulnerability that we identified um and i want to continue to invite the public that has any concerns about their children's experience of remote learning um to reach out to us and let us know what those specific needs are so that we can um deploy the resources that we have available to support children and families in order to respond to those needs because everyone's wellness and learning is a priority for for district 65 and we cannot um because it takes a village we do need to be communicating with one another about what those needs are in order to to meet them and that that's um all my comments for this evening thank you thank you anya all right so we're gonna
012go right ahead with our agenda um the first item on the agenda that i have is comments from the public dr davis where are you there are so many people on this call dr davis how many public comments do we have oh let's see we have i believe it's 50 over 50. okay all right so we have over 50 uh public comments from the community tonight so given the need for our boards to conduct our business i'm gonna follow our policy district 202 has a policy um for public participation at board meetings is policy 2.230 and i'm gonna read from that policy it says uh ordinarily comments are limited to three minutes um however the maximum period for citizen participation is 60 minutes um so if they're more than 20 speakers and you know we're
013not in person so 20 i'll say 20 comments the board president will allocate time for these comments to ensure that um that they don't exceed more than 60 minutes um so what we're going to do is um observe the 60 minutes in order to get the maximum amount of speakers i've asked our board secretary dr bavis to read as many of these letters as he can with in the 60 minute period so that means that we'll have a little bit more than one minute um so we won't be able to read all of the letter however i would like to say that these are public comments so the entire letters will be in will be on our our website so they will be a part of the board meeting so that they can be reviewed
014in their entirety um by the public and will be reviewed by board members [Music] okay thank you president savage williams what i'm going to do is it's about a minute and 30. some of the comments are very short so i believe i can do a minute 30 and get it done uh but i would ask that we have someone look at the time 7 16 and then just um i'm going to try i'm timing them myself and i'm reading them myself but i will be i will need someone to interrupt me maybe a madam president at uh 8 18 to keep with our with our goal okay i will do that and they all will be published in their entirety on our website on our in the board tab of the website all right ready
015ready strap yourselves in here we go number one is from matt pierce dear district 65 school board i'm a parent of a sixth grader at haven and i humbly request that you reopen the middle schools to all students who want to return to in school learning well my son has gotten good grades during remote learning and appears to be doing quite well there is so much that he and other kids should be learning as an example during the recent material cover the last round of math tests the teacher had uh to take change yet to cover even half of the cop topics that were on the test and were approaching two thirds of the way through the year my son did not do nearly as well the tests that he had in the past jumped
016from the 80th percentile to the 50th percentile as is simply because teachers don't have the time resources and online environment uh to cover even half of the necessary topics respectful respectfully i think you and the teachers realize this and i think public opinion and scientific opinion has swung dramatically in favor of a resumption of in-school learning please please at least have the schools open by the fall i'm a huge public school believer i want the public schools from kindergarten through middle through medical school it is in my blood but if there is not in school learning from my son on the file i'll have to send him somewhere someplace else thank you for your work and your consideration matt pierce uh let's see next comment is steve brown i am ready to request the eths
017take immediate steps to reopen for in-person learning and share its planning process and the goals of the community i have had two graduates from eths one as a current junior no matter how much you try to spend it remote schooling isn't fair to in-person learning you have received letters from doctors and organizations that doctors are a part of them and you have refused to have a discussion with them everyone is confused eths is inaction will have long-term negative effects on the community a community of which i've been a proud member for over 20 years i believe that district 202 administration and board should one take deliberate transparent steps towards reopening this school year prioritize students who are most at risk and remote learning well providing options to continue remotely for those who do not wish
018to attend in person to share information including publicly answering live questions from community members and three convene broad-based advisory panel that includes local physicians you have people who disagree with you about the speed of openness schools make it product make it productive d202 has support science decision making and particularly values the expertise of doctors uh they must do that in public health professionals who are diverse backgrounds and are up to date the science that covered as well as aspects of children adolescence physical and mental health cdc ama america academy of pediatrics all came out recently in favor of schools reopening as confusing as to why you're not taking a science-based progressive approach lastly in a personal level i'm disheartened at the board and doctor witherspoon is evidence by my email watching board meetings is celebrating
019how good a job they are doing with their children are struggling and not being in person for learning thank you steve brown uh the next public comment is from abby torelli uh i am an alum of vths our daughter is a senior in the first 2.75 years are very good well we do offer uh support follow the science the science is suggesting return to school remote learning is better than no learning but absolutely no substitute for in person as a board you are completely failing all those students by not pulling uh putting their needs ahead of everything and the lack of transparency is really concerning either every other district is moving toward or already in person as an emmistonian i will have a hard time recommending the school i've been impressed with many teachers dr
020campbell and many other things but this is just not okay in frustration abby turtle the next public comment is from cara rudolph i am writing to you because a concerned parent of two children at eths as well as other parents whom i am in contact well this plan for reopening and what can parents do to help the school open their doors i'd like to know if there's anything i can do to help get my child back into the classroom i can assist in communications or any other avenue please let me know parents need more information from the administration school board and teachers about what is happening with the reopening schoolers my job as a parent to do the best i can for my children i do not want my family to feel forgotten or dismissed
021without knowing the plan from district 202 thank you cara rudolph next next we have uh reverend dr michael nabors i am taking the liberty to write in support of regarding uh how you are handling the pandemic as it relates to edison township high school as a parent of a 16 year old junior i am aware firsthand of the maturation process of students during the academic year audition as a senior pastor of a local church i have been attuned uh to many parents and students attending eths finally as president of the evanston north shore branch of the naacp i have also been very aware of black and brown students throughout evanston skokie communities national data has clearly suggested that black marine people have a higher susceptibility we have given coping 19 of expressing a pre-existing condition
022in fact most studies suggest that people of color are nearly three times more likely to get coronavirus nearly three times more likely to die a significant course of students at eths are black and brown addition a significant amount nearly half of eths staff is also black and brown the sheer volume indicates that any covet 19 outbreak would have a potential deleterious effect on black and white next population it's very clear that you both have done your homework well especially painful to see our children out of school we also prove wise in the months and years to come my son pierce recently made the honor roll uh and has been acclimated with e-learning well it is not his first choice he is also not uh ready to return to school until it's safe to do so
023i feel comfortable speaking for on behalf of nearly 900 members of second baptist church and the 425 members of emerson north shore branch the naacp while the sacrifices of families has been substantial please stay the course until the science and the medicine offers a full go-ahead for establishing learning uh even in a hybrid model very warmly reverend dr michael c r neighbors pastor second baptist church president emerson north shore naacp next comment is from katie ojala first off thank you for working up to open district 65 schools i am very grateful to have the school open for after 11 months of closure my current fifth grader at willard uh is so grateful to return to school this week i appreciate our teachers here in the classroom and i hope we can build on that success
024that being said i have been uh local there's 65 decision makers that are middle school planners inadequate and inequitable so many students including my current eighth grader haven had no hope of returning to in-person learning this week we bought a cap and gown for eighth grade graduation for a school uh he will have attended half of the three years how is this a step of the right with the district of the motto of every day every child whatever it takes i hope district 65 can work to create a solution that accommodates all children who want in-person learning let's take the success of the school openings and build on them to help students in our community thank you for all the hard work on behalf of the children and taking care of time to hear me
025in the district and other district families sincerely katie ajala next up is jennifer fisher uh as much as i was for social communication i do miss ath dearly i'm compelled to write as a community member i have seen emerson texas high school go through many changes and challenges and i have also been proud that the decisions made were both good for the school and the community these feelings have also been underscored by the administration's commitment to the health and safety of the entire eths family during the pandemic i believe that decisions to keep learning remote and build clothes uh were based on the best science and information available i am hoping that you will continue to base future actions on the same criteria i understand this is terribly horrible time for students parents teachers literally
026everyone and no time in recent history has has any of us had to lead make decisions or follow directions under under such duress or with the unknowns that what will happen next literally looming in front of us i still have faith in the curse of eths leadership has shown focusing on health safety and science the guideline guide posts for decision making i am hoping that the leadership will continue to stay the course with remote learning for as long as they can the best take the best card of action as a former teacher and department chair i still want the best for eths this is a strange time and an unknown outcome let's make it the safest and best for all the information we have thank you stay safe stay well jennifer fisher next public comment
027is by annettka annetta patko i'm writing a request that eths take immediate steps to reopen in-person learning and share its planning process with the goals of the community i'm a parent of student eths who's a sophomore and business owner in town and a board member of the board of directors of the emerson chamber of commerce i have been part of this community for many years now and i also am happy to be part of uh evanston their last month have been the last months have not made me feel so happy about things that are going on i'm very concerned that the young people in our community are not uh and their well-being i am regarding numerous posts from parents stating that they are dealing with depression in young children and teens depression that is coming
028from children and teens being so isolated during these times i have seen that so my own son e-learning is not for everyone or my son is one of the few students who one of those students who was falling behind because of this when he was returning to school in the fall when we found out it was still going to online he told me mom i die a little inside in these online classes statements like that from a teenager who is a positive active young man is heartbreaking for me to hear the cdc's operation strategy for k-12 schools emphasize quote it's critical for schools to open as safely as possible as soon as possible and remain open to achieve the benefits of in-person learning and key support services i share the cdc's view that equity must
029inform reopening decisions and aboard community engagement and transparency and critical and reopening processes i believe that the cost of remaining completely closed and personally outweighs the risk beginning beginning to reopen i am relieved that vaccines are inclusive available to each staff administrators have provided no specific information on how they plan to pursue the growing number of staff or vaccine administrators previously said they hoped for a form of in-person learning fourth quarter of the school year and that is three weeks away up time next we're just going to keep moving again you can see these uh in their entirety uh they will be posted next up is christy brown uh as we are as schools are closing almost a full year of staying at home i beg you to truly reconsider and allow students to return
030in the spring not to fall there are many in the medical community seriously concerned about the mental health of students it is real every day another slice of misery for my eths junior the day starts with him and ends with negativity and sadness over the isolation of teachers and fellow students endless zooms for blocked classes the lack of learning interactions and the new never-ending homework that i think is intended to replace the lackluster school experience this week uh the week with depression over seven eight hours of homework she had to complete on monday and friday she is relieved to have survived another week if we are beginning our high school journey we absolutely have pulled her out of eths and into a private school but she's in her third year youngest she has third and
031youngest child so we are we're here to survive this miserable existence and get to senior year i am not sure why you are disregarding medical communities concerned about the mental health and students and as nine doctors stated in a recent letter quote we believe that evidence supports returning to students eths for in-person leading let's get going kristy brown her next public comment here's from sandy deschamps i have a grandson who would greatly benefit from the school reopening as safe as safely as possible with e-learning as a stop-gap measure it just isn't the same as in-person learning with appropriate safeguards it placed i.e mass wearing times taken ramped up ventilation and social distancing and forced i believe student staff and teachers can safely re-enter the building looking at screens five to six hours a day is
032taking a toll on students and i hope uh you seriously reconsider your plans to open in the fall sincerely sandy shot next up is david alako i am in support of opening all schools for all students who want to attend in person remote schooling is not working academic socially emotionally for my three children and i am deeply concerned that the damage is becoming irreversible public and private schools across the state the country in the world have shown without question uh that in-person learning can be executed safely it's time for emerson to get with the program thanks dave vellanco next up is eric shahab physicians and practitioners throughout the community uh continue to sound the alarm regarding the mental health 12 remote learning last week the center for disease control issued the following statement it is
033critical for students to reopen safely as soon as possible remain open to achieve the benefits of in-person learning and key student services the amount of instruction time lost throughout the pandemic is staggering every week etc just receives nearly 60 minutes less than structural live teachers per subject over the course of weeks of school the amount is nearly 10 weeks lost eths has been recognized as a leader remote learning and apparel and appropriately so you have to face reality remote learning is diminished learning lost time is never coming back more concerning however the hidden toll of remote learning and the contributions to evolving mental health crisis which lose many of us due to the unfortunate stigmatization of mental illness that remains in our achievement culture most children and their families choose to suffer in silence due
034to embarrassment judgment or perceived failure in our children if our children are depressed suicidal did we do something wrong as a parent to make them feel this way if a child is exposed to having mental health challenges are they ostracized or ridiculed by their peers why are they uh aggra why is there gonna solve physicians mental health providers concerns with the declining mental health status of our children you have very few family anecdotes come forth with these stories just as health disparities have been exposed by the pandemic so the stigma of mental health but the data is clear adolescents are suffering compared to the same time period a year ago the cdc reports a 31 increase in emergency room visits for acute mental health treatment from january 1st to october 17th 2024 ages children aged
03512 to 17. our local community hospitals has no room uh to accept any more adolescent parents or for mental health patients for mental health services due to lack of further capacity uh there is more to that comment again you can see that on the website it was also signed by several physicians eric shahab shayna christensen virginia de paul kathy d vincenzo mary hall valerie kimball terry marines james olson matthew pellerite and melanie thomas next up is public comment from david scrim uh okay i currently have a junior hhs and two fresh and two incoming freshmen i'm concerned with the health consequence of isolation they felt over the past year which go got worse with every passing week uh our restaurants are open for in-person dining our sports teams are playing cross-city competitive games our entertainment
036establishments like altitude and jump zone are open for business parents are being called back to physically work in their offices yet most important part of our kid's life school has not communicated a plan to resume in-person learning this is made more frustrating as the communications with our families from schools that have returned with no issues in addition to health issues for our kids are falling behind their counterparts will be competing with eths students for coveted college placements with others moving forward we fall behind you are trusted with the care growth of our children you are failing them i write to request the eths take immediate steps to reopen for in-person learning and share its planning process and goals with the community dave scrim next up is nina alako i am writing support of opening schools
037for all students who want to attend in person remote learning is not working academically socially emotionally for my through children i'm deeply concerned that the damage is becoming irreversible public and private schools across the state the country in the world have shown without question that the schools that they can reopen in person safely and be executed safely it's time for emerson to get the program thank you nina alako next up is christine luffquist i would like to thank you from the behalf of our community this has been a difficult year as an understatement i wanted you to know that i trust you all using the data available to make decisions regarding schools regarding reopening the high school this year i fully support any decisions you have you make and do not force you to open
038your schools until we have administrative teacher and student buy-in i realize that schools nearby have opened in a hybrid model however their demographics are totally different from ours and i truly do not know how much learning is going on within the hybrid model i definitely feel school should reopen the fall and hybrid at a minimum but only if teachers and some at-risk students are able to be vaccinated and there needs to be a robust testing on a regular basis again this also depends on the community statistics i'm hoping continue to improve i'm also in support of in-person experiences you are offering on the asynchronous days and after class i was also hoping that seniors can return to person when that when the weather is better so some kind of hybrid graduation recognition ceremony ceremonies can
039be held that will allow students to see one another on person even if they have even if there have to be four or five of them i'm not pushing to get the high school reopened immediately and i love the gradual approach kind of testing the waters in terms of covet 19 transmission finally i do not want the district to have to spend millions of dollars to satisfy a small group of privileged opportunity hoarding parents who are worried about their students getting into elite colleges some say they have spent one thousand dollars on tutors which is a sad testimony to other to their opinion uh about our fantastic school order so i assume they realize that other school districts throughout the united states are in the same situation so their children are not losing out uh
040some of the parents are looking at the new trier has done this has also been a great resource some of the parents are looking at oprf that recently opened at hyderabad however to my understanding they still need to hire temporary classroom monitors and the rest of christine luftwass's comment will be available on the website next up is deborah terkelheimer i'm a parent of eths sophomore well i much appreciate that any of the challenges and pandemic transparency around the school reopen decisions have left me with several questions that i hope the administration can answer the cdc operational strategy for k-12 uh through phased mitigation includes two tiered plans for reopening one of schools implement screening testing and other for schools that do not implement screening testing each of the recommendations addresses in particular reopening of high
041schools with proper mitigation suggesting a set of procedures for partially or remote instruction at the pen's level of community transmission in other words a very specific metric will the cdc recommendation apply to eths district if not why not more broadly will the district adapt a medical advisory board to ensure that it is implementing the best available science it will ways and implement reopening procedures three although the cdc has emphasized that it is not considered vaccination prerequisite for safety opening schools and communities with low community spread such as ours it is also recognized that vaccinated teachers and school staff can be considered one layer of mitigation and protection for staff and students adding quote strategies that minimize barriers to access vaccination for teachers in frontal frontline essential workers such as vaccine clinics that are close to
042the place of work are optimal on the subject of ventilation one what is the district vaccination was district made to minimize barriers to access of vaccinations and teachers and staff too one teacher and staff have been given the opportunity to be vaccinated and the recommendation time for building uh immunity it's possible hhs properly reopened with recommendation mitigations in place regardless of whether an individual choose to vaccinate themselves once teachers and staff have been given the opportunity to be vaccinated up time and the remainder of that comment is also available uh on our will be available on our website uh next up is uh edward zwerner i'm running late to express my support for the administration faculty and staff at eths as you move forward with your reopening plans to support students as a parent for
043current uths student educator neighboring district i know how to accomplish difficult emotional these issues are and try and open a high school building also the no buildings physical environment social dynamic are exactly the same as watched from the science from my children's education i want to thank the educators who have worked long hours to make remote learning successful as it could be you made a dramatic shift in just one year and rather than bombarded by national and local critiques of your performance you deserve praise for the constant pivoting you have to undertake in the care you've given uh provided our students i'm running to ask by neighbors represented by the reopen amnesty group and the separate md group uh who have penned the letters the ms roundtable to change your radical and advocacy to be
044part of a solution for our schools currently your opinions and advocacy instead strike me as a group pushing their white privilege on the district in a historically tone-deaf fashion in particular to the md group push yourself as experts as to say we trust you an all-white privileged group as you make demands in this kind of an enactment of privilege that we and evans should be especially sensitive and mindful of to the wider reopening edison schools group we are publicly facing positions with reasonable are also put forward the problems of others what you suggest in your guest essay that we can prioritize teams for a student in risk at-risk household after defending those households in your paragraph that's particularly black and latinx you other than uh you other the concerns that is disease poses and misses
045what will be your responsibility you'll be called upon to restrict travel not to let your juniors get in the car over the weekend with four other students especially with the be tested not just the at-risk everyone and again ed zweiner uh his remainder of his comment is available uh on the website next up is michael allen and julie allen we write as parents from bths seniors district 65 7th grader to voice our dismay about the continuing closure of emerson public schools in order to return to in-person instruction at eths and increase the number of students permitted to attend in-person instruction evanston's middle schools we know that this has been a difficult year full of challenges beyond the control of amazon school leadership in sharp i share your commitment to the health and safety of students
046teaching staff that said edison children have now been a full remote learning for an entire year and the open-ended program or remote learning has taken a terrible toll on education and social emotional well-being we believe such costly weight and balance against manageable health risks associated with code recent studies scientific based on hundreds of thousands students and staff districts northern care north carolina has shown that transmission within schools is much lower than the surrounding community and found zero cases of co-transmission from a student to an adult uh in the context in both cases were results with no capital improvement to school bonus and the wisconsin case only three-foot social and given the amazon seven-day positivity rate is under just one percent for nearly a month such fig such findings suggest an acceptable risk for more aggressive
047reopening plans on one adopted by district 65 and certainly a more aggressive approach than wanted eths which remains fully remote we must remember that the original logic pan school closure was to prevent rapid spread that would overwhelm community hospitals and staff a threshold of emerson met long ago from our perspective there have been a decided lack of urgency on creativity from the district leaders concerning how to safely resume personal instruction at eths and extending personal opportunities in distressified death which position as far as we tell essentially that until hhs can open safely can open precisely as it will be before code it will not reopen at all and the remainder of that comment is also available will be available on our website next up is whitney reagan my name is whitney reagan i'm a math
048teacher aths i support the school's decision to continue enhanced e-learning do not think we should move to hybrid hybrid models do not show benefits in learning and will result in worse qualities of education for both students in person and online teachers cannot effectively simultaneously teach both online and in person without someone getting a worse version of their education although teaching online is already a challenge come combining that with a handful of students in person will not benefit those in person students furthermore i believe that the concerns over the students mental health are better addressed with activities provided than in-person instruction experiences uh by the in-person experiences the regular school experience students are missing is now what they will get in the hybrid school model will not have the same personal connections during class as usual
049further staying remote provides prevents covered spread via school many teachers and staff had underlying conditions which put them at risk of greater effects with virus addition our students as young adults who are still at risk as those become more information about the strain that impact children more intensely they also put our youngsters students at risk i myself i miss my normal relationships my students and how they used to be uh but if moving to hybrid could result in even one possible death uh that move is not worth it uh even in the move to the hybrid there's no guarantee along hybrid would last if they're at outbreak at ets that will be back to enhance the learning model the idea of going back and forth is disruptive students learning look at the back and forth
050happening in our neighboring districts consistency is comfortable in such a tumultuous time having some consistency will make a big difference in the lives of students staff and teachers and the remainder of whitney reagan's comment is available on the website paul heathco has a comment it's one sentence long i would like to know the metrics used to reopen simple water please next up is james olson i'm a local pediatrician who is uh who is seeing grave academic social and emotional damage the hhs students in my practice are enduring and is getting worse with each passing week of school closure i am writing to request the ets taking immediate steps to reopen for in-person learning and share its planning processing goals for the community the cdc's operational strategy emphasizes it is critical for schools open for safety
051as soon as possible remain open to achieve the best in personal learning and key supportive services i share the cdc's view and equally must inform in-person learning and key supportive services i share uh their view however fear in the face of reassuring science is not supporting equity in fact is the opposite leaders must stand up and reassure re reassure fearful communities with science will guide operational plans and the students can attend school safely as it requires identifying leaders that hold the respect of the community to provide the reassurance then so be it but it must be done with the benefit of students before it's too late a nearby very similar situation a similar community oak park air force has found its way to develop and implement in school plan i do not understand how emerson
052has not been able to do a similar advanced advance toward uh in-person learning reopen amazon school is a local group to increase uh many physicians and other health care providers with expertise in areas of effectiveness public health mental health they stand by to help eths taylor cdc's recommendation need your community we call an administration to convene a broad-based advisory panel to share information about its plan or reopening a community via available presentations public answers question community orders and take deliberate transparent steps toward reopen prioritizing students who are the most at risk during remote learning while providing the option of remote learning to those who do not wish to return james olson next up is rick curtis good evening my name is rick carter and i've been a teacher for 25 years including 13 at eths
053i'm writing to express my gratitude to the board administration we're staying on remote this school year the decision prioritizes the health ethics community by significantly reducing the possible community spread of the virus additional choosing remote learning is sensible educational choice teaching and learning and the hybrid is the worst option we have as the administration really explained having students in the school but social distance is not anywhere near what we normally experience the added stress and complications of for teachers will reduce effective learning this simply is not nearly enough benefit to students seeing their teachers once every two weeks extremely restrictive setting to justify the health risks with families their teach their teachers other school staff and the larger community thank you for consideration i hope to stay the course and continue to make the best
054of a very bad situation rick cardis next up is oliver ruff i would like to commend to support eths administration is global for its e-learning strategies while educating students during the cover 19 pandemic is the most difficult decision for everyone to do the myriad of factors that plague students and their education i know uh other school districts are taking different approaches to hhs however i believe that they may be a viable approach for world community may not be the best and most relevant for another one of the reasons i feel this way is the in-person approach is not the most optional optimal education experience for eths because the high percentage of black and brown students faculty and administrative uh administer the administration we serve according to the latest test date available cover 19 black maryland
055people are 1.4 to 1.7 times more likely to contract cover 19 and once they get in effect their 2.8 more times likely to die it sounds negligible but it's a major concern for those who are affected most proponents of in-person school including cdc based their confidence the school making structural changes to the school itself and compliance and safety among the students where mass practical distancing frequent washer has complies with weakness in the argument since so many of us are social beings ask yourself in the following compliance cdc safety standard guidelines adults in society at the cdc's safety standards occur for those with a short memory consider the super bowl where most of what we witnessed interactions without regards to cdc standards how many people were actually wearing massive practice and social distancing if adults weren't
056wanting to apology safety standards what compliance can you expect from a high schooler i realize educational institutions classroom are more preferable than virtual learning however my concern is what is most costly the potential losing well losing lives catching up unless educational conducive we realize um that education is our number one priority but trying to prevent a loss of life that is a deadly pandemic that being cautious is parallel to that issue and the remainder of oliver ruff's comment is available on the website uh ness up is jessica and alan littman uh we write as concerned parents of juniors hhs and seventh grader haven and third grade at lincolnwood urged reopening of learning at eths we acknowledged enormous difficulties that last year brought with our advocacy community and beyond like you we are committed to the
057health and well-being of our staff teachers and students at this point nearly a year into remote learning we feel that any reasonable risk benefit analysis suggests that an imminent return to in-person learning is essential to the well-being of high school students or daughter community isolation is laying depression apathy in our opinion in person experiences while a step in the right direction not sufficiently mitigate these serious problems the science and all available data point of the possibility of safe return we urge you to look for many districts uh around us that have a successful return to school in a form including our very under 65 we're young teacher dollar thrilled beyond measure to return to school past week despite the altered schedule may change routine further we request uh more information date about to continue uh
058off to offer in person stretch for example this is two or two have a medical advisory board uh that was the same as someone who was convinced 65 were unclear is whether or not to security leaders will consider it safe for students to resume in personal learning we are considered the decision about our return to school are not being made based on data we urge you honor your commitment to educating our children in reopening schools uh jessica and alan lipman uh next is susan williams the high understanding of the joint boardroom just two or tomorrow my five-year-old attends dewey elementary we returned in person last week for afternoon session while i'm very happy that she's finally in school is entirely too short generally e-learning with lunchtime drop-offs is important is impacting my husband and i
059his ability to work with my daughters desperately wants uh and needs full-time school my young daughter has been back in full preschool in person since july 2020 my oldest who is in full person preschool pre-pandemic so she's used to being a structured environment surrounded by other children we have struggled with behaviorist and regression of nighttime toilet training while she is at home of school after spewing doctors we believe she is looking for attention and simply missing routine my main concern is that my daughter struggled with her reading and i am not best equipped to help her over the last six months we have a couple of babysitters help a few hours some days i take my daughter to work with me some days and home with my husband and i uh with all the calls
060a few weeks ago we managed to get into an afternoon camp with the park district this week my daughter attended camp and uh she's been happiest on the day she is home with my husband and i she sometimes ends up spending half the day alone playing or watching tv i'm not proud of it but it's we don't have any options dewey has gone above and beyond with the covered procedures and reopening it's my understanding teachers are being vaccinated i'm happy that the school staff are protecting uh against covenants soon i'm also looking to understand why how in person learning is expanded for more students to extend hours that are vaccinated i would like to see a flow plan laid out get the kids uh back to in person full time in the fall recent comments
061from the cdc anthony falchi uh have claimed that schools can reopen and get the kids back to school the remainder of her comment is available uh on the website next up is dima hamilton i'm ready to encourage you to resist the pressure reopen eths to hybrid learning is both faculty community member my urging uh of this is multifaceted one of my primary concerns will be reopening hybrid learning is relative to the new coven 19 uk variant known as b117 this variant said to be 50 or 70 more contagious 30 70 more deadly and has been shown to do greater harm to young people than initially covered 19 the b 117 variant poses those new properties because of 13 genetic mutations many of which are the spike proteins these mutations are changing the structure of the
062s protein enhancing it to bind in the human ace2 receptors existing cover 19 vaccinations are designed to target the original structure of the s protein so it may not be effective against the new strain not only has some of our staff not been vaccinated yet but our students have not been vaccinated either this new very coronavirus was getting ex growing exponentially csg expects that b117 apparent to be a dominant variant in the united states by march 26 leading to possibly the fourth wave of american corn virus infection many countries including the uk are preparing for a very aggressive lockdown as anticipated at the spring the united states will be following suit after we've done the safest for the students and the staff in the community now is enough time to relax our approach by prematurely
063transitioning to hybrid learning we don't just for safety of thousands of people we are possibly risking in-person instruction in the fall as well aside from microsoft's b117 very high restriction also proved to be instructionally uh as has not proven to be structurally better not only will our attention as educators be divided between persons from all students but our on-site students will still be learning with a computer the only difference is that they will be wearing masks and socially distance this and that's the time on that one and if you want to read the rest of dima sabara's uh comment it was available it will be available on our website next we have dr greta maker clark uh i write to you is an amazon-based physician north shore medical group global public health experience educator cps
064school and another two children eths patiently i've waited uh even when emails and messages have not been answered for some transparency the ths pandemic management process well the e-town live videos are uplifting and helpful to hear them that make us feel somewhat connected to the school during the school year they've been started lacking impertinent information i will get to the point when is the communication about the plan for the reopening what is the plan where is the plan what are where's the board meeting to communicate plan the community and asking hhs leadership to do the same at this point i have to assume that there is no plan the eths medical clinic is run by a public health trained adolescent medicine trained pediatrician the north shore mega system is a stone's throw away so it's
065unclear as to why there are no direct medical professionals transparently guiding the board to help make the need a decision to show how to handle the pandemic this time my question is metrics what are being uh used to determine to each hhf will reopen if positivity rates are what is being focused on what rates will be used state local national why are we on not on a dashboard as with oprf neutria uh we should look to them vaccines how is ets coordinating with local regional hospitals to help get teachers vaccinated teacher vaccination is not required for safe schooling however with a high bipoc staff percentages how are we strategically helping our teachers who want to get vaccinated this is possible skokie health department is doing it medical board is there one if yes who's on
066it reopening metrics was the protection plan for 20 20 21 most of the data research shows that you should prioritize and the rest of that comment is available will be available on our website next up is prabha para masaram all right i requested hs take many steps to real print school learning and share its plan processing goals with the community a taxpayer here in amsterdam coming at this amount of true concern deflate of edison do the only public high school in town eths not being open for in-person learning while other public schools have committed some form of impersonating a large reason a lot of people moved to embassies for the outstanding host school district five minutes and ethnic 202 continue uh to not even put forth a plan for in-person classroom learning whether the remainder
067of 2021 school year or the 21-22 school year jeopardized reputation described two or two leased families with continued uncertainty and therefore needing to make other plans their children prompting some families to start to leave ellison the cdc's emphasizes christopher schools reopened safely as soon as possible remain open to achieve the goal of in-person learning it's key success key support services i share cdc's view that equity must be informed reopening decisions in the community engagement transparency critical reaction process i believe that the cost of remaining completely closed and in person learning and outweighs the risk of being in rio and i am aware that vaccines are insured supply presently in emerson for the one big group however administrators need to plan for and provide specific information about how they plan to proceed getting all districts found
068202 teachers and staff who are willing vaccinate each administrators police said they hope for some form in person education in the fourth quarter of the 2021 school year and that is three weeks away yeah eths has not updated community on how they will reopen firm personal learning and how it will make decisions about reopening by remaining largely silent about his plans reopening in personal uths is harm the community many students are suffering from isolation and that's time for that uh remainder of that comment as it will be available on our website next up is mike harris so as far as 2020 i support this isn't responding to cover 19 the quick response to remote learning last spring the decision to maintain a remote platform for a fall semester however i believe the wisest and most
069cautious approach as an educator i'm an adjective in columbia college and parent-to-eth students i felt the conservative course you chartered was the best for all involved in the additional community i taught a hybrid class last fall we only met three times during the semester because the state and columbia college wisely shut things down in november during the one year mark the frustrating pandemic with many months of scientific and practical experience i feel strongly as do many of students parents teachers the aths needs to implement a safe plan for getting its students and teachers back into the classroom during the spring semester this is overwhelming evidence and hundreds of models nationwide how to return students and teachers to classmates safe and cautious of animal we know that that two most recent national spikes and coveted cases
070were connected were not connected to schools they held in class meetings during the fall again or in the winter we also know that schools across the country have employed creative and practical systems for returning students to class in the myriad of hybrid forms and again there's been no measurable verifiable spike in covet cases report in those openings the hybrid coast is used in many exposures across the country and starting here industries fast schools have proved to be effective and manageable and safe for all members of the school community it seems a logical approach for eths in class of 10 is two or three days a week based on the same remote schedule students are currently working in class numbers could be split between classes weekly in order to keep classroom documents lower than normal classroom
071meaning or aths could alter grades attend on specific days the remainder of um the comment mike harris's comment will be available on our website next up is valeria bailey uh i write to request hhs take immediate steps to reopen for in-person learning and share this planning process with the goals of the community we have a 16 year old junior aths who's been sitting in front of a computer in his bedroom for almost an entire year now a year ago our child uh our love going to school was looking forward to a great junior year eths would say about get ready for college how things have changed in one year our child who has once driven highly motivated student has lost his job and ability to focus and is clearly depressed the cdc operational strategy emphasizes
072is critical schools to open as safely as soon as possible and remain open to achieve the benefits of in-person learning and services i share with cdc's view that equity must inform reopening decisions and that the broad community engagement and transparency is critical reopening process i believe the cost of remaining remote uh complete in-person learning outweighs the risk of beginning to reopen i am believe that vaccines are increasingly available to hhs still administrators have provided no specific information about how they plan to proceed in growing numbers of staff or vaccinated administrative producers said they hope for firm in-person instruction in the fourth quarter of the school year and we're now just weeks away yeah eths has updated community has now obtained a community on how we are and what our plans are to reopen for in-person
073learning how it will make decisions about reopening by remaining largely silent about its plans reopening for in-person learning ethhs's hair is harming the community many students are suffering from isolation deteriorate mental health others are confused and stressed out and women bearing the burn of the pandemic caused emotional financial crisis that is exacerbated by the closure school for almost a year reopened evanston school as a local group and that's time and the rest of valerie bailey's comment will be available on the website next up is david vick thorson on behalf uh it's an open letter to the eths leadership calling for greater transparency on behalf of 27 eths parents please find an open letter and here it is hold on start over um we represent a group of concerned hhs parents several for of us who
074are happen to be licensed medical mental health professionals and experts working for children adolescent senior adults you have heart you've heard from many of us over the last few months about uh through multiple communication channels try to engage in sensible constructive dialogue with you regarding our growing concerns at the current and future negative consequences of remote learning on eths students mental health and well-being across cognitive emotional physical and social domains we will not spend too much time here elaborating on the growing rates of depression suicide anxiety isolation substance abuse or sleep disorders that have been associated with remote learning among adolescents or the compounded negative effects of social comparison with nearby similar schools that have reopened in different ways you have acknowledged your awareness and concerns of this and for that we are grateful we
075know you are also where the possibility of post cover stress after effects such as social withdrawal avoidance of agrophobic like behaviors heightened stress reactivity social anxiety related maladaptive coping strategies alternatively for some you are also likely aware of the surge in fear of having missed out risk of taking behaviors and attitudes try to catch up making things right after feeling they have sacrificed and gone given so much we know you're aware of the secondary risks and reverberations and that each child is not in the classroom has become exacerbated we cannot speak to the tone of all the emails and phone calls you've received over the last or months but we are stand in your shoe in our communication with you we have tried to understand the monumental tests and decisions that you must face on
076a daily basis we have tried to model our communications to you with concern understanding legality respect and sensitivity because we are all members of the same eths team and that is a minute and a half for that comment and a comment in its entirety uh will be available on our website next up is julie matia i'm ready to express my dismay there is no outline with regard to concrete reopening process of the eths i watched the recent u10 lab and instead all the concerns raised in it i also know as a parent and licensed mental health provider in amazon that our teens including minor suffering from isolation anxiety suicidal thinking i know i've never taken many local teens uh contact me for counseling my own hhs sophomore has to add medications psychiatric visits and other
077specialty visits to help her therapy visits her previously managed anxiety has taken over her daily life she despises remote learning she now feels uncomfortable in her own room where she has been sitting daily for classes she forgets the material from one class day to the next due to her black schedule and my encouragement she has lowered her academic standards just to get through the day for the more i'm unable to take on new team clients due to the time it takes for my schedule to manage all the new needs for my own child the in-person experiences seem like a good idea but it's too difficult to understand that the student who is deeply and anxiety anxious and depression will have difficulty finding energy to go to an activity on their own not knowing what to
078expect in addition the opportunity option to attend remote learning at the school is fantastic for the kids in usa space while others feel they have the safety they need at home maybe we're looking to take advantage of the option they might feel it's not for me i also have a choice for sports i also know that choice for sports return was not made at the local level but it's unfathomable to me why this is most happiness successful kids who do not participate in sports are feeling left out and isolated my teen uh checks for news each day for a 30-day return plan is promised by dr witherspoon her and the remainder of that comment will be available on the website next up is steve ewald i am writing you as a long time amazon resident
079higher ed employee most important close friend and partner of multiple public educators i know they aren't uncommon or particularly meaningful credentials but imagine you are welcome to additional perspective first let me say that how proud i am to live in a supports high school mission to be inclusive equitable and progressive i never thought i would be bragging about local high school efforts to others but over the last several years i found myself repeatedly oppressed i hope you'll consider a fine comments regarding potentially reopening beyond the limited voluntary supplemental and personal experiences in short given a limited amount of time for the school year i do believe a potential reward outweighs the risk involved teachers have spent months perfecting their routines setting expectations learning how to effectively use online tools and discovering how to appropriation how
080appropriate their attention properly to students that deserve it to upend these efforts now with new challenges would be very disruptive too since remote learning will continue the in-person experience would be simply mean additional effort with no reduction in others teachers would either have to reduce the instructional remote learners or take time away from their personal time personal time which would further impact their mental health the administration previously remote is preferable to hybrid from an instructional standpoint both students and teachers value consistency instruction and messaging i know every teacher is dying inside because they can't interact with their students in person there is so much pushback despite uh this should be telling i'm curious what voices the support staff has their crucial component i worry that there is a vocal minority pushing an agenda that's not
081consistent with the school's value the opinion of educators epidemiologists experts and expectations of the school administration and the remainder of the comment is available uh online next up is lee clifford it was a mix of emotions that i finally say that sent my kids back to 65 in person last week the joy and really that they could finally be back in the classroom with their teachers was tinged with bewilderment that it took so long to stress that they could only be there for a few hours and a sense of status of so many amazing kids that want to be in class are still stuck learning remotely with nuclear path through a return this is a crisis and we need our as our leaders to understand the real urgency that parents are feeling comments that e-learning
082is just as good as classroom learning or that it's working because students are getting a similar number of a's they did last year have been met with absolute bafflement by the community every single parent i spoke through an atmosphere reports that you learned does not provide even a shadow of what in person school has given our kids the parents of high schoolers report their kids are depressed isolated falling behind and have lost their love of learning it's a tragedy furthermore cdc and doctor factory have been stated that one school is real even if the area with the increased community spread and b vaccines are not represented for safe reopening death through this pool we cannot only follow the science when it suits us do you believe that justice is oak parkware force not care about
083the safety of their teachers of course they do but they are implying mitigation methods to keep them safe and while also weighing the great harm done to the students by keeping schools close the entire point of this spring lockdown was not to eradicate the viruses flatten the curve so our hospitals would not be overwhelmed your comments are distressing because they give the idea that school is unsafe and the vaccines will mean the end of the pandemic rather than what the views of the current science support we are far past the point where evanston's only public high school can remain close to that i respectfully ask the 202 created medical advisory team the remainder of the comment will be available online next up is andrew siegel uh my name is andrew siegel i'm a teacher education
084parent eths student all right today in both roles at eths regarding remote learning as a parent i have seen the challenge remote learning has for students as a parent i wish that they would come back to school the school that existed pre-covered the school that i hope they can attend during the 21-22 school year sadly when i shift roles from parent to educator i cannot give myself the answer i want to hear any return to school this year will follow eths's hybrid plan with all that it calls for in terms of distancing and reduced class sizes i remember the video presentation that the administrator gave us in the summer when i introduced the hybrid plan specifically the moment when dr campbell said that we would be bringing students together to keep them apart being in
085school only two days every two weeks and being isolated from pierce is not what i want for my child nor is what i want for my students during remote teaching i can present myself unmasked and focus on each student in my class i can work with colleagues to develop lessons and follow up with students who need support if we begin teaching under the hybrid plan i can only not tailor my teaching for the students in my classroom because i would have to keep at least three-fourths of my students home on zoom in the forefront of my mind my teaching in a hybrid would be the same as remote only with less class time and probably less effective finally i commend our school for doing what is safest even is undesirable continue doing remote schooling in
086the safest path for eths at large we do so to the very end if someone in the community were to tell me to stop taking antibiotics during the day seven of a 10-day treatment because i felt better i would reject that as an unsafe suggestion i think the board should do the same if anyone in our community suggests we're remote learning before the end of the school year next up is drink water we have jill bishop as the parent of eths fresh and who has been in the building for five times ever i'm asking you to originally open eths i understand the concern to keep staff safe but as we see the superior high school's almost safe i'm increasingly frustrated with eths not done the same and when students uh should have the opportunity to
087learn meaningful ways inside the building fresh from the majority of whom no connection in context urgently need the opportunity most of all promising vaccination news shows at least 75 efficiency within two weeks of the first dose given at the given increased vaccine supply not to mention the ventilation space and cleaning precision implemented the building over the last year eta should quite recently open 30 days notice starting today and make plans of staff in the staff the building accordingly the academic social and most important mental health of our needs need immediate action thank you jill bishop next up julie ward i am in evanston and put forward my children through districts found two two currently my last childhood junior hr family has been positive experiences thus far with all teachers staff coaches and ministers however beginning
088in august the breakdown in communication with our community has left us as parents students with unanswered questions as someone who works a long-term substitute teacher in person in the surrounding suburbs every day i felt safe and procedure spread of covert 19. additionally i just received my vaccine two weeks ago i have never missed one day of school as a teacher student parent administrator support staff and counsel other workers in my district here test student learning social emotional well-being and teacher safety i'm with rio nemestein for three reasons one asynchronous and remote learning for over a year should not be normal has left eths children and a deficit moreover i have missed out on classroom interactions would take place at high school in a safe and productive manner too in mid-february cdc rolled out their blueprint
089for safety we're opening schools the agency crafted a plan based on research and data showing the risk of copenhagen transmission in a school setting is extremely low and mitigation strides are implemented strictly enforces the base school monitoring covenanting the community school consistent implementation mitigation strategy reduced risk coronation transmission six three rather we can prioritize sports hhs why can't we vaccinate our teachers open our schools and address the issues of cover 19 testing many addresses have approximately the same size each yes of open in some capacity hybrid model at the minimum as emistonians we know the village to solve anything i'm one to help in any way i can we all have the same goals to see our students see academically emotional gain independence and move through the stage of life thank you for all you
090do for everything make better place for everyone i urge you to please reopen emerson this spring best julie ward next up is laura lindroth as a parent current sophomore and as a professional mental health strongly or gths to do everything possible to help release hypermile for the students next fall of course i am just concerned as anyone about code making support staff staff and students feel safe but i would urge you to please consider recommendation dr valastro cdc and strongly consider percentage vaccinated individuals we would need to have it in order to safely open without putting anyone at significant risk there will be some risk about the mental health of folks more important and as we at rainbows are seeing a lot of students who are feeling negative effects of isolation and social connection not
091to mention suffering academically which is important when weighing those decisions suicidal ideation is increasing and many are losing hope i've heard a lot of young people including my own wonder whether they will ever see the school again i doubt that they will ever many doubt that they will ever return and it concerns them that the point they often feel helpless and discouraged as i'm sure you are aware young people are much more in the moment than adults they have less of a capacity to imagine the future and consider long-term thinking long-term prognosis of things therefore they are moral inclined to think negatively and feel the way things are now is the way things will always be i think they need to be given some sense of normalcy and hope that an increasing experiences they had
092or hoping to have at ease eths wildcat will still be there hhs has done a decent job and obviously for lab effort and remote learning it's just not the same i would like my children and all hhs students to flourish not flounder i think they have worked uh too hard for too many years to prepare for the high school experience not to be given the opportunity the mental health toilet virus has been discussed [Music] and the remainder of the public comment will be available on our website next public comment is from susan wishnick with the many recent discussions in the press and on essentially public school media groups regarding eths in its operation of school year during the paint network i feel compelled to write support of administration and teachers personally i have no strong
093opinions on whether or not eths can or should reopen other than this what is the safety of students teachers and everyone in the building should remain the primary consideration during the pandemic i trust our administrators with the support of the school board and the expertise of the community in the state uh as they choose to consult helpful to their efforts to make those decisions i commend eths administration teachers for the herculean efforts of the school year providing educational services to our students during these challenging times with information and circumstances can rapidly change from day to day i applaud my senior students teachers who have been done an extraordinary job providing high quality education and engaging my student during e-learning i'm grateful that we live in an area where we can have you learn to compensate
094for the loss of opportunities to attend school in person fths is able to reschedule uh to school open their school building quarter four i support the priority return of our most vulnerable students those who are struggling educationally or emotional or with e-learning who need face-to-face teaching i support the rights of teachers and staff to continue to work remotely if they feel returned to school building at this time is not safe for them or their family members or if they themselves have young children either and require their supervision respectfully submitted susan wishnet next up is peter slevin it's disappointing to see how little information is being shared just 202 board eths administration deliberation reopening in the very uh in the spring of summer fall of 2021. lack of transparency around the decision-making process during the pandemic
095was creating confusion dismissed cap system unfortunately vitriol that could be avoided i would like to make a simple request each administrators hold a live weekly question and answer session beginning the first week of march the session will be focused on the high school's planning and progress with questions its conclusions and what is known and what is not yet knowable handled while these sessions will provide invaluable information to the public alert eths administrative apparent students concern help the robots trust and develop support for the goals we share the information share of the accession calls we posted the website and broadcast via social media i do not believe this is asking too much governor priskur has held such briefings to great effect indeed he answers questions in public on camera every day in the early weeks of
096the pandemic so did for example dr allison erwati the director of chicago's public health department districts have been increasingly open to showing his work and his other schools districts in the regions many thanks peter slavin next up is david zurega hello i'm ryan to address the change in the middle school math curriculum that presented a district's fab school board meeting in february 8th especially the newest student plan uh the cancellation of math 67 by a large and cancellation of math acceleration general essay by and large because the individual evaluation and undefined accommodation will apparently continue to be exceptionalities i see this as though as was an afterthought to the plan however there is no mention of what these exceptionalities would be or how these students would be identified nurtured accommodated within the framework it was
097mentioned in the presentation that the original assessment would be given to me through a comprehensive xlr replacement act but the process was not made clear i would suggest if i did not codify the process to include condition clarification publicly on the math acceleration information website on the whole iphone districts five tried to eliminate math acceleration to be confusing and disturbing it seems self-evident that the goal of an educational institution would be an opportunity to support not subtract it furthermore i would have expected that the preferred path path acceleration other high level opportunities would be to tear down barriers including racial bias policy choices and build more on-ramps to opportunity instead if one in three white asian and multi-racial students are participating in math acceleration soon the golden have one in three black latinx and uh
098students participating too if a uh if a one in three participation rate across races is better the goal of zero for thousand nine hundred as a party of zero literally served no one we're talking thousands of current students that will be negatively impacted by this choice because of the intriguing importance of building camp on ramps to success is expert up time uh the remainder of that comment this will be available on the website next up is elena amaker i'm ready to let you know that i support your efforts to keep our community and school safe during cover 19 as pandemics affected all of us as well as many of our students and families you've kept us safe and our students educated applaud the hhs school board administration for analyzing experiences of students and families and
099surrounding districts recently cc updated uh their guides and made it clear they're revising their situation related just cover 19 in high school is not the same as an elementary school the threat of spreading disease more likely i have a freshman student retracted cover 19 in october and she's been fighting many uh lasting effects ever since she has on average two doctor applies for the host of medical specialists if they cannot help her get well that's something i know the nature of the beast my students allowed two quarters not has not been able to attend classes even virtually okay for this opportunity to move to i would have this to have more of our students let's think long term what will we do if many of our students ended up ill what will the parents turn
100to educate their new physically ill student indefinitely if we open to the hybrid model we could possibly risk many lives faculty students and families how we fix them just because things are lawful does not always make them expedient let's consider the entire community not just specific families i encourage eths administration to hold fast to our current educational model elena amaker next roger goldberg as a north star physician and surgeon who has been working throughout the past years for the additional health degree in epidemiology i'm i'm among many of those at the point dismayed rather watching our students experience an unnecessary degree of anguish i wanted to ask a few questions one sports athletic practices are permitted for some is there a reason that other safe activities such as geometry and construction science labs art or
101music are not already running can the administration now that delay open such activities begin proceeding a new psychological providing new cycle loss to our student population it's impossible that a physician public health training and parent that performs construction on and out their home will be unsafe two as parents for children across high school age spectrum it seems clear that the current senior class experienced an epic blow to their development we have taught the we have taught these kids to be passive to sit in their rooms and to wait for the next directive which never comes many of us wonder why we can't harness that creativity of those incredible students why not organize small groups discussion larry classics for debating history spreading out in one or more specific gyms why not present a challenge to the
102students themselves uh have them prepare safe learning and social sessions and activities or have them place part in up planning a safe outdoor graduation these hard times could be the best opportunities for the kids to be to be innovative we landed a rover on mars and yet we have nothing to for these impressionable kids we're asking them to sit still and have them trapped in none of their creativity or problem solving from the community perspective and certainly for me as a physician it seems clear that there's swift reopening and many activities that will lift spirits even if they're resuming full capacity classroom learning there are still ways to help impressionable kids learn the year relative upswing that's roger goldberg next is elizabeth johnson i'm ready to let you know uh that i support your efforts
103to keep the community in safe schools during covenanting the epidemic has affected all of us but in this time you have kept us safe our students educated i applaud eths board of administration who analyzed expertise of students families surrounding areas uh throughout the pandemic district has been carefully filed the gallants of the cdc idphms department of public health recently so you see updated guys and clearly revision situation uh relates to kova 19 and high schools is not the same as elementary schools i'm not part of the reopening group who claims the voice of the community i'm ready to tell you that i support ath administration occurs they have shown to find a different path to keep students educated during the pandemic elizabeth johnson grandparent sorry need a drink uh next is alice barry since the
104beginning of the pandemic i have listened to discussion our community about the school's closing the hardship that have been placed on parents i've seen the stress close up of my families and friends i've seen economic hardships in the parents having to stay home to take care of their children i've seen the emotional hardship and teachers who are showing up while fearing for their lives and welfare their children if they should die before writing this comment i went to look at the data the trump administration apparently discouraged data collecting in schools because the big numbers would look bad according to research at brown university january more than 2 million people under the age of 18 are caught covered in almost 11 national caseload of time was children think about that 11 percent of cover 19 demand
105on a health care system was for stake children many patients believe the true number of effective hours is much higher than the illness uh often mild in kids and goes undetected now as around no one knows for certain about the long-term damage done by the virus the best guess seems to be that 200 to 300 children under 18 have died brown university says that schools from january 18th to 31st 0.55 percent of students in person learning code 19 translated to the 3615 students hhs that would be an average of 18 students getting infected every two weeks and if eths open for impersonal learning with no way of knowing how they'll get uh or if they get it they might die brian university also says that two teachers will be infected over the two-week period a
106remainder of 32.4 percent of eths teachers about 86 teachers are non-white and therefore have already uh have a high risk of infection as of january 27th aft knew that 530 school employees would have died of the varys it seems it's very easy to get lost in the weeds on this dog because there is so much speculation so many strong opinions and frankly so much racism and opportunity hoarding in these opinions and with all of it i continually coming back to the same conclusion they're for echo that for economic hardships these are the remedies for emotional hardships these are remedies but for death there is no remedy how we do it um how we doing on time it is 8 18. uh we um the rest of the comments will be posted uh on the website
107uh there were there are about six more comments that i couldn't get to okay thank you thank you dr davis for reading faster than anybody i've heard thank you so much all right so we're gonna keep going here items for um information here we are um item number six we're starting with the joint literacy goal um we've got some historical data there were some and some updates there was some attachments in the agenda so dr witherspoon you want to kick us out you mute it on our end i'm going to uh introduce dr bavis again but he's only going to make a little bit of an introduction so that he can get his voice back yeah and and and pass it on to our folks and then uh dr horton uh is it to stacy
108uh on your end or uh uh yeah yes it's uh dr bearsley and and kylie okay uh so uh you want me to go ahead why don't i toss it to pete and he and dr beardsley work together a lot and we'll go from there sounds good thank you doctor the first item for us is just the historical uh analysis this comes out of our last joint board meeting where the boards uh requested to look at the historical data using the same thresholds we did in the initial presentation using uh map and star data those results uh of that of that work are in your your packet we use the same reporting format that we used in the past and this reporting format would be the uh same format going forward again uh what we
109found was incredibly consistent uh with years past uh their trends are stable over the three years reported in grades three through eight uh would you see some areas of notable progress which we could you know just just basically um that are in there and by gender we see that female students make the literacy goal to higher rate the male students uh there's also progress and goal attainment for those who qualify for two free reduced lunch and there are other uh other patterns as well but the headline is it's it's very consistent and stable as a measure and essentially that's what we would look for in a measure but i'm going to turn this over to dr bearsley for further uh analysis uh we also have uh kylie klein and uh dr carrie levy here as
110well for this portion and then once we just do those general observations we'll move to uh to the second item uh on here which is the literacy partnership update which uh where you'll hear from scott bramley uh dr scott bramley uh newly minted um along with uh dr elizabeth cardenas lopez and dr stacy bearsley but i'm gonna turn it over to stacy for the historical piece yeah now i'd really echo a good bit of what dr davis just mentioned um the outcomes currently are fairly stable we did highlight a few essentially like promising areas within the memo one area is looking specifically at some performance for our black students and our black eighth graders as we show an upward trend in that particular area and also note that um the pattern around reporting for this
111goal would be that we would bring data forward again next spring and that would be for essentially the class that would be currently freshman the class of 2025. we're not bringing forth current data this year because of because covet impacted our assessment schedule so we're filling in the back of the historical data that we promised to deliver both schools at this point are committed to giving their assessments to 65 in the spring 202 in the fall which would allow us to bring back a current data set next spring okay and i think at this point that's really you know we wanted to bring forward the historical data and i think if there are particular questions we can open up to those dr davis is that correct or do we want to move into the second
112portion first well let me ask um because we did have we did have the um the memo and the handouts so um i'll ask um are there any questions or discussion from any board members before we move forward i um appreciate that we have this information um given how long of a journey it's been to be able to pull it together um i in curious what well in the memo there wasn't a significant amount of analysis shared in terms of how we are interpreting this data and what the plan is to respond to that interpretation of the data so i would like to hear more about um [Music] what the response each team has to the trends in the day so anya a couple things that i would speak to for the district 65 team
113um one this is what we're presenting here is historical data to fill in comparison points from previous years and so this was data that meant you know we not have not shared in this format but we have shared we have analyzed and worked from over the past several years the fact that we see that it is consistent then speaks to ultimately our goal here is about accelerating learning outcomes and so that then moves us into the work that we're doing currently and as a district we really are working on attacking our literacy outcomes up through essentially a tiered approach number one we're taking a look at our curricular materials and ensuring that we have high quality standards aligned materials that our educators are having an opportunity to dig into through our professional learning communities and
114our plc's and it's in our plc's then we're also paying attention to ongoing and regular assessment through our unit assessments pre and post assessments as well as our formative assessments and using those plcs to also focus in on our priority learning standards which have been incredibly important this year with remote learning we've taken the isb priority learning standards and also compared those with ones from student achievement partners to really say where do we need to pay the most attention to learning our educators have been digging in and understanding the demands of those standards and our plcs and then designing instruction to help our educate help our students achieve those standards as we look at formative and unit assessment additionally a couple of things that we've shared in through our spotlight systems is our leaders have
115been visiting classrooms throughout the year to provide feedback to our educators to really support ongoing growth and we've been using those mondays to provide both planning planning collaboration and professional learning to support the work remotely as well as with these curricular materials that really moves us from the tier one into tier two and tier three and as we talk a little bit later about summer lift that is an example of a tier three intervention we're also taking a good look at our interventions tiers two and tier three and the process of a redesign to say how can we adjust these interventions both school year and summer in order to support learned students that are not yet getting what they need in our current environment and so that would be kind of our approach this does
116say to us that the results are stable but we know we need to accelerate learning outcomes and it's through those spotlight systems and the approach in the three tiers that we really see the opportunity to be successful in accelerating learning and i would like to chime in on that uh something that we've done stacy mentioned quite a bit and it would take a long time to go into all but i will i will say uh as we looked at our spotlight systems uh around really actually breaking down assessments deconstructing learning standards that's the first process in our six instructional systems and we think about literacy and we see how students are engaging or being able to really review student authentic work we've maximized we began led by uh dr kilgatti and mr little our plc
117design being sure that our plcs are valuable and effective and that they're used in the right way um we're getting ready to launch a curriculum audit and to be i just want to be honest um we are concerned about what we're getting from our lucy calkins curriculum i want to call it what it is i don't want to dance around with that uh we know that that has been problematic for us um in our and and some of the work that we've done well as it's benefited a certain population of students it has not had the same benefits for our black and brown and so we will be um and when we when we go through the audit we will see some other things and i don't know if dr green wants to chime in
118but there are some findings that came out in the fall uh regarding uh lucy kaufman's in her own work uh i don't know if you all are familiar with it but it's been pretty um it's pretty serious and we are aware of it i would just concur with what dr horton has shared um i think there's been some admissions by the calkins uh team in relation to um the phonemic awareness work uh some of the foundational reading foundational literacy supports that are definitely um have been on our radar for sure but to have that admission coming from uh the calkins team the teachers college has been uh important for us to pay attention to i'm sorry um again i want to thank the team for you know sharing some of the data and again trying
119to again finally getting this to a measure that is consistent right and like you're saying now the move is to make sure that we now build on this consistent measure uh and and really try to build out the capacity of our children to be successful in literacy and as we talk about strategies right one other thing i'd like to hear is is making sure that um the educators right who are in charge of um ensuring that there's a smooth transition between eighth grade and freshman year and uh you know have an opportunity to dialogue and meet so i'm not sure if that happens already uh but making sure that there's a community of practice and that uh you know given that you know that that you know covet is forcing us to rethink how we
120approach education you know creating opportunities and spaces for dialogue between educators right that can help us focus on this joint literacy skill and help us close that opportunity gap right in the capacity gap and making sure that educators from eighth grade they've created our 8th grade reading teaching team is is and educators are meeting together with our 9th grade educators around literacy and i say this you know having seen collaboration between uh within our school our school district 65 uh where we have our kindergarten teachers meet with our pre-k teachers in order to really make sure that the transitions uh are smooth as possible right and the children know in fact well but the educators know what what each part of the system does and because i think for me you know where we lose
121our kids is in those transitions and it's particularly those kids who again don't know how to have families who don't know aren't really sure how to navigate the system as effectively and advocate you know making sure that we have our educators who are on the front lines and making sure they have opportunities to collaborate and talk about the work that they do in dialogue i think would be very beneficial as we think about um you know improving literacy outcomes for all kids and evidence in spokane yeah biz um you know i think we we have seen some progress in our kindergarten readiness numbers and we saw some really promising things coming out of our pre-k and i think we all have had conversations about how important those investments are uh in early childhood i am
122concerned that we're we're missing another targeted area in middle school i think that you know for some of our kids who are identified early if they don't catch up they're never catching up right and so i think we need to think about what is a what is a robust intervention that we can be targeting at our middle school age for the kids who have already fallen behind or are newly falling behind there so that we're when they're transitioning to high school there's already been another level of intervention you know and i'm not saying wait don't do some of those things but i think that we need a pretty robust plan for that age the the other piece that i'm wondering in terms of our shared data um you know when we try to make this
123actionable uh i think it's hard across a district or across two districts to know exactly where the coaching and the support needs to go so i would love for us to add a layer where we are dialing down this information into what schools some of these numbers are coming from right what middle school we're seeing what elementary school what you know is it in 10th grade with these teachers like really being able to identify kind of what um where are those where are we making progress in those gaps and where are we not um and so that we can have more targeted coaching and teaching for educators across our two districts because i think it's it's very easy to not see yourself inside this data and so having some some more information about exactly um
124where where we're struggling would be a good use of information abyss i want to say you brought up ver two strong points um the first one is what we are we are currently evaluating our our intervention support i don't stacey i know you're great talk about this but um in our middle schools we have not um we've not resourced them properly in regards to how we are to support students who have literacy uh reading you know issues in the middle school while our teachers do their best and they they they stretch themselves as far as they can we have to put some other resources in place to give them the opportunity to develop those reading skills so there will be um some new intervention uh processes coming in with literacy being the center of that
125uh and and dr beardsley and the team they're looking at some some models and going through compression process right now to identify specifically what that will look like and then there's uh we have we have a a group that we're meeting with members of um 202 the meac and plus members of 202 not only are we looking to design um literacy support but also our college career readiness piece and we know that that's a major part um we have uh mr little along with um kirby who's been working with the team and we have compression remembers this on this call uh part of that alignment i think you got a great uh idea of is around how do we flow and follow students from shoot and have and nickels and king arts to see how
126they're performing it's it's a good measuring tool that we would like to use and i believe that in this design as we think about redesigning our middle schools and then doing these partnerships and this this this other joint piece that we're doing uh with 202 we can make that happen um as far as knowing where our students are and where to provide supports on the frame once we look at the data of how these students are performing when they get to high school that would be good i think uh you know smart strategic uh interventions that are related to the data are really important and i think you know we've all identified that this is a problem and we all identify that there are certain things that will help but we want to make sure
127we're giving the right supports to the right place and if we're seeing that it's emerging from and have accountability for you know for for if those gaps are continuing in certain spaces and we need to make changes so i you know i'm also thinking about how we tackled the challenge of kindergarten readiness with our early childhood programs in a successful one you know if we think about uh what is proficient literacy on star as a high school readiness um indicator then i you know i guess i hear what you're saying that lucy calkins is not a curriculum that is accelerating um literacy in the ways that we need to see it and and also some lack of supports at the middle school to help folks accelerate their literacy has been the reason why we've seen
128some of those lackluster numbers in the trends um but i'm also curious what so one of the challenges with early childhood was that t.s gold's measure for proficiency was not adequate for k readiness measure of proficiency so i'm curious if we look at high school readiness proficiency as the writ the proficient grit target on star is proficient on map also is it exceeds expectations on math that is equivalent to proficient on star does that make sense are we asking children to meet expectations and those expectations are adequately preparing them for high school readiness or do they need to exceed expectations in order to adequately prepare for high school readiness hey kylie do you want to pick up on that or should i you can start and you can fill in any gaps i might miss
129um that is an excellent question thank you so much for that great question and that is the work that i think that we really dug into with the eths team in a really deep way last year to make sure that we were intelligently and um strategically aligning our measures to ensure that proficiency meant the same thing across our different assessments and across our different districts and so the work that we did to come up with those four mutually exclusive categories for our cohort analysis to make sure that we were selecting writ bands and star proficiencies that really ensured that we were talking about the same things in the same way that brought us and led us to the place we are today which is a much more solid ground of understanding of where we are
130and where we need to go um i do think that you know we have a great opportunity in district 65 to be looking at so many years worth of student information and really spanning honestly not just the k to eight span but also like birth to eight right so we have such an advantage in our district to do a lot of what sergio was talking about really be be looking at the whole gamut of student learning experience and so um not only do we have this shared understanding and this this analysis that gives us a clear measure of those benchmarks that are going to convey proficiency towards this goal attainment but we are also internally in district 65 working really closely with educators and administrators to revise a lot of the other sources of information
131so that we're really triangulating the data across multiple fields so we're looking at our map data but we're also working to revise our grading structures we're working to revise our report cards working to ensure that our priority standards and learning targets are very clear very well aligned and really robust that coupled with the spotlight systems and plc work we discussed earlier will really help us to create even further opportunity and so i think that as we work more closely with jh and the early childhood team you know we're learning a lot from them about supporting kindergarten readiness we're working really closely to have eighth grade teachers work with the ninth grade teachers and develop those internal structures to foster more collaboration so i do think we have really clear measures moving forward and we're developing
132the measures that that need additional clarity to help us really be be able to triangulate so it's exciting it's a lot of work but it has great potential for us and our kids thank you thank you sunni so thank you for that kylie that definitely does sound really exciting and promising i guess i would just um one thing that i noticed and seen missing in the data that we saw today in the memo that we saw today is that k through two um you know we have this is a k through 12 literacy goal and we're only seeing a portion of it and so i always want to make sure that we're not losing those early grades and that that's going to be something that does get to recorded um at the board level that
133that we're not going to just only be starting with map that we'll figure out what the assessments are um and how we can include that k through two band to make sure that we are seeing the changes that we need to see over time starting really starting in pre-k but um certainly at least in in kindergarten and i would also ask um if we can you know i think visually a more helpful way to see the data too is instead of the sort of discrete charts by grade is i'm hoping that in future reports now that we have like the system in place that we can can be doing this that we can see more of like a graph of over time i think that's how as a board how we're gonna see whether or
134not we are making progress or not which grade levels maybe we are making progress or not um is to be able to sort of see it all in in a chart that way as opposed to having to to break it down um separately so i'm hoping in the future that can be a way that the data can be presented to us thank you for that suni i would just like to add two things to what you're saying connecting to what you're saying um i know that kylie she's like our a master of our domo our dashboard system so i'm sure that i know you before you're tired of hearing me say that um but we would i mean we would definitely take on that challenge of creating a structure that would allow that data to
135be able to tell the story in a in a in a over the course of time uh but we do have a platform that can do it and then also um i'm i'm not mistaken i really i'm pretty sure this is true we now are giving matt to our kindergarten through second grade so we will have we want our data's a little a little inconsistent um from the previous years in our k through two and not because it was something wrong it was just trying to find the right assessment that makes sense uh we were moving forward we would we should be able to have uh some data that's aligned that don't require my team to like really dig in too deep and try to make the the two assessment systems align but a very
136good point around getting that k-2 data ready all right anya did you have your hand up or are we ready to move on yeah i did i just had one other um inquiry which is um there's a significant trend a racialized trend in iep data um for district 65 and so i had the curiosity when i was looking at the racialized um trends in the outcomes for the joint literacy goal how much is that influenced by the iep data that disproportionately impacts black and brown students and so i'm curious how we include the progress the literacy progress for students who have ieps in this reporting process and have an idea of how students with ieps are attaining this joint literacy goal yeah i'll start with this and then i may ask colleagues to jump in
137as well um so you know in our planning with the high school we we worked to come to uh shared consensus for what we're going to include in here obviously there's so many different very important cuts of data that we can include and we both do additional reporting for our various districts i know that we had a very valuable report on the outcomes for our students with disabilities led by dr d chris farrow and we will be bringing forward to our board and everyone in evanston right everybody who's watching this call please join us we love to have participants and members of the community at our board meetings so uh and members of the eths board as well you're always welcome um we'll be having a really wonderful presentation um in march that includes a
138really robust look not just at literacy but at a lot of different critical outcomes including the disproportionality aspect that you're noting and so i think that will be a good opportunity for us to really have a wealth of information to dig into these questions and make sure that we are also addressing the needs of our students with ieps dr d chris farrow do you want to add to that that's really all i was going to say is that a lot of this information i'm pulling right now to present to you all um in a few weeks from now [Music] thank you okay why don't we move on [Music] who's going to be our next presenter so uh i'm going to have uh scott start this one we're going to be talking about the literacy partnership
139update the report is going to highlight two of our current literacy partnerships between 65 and 202 specifically the summer lift program we're going to talk about that uh and we're also going to talk about the work to build literacy teacher capacity in both districts in a in a partnership effort so uh and scott you have a presentation to share correct uh yes i do so go ahead and share my screen here and then of course the rest of the team will chime in and and we'll do all that too all right well good evening everyone uh thank you for that conversation and uh this conversation that we'll ensue shortly about this update um i am joined by dr kiwana brown this evening and uh dr staci bearsley will be joining me as well from 65
140to talk about this update uh dr brown is a little under the weather today a little bit of sore throat um so she might not speak as much but if we have questions for her um we'll call upon her to come forward uh but i'm going to try to help her out and handle the majority of this uh tonight so we just really wanted to bring forth um some of the shared work that we're able to do and i think sergio asked about some of that transition planning that we do and we have been able to do that in the past and we look to continue to do that that's been actually one of the strengths of our partnership is when we bring our 8th grade and 9th grade faculty together and the teacher aides
141from district 65 who work with reading we've been able to share our scope and sequence of curriculum our assessments the work that we're doing in our literacy lab at eths it's been a very strong partnership and um post pandemic we look to continue it in person to get folks back together to work on that so but tonight we're focusing on one of the collaborations that has been extremely successful and we're super excited about it and has a great potential to continue to serve our community for years to come so we're very excited to present you information from your packet specific to the program known as summerlift and this is a program that's been in place for the past two years and as stacy talked about earlier this is a student-focused tier three intervention so we
142have a one-to-one student-to-teacher ratio in terms of this intervention program and it is geared towards specific literacy instructional needs of students so as opposed to maybe some of our group or programmatic pieces that happen during the school year this is individualized what each student needs based on the assessments that we give pre and post to be able to build a specific curriculum to work on with each student and again through some donations that we'll learn about later we've been able to have a one to one ratio throughout this program which has been extremely beneficial to our students i think that this program really highlights as you'll see that when we can invest in that level of intervention and support for our most striving readers that were able to have success in terms of growth and
143grade level growth through the program the nice thing about this program is it is one of the one of the opportunities that we have where we're able to serve students from both school districts in our partnership and we've been able to serve students from rising second graders to rising 12th graders partnering to provide early support intervention by including district 65 students um as well as continued support and intervention for our high school age students as well and like i said this has run for the past two years uh in 2019 the first year that we ran this we had 28 students participate or were invited to participate 14 from each district and this past year in 2020 we had 30 students um invited to participate 15 from each uh from each district and i want
144to just highlight the 2020 summer program as you may all recall as you heard 50 plus uh comments tonight about uh reopening schools uh one way or another the 2020 program happened during the covid 19 global pandemic and so we were able to continue this level of support albeit remotely and still have extreme success during the remote delivery of this intervention program which again is surprising and uh it's uh excellently surprising we were very pleased to see that that happened just a little bit of background on the intervention so we do look at growth we try to assess for growth and the intervention program is modeled after a research-based literacy lab program that is housed at northeastern illinois university with whom we have a great partnership which we'll talk about a little bit later and
145the use of the basic reading inventory the john's inventory to assess students at the beginning and the end of the program is you so we do provide this level of data we provide reports to families we provide you know the research-based assessment intervention reports to families but we also provide anecdotal narrative comments about the experience and as you'll see from some of our student comments the students uh have a sense of belonging and they feel that they are treated well and cared for in the program and as we all know when you're cared for and you see yourself and you are you feel seen and it's a comfortable environment where the educator shows care and concern you can grow and develop and have great success and so again this program is a testament to that
146but in the program we do look at these levels we look at the instructional independent and frustration reading levels both orally and silently as well as listening levels based on speed word accuracy and comprehension and so we're getting a really holistic picture of a student's literacy abilities um in the program so that we can create a plan tailored to each individual student's need the john's inventory is also used in addition to being a pre and a post test it's also used to determine the most effective literacy strategies to improve student success so again the data that is obtained from that basic reading inventory is used to also develop and tailor instructional plans for each student in the program so we'll go over a little bit of the high level growth data from the summer from
147both years and we we did bring break this out by district and by year so you can see just some high level average grade level growth so the average grade level growth in the first year for district 65 students again was 2.0 two grade levels and in 2019 this program ran for 11 consecutive saturdays in the summer on saturdays students coming every saturday for several hours to work with an interventionist so again the commitment that the families made to have to have this experience the level of commitment that the student showed the level of growth was just fantastic at district 202 in that first year again the average level of growth was 2.7 grades and again this is the average level of growth there are many different ways to look at this but we felt
148this would tell the strongest picture in the clearest picture of of the of the impact of the program again that happened 11 consecutive saturdays where students were coming to the high school these are high schoolers now coming on saturday in the summer to work with an interventionist on reading so if you can paint that picture for yourself in 2020 this past summer again in district 65 we see a 1.8 average grade level growth this is during the pandemic using remote instruction as the intervention so i just want to note that again and then for district 202 2.1 so again we don't see this the same strength of level of grow average growth this year but we still see this level of growth and every student grew uh at least a grade level except for two
149students and so i think when you consider everything right all those factors um being in in the summer being during the global pandemic being remote um and again this would have been june uh so this is right kind of after we've had that that weird uh second semester after the initial pandemic hit again i think this really uh speaks to the strength of the program and the design of the intervention uh being so individualized in 2020 because it was remote and because uh we were doing the motto a little bit differently in the in the summer lift students worked with an interventionist each day for approximately an hour for 15 straight days school days and so we changed the model because of the remote nature and because of how we structured the lab so in
1502020 students participated in this experience for 15 days of summer school as opposed to on saturdays so uh we'll talk a little bit about how the lab was staffed and all that momentarily but just just a couple snapshots of student feedback and so again i think this is really telling we have that quality or the quantitative data that speaks to the assessments but then we also have this qualitative piece where we have 100 of the students agree that the program helped them achieve their individual academic goals so again students are setting goals working with the interventionist um students indicated it was helpful their reading improved they read more often than previously and it helped them with reading and comprehension so you can't get any better than that in a program designed to support students to
151address their reading needs all students on the survey that we gave either responded strongly agreed or agreed or had a neutral response when asked if they see their reading stamina increase so again if you think about students who are reading multiple grade levels behind striving readers to be able to increase your reading stamina as a great end product of the intervention and as that continues to grow and grow you know students being able to show more success with reading and with their literacy based activities and assessments in their academic uh performance is going to be something that we're actually going to look to look to see if we can identify um going forward getting permission from some of the families when they sign up for summer lift for this upcoming summer to see if we
152can actually do some data sharing between the districts to see okay if we're serving students in the summer through this program how are they transferring those skills and that experience during the school year back in district 65 and also in 202 and so when we meet as a collaborative team we can share those those results not only of the summer but also how are students performing during the school year which i think is going to be an extremely illuminating process and will help us continue to target how we can support students in both districts and lastly you can see there students reporting that it was important to work with someone who was nice to them and just thinking again that social emotional aspect of whole child education where if you're going to be working with
153me on something that i need to face as a challenge for myself i need to be able to trust you and believe that you care about me in order to find success and the students reiterated that point so it's it's a part of the research base that informed our program but it's also being reaffirmed by our students i think i'm going to turn things over to dr beersley now to talk a little bit about the community partnerships and how we were able to structure the lab support for summerlift thank you scott um so this program summer lift is really supported by some really important relationships and partners and when we think about what's helping to make this program come together district 65 and 202 have been collaborating in the process of identifying students and also
154in sharing some of the literacy lab practices and experiences that we have in interventions specifically we also are benefiting from private donor support and support from foundation 65 as we build the capacity to our educators and as scott mentioned earlier neiu is being is a really strong partner in this program has allowed some of the coursework to occur at eths and is allowing the practicum work when our individuals are working towards reading specialists or reading teacher endorsements to happen within our community and so when we think about the work that's contributing to the success of the summer lift program 202 has been committed to creating opportunities and tuition sharing arrangements for some of the 202 educators to earn the reading specialist in teacher endorsement which is bringing some of the capacity and the specialization knowledge
155to support the learning outcomes and then similarly foundation 65 and district 65 are partnering to support and do tuition sharing with district 65 educators a um a cohort of 11 excuse me of 12 staff members currently to pursue their reading endorsement thank you scott um and so that partnership is continuing the capacity building work that we're doing and scott you can move on to the next slide um and scott do you want to pick up on 202 and yeah thank you absolutely so you know we we through the generous support of our board of education we were able to do some incentivization of taking the course work uh two or three years ago we've had one successful cohort already graduate so you know they are working in our literacy lab right now and for the
156202 board we're hopeful to present either in march or april a report specific to the literacy lab we wanted to make sure that tonight's presentation was about our joint work but we do have some really exciting uh success stories to share from the literacy lab and so the students uh are being served there from enter by interventionists who went through the neiu cohort program and so it's been it's been a great investment in capacity that is really being put to direct use to support students needs uh in our building and again thinking about this is offered during the summer which is a great opportunity in the summer and we're seeing great growth but to be able to present and provide that same level of tier three individualized support to students during the school year uh
157has been extremely helpful as well and you'll see that report uh like i said in the future but we do have 11 staff members who have already gone through we have a new cohort that formed and two of our staff members are part of the new cohort that stacy mentioned several district 65 teachers are part of as well and so i just wanted to talk really briefly before we close out about the uh the lab experience during summer lift the first summer in 2019 we were able to run the summer lift program as the practicum experience for that first cohort of teachers going through the certification pro program at neiu and so one of the great advantages to the partnership is that rather than having our teachers work with students in chicago which there's nothing
158wrong with that but if we want to be able to serve our local community we were able to get them to agree to have the practicum experience be in our local community with our students and so that happened in 2019 in 2020 this past year we were able to pay teachers to work in summerlift through a generous private donation through the eths foundation and so because we didn't have a cohort going through their practicum experience we were able to support that through the private donation to pay for their salaries and so again we're hoping to do that this upcoming summer and we have some private donors who are interested in continuing to support the program into the future and expanding the access and opportunity for more students from district 65 as well so um i
159think that this is a huge foundational piece that we can continue to grow for for years to come as we continue to commit to providing this level of support for our students and that's the end of the presentation awesome very exciting wonderful really good it's great to see those cohorts and grow and the amazing work you're doing with students really good excellent okay board any um questions from the board i have a question yes hi um thanks so much for the report um i'm wondering if you could take a minute uh given the prior discussion of the joint literacy goal and connect up this summer lift project with the overarching literacy goal and talk a little bit about how it fits within this broader structure of achieving um literacy for all of our students yeah
160do you want me to start with that stacy sure sounds good okay so yeah i think the so the ultimate goal of summer lift what is was and is continues to be connected to that larger goal of trying to have all of our students read at grade level right and so when we look to identify students who participate we're looking to invite students who we have already identified as heading down that progression as was talked about earlier early warning signs of showing that they might be uh not reading at grade level uh early on and so we work with um elizabeth and stacy in district 65 and the reading team uh teachers and and support staff in district 65 to identify the students who are most at need and then we invite them into the
161program and so again due to capacity again this is a one-to-one ratio we're looking at the the most um identified student need uh in both districts and so as we're tracking that we're trying to match that up with the intervention yeah that that was you were sort of getting at the point of my question which is yeah it seems like a relatively small number for the reasons you said but obviously something we would prefer to scale up if we if we could and we had the funding so so my part two of this is um i think you alluded to it at the end it looks like we're seeking more funding we're gonna try and scale it up and it's i would imagine dependent on funding and not so much the fact that there's the
162need we have the need there's more kids who could benefit so we need to expand the funding and then the so um how how big do you see this getting and then the second question is over time is there a plan to keep track of the whether these gains are sustainable going forward um i'm curious about whether i mean i'm not the educator here so but i i know that we hear about backslide and summer learning loss and you know places where kids lose ground and so i'm wondering if that's a concern here and if there's plans to keep track of that and or try and avoid it yeah so go ahead john you know i i'm going to speak from 65 position so we are in a process mind who's speaking thank you sorry
163all right we are in the process in 65 to build out a pretty um progressive and aggressive uh summer intervention program uh and i just want to just i want us all to just remember as we approach this work there are three layers of the three layers that we got to be conscious of around these tiers this what we're speaking of right now and what you all have been able to what we've been able to do in partnership uh with 202 is really tier three work right um and we're not able to serve a lot of students but we are working on a plan to extend that learning in the summer uh and also you know and even when school is back in session um you know gretchen as yours as you think about how
164do we make sure this work is sustained but when we talk about our tier one instruction which is the best defense to make sure that our students are reading and attaining at the level that they need to be that's what those elements that we spoke of and this is where the trains come in really handy as we talk about making sure that uh teachers are not just not just finding you know ways to find to support intervention but are doing it at the highest level for our tier ones part in challenging them for our tier two students being sure that they use the plc structure to go back and redesign some of that literacy and support and then tier three is where what we're talking about tonight uh that we find ways to keep those
165processes going not just in the summer but throughout the course of school year as you spoke of it sounds like um how do we maintain interventions at level three as for tier threes throughout the for 365. and that is something that uh my team and i have been have been discussing uh we just released an rfp to um to our community partners we've had some community partners to jump on board they we have some strong community partners that's working with us that focus on uh some heavier aspects of their program is focused on literacy and then we've also sent it to schools uh so i would say i don't know uh scott if this has been discussed with you but if this is um if this is something that we're looking to expand potentially um
166maybe that could be a part of rfp can be completed to make sure that this program grows and that 65 can put in some of our dollars to make that connection to thank you so much dr horton yeah i think the one thing i was just going to add is that we we talked this year it's we're super excited that we're going to reach out to families to gain their permission to do some data sharing around this program so that we can track the students performance during the school year who participated in the lab we know at 202 because we can look at that for ourselves that that that learning continues and this was one of the interventions that we tried to use to target that quote unquote summer slide that we read about because
167it happens in the summer so it's a way to continue learning in the summer and so how do we then continue that and how do we provide teachers during the school year that information so that they can continue to support that learning and so that's how when we look at our star data and we look at our individual you know uh instructional planning reports out of star when we continue to do that progress we're being able to provide our teachers with that additional layer of information and continue that so we're hopeful to do that for district 65 students as well um throughout the school year we can share how the summer experience went and then how that looks as it's continuing into the school year so we have a great foundation to be able to
168do that and we're and we're excited to do that moving forward and scott one other thing well two other things um i would like for us to also just to share that our bilingual uh programming our tweet program we're adopting a new literacy curriculum and there's one i do know this and stacy tell me if i'm wrong i believe that um betsy rhodes uh they've applied they put in an application to our to do an rfp for our tweet for literacy this summer that is something that we also in the district is our population continue to grow uh we want to be conscious and cognizant of how we provide those supports as well um and i'm not sure how that's connected with uh with what you all are doing right now but i definitely know
169that's an arm that we need to put in place sooner than later excellent uh can i ask a question well not really a question can i just well maybe it is i don't know um i'm wondering like what i'm hearing from the the report on the data that we just got the historical data um the partnerships the um interventions and all the other things that we're talking about that go into us achieving this literacy goal does it make sense that the next step or one of the next steps is to create some sort of operational plan that includes the inputs as along with the accountabilities so all of this is kind of brought together um as we move forward so we're able to see the interventions we're able to know you know what's happening at
170district 65 what's happening at 202 to move us towards achieving this goal we've been on data forever so we've got that right we're there with that yay so now how do we how do we start moving forward tracking the activities tracking the accountabilities and moving us closer to that that goal yeah absolutely uh i'm i'm gonna ask kylie to chime in a little bit about what we're doing around that action uh and also if under leave uh can speak to this some of the work that we're doing uh to make sure that it's moving forward uh and then we have a miracles framework uh where a lot of this is it lives and i don't wanna go too far into that discussion but definitely knowing that there is a process i would love to plug
171that component into what 202 is doing so that that operational plan could be fluid uh monique so kyle because what i'm hoping is that we can get together and do that together you know what i'm saying so that so it's truly a plan that we're both working on but yeah that's it you know what i like about what i'm hearing the two of you say is if we if we really develop an operational plan together we can we can be uh what's more intentional about overlapping you know i don't think it just butts up against one another i i i think somehow there there needs to be an overlap for us to be most effective at this well it makes sense as well because then the districts are it can anticipate what's going to happen
172at some point in the future so 65 can better prepare students for their high school experience around literacy which is in in my opinion the whole purpose of the literacy goal i'm really appreciating this discussion because operational accountability these are these have been the missing pieces we've been we've been collecting a lot of data and you know there's nothing wrong with that but it seems like or at least it has for me that one of the purposes of the literacy goal was to collect data but in my mind i'm thinking the purpose of the literacy goal is to track how our students are doing and to make changes in their instructional experience as we can anticipate the students who might struggle so that it so that by the time they leave us they they have
173stronger skills so that that's been that's been what i've hoped to see happen and this discussion makes me feel um hopeful um because um we're not talking about data so much yeah i mean it's a great discussion i love talking about data so um you'll have to forgive me i but i think it's really important now that we've established really clear foundation of where we are and we all jointly agree now we can start to move the data into action the data doesn't do our students any good until we unlock the potential of the data and turn it into actionable strategies i can share very briefly some of the things we're doing at district 65 that i think have really remarkable promise um for how we move things forward and i think that you know
174we have a great collaboration going now with our team um to really be able to expand and build on the successes so in district 65 this year we have really done quite a bit to deepen cycles of inquiry and cycles of learning related to data we are having school reality check meetings where we bring in school leadership teams and we do a facilitated protocol to really investigate the data multiple data sets to really dig in and do some kind of dialogue and kind of a root cause analysis um in the moment of where do you think you're seeing improvements how do you build on those successes and how do you address the areas of um for growth and for improvement because you know we have to also recognize that the data doesn't tell a full
175story the data tells a partial story and it doesn't tell all of the strengths and so as we work internally in the district you know we provide public data reporting that's it really aggregated and essentially it gives you kind of a high level map with when we work with our schools we're getting down to like the gps coordinates of that map we're using a geo locator to really tell you with precision where things are and so you know that's some work that we're doing that people don't necessarily see um it's internal work you don't see that but that's the kind of the stuff that's the stuff that makes the magic of learning happen and working with our teachers and the plc's they're really digging into the information and the data and then they're also looking
176not only with their grade level team but that vertical planning and i think the more we could do that vertical planning around our curriculum and around um the the supporting transitions for students with the high school in collaboration with the high school i think what dr branley and dr beardsley have done has really it's a demonstration of the success of our collaborative efforts and so the more we can do work like that where we we all kind of contribute to the shared um the shared development of our ongoing collaboration the the better our students will be when they go forward in their academic career to to college and career and onward so and i can say in all honesty and as as i pull us out of the data hive that kylie was in um
177we were we have i've i can hear it in the conversations and the discussions with our principals and aps and we're now in our second round of our reality checks and so those numbers are one thing but we're hearing them reference back to actions and decisions that they've made to change how they're approaching supporting their teachers uh around plc around plc around uh like that just the best practices for delivering high quality instruction which is the purpose of data right at some point that those numbers have to change and shift into action and we are starting to hear and and see uh uh you know from getting into classrooms with really high frequency uh levels the principals will talk to you about that as well so i i think there's an opportunity here uh to
178even expand that and maybe grow out um some of the work that we're doing to make sure that it stays connected um with 202 and we don't have to and i think that the team that uh i think uh scott and and stacey's done some great work and i would like to keep that moving and how do we make it better uh moving forward and even expanding it to some other areas as well matt i'd like to jump in here yes go ahead so thank you for the work that you all are doing is uh it's it's very very difficult work um uh your heart can be in the right place and still at times you may not hit the mark so we're in a difficult situation of having to do triage to stop the
179bleeding as students continue to matriculate through our school system because what the data also shows is as they matriculate black and brown students fall further and further behind so what we're talking about right now is the triage work so i'd like to take us back to the root where the root of the problem is which the data also says we know the students who aren't prepared to go into kindergarten and the data also says i've seen the map of where early childhood education experiences happen formula formally in this town and and most of them are not happening in the words where black and brown children live so there is clearly a disparity and there has been generationally on um the quality of early childhood education and the access and access to formal because there are
180many mom and pops doing it out of the house and are is there alignment between what our children are getting in those spaces and what the expectations are as they come into the district and the data is showing that there isn't in in most cases in many cases so it's a difficult situation because of funding and because of jurisdiction and but it also has been illustrated that there is not alignment historically in early childhood education and district 65. and i look at this as a community issue because there are so many and there's been so much work done in the early childhood community and i really want to commend everyone involved service providers parents everyone but at the end of the day if we know consistently these students who were trying to do triage with
181come not come unprepared for kindergarten can somebody speak to what is being done what type of traction we're making um in terms of shoring up our early childhood education delivery here in the city of evanston [Music] can i jump in yeah yeah i just was it last month dr sprague our early childhood director gave a really wonderful report on um just the questions that you're asking so i would encourage you to go back i think you can download the report from the district 65 website but um and i i can't speak to it as eloquently um as she did but overall what she's been able to do with her team um has really led to improved kindergarten readiness assessment scores um this past this most recent assessment round so definitely has made some positive traction
182there and i just know as a system as an organization the plc work that they're doing um in early childhood and just the the peer observations and collaboration and deep dive into data um and setting goals um it's really impressive so i think there's a lot being done um i don't know if anybody else on my team wants to chime in but um i do think that we're moving in a a really strong direction with regards to early childhood the most recent data does show that i can talk about not the pieces maybe states you can add to what you were referencing to uh romy but i can chime in and say um we are in the process of we've gotten a grant and we've accepted we've accepted and we're building out uh an urban
183teacher residency it's called create and we are in the process of working with national wills in northwestern where we will be able to uh build our own early childhood instructors so as teachers retire you know it's very hard to find features that could fit that doesn't cost us out or um that you know that are ready to come and work in 65 this is a very unique unique community and so one of one of the things that we toyed around with and we're talking with dr sprague is that she won't need to replace we have four uh resident teachers that will build a year they'll work with us forward they'll be trying to bounce for a full year get a master's from national lewis and then we'll hire them ideally i think you would you
184got me thinking about um potentially as we work with other early childhood centers maybe these teachers can be um shared and placed in some of the other early childhood programs uh and they would they would get we can still provide some supports of course i would need to you know work with our board and i'm sure they will be open to that i can't speak for them but i can't see them being against it um to actually spread some of that support uh you know early childhood sometimes people think that's a an easy degree and an easy field and we all know that's not it's one of the most challenging areas to work in so those are just some ways that at 65 while we don't run those other organizations or other schools we can
185provide some supports to build that relationship to those residents that's trained by us uh for us to see to teach at those facilities as well so there's just a little something i want to put out there it's a potential way to help extend uh our outreach because it seems like our early childhood center is moving in the right direction and you know dr horton and and welcome by the way welcome thank you i i'm encouraged too because cradle to career has really masterfully brought all of the uh early childhood providers together not all the little mom and pops uh but but but all of them in the city and they they are committed and i i do know that they look to district 65 dr horton to really help provide uh you know if if
186you will kind of the concerted upgrading of what uh is available to the youth of the community i think i think where they've been stymied is is how do we get enough funding or you know how do we expand this so that it really is reaching all uh the early childhood uh children uh in in the community and uh and so i i think we we are really going to see and thanks to district 65's leadership a real upgrading of of what kids are getting uh but if we can work together and i know the the community foundation is is is committed to this but but you know this is going to take a real effort of resources to figure out what about all the kids that we miss if i could interject um back
187to a point that uh romy was making about the jeh and this kind of ties back also to the reality checks that kylie was referencing from a most recent reality check from our jh early childhood group it was amazing to see the level of corrupt collaboration from the zero to three program the family center in addition to uh the work that sharon and her team is doing um not so long ago she presented a pretty robust strategic plan so it was very um inspiring to see some of the work that has been moving as a result of that strategic plan so that goes back to the pieces of tying things together in a way to track and see the movement over time and so um to see growth at a time of remote learning but
188we also saw some pretty talk about qualitative information to hear the reports of how teachers are gaining a different appreciation for asset based learning from families now that they're getting a peek at how families are supporting it's also changing their mindsets about what can be gained from that dual relationship of seeing how parents and families are supporting their young young students and young children and so um i can just say sharon has referenced a lot of use of data but also as a tool for her their instruction and for what those changes would need to look like in the moment i think the uh investment for us in terms of map fluency not a perfect science certainly not perfect in a middle of a pandemic but just even having a consistent language of assessment to
189speak to ts goal which is the primary or primary assessment for early childhood but then to even look at map fluency and kindergarten readiness in that regard provides a an opportunity i haven't seen in a few years of us just even being able to talk the same assessment language which is just so important and really trying to shift educators minds from assessment being a tool to demonize or being weaponized against their practice but to be used as a tool to help encourage their knowledge of students has been pretty impactful to see too so i think that um and i like to think that sharon's uh sharon's the dr sprags entity in jh it's it's it's new york if it can happen in our jh with we know our programs are built for uh at-risk students
190and students who you know come with um pretty much a a delegation of almost a label for having an iep and so to see growth even in the middle of a pandemic is pretty promising to uh to us certainly and had begs us to question some of the things that we might be able to learn as an organization from our early childhood for matriculating and k and beyond so i just wanted to share that 90 of all students are friend reduced to launch as you spoke about the grant yeah uh can i restate my question because i'm i'm wondering now that we have the data and we hear what's happening in 65 and you know how do we bring together the joint in this like how do we make sure together we are moving forward
191um with achieving this joint literacy goal outside of just sharing data and creating the the partnerships i know that were spoken uh how do we hold accountability so that everyone is is moving in the same direction and it's under one one goal i'm not saying we need to rewrite the goal i wasn't here when it was written i think the goal is still very relevant but i'm i'm wondering you know what was the plan after we gathered the data i i guess i'll jump in really quickly monique i think i think for me as i hear the question um obviously you know with dr horton and a lot of the new um structures and systems and reimagining of curriculum and things that have just been spoiled i mean he just touched on just a few
192of them this evening but i think there's a great opportunity here to now reassess what the goal is and so certainly we obviously want all of our students to be reading at grade level throughout our school district and within our community but there are some new avenues that sound like they're going to be opening up to a deepening of our collaboration across the districts um and again i'm i i'm not here to tell you know pre-k teachers and kindergarten teachers and first grade teachers how to teach reading in in the district but i think if we are together at the table thinking about what the end goal is and we're learning from each other's strategies and the systems and we can contribute feedback i'll i'll just speak very personally uh locally and immediately about my
193experience just in a short time with dr greene and dr horton um have continued the the tradition uh that stacey and i have had with the great collaboration um just with their reopening plan this summer like welcoming me in to be a part of those conversations it's very open it's very collaborative there's a there's a great sense of urgency around these topics and so i i would say that i think if we had some time you know we've been in such a survival mode of addressing the current pandemic but when we get to the other side of that and can sit down and have some deeper conversations about this goal and what's changing in both districts how we're evolving in both districts that we'll find the spots where we can come together and again hearing
194tonight it sounds like you know as we continue to report on this as we continue to provide feedback to the boards about how we're progressing those pieces will be able to be brought to forward you know we have a good structure in place for the quantitative data that we're measuring the goal by now we can start looking at okay where are the new avenues that have really been presented i mean just just in hearing some of the things that came up tonight you know i got some notes down you know for some things to follow up with um district 65 on i think can be great um points of collaboration so i i think we have good systems and structures that are coming down on the road here as things are being evolved in both
195districts and i think we have a commitment um within both districts to be working together to identify ways that we can support the larger goal for all of our students in the community so i'm really excited about the potential here and i just want to really urge us uh you know let's not be just a bunch of adults talking uh you know let's really get on this uh because i'm on on the receiving end and i don't mean from district 65 i'm talking about age group the older an individual gets the more profound the effect becomes on their inability or deficiency in reading and and you just see it and and and and and you realize that you know if if you're a sophomore and you can't read at the level the materials that are
196being uh used in the class uh you can just you can like see it in a child's eyes uh you know they know they can't read they know they can't keep up with the other other kids and it doesn't get any easier junior and senior year and planning what to do after high school so i just want us to really remember you you know we shouldn't just be be talking and come back again the next time we meet and talk some more we've really got to get this operationalized we got kids in the community who really lack the reading skills to progress the way they should be able to in their lives and i know we all know that but but we can't lose sight of it you know real simply you know may sound
197like a cliche but it's the truth reading is the gateway to all learning and we have to do that this for for our children [Music] dr green and dr horton you did um minch allude to this but i just wanted to highlight specifically that jh serves primarily black black and brown students and students with ieps and also 90 frame reduced lunch so for us to double the amount of children who are kindergarten ready coming out of jeh is a recipe for closing the gap an opportunity to achieve and it is what um our kids and families deserve and it's what we need to continue to do over and over and if we can spread that good news around our community i think we'd be thrilled as a board to support that um i think also
198um [Music] you know how we engage families with this conversation is important and so um part of you know ensuring that we have more students who are kindergarten ready has to do with our educators collaborating with one another and de-privatizing their practice and um you know interrogating data but it also has to do with families understanding what they're supporting their children towards um and i think high school readiness is related to that as well and so i just wonder how now that we have this data we've aligned um how it's being measured how can we communicate with families so that they understand if their child is on track to be ready for high school literacy or not and what they can do and that may be supporting their child in receiving tier two interventions or
199tier three interventions but um i think we can't underestimate the um how families are compelled to help their children reach their full aptitudes and and how how they are partners with us in this exercise um and i think it you know it's something really it's a really tangible benchmark um that i think folks can can hold on to and so i'm curious when we're thinking about like report card redesign when we're thinking about um yeah parent teacher conferences um and redesigning that process how do we let folks know early on if their child is on track to meet high school literacy goals and if not what we are doing to provide interventions and what they can do at home and in the community to ensure that their child does reach that goal all right so
200if i may right on the way you know i was just going to say that i think what you just shared lines up really quite well with one of the initiatives that we've been focusing on recently which is really thinking about our grading practices both our grading practices as well as what is in our report card and thinking about what are those um expectations what does grading for equity look like and really thinking about the kinds of standards that are going to be that our students are pursuing i would also add that um connected to that is really even in the work of connecting with families about what the expectations are or really what our teachers are doing i think that there's been a tremendous partnership this year through our six systems which you've heard
201mentioned quite a few times this evening of really raising um a higher level of focus on the alignment of what our curriculum is driving versus what are the standards and what are the things that we expect our students to need what do our students need to know and how are we measuring that progress so you know thinking about the use of formative assessment and really helping um our teachers and our school leaders really collaborate together to be clearer about those various elements and so i think that you know when we think about the six systems i'll just name them because i'm not sure we've actually hit them tonight but one is really that the standards and curriculum implementation thinking about those standards the second one is the effective use of data we've heard tonight what's
202the accountability so really it goes down to these to the effective use of data really to drive instruction um the third system is collaboration planning and instructional planning for deeper learning so really we've met we mentioned professional learning communities so that's been the bedrock that we've really used this year to bring teachers together to reflect on our own practice because as we know this gap is not going to go away if we don't get together and problem-solve and we know that you got to go together and not individually and so it's got to be a collaborative effort to learn together um the fourth system is progress monitoring and analysis is going to work um really then thinking about the the climate and culture which is really system five and then system six is really the
203coaching and the feedback that principals are giving this year it's been a huge effort and i think this is an area of collaborative where we i know across dr campbell and i we've talked about in the past about um instructional rounds across both systems and maybe there's opportunities for looking into practices so system six is really about um really the feedback in our principles and coaches have been really getting into the ground onto the ground level to see what instruction looks like because without that ultimately if we're not really paying attention to close and we're not closely paying attention to instruction then we're not going to see the shift everything we know about change in practice and moving towards equity and our in our learning for our students is definitely correlated to the way in
204which what happens in the classroom and so i think that that's the result of that relationship of increased coaching across the system so i just thought it was important as we think about accountability and some joint work i wanted to share those systems and i'm i'd be happy to i know we'd be happy to share that that's those six systems to then see if there's a way to make some cross connections across both systems tom and thanks for that under the limit some things that i would like to highlight as uh i asked about we are actually in the process of getting our face team and some others trained uh and i don't know how familiar you are with dr karen mapp's uh family work family support work which will lead which will lead into
205better structures around getting families involved and extend their learning from from the school and to the home you have to be very intentional about that so that's some of the things that we're doing that's not necessarily data driven but more about the action that uh that i continue to hear uh as a as something that we want to see more of so that's a one uh and then i'm gonna also go out and and say that when you talk about our um our our our in our instructional work like when we go back to the learning standards it is important that that our teachers have the tools to be able to deconstruct learning standards as we're looking at how students are performing on the data as we talk about moving forward the next step would
206be let's make sure that they can take that data that we're referencing and be able to see where the where the kids are having gaps in the literacy right uh and then that is that is like the first level of this work that we're doing and it's it's it's a it's a it seems like a heavy lift it's really best practice and we just sometimes we get as educators we get bombarded and caught up in and and adding new and adding new well what we put on our plate for this year uh in 65 we plan to keep that on the only thing that we move for the next you know three to four years as we master it and so that is something also that i would say last thing i think dr green
207and i'm going to say tonight i promise you i think that dr green uh will be leading in partnership with mr little and doctor and dr kilgotti uh are these instructional rounds i see this as an opportunity potentially now listening to everyone tonight that maybe these i see these icrs could be something that we bring some high school team members into our schools to do some instructional rounds with us and we go over to the high school and do them as well of course when kovac gets you know a little bit better uh but i think those are opportunities we talk about what are some actions that we can we can put into moving forward so i'm gonna try to shut down all right all right and i i'm actually going to move us along
208i'm going to move us along we have another big item that we we would we want to discuss here but i'm just really going to encourage the the collaboration to continue around this um operationalizing this work on our literacy goal really [Music] like kylie said you know making putting the data into action so i'm really looking looking forward to that so that's what we need to do and i am going to move us along so our next item is our equity discussion and um who is gonna start this off for us dr campbell are you gonna get us going hey low yes i sure can well thank you um thank you to both boards um for your um commitment to literacy and equity i'm just going to share a little bit about the uh the
209equity work that we've been engaged in at 202 during the pandemic it's been um quite the year given the racial disparities of covet 19 and its impact on communities of color as well as the deaths of of george floyd uh brianna taylor and about aubry so um we've we've done a number of things um as a community to begin to speak to uh the world around us over the past 12 months this past fall all dta staff received information at the beginning of the semester they listed tips and suggestions on how to navigate the issues that could surface during enhanced e-learning using an equity lens the communication explored how to approach disparities in uh accessibility to physical space and technologies uh to encourage full engagement and synchronous and asynchronous learning and various levels of comfort
210with turning on video during live learning we shared information about video classism and why some students may not want to turn their cameras on and really talking with teachers and giving them resources to really think about the implications behind that educators were encouraged to be creative and assessing student engagement making learning accessible for students also with diverse learning styles is also a priority and accommodations individualized learning plans by familiarizing themselves with zoom and um many account google meet accountability features screen fatigue and how to incorporate breaks and activities throughout live learning that could also act as a buffer our staff also included engaged in mandatory training on how to build relationships um through the screen my office built a anti-racist toolkit for educators it is a resource toolkit addressing the current issues related to the
211pandemic and social justice movements the toolkit is comprised of articles podcasts ted talks and social media accounts their father that follow and center black and brown voices it encourages an anti-racist mindset and it provides opportunities for action the toolkit is for educators interested in enhancing their understanding of what is happening in our country to better engage conversations with students with an anti-racist lens the toolkit includes a variety of resources that address the following the history of black liberation movement and how it shows up today the intersections of race poverty and the pandemic resources about the efficacy of protests and how to safely engage in actions uh the impact of language when we use processing when we are processing various events and topics and uh how do we talk about certain things like the attack on
212the capitol the importance of intersectionality in all liberation and justice movements uh how white me engage in radical self and community care black joy as an act of resistance the difference between calls to reform defund and abolish policing and the prison industrial complex bipoc that is black indigenous people of color solidarity and white co-conspiratorship local school updates about anti-racist work in district 65 in northwestern non-partisan exploration of topics related to the 2020 uh presidential campaign and how to appropriately navigate these confident conversations in the classroom setting the toolkit also includes resources about how to engage in healthy conversations about all of the topics listed listed above along with racial equity glossary to ensure that everyone has a shared understanding of the terms that are frequently used and the conversations that center race our building leadership
213team is in the second year of anti-racist work with educator and consultant corey wallace guided by corey the team has committed itself to internalizing the courageous conversations about race protocol and identifying opportunities to decenter whiteness in their leadership and departments of in alignment with the district's vision for equity throughout the course of the year we've read despite the best intentions and i know district 65 has also done that how racial inequity thrives in good schools by amanda lewis and john diamond the blt has also incorporated student voice into their work and how to support students with remote learning student leaders shared their feedback from a student survey about e-learning meetings have led to a creation of an equity essentials document they consist of book books articles movies podcasts websites and speakers recommended by team members
214another component to our work this year has been calvin terrell calvin is a long time partner bths and has facilitated and co-designed anti-racist professional development with students since 2013 he has led an all-staff meeting in response to the call to continue offering spaces where vulnerability reflection and care are prioritized i can't emphasize enough that when our staff had an opportunity to meet with calvin in the fall we all came together and we listened to him really talk to us about the human toll of the pandemic on the racial reckoning that was happening in america and um after that session about a hundred folks of just more than a hundred poachers just hung back and cried and a lot of people shared their thoughts and their feelings and some people just cried and we stood in
215solidarity with our tears and there have been many many staff meetings this school year where our our teachers and our other staff members have just been very vulnerable um and um because this has been a definite definitely a difficult year for them as well and calvin has created spaces for healing while he's offered words of encouragement and allow time and space to process the multitude of things happening in the world and has centered staff and have asked them what they needed as part of the wildcat future series calvin hosted a series of a hosted a virtual family night where he discussed relevant topics for all families community members being in conflict communication bullying violence permit prevention community building diversity awareness to social consciousness 21st century parenting gender equity race racial healing and racial justice student
216achievement and constructive decision making this year we've also created a district anti-racist working group we affectionately call it the dog district agency races working group this space was created to for staff to come together to learn examine and reflect and take actionable steps to enhance their racial equity lands and their professional sphere of influence participation in the group was voluntary and included anyone who was interested in staying connected and committed to anti-racist growth learning and action beginning in the fall we began a partnership with dr jackie bataloria a speaker and author and consultant from our community who facilitated the learning and development for this group for free by the way dr bataloria had held a series of meetings that helped lay the foundation needed to concretize whiteness and how it shows up in our practice
217jackie bataloria is the author of birth of a white nation the intervention of white people and its relevance today and she lives in evanston the arc of the learning for the first semester included understanding whiteness and how it is seamlessly reproduced today identifying opportunities to implement changes uh that fractured these norms and just a couple of weeks ago the black student summit was held and staff and students were invited for an interview between eths alum nia williams and author political strategist and organizer alicia garza who is the co-founder of black lives matter and the black future project as well as a q a hosted by the student union leaders the recording of this segment has been available to all eths staff during the day students had an opportunity to sign up for various workshops including
218navigating social media during the pandemic black resistance and community work factors that impact the mental health of black youth along with strategies for self-care students also had an opportunity to attend intersectional affinity spaces for girls student athletes a boys group students with biracial identity and an lgbtqia affinity space 500 copies of alicia garza's book new book the purpose of power how we come together when we fall apart were given to our students and staff along with summit t-shirts designed by an eths student class of 2022 black history month is also currently happening and this year's theme of celebration is know it show it become it 365 days a year that's being black 365. it is a month-long celebration that kicked off with the virtual spirit week that invited staff and students to show their hbcu
219college pride share their favorite african-american heroes and celebrate the influence of black culture and fashion the celebration continued with black student summit conversations about mental health healing movie nights the heat you give and black panther were two movies that were shown video and series including fun fitness sessions cookouts soul food dessert uh and evanston owned black businesses and uh 100 copies of angie thomas's and concrete rose were giving to eths staff members and i'm getting to the end here just wanted to highlight that we've been in the global pandemic but we've been still doing a lot with equity uh myself dr p davis carrie levy and lauren hamilton developed and facilitated a virtual workshop as a part of a learning forward conference in december 2020 the theme of this year's conference was innovate for impact
220and the invited presenters were submitted proposals that highlighted innovative solutions educators have taken to perform professional learning practices systems and um and policies in an effort to ensure students have access to high quality learning eths administrators delivered a presentation entitled transformation for racial equity a curriculum review process the goals of the session were outlined and accepted by the proposal hello i'm pat savage was a part of that as a participant uh the participants acquired an understanding of how a school district maintains accountable to its commitment to racial equity within the context of an ongoing in-depth analysis for courses for the purpose of curriculum vision and change uh our participants also explored and developed how to sustain a non-traditional curriculum review process to center students as research participants as well as research partners the workshop focused
221on identifying opportunities for other people within their own districts and organization to engage in adaptive racially and transformation work specific to ensuring that curricular instructional designs of course supports the success of all students particularly students of color it was also designed for folks to reflect or as district leaders to lead racial equity transformation by completing a self-evaluation that helps them identify the strengths and opportunities for growth and after this workshop we got an email back saying that uh from some researchers saying that they wanted our workshop to be written up to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal it doesn't happen often where us practitioners get an opportunity to submit something to the literature so that's a that's what's very good to nice to get that nod and lastly there's just more summits to come more
222conversations to be had and um you know we're excited about the work that we're doing and um continue to do so that's our update from thank you awesome that's awesome marcus i just want to add that the board has been working also with uh dr darnissa um so we've been doing that that's ongoing and we will continue to schedule meetings with her because it is very important work for us to do it's important for the board to stay engaged in this work work together learn together learn side of our colleagues at district 202 but also do our own work and work collectively so thank you all right um pause for questions or should we move forward just a little bit of an update uh for us yes of course marcus's list was was very impressive
223and inspiring and so um i just want to add a little bit of i guess the duality of where our lives are right now where equity um is concerned one part of it is somewhat of back to the basics right really trying to think about what healthy racial engagement looks like and so many of you may know our colleague devon alexander joined our district this year is um obviously experiencing what a first year looks like but in the middle of the pandemic and so um the other part of his work uh really centered around a lot of the family and the community engagement so what i think i want to highlight is not only a back to basics around our our racial equity work but also uh putting equity into action and and trying to
224ensure that we are moving into our what now what next phase because i do think that the investments that both of our organizations have made in terms of um racial equity literacy is is obviously to be admired and now and but yet we've all been feeling like what do we do with this information or now that we are um how does this impact what students lives are like in the classroom and so that's part of what our work has been centered on devon uh came in with some really robust programs and and plans and ideas um and they were centered on a couple of things one really continuing the work with cabinet and leadership uh in terms of some really racial equity authentic leadership um development and again with the piece of how does this
225impact my practice uh he's been doing some work with the dr karen map program to really just ensure that not only from a community partner and uh partnership but that it's a two-way if you know dr mapp's work it's really about an asset-based partnership for both family engagement as well as district partnership and so that has implications for us as well as we more so now than ever find ourselves in our family's homes and them finding themselves in our classrooms so uh that work is is definitely being highlighted for us this year we also are seeing um some work in terms of i think we've referenced our miracles framework but uh we have some partnerships in terms of our professional development with student achievement partners we've been working with them for a while we also
226redesigned our professional learning this year and so educators have an option to have choice in terms of their professional development and we thought that was critical for moving uh our racial equity work into uh into practice being where people are investing in how it impacts their instruction and so we've got a small core cohort a mighty but willing group that is working on it's called what now what next and they are literally investing in action research that is looking to develop um the plc framework but from their own personal inquiry cycle about their practice and their work with students and so we're excited about the work that devon and dr pitts are actually doing with student achievement partners in that regard the cabinet team and administration has been uh recently partnered with a it's called
227an idi so an intercultural development inventory we've uh we've been intrigued a lot about how we measure the impact of our racial equity literacy and so in starting this partnership it began with an inventory and followed up with some conversations just in terms of where we are on our own personal journey so i i agree with pat in totality this is such an ongoing experience that you have to continue to feel your bucket and feel your toolkit and so we've done that work as well and engaging in that partnership um and one other thing um the panorama survey that we were given this year really afforded us an opportunity to explore uh belongingness and the impact of our work with our students from their perspective so if you would think of the five essentials as
228kind of a culture and climate assessment for the health of the organization panorama lets us drill down a little bit more into student voice around issues of belonging um and so we saw some very we had our first data dive from that information and so again blending a little bit of like let's just go back to the basics how are we ingraining ourselves in the courageous conversation protocol but now how does it apply to our practice and what are those steps that we're taking uh in terms of how we organize ourselves uh to see that change being implemented and so those are just a few of the highlights um dr horton can talk a little bit more about some more action-oriented work that is uh work that's been in the making for us in in
229relation to um not only our social studies curricular rewrite project but also our math acceleration and then i also want to not acknowledge our boards uh insistence and persistence and really looking at land acknowledgements and so we're excited to bring a topic to our next board meeting um where we'll really be looking at the importance of not just the land acknowledgement but what it means for us in our community in evanston as well dr horton would you like to expound more yes i'll just you've done a great job i would say uh as we the theme from this conversation tonight in this board meeting what i'm listening to is put it into action and that has been our priorities equity in action and what one of the things the detracting of our math advanced math
230program uh we have been through a compression process we presented to the board earlier this month uh we will be working on changing some policy and redesigning while we're not we're not eliminating advanced math we are opening up for opportunity and dr beardsley and her team they've done a phenomenal job of getting us to this point to address something that's really challenging and hard you all know very well about the tracking programs in echs so i don't i'm preaching to the choir when it comes to that um i would also like to just say another piece that we're doing about action our social studies curriculum is being rewritten right now and with the rewrite uh it's going we are at the point where we must really speak truth about history and so i'm just going
231to kind of go over the high just really high levels so i can be quick uh making sure that um this is not this is not just you know telling about black history but really talking about how it has impacted so if miss diller was here stacy want to chime in this is under stacy as well um she's been doing a lot of work in our department but the component one interrogating systems of oppression the curricular material resources engage students discuss and interrogate systems of oppression i can't read as fast as pete but um i'll try component two recognize the students as individuals our curriculum materials and resources will recognize students as individuals within the context of their families and their communities component three prioritizes historically marginalized students we will prioritize historically marginalized students in
232this in this section there's so much more that i'm skipping through that i can't read to you all because it'll take all night curriculum materials and resources are leveraged for student activism that's component for leveraging the student voice and activism component five include diversity and representation curricular resources will help students to realize diversity and character and accuracy of portrayal and we want to be sure that our students learn the diversity is diversity is more than just we want it to be more than just counting people we want to make people count um and that's what we are in that area where we're trying to target social justice orientation uh again understanding of decolonization power and privilege center multiple perspectives and connect students learning to real-life action component seven uses culturally sensitive fair and unbiased assessments
233component 8 engage students in a range of anti-bias multicultural and social justice issues and under component of teacher materials teaching materials resources represents artists of diverse identities race ethnicity gender and other identities uh if possible these are just the frames in which our curriculum is being rewritten and redesigned we are working um extremely hard to bring this to our curriculum committee we plan to have something for the board uh in very late spring or early summer for them to approve and that is part of the work something that i will be remiss if i don't discuss around our equity journey is that this summer we hired a diversity hiring specialist and what we've done we wrote a grant for um isbee and we were awarded the grant this summer and we are building our our
234own um teacher residency we don't have a teacher shortage in our district but we do have a teacher diversity shortage and so with the with the teacher residency uh it's called it's called create we're a partnership with northwestern university and national lewis university where we will identify individuals that are diver we wrote this and got it approved from the state diverse candidates um that look like our students we will take they'll get accepted into the program they'll get a masters in the year i'm giving you the highs of it they'll be trained at either king arts betsy rhodes or jeh early childhood center you heard me mention that earlier in my discussion and they'll be and we'll have 20 a year and they'll finish and we'll pay with 30 000 stipend and we have partnerships
235from uh some some really strong uh philanthropists here in the community uh to help us do this and they'll graduate and we'll be able to place some extremely diverse teachers that's trained by us for us the old fubu logo um to really get into the classrooms and we'll place them in cohort models so that we won't just have one teacher here and one teacher there they'll be put together we all know if you're familiar with hattie's work john hattie he speaks about teacher efficacy we know that putting teachers together to have a like mind and believe that students can change we have a lot of those teachers right now in our district but many of our teachers are at the age we're able to retire we want to replace them with teachers that can carry
236on the legacy and do and continue to do great for our black and brown students so that is just some of the things we want to say around our equity in action uh here in 65. super thank you thank you thank you dr green dr horton dr campbell all right uh board questions comments pat see you again yeah i just want to um just take a a moment and and say and it sounds like we could say this about both districts um but certainly our you know with the work at eths it it is it isn't um to be ignored that in a time when the world literally went crazy you all stayed focused on what matters and obviously there is an equity component to covid but i think there are people there are organizations
237and there are school districts who probably said oh we have so much to do on covet we'll do equity later and i am just so proud that it is so a part of our culture now that that would never be remotely a thought or an option um and that not only did the work you know our our summits go to remote um but that you've advanced so much work and that you've integra it's so woven in it's like it isn't it isn't this separate bucket and i i just want to stop and say that out loud because that is not the norm in most school districts even ones that are trying they're not they're not there yet and so i just am really proud of all of you and all the work that you do
238um that you've done to get us here and that you do to keep us going in such a a profound way so under really crazy conditions um so thank you i just i just want to make sure we we don't miss that because this is this conversation that you all just had that is very unusual in this country and i i just want to make sure we all we all recognize that so thank you all for your amazing work thank you thank you for saying that pat that is extremely important very true and extremely important to highlight at a time like this especially it's it's important anyway but it's really important to highlight at a time like this and it is what makes evanston different so not to be taken for granted so thank you
239and i appreciate the information the reports and the work of the faculty and staff in in doing this this is this is probably the most difficult part of our work to do this alongside everything else you've heard me say before that at eths were past the presentations and the training and we're into the doing the implementation and it is so much harder because everything we do now has to be done with an equity lens it's just harder but it's really important to do i just wanted to comment really quickly and uh as we think about equity and have a conversation about equity right uh one of the things always is to remember that again our children always think about bioecological view of children is that their children are couched by families that are couched by
240communities and other institutions right and whatever we can do to continue you know again as colburn 19 has exposed uh you know again that you know that there's there's um you know there's still such a need for us to continue to collaborate with one another which is why i appreciate these joint meetings as well as you know working with our institution and community partners community based organizations to make sure that we are uh really identifying whatever not not only what our students need what families need because we know that whatever the issues that children are dealing with at home actually they bring into our classrooms or bring into our virtual classrooms right uh and one of the things i really i want to point out and i said this at our at our last e65
241meeting is that again i know we have a lot of parents who are are very upset and rightfully so as i am for not being able to come back to school and have our kids back back in school and i know at d65 we started a hybrid model but again many of us in the community who again are want our schools to open right away and open up fully there's an equal amount of folks who don't have the time to to tell us that they they that they are deathly afraid to send their children back to school right uh and these are people of color these are folks who are working out there and who again are serving our community uh in grocery stores or the laundromats um you know who are nurses uh who
242again are seeing some you know the uh you know with their own eyes and some of the disparities who have lost loved ones because they were forced to work for our comfort and to make our communities comfortable in our lives comfortable so what when i hear folks out there and sent us emails and messages around how their children are suffering and again i have been through that suffering prior to the culvert right black and brown communities and poor white communities have gone through an economic pandemic and a pandemic to uh lacking access to proper health care a pandemic that a pandemic or structural racism that has cut access to them to opportunities so again what people are feeling if this this may be a new feeling to you for a lot of us this is
243something that we've been feeling for generations and we just have to be super i have to be super honest about that and i hope that the folks who are reaching out to us today now once we open schools will continue to reach out to us to start advocating not only for us to open open schools but open opportunity and access to rigor into success and to normalize the success for all students black brown white latino asian because that that is what we need to do as a community we need to come together and again i'm proud to work in the community and with you as colleagues uh to try to make this work and equity something that is embedded and operationalized and is something that is just something that becomes the nature of how this
244community works and again we have a lot of work still to do as you're saying pat but i'm here for the long haul as long as i can contribute to the work alongside all of you um i am hopeful in knowing that we are you know two institutions that have a significant amount of uh care and um role in folks lives that we are centering um witnessing and caring for the full humanity of all of the children and families that we're working with necessary mentioned there are many of us who have had to live most of our lives not being fully witnessed not being fully cared for and not having our full humanity protected and cherished and it's hopeful to hear um that we have two major institutions in our local community doing that um
245i wanted to just also note that the district 65 administration team has been centering racial equity around a reopening plans with making sure that we reserve spots for the individuals who preference in person who are vulnerable and also with our discussions around resolving the structural deficit i think that um you know these are processes and plans that if they're undertaken without a specific racial equity lens will default to the most privileged and um you know it's important if we want if we are telling people that their their lives do matter and that we do owe some repair to them that we do the extra work and the extra labor of um doing our work through a racial equity lens and it's not easy in terms of the practical work it's not always easy to undertake
246politically either um and you know that has meant that we have had to deal with threats and and misunderstanding and engage you know extra energy and educating and um communicating but it's worthwhile and it's what our children and families deserve all of them and um i am heartened by the work that we are doing i am heartened and hopeful um [Music] for the incredible impact that all of the children who are able to benefit from from this work that they will have on the future they are going to be incredible they are going to take these seats and they are going to soar and they are going to take the world by by storm when when it is their turn um so thank you all for being partners in this work thank you to the
247administrative teams that are taking on incredibly complex and unprecedented tasks thank you all right so we will continue with our agenda i'd like to keep it moving so we're at item number seven district 65 action items anya i'm going to turn it over to you well i think so while you have the motion i move that the board of education accept the recommendations outlined in the attached group motion and approve the personnel appointments please and separations january 2021 board of education meeting minutes uh destruction and release of january closed session meeting minutes and recordings december 2020 list of bills budget amendment and treasures report students student fees for fy 22 and student transportation fees for fy22 second ryan yes mendoza yes cartha yes hilpern [Music] kim yes hernandez yes tanya rudy yes thank you so
248district 202 um anybody say something okay consent agenda which consists of approval of acceptance of foundation funding for the band tower approval of minutes from february 8 2011 closed session meeting approval of minutes for february 8th regular meeting treasurer's report from december 2020 approval of bills personnel agenda appointments to staff support staff change of status and stipends can i have a motion please no moved second thank you vocal laude yes livingston yes yes carson's yes rolowitz yes the terrace yes savage williams yes thank you all right so we are at adjournment um anya district 65. well i'm unmuted okay great yeah um with no further business before the board we adjourn sorry i can't see my clock at 10 21. and district 202 can i have a motion for german please second all in favor
249say aye hi hi this meeting is adjourned nice thank you all good night really good to see everybody you