001I will now call to order the Lake Forest School District 67 Board of Education meeting for June 17, 2025. I invite all members of the board, administration, and community to stand at attention facing the flag with their right hand over their heart to recite the pledge of allegiance. for all. We'll start off with a brief president's report. Um, this is the first board meeting we've had since the end of the school year in district 67. So, I just want to acknowledge as we bring this school year to a conclusion. The hard work and effort from teachers, staff, the administration. Um, I think this was a great year. It was a successful year. Everybody accomplished a lot through all their hard work and effort. Um, we all know there's lots more to go, but I think
002we're also making a lot of of progress. So, thank you to all teacher, staff, and administration. Um, and then also, as as we all know, we've welcomed three new board members this year. Part of the transition from the school year is transitioning to a new board and we look forward to we're in the process of scheduling our our board retreat. But I welcome all the new insights and viewpoints that our new members bring. Um we'll be meeting later this year to talk about our board goals where we want this new formed board to focus our attention and our priorities and we look forward to working everyone in 2526 school year. With that I will turn over to Dr. Montgomery for the president's report. Excuse me, the superintendence report. Thank you so much. Just one second
003with technology. Okay, thank you so much. Uh before we get into the presentation itself, I want to make sure that we welcome Britney Jardis who was with us in workshop. Uh she is a very familiar face in that she spent years in the district uh prior to her going to experiment not experiment but different adventures um in her career and we are thrilled that she is back on the 67 and 115 team as our director for fiscal services and the chief school business officer. So our official we um she has been dabbling in her free time. She was here all day with us today and she even went on um a hike to uh around West Campus as we were looking at things to improve uh downstairs. So, she is all in already and we
004can't wait until she's here uh officially on July 1st. So, if we could give a round of applause just as a welcome. [Applause] Tonight's report will include uh the following topics. We're going to finish with uh a year in review which will be a summary that Dr. Fitz Emmens and I share together. Uh but we're going to touch on graduation, field day, last day of school. Uh some an opportunity to march with us at the parade coming up um in August. So, a lot of exciting things happened since the last time we uh spoke. Uh the first item is that we congratulated our class of 2025 graduates on um in May after Memorial Day. And I want to highlight three student speakers. There is a lot of stress when you think of an eighth grader
005standing in front of a thousand plus people sharing a speech. And uh the three people were Ruby Halpern, Owen Shuer, and Carolyn Thai. And um again, just congratulations to those three student leaders. Uh it always fills my heart with pride when you think of young people taking a leadership role and speaking in front of their peers and their families. A field day was another success and it does seem like a distant memory, but it wasn't that long ago, May 29th and May 30th. Uh a huge thank you to our parent volunteers who made that day possible. without them um we wouldn't have the ability to have all of the fun activities that we did. The last day of school was June 2nd and it pains me just a little bit uh to think about when
006school is resuming. I will be excited about it soon though and that is August 27th. Both districts open on August 27th this year. There's an opportunity to join in on the Lake Forest Day parade. Uh there is a sign up a QR code in the report tonight and we encourage uh members from each school community to join us in that parade. Uh we have been marching in it the last few years and each year the amount of participation has gotten larger and larger and we hope uh the same occurs this year as we move into the year in review. Uh we will start with Dr. Fitz Simmons and we'll kind of bounce back and forth. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Montgomery and um we are pulling into the harbor after this great year. That
007will have to be the last time that you hear anything about our ship theme. Although people asked for a new theme, we've got a new one coming which I will share with you at the end of this report. Um we have a lot to celebrate and what I will say is that when we look at how we've been guiding our work, we have been looking at our five-year strategic plan which you know we had all of our stakeholders involved in creating those three goals. The three goals being all around the cultivating the academic excellence, creating that um sense of empowering our communities and then also creating those transformative and equitable resources. The other if we advance to the next slide is the board priorities that the board came up with and they are beautifully aligned.
008It's all around academic progress um how we create a positive climate and culture and then very similarly how do we access and use resources wisely. Um, the next re the way that I would really summarize this is that we worked hard on the teaching and learning and the ed side and how do we focus this work for all of our staff, our teachers and even our students and our parents, but we took those priorities in the strategic plan metrics and we put them into three areas of focus. The academic excellence um how are we pushing our students to really meet those metrics and to go farther? How are we being an innovative school district? And then how are we creating that sense of belonging? As you remember, in the fall we received our designation. We
009will be receiving these again on October 30th. So we'll be pulling all of the data. We'll be looking at everything together, comparing ourselves and um hoping that we are able to keep our exemplary ratings in our schools and moving our all of our schools to that exemplary rating. We are curious how that is going to look. As we said that is based on a big growth measurement and we have grown so much as a district in um the last couple of years that we are going to obviously look where we land but be aware of the fact that that could affect our ratings but we are looking to move ourselves forward where I can share if we move to the next slide. I am extremely proud of where we landed at the end of this
010year. Um there is um I don't know why there's a fastbridge icon in the middle of the the report but that's okay. That that essentially what this is this is our third party vendor ECRA and they are a completely separate um vendor that we work with and they are able to take a local growth model algorithm and calculate our performance as each individual schools by subject. This particular report that I have on the slide is a an all subject overall district-wide growth. Now, if you look at the green circles on the right, what you'll see is that we have expected growth. That's a beautiful, beautiful color to see on there. We don't love seeing yellow. We don't love seeing red. We really love seeing blue, but when you are growing at such a high rate,
011it's hard to continually get blue. But that green is a an an indicator of the successful year that we've had. Where I like to look even more, I like to look at the percent of high growth. And if you just go back one more slide, Dr. Montgomery, if you look at the percent of high growth, it's the um third column, fourth column, it's the percent of high growth. I love looking there because what you want to see is an increase in the number of those students who are growing. I will highlight Everett Elementary there and Everett is at I think it's 26% of their students had high growth. So I'm pulling out just some of the pieces of all of the growth reports which you'll see more about in the in the fall as we
012start the school year and we actually get our IR scores. We have some preliminary data already. We can't share it. It's embargoed. But I am pleased to say that overall the district has moved in a positive direction in both math and ELA. Um if we do move to the next slide though this I wanted to pull this particular report out about mathematics. Just in looking at that report there, one of the board priorities is early literacy. Um early early early literacy and early mathematical fluency and I'm extremely proud of where we landed with K and one. That is actually in the blue and that means higher than expected growth. As you can see, we still have some issues with um fifth grade math, but we do have a plan. Dr. Shin and uh Miss Harvey
013are looking at all of the different things that could be affecting that like the scheduling, the instructional minutes, the transition which is also a board priority not just to the high school but just transitions across the district. So that is something that we are still keeping our eye on and it's an important factor for us. We're not ignoring that. But I did want to highlight that tonight just we're not we are not stopping. We're looking at every pocket of the organization and we want to make sure that we're really growing. Okay, the next slide is to tell you why this is happening. I'd like to give a huge shout out to our coaching community and this includes the eight coaches we have, our three district coaches and our five building coaches. much of the work
014that they did this year were all around looking at our uh standards and then creating those performance-based writing tasks both in math and ELA to make sure that our students had practice in how the tests the state tests and the different assessments were being held but also just in ensuring that this was standards aligned and we were very focused. If you have any other questions about those particular reports that we were working off of this year and what guided our work, you can use and access our fall assessment report as well as the presentation and the winter report and presentation. Our second bucket innovation really this was this is exciting. Um we just had word today that we were we were nominated as one of the SAM lab. So, this is the new STEM curriculum
015that we adopted at the um K4 level, but we were just num named one of 2025 SAM Labs um top 25 districts. So, we're excited about that recognition today. But Sam's Lab is a wonderful curriculum that's fit into our existing science curriculum, but it allows students to, I think, balance when we're using technology and when we're not. And under the leadership of Jordan Salis and our curriculum coordinating committee, I think we did a nice job of balancing when we use tech, when we don't use tech, and I think that our use of it for some of our STEM programs, our coding, it filters very nicely up into DPM with the smart labs that they're doing. So, we're really proud of that work under innovation. Dr. Montgomery, do you want to talk about how that blends
016into quickly? We're talking about how we're looking at innovation across leadership in general as well as what's happening in the classroom. And this spring, we've spent time in Google, Stanford, and Harvard as we have looked at the future of education, whether it be through a leadership lens, through an artificial lens or beyond. And we will continue to look for opportunities where we are elevating our educators and leaders to make sure that we are cutting edge whenever possible. Uh in workshop tonight, we talked about the innovative spaces that were improving within the DPM cafeteria and you can see some of those renderings. The work has begun uh as as soon as school was ended and the board got updates of those pictures uh at during workshop. And our third bucket around belonging, one of the board
017priorities and also on the strategic plan, the metrics were really about keeping a rolling average of satisfaction with school connectedness at a 4.1 out of five for students and a 4.2 out of five for staff. And it was um amazing to see that we landed exactly there. We can always do better, but as a district, those were our averages. And some of the ways that I think we accomplish this is just even starting off the year inviting all the schools to participate as a family and as a team in our parade. So that's why we're encouraging you to join us. That kicks the year off. Other ways that we're embodying the different um strategies for belonging in our different schools. It looks like families in some elementary schools. It looks like morning meetings, which is
018a a bit of SEAL explicit teaching or teaching around the Illinois social emotional learning standards. And it's just a way for students to connect. It's not necessarily teaching a particular curriculum, but it's teaching kids how to be kind to each other, how to get to know each other, and how to even use the right language with each other um to make all of our our friends feel like they belong. Um, we also had a DPM doing some of the great work at the grateful market. So, there are just some examples of ways that we've achieved this connectedness goal. As we move into community engagement, we know that this has been a priority in many different facets, but I'll begin with our commitment to keeping the community informed around financial management and oversight. And we were
019proud to introduce two new um mediums in which to help educate our community. First is with beyond the budget video similar to under the hard hat series and then one of our two community mailers dedicated to financial oversight which is called the bottom line. We got positive reviews or feedback from both of those and we'll continue those into next year meeting our community wherever they are. These are the many different uh ways in which our community can become engaged or more engaged with us and we continue to look for new ideas. But from board coffees to uh the all access where you can essentially click your uh choose your own adventure for the amount of communications that we have to the insight to the let's talk events some of which I'll talk about here in
020a minute. The superintendent advisory council is another great example of outreach and I'm grateful to the 25 plus members who are part of that group uh that signed up for two years of quarterly meetings and learning walks uh to help me better u be better prepared in my leadership journey with Lake Forest. the book talks. We hit four books that hopefully help support uh our parents and our guardians at home from the anxious generation with Lake Bluff over the summer to David Joerger's 10 to 25 Ellen Glinsky uh pictured uh on this slide with the breakthrough years and then untethered uh with Doug Bolton. We have been trying to meet our parents and guardians where they are uh to help support them in um the countless ways that they are trying to support their own
021young people in their households. We have some new district faces next year which I'm really excited about. Dr. Fenton and Miss Ratan uh who are will be joining us. One as the director of teaching and learning and the second as our new principal at Cherokee Elementary. Student voices continued to be a priority, whether it be through roundt experiences for our eighth graders, shadow days, or as simple as rate the experience of the uh food that we're getting or offering uh through Quest. We want to hear from our students and we continue to find ways uh to do that. A great example of an innovative way this year is through the student and parent, excuse me, the board student and parent listening session that happened in the spring. And I want to thank Dr. Lonard for
022her leadership as well as the teacher or excuse me the student group or the principal advisory committee who uh really curated this whole experience this year with so this whole event was studentled and Dr. Fitz Simmons I'll let you do the honor because you know I don't have the stomach for it. Well, the theme is, as funny as this has now become here in district 67, it's just become a thing. And people were reaching out to us earlier in the year asking us what the theme was for the following year. Well, we uses this term vaguely. No one reached out to me, which is some people I don't know. Um, in any case, we decided to turn this over to the whole community in ' 67, the teachers and the students, and they came up
023with many ideas and we actually voted and soaring into space. I can't what do we remember what the tagline is, Miss Oakley? The new tag. The new tag. Are we not unveiling that yet? Not yet. Okay, we're not. But let's just say that it has something to do with exploring the universe soaring. We're really excited. And um, Mr. Gity put the little sailboat in the He's so talented. If you go back one slide, look at the That concludes our superintendence report. Here's the sailboat. I just Thank you, Dr. Fitz Simmons. And thank you all. We welcome any questions that you have. Thanks, Matt and Renee. Any questions from the board? All right. Thank you both. Public participation. The board will now hear public comment subject to board policy 2230. Are there any members of the
024public who would like to address the board? Seeing none, we will move on to the liaison reports. Um I do not have any updates as the legislative liaison. Um Greg for True North, we have an action item tonight. We've discussed True North and in workshop. Is there anything else that you would like to add regarding True North? Nope. Um, Megan, any spirit update? Okay. And Monica, no updates. All right. Moving right along. First action item. Action item number one, approval of the resolution for the withdrawal from True North Cooperative. May I have a motion, please? So move. May I have a second? Second. any discussion regarding the true north motion to withdraw. I'm just would like to add we discussed this at length at in workshop and have talked about it for some time. It's
025a decision that's precipitated by many of our uh by the withdrawal of other districts uh that are part of the cooperative. It turns out that all 18 of them are. I think this is the best thing to do for our stu both our students frankly and u and for the taxpayers in town. So we should prove it. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? I got a couple calls from parents who were kind of alarmed at this and I just wanted to reassure people that with our board and with the administration, what happens to these kids that are getting services are always at the forefront of our discussion. um the plans will be forthcoming, but just know that we take that very seriously. I I think our our superintendent has done an excellent job helping
026to create a clear path forward for the organization. Uh there's been a lot that's gone on and I I I appreciate your assistance in this, Matt. Thank you, sir. May I have a roll call vote, please? Mr. Mr. Rodamo, yes. Miss Yan, yes. Miss Angelberg, yes. Miss Fitzgerald, yes. Mr. Reis, yes. Motion carries. We will now move on to the consent agenda. May I have a motion to approve the consent agenda items numbering 1 through 10? So, moved. May I have a second? Second. Any discussion? I will say I I have one question, Dr. Montgomery, if you could explain just because I know a couple board members had questions about it and it's item number eight, which is the approval of the consultant contract for special education evaluations. Can you give a little context to
027that one? This individual has helped us out in the past and we are recommending that they continue for next school year and the help that they are offering is providing outside evaluations for the students that are uh enrolled in private schools that uh are residents of our district or within our district bounds which were state bound to uh evaluate any students who may need special education services. Uh there are about 25 evaluations this year and we um use an outside um consultant to provide that to make sure that our services um are that we we are able to provide the services we need to within the district. So we ask for outside help to provide those for engaging in private school. Thank you. Any other questions or discussion on the consent agenda items? May have
028a roll call vote, please. Miss Yan, yes. Mr. Reis, yes. Miss Angelberg, yes. Mr. O'Damo, yes. Miss Fitzgerald, yes. Motion carries. We have a number of FOYA requests to report. Um, Abas Khan, Academy Research Group, Pete Jansen's, Samir Vidra, Dwayne Johnson, El Lite, Parents Care, and Frank McCormack. I don't know if that's Dwayne Johnson, The Rock. It would be really cool if it was, but probably not. Um, at this point, the board will now hear a second opportunity for public comment. Is there anybody who from the public who would like to address the board? Seeing none, just a few announcements. Um, the next board meeting is August 19th, 2025 and the first day of attendance for school is August 27th. I hope everyone has a fantastic summer. Uh, with that, may I have a motion
029to adjourn the Lake Forest School District 67 board meeting for June 17, 2025? So moved. May I have a second? Second. May I have a voice vote, please? All in favor say I or yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.