District 57 Board of Education Meeting 3/20/2025

001[Music] good evening everyone Welcome to our March 20th meeting of the District 57 Board of Education this is our call to order if I can have a roll call please vice president Bennett hill here member Chung here member choke here member qualek here member Leto here member Nelson here president Fay here if we could stand please for the Pledge of Allegiance unit States of America theice okay at this time I will turn to our vice president benett Hill who is going to read our women's History Month recognition please give me one moment for sorry B duck is giving me trouble hold on one second if you like Karen we can move on to the student recognition and we'll come back no I've got got no no problem we're good so March is women's History Month

002time to recognize the Bold brilliant and resilient women who have all shaped our world from Trailblazers who fought for equality to the quiet Heroes who made everyday impacts their stories Inspire us all at District 57 we honor their legacy y by empowering the next generation of leaders our students will continue to break barriers and create a brighter future for all to celebrate our school librarians have curated books highlighting remarkable women in history and we encourage families to explore more resources at Women's history month. goov let's take this month to reflect learn and Inspire the leaders of tomorrow thank you very much and at this time we will have an acknowledgement of our Lincoln Lego robotics teams if you all want to come forward uh first of all I would like to thank the district's board

003for supplying us with the resources and space we need to do this and also I think we're all going to say something that the club benefit has a benefit for so for me it helps me develop leadership skills for helping collaborate with other kids as well my name is Henry what I learned was to go more indepth with my coding skills I'm also Henry and what I learned is umum engineering umum engineering practices um I'm wall Kaminsky and I learned a whole lot more about coding skills um I'm Joshua sji and I'm in seventh grade and I learned more about teamwork and coding skills um I'm Colton and I learned about team skills I'm Bennett and I learned about how to collaborate and work together I'm Zach and I learned more about coding than I

004could ever have imagined I'm brenen I learned a lot about underwater drones and coding I'm love and I learned a lot about how to build a robot I'm Thomas and I learned about how important teamwork is [Music] um I am uh Ken Bray I'm one of the coaches uh on uh one of these great teams uh again want to thank the board for their support for the program want to thank all of the parents of these remarkable kids for all of their support um for driving them to all sorts of practices for pitching in at competitions um and for putting up with all of our last minute ch [Music] so oh and also thank principal Larson for his support of the program as well well thank you all so much and congratulations on your achievements

005did any of the other coaches want to say a few words here just to give a little context uh so these are two first Lego League robotics teams they compete in a challenge where they build and program a robot they do a research project for this year that uh solves a problem related to exploring the oceans uh and they also speak to uh the program's core values which includes things like teamwork and inclusion uh so both teams made it to the state tournament which had 55 teams out of more than 500 in the state so top 10% uh both teams came home with Awards uh Team 493 in blue won the Breakthrough award uh Team 492 in Black uh play second place in core values uh and was ninth overall and so has uh is

006going to an Invitational in Massachusetts in June that's [Music] amazing well congratulations again to all of you um if you've heard about or been to any of our other meetings you know that you can't escape without taking a picture so we're all going to move to the back of the room and take a picture and I have some certificates to hand out to your coaches that they'll distribute to you thank you so much guys for e don't B spe [Music] you well no one should feel like they have to rush out the door but we are going to continue with our meeting at this time we have an opportunity for Community comments I could have read this while you were chatting it would have been fine The District 57 Board of Education welcomes Community participation

007in an effort to both listen to our stakeholders and keep the meeting moving I want to remind every one of our public participation procedures and guidelines which is available in board policy 2on 230 individuals wishing to address the board can do so during the community comments portion of the agenda individuals should provide their name and limit their comments to 3 minutes please remember this is not a dialogue between you and the board the board is in listening mode during this time individuals wishing to contact the board of education are welcome to do so via the d57 website under the Board of Education tab individuals should behave with respect and civility towards others and abide by board policy 830 visitors to and conduct on school property are there any Community comments at this time okay seeing

008none we will move on to a I don't want to call it a presentation and put you guys on the spot but um some words from our student board members [Music] um hi my name is Michelle Gman chuk I'm in seventh grade and I'll be representing the the student board good evening I'm Alex Marsh and I'm in eth grade and I'll be representing the student board as well um we're really excited to be here we're going to talk about some of the meetings that we've been through in the past couple weeks and how excited we are to be here so during our meetings over the past couple of weeks we have been reflecting on our experience as students and how we can improve the community as board members uh we have met three times with

009Dr Gore uh and we've met to develop some new ideas for our district we felt that some cultures haven't been celebrated enough at our school and we want to try to shine a light on some of the unique people in our town we are working on some fors to send to students parents and staff to help us move forward with this idea of a cultural fair this morning we met to look over the plans for the new Lincoln Middle School and we were able to share more feedback on how us students think it could improve and how we feel about the current design and since there's only one quarter left in the school year there's only so much time for us to accomplish our goals as student board members our hopes of organizing the cultural

010Fair are promising but there are multiple other things we hope to achieve by the end of the school year all in all our student board member Council want to create a better environment for students and for our district and we want to make this year as memorable for all our students as well any questions from the board or any community members I think go ahead uh for this cultural Fair what where and like what I guess in the spring or when do you think you guys would be able to have this um we're still working through the more fineo details which is why we're also developing these surveys to see when people will be available when they would be able to come whether they would want it over a weekend or on a school night

011okay so it wouldn't be during school hours it would be after school or potentially a weekend most likely yes and then one other question oh what were your ideas that you had when you saw the plants did you have just curious I mean I really like that was it was going to be like three stories and I like the idea for like the break rooms kind of like between like two rooms like the clear glass to like work independently I like that a lot I loved our new gym the Gym's going to be huge I think that's a big plus especially as a volleyball player there's not a lot of room to serve and uh I've been loving the band room designs and how close it is to the street for easy access as well

012yeah for the early morning rehearsals y I also like that the um that the stage is in the cafeteria and not like the gym because when I did like chorus sometimes we would have to be with like the basketball team and it'd be kind of hard to sing while they're dribbling all the time that's a lot of noise was there anything you thought we they should do or ideas that were not on the plans I don't think we thought of much but we like the current plan okay thank you Vicki go ahead yeah so I just want to thank you as well Alex and Michelle for just being our school board representatives and um I was impressed to see that you've already met three times with Dr Gore to develop your ideas and I was

013um uh Eileen already asked some of my questions but I was wondering um over the course of these three meetings I'm guessing the cultural fair was maybe one of your top ideas was there any idea you have that didn't quite make it to tonight's presentation but you're thinking hey next year or was there anything um any other ideas that you were kind of brainstorming about like maybe creating like a debate team or like a Science Olympiad team possibly I was looking at creating like a financial literacy club or an investing Club to teach kids you know more about finance and how to save your money maybe we'll get Dr K to be the faculty adviser for that one um Jen and Karen I want to check in with you before we circle around the table

014did you guys have any anything you want to share um I just can you hear me we're getting just a little bit of Echo and feedback but we can hear you [Music] all right can you hear me now yes go ahead ahead okay U I just wanted to say thank you to the board members uh and really appreciate the fact that you are already starting all these meetings um I think my only question uh really is just about are there have there been opportunities to reach out to the other schools to fair viiew and Lions Park and Westbrook yet I know it's very early on but I was just curious if you had already been able to do that we haven't been able to do that yet but I heard from Dr Gore that fairview's

015um working on a cultural Fair as well ands thank you um we also had an idea for like a newsletter to introduce like the whole student board to like the rest of District 57 and to like tell them about like our maybe plan and to just like get them used to the fact that we're here and we're here to help awesome thank you so much all right go ahead right thank you everybody for listening I think there there might be some other questions Chris did you want to go ahead uh yes well first of all thank you both again uh Alex and Michelle for volunteering to do this and and putting yourself out there and volunteering your time I mean it sounds like you've really you've wasted no time jumping right in and meeting with

016Dr Gore and that's that's awesome um and I think it's pretty cool and hopefully you you're finding this to be true that as the first student board members you know what you guys do will really lay the foundation for those that will be coming after you so uh a pretty cool thing and and a and a big responsibility too um two questions I had and actually you kind of alluded to it earlier um cuz Fairview is doing a cultural Affair and so I'm wondering have you I love the idea I think it's awesome have you gotten any ideas yet from what they're doing that might be helpful as you guys think of how we could plan something districtwide well we really haven't had the time to look at what they're doing as well um we're

017kind of limited on time because we all have different schedules and you know missing class is kind of tough sometimes I I understand yes probably yeah that's right that's right yes um we've also looked at examples because I know Mount Prospect is a cultural Fair every year I think they've done it for about eight years now we looked at a couple things on their websites like the different bands that they've had play and like the different food stands that they've done so we're just taking it from there now but we might also like look at fairs cultural fair and like other Fairs around the area awesome and I'm curious now that you guys are in this role do your classmates come up to you constantly saying hey Alex hey Michelle can you can you you

018ask if we could do this or are you getting bombarded with requests for things or well I haven't seen a lot of that yet which is why it's really important for us to implement this newsletter so people can reach out to us well said well said awesome well thank you guys so much for the presentation and great great job so far Pam did you want to say something I just wanted to say thank you and I'm on the Historical Society board and we are supposed to be having a student board member so our next Historical Society meeting I am going to mention how wonderful it is to have you as a student board member so thank you wonderful um well certainly we're really excited to hear about the things that you want to bring forward

019and the ideas that you're having for how to improve not just Lincoln but the district as a whole um but part of this opportunities for you all to be able to learn sort of what it means to be on a board right and how how decision get made and and things get done so hopefully as you're looking to contribute I hope you're finding opportunities to receive also and it you know obviously Dr Gore is a great resource for that and any one of us would be happy to talk to you about what it's like to be an elected official and what it's like to plan an election and and all of that stuff or a campaign rather um so just keep those things in mind as you're working and I I just appreciate what you

020said about um the short time frame right wanting to make the most of the time that you have have and really set the foundation as member Leto said for what comes next so thank you so much can I add something in clearly um Michelle and Alex and they're representing also Josh and um Zoe who are going to be next month's Representatives coming the four of these kids are just such profound awesome people which is so evident every time we get the joy of interacting with them that one of my early takeaways is there's just not enough time to have with these kids and we joked today at our meeting that maybe they need to just be given um clearance to be full-time assignment student board members because they have a lot they want to get

021done they have high standards and how they want to do it and class is just getting in the way um but we joke joking aside one of my um commitments to them is making sure I'm protecting them from balancing their obligations as students and active members in their communities because they are very involved and very committed not only just as Lincoln students but just as community members so I think just protecting them from the commitments they already have and also growing them and receiving all of their greatness too so that's something that I promise to keep um listening to you and um Zoe and Josh to to make sure that we can get as much as we can done but also do it in a way that doesn't result in stress or you know worries

022about making up class that's been missed and that that's going to just always I think be our challenge cuz we we have a lot we want to get done and they're going to hold us to it so well thank you again so much before I dismiss you I just want to check in with Karen did you have anything you wanted to share thumbs up or thumbs down just a thank you to all the diligent work that you guys have put into this and we're really looking forward to seeing more of your work absolutely well thank you so much I think we we miss or we're we're ahead of the sunset goal so you can go ahead spring break officially begins yes I did want to mention right these students are here on the eve of

023their spring break right and school is dismissed for for the week so thank you for your time coming out and sharing the the start of your vacation with us we appreciate it thank you thank you we're happy to be here [Music] we'll let you guys take your time getting packed up and we'll continue with our agenda um that brings us to staff and superintendent reports starting with our professional development plan update no click thank you both uh good evening everybody uh my name is Aaron Wilkins the assistant director for professional learning good to see you all again um thank you I just want to go through some uh things pretty quickly um we also put in a memo for this evening um and wanted to give the opportunity to talk about a few of these

024things so will also go through it um we talk about the professional learning summary um a lot of what we've done this year in terms of professional learning uh is centered in the reading curriculum implementation that we've been doing that you're all aware of uh we'll talk through how we've extended some of the structures from that work um to Lincoln and then we'll talk uh just briefly about the role of our amazing instructional and Technology coaches so um like I said and I'm skipping all the way to the last bullet here um the the summary of the complete professional learning that we've done up to this point um is in appendix a of the memo that we uh gave you so if you want to reference any of that it's there but just to to

025point to a few things um we began the year um in our theme of being inclusive uh with Dr Allen um and we did work in January with Alina melli BMA uh she's from the north cook intermediate service center and we were working with all staff at that time which is a really wonderful thing um the January Institute day uh I believe it's in its second or third year it's my second year so it's it's second year to me um and it's really developing into our sender school district 214 collaboration and shared learning day which has been great and we do plan to do it again next year um and in general you know we continue to do what we can to tailor all of our learning to a really wide range of Educators that

026we have here um in terms of the reading curriculum implementation like I said where a lot of the professional learning has really um centered this year and as a note uh in K5 that's the hmh that we've talked about inter reading um and in middle school it's the savest my perspectives um here I want to just point out um some tools and structures that we've used to make this go really well uh one of them is the reading program implementation guide that we developed um and Then followed throughout the year um the RO of the content area specialist which is a growth and Leadership opportunity for our teachers um the meeting structures that surrounded that and then uh for for those specialist and then how we brought that to schools and worked with grade level

027teams um so first of all the the program implementation guide is something that um that uh Chris and I were working on in June of last year um and we continued to work on with our content area Specialists and really what it do did was it gave us a road map for what we're going to be looking for from an implementation you can see in that first one from trimester one that it's about the use of the program um what's important about that is it messages to our staff and teachers and everybody who is using these programs that the first step is getting to know the thing and using it and is it actually happening um nobody expects to step in uh at the end of August the beginning of September with something brand new

028and it' be as perfect or as wonderful as what their class was previously because it is new um so that was that was really important um and there's a lot of moving pieces in these new programs with the electronic component and then the new physical um components as well um from there we move on to talking about uh best instructional practices uh which makes sense what once we're getting used to the program um how are we doing it and and are we doing it well and how can we do it better uh and then we get further into differentiation instructional groups and what are we doing for individual Learners and that became our guide um if you could go ahead there Mark um we like I said before we co-developed it with the conent area

029specialist after we had a framework for it so that they knew the language and we didn't do anything that felt like it was um judgment or that it was you know things that we be going into classrooms looking for it was really a guide for how we were going to be pursuing the conversations the actions we would take and the professional learning we would follow up on um and in that regard we also used it as a self assessment tool so folks could name where they felt like they were in this process as we moved through it um the content area specialist role is a role that has been used in the district um previously we adjusted it to fit uh this new purpose um it is a stipended position uh it did have a

030full day of training back in June of 24 again what's important about all of that is you know we we spent time talking last year about building capacity and uh this this is exactly that right it comes with training it comes with leadership and it's kind of the best sort of leadership um because it is um someone's colleague who's in there with them uh uh doing this work so that's the role itself uh wanted to take a moment to recognize uh uh which folks are filling these roles um so you see them up here it's been an amazing group um it's not always uh easy doing this uh and so you know they they have to play this role where um we are seeking Solutions and uh sometimes we are seeking agreement between grade levels

031or across schools and we have to come to consensus and then they are sometimes sharing that information back with their teams and it might not be everybody's First Choice uh but it's something that we all decided together was best so um they they really jumped in and it's it's just been a fantastic group I can't say enough good things about them honestly so um in terms of the meeting structure we lovingly call this contary Specialist Team our c uh we meet monthly and we always uh we we plann these out again back in June the whole calendar which I'll give you a peak of in just a moment uh but we planned these out so that we would meet with that small group of contary Specialists and that would always precede a grade level team

032meeting so that uh so that this team felt ready so that we were bringing things to the table uh for our grade level teams to do um and that last bullet point on there um what what I'm trying to indicate is that at the beginning of the year uh at the at the cast meetings we would set the agendas and then as they got more used to the role and we got more into the work they were you know we were kind of informing that agenda back and forth until you know toward the end and now they come in and they they know what we need to do they set their own agendas they know what their teams need um so they it has really progressed in a very positive way um the importance of

033those cast me meetings is that uh we worked with HR we worked within our building we worked with all of the principles to get extra time for teachers and grade level teams to plan together so that they felt like we were spending enough time on implementing uh this new program and so at each building um full grade level teams by content area um well those are classroom teachers in K through five and then bycon area at Lincoln they had 75 to 90 minutes extra uh plan time and collaboration time per month to come together um the building administrators uh they were getting subs for this last year as soon as we put out the calendar uh they attended all of the meetings and and supported the work um and at every step what was really

034wonderful wonderful about all this is that we all knew exactly where we were what we were working on what the challenges were because you can't hide from those challenges um and then how we would be working to come up with uh solutions to those challenges um like I said this is a sample of the schedule um so that you can see like there on the 14th that cast meeting for K5 comes before all of the grade level uh meetings and then we did the same thing for the middle school so that we would come together on the 15th after school and that would pre the L the Lincoln grade level Ela meeting on the 21st um and then the rest of this on here previews um how we extended some of this meeting um format

035and structure to Lincoln which I'll talk about in a moment so um got to talking to Dr vandar and Eric Larson the principal at Lincoln and um they have content area meetings by grade levels and uh we were all feeling like hey this seems like a really good structure and we've talked about uh building better communication with a lot of the teams so we know what they're working on and what professional learning will benefit them and so we found an existing structure of meetings that they already have and then I would be able to go in once a month and meet with math social studies and Science and so then with Ela already in place with their implementation we were hitting the core content areas um and through this uh we we're able to learn

036about good work that teams wanted and needed to do and some great things have come out of it um the science team's been looking at the uh Illinois Science assessment um data and thinking about that for curriculum work that's coming up um social studies just recently started looking at common assessments so I mean these are really important things that um that give teams uh what they need to have great conversations in in their own meeting so um it's been time really well spent um and then of course our an instructional and Technology coaches uh it's you know stuff at the building level is just really hard to do without them uh the Insight that they have really is only possible in their role they're in the classrooms they're co- teing uh they are producing things

037to make teachers uh lives uh easier and the learning better especially with new programs uh when there are so many things to click through and search for they're always streamlining that uh they have uh they've guided outside trainers that have come in they've sat down with people who have come in from the Publishers and said look this is really what we're wanting when you come in um they facilitated their own sessions based on like what comes out of these meetings so that it's uh specifically tailored to grade level um they they coach in the classroom uh and they are uh generally fantastic and and uh very much appreciated uh especially in this work this year um and just some concluding points that I think are important to mention uh implementing new curriculum is not easy

038and maybe that's a silly thing to put up there but uh you know the our teachers Pride themselves on being fantastic and they are and when there's something new and they don't feel like they are perfect at it it's really really hard for them um and it's not because the program is poorly written it is because they want to do it so well and so this is a tough thing for them to get through and we have and uh most recently at one of our meetings all of the teams were saying like we we feel like we're good we feel like we're in a really good spot uh and that's a wonderful thing to hear after less than a year in all fairness um ALS about capacity building uh you know I talked about the

039leadership role that is the content area specialist but also the teams themselves you know here we're taking data from program implementation and looking at it and thinking about it as a team and then saying okay because of this what we need to learn as a team or do as a team is this and that's a different kind of conversation for many and where teams were already highly functioning uh they're doing even better um so you know in general we feel like we took a lot of big steps um this year and uh we continue to work on it and there you have it wonderful well thank you so much for sharing that update are there any questions comments from anyone vicking oh yeah um yeah thank you so much Aaron for um your presentation it

040was really informative um and just how to hear how everything's going I did have a question um and it's something you you mentioned briefly it was the January 6th The Institute day that includes the center districts and um 214 so I was looking over the ratings um the staff ratings of that and I um kind of was maybe diving in too closely but um I I realized so if if I looked at all the ratings across the like half day sips and The Institute days if you look at the rating of best and among the best almost all of them were in the 50% like this was best or almost the best or among the best except for that one and it was like lower about 40% so I was just curious um if you

041received a lot of feedback in particular about that one maybe how it could be improved or why it was maybe rated a little bit lower than the the rest of the ones offered yeah um I think a couple things one I think we could do better about um asking there are so many sessions going on on that day and um you know we have always tried to keep it simple and uh and get feedback kind of globally across the day um given that a lot of our folks are going to outside sessions um or maybe they have moved around during the day um we we probably should be getting feedback more specifically about some of those sessions um the other thing is that we had the entire district there and um I don't know if

042uh if again like the survey for that day was specific enough to what we were looking for so you know we're used to putting out a survey for educators um but on that day in particular in the afternoon um secretaries were there um building and maintenance were there um literally everybody um we were all in the audience so you know I think that like just some of that lack of familiarity with the process fuels some of that as well uh maybe all being in the same gymnasium makes people feel like this isn't specific enough to my role I mean We Were In fairness asking asking a lot of folks to bring themselves uh and and meet that learning in the middle um so that could also be part of it yes and I just want

043to add on to um especially with our partnership with district 214 and 214 Center Schools a lot of times it's for the smaller groups that that we have them coming together so if you take a deeper dive into that so it is for our special education staff related Services um our music department art uh PE kind of some of those smaller groups so if you take a look at those surveys and we've also done some specific feedback with those groups it has typically been very positive because um those individuals are able to receive learning that is completely specific to their role there's also a desire to have more collaboration time and things like that with uh the Sunder schools so that is something that we are having conversations with um with my role in in

044other District so just to add that y thank you Jen and Karen can I check with you do either of you have a comment or [Music] question yeah I have a couple um the first is just and this is best forwarding a little bit to the staff survey uh results but um a lot of it focused on like PD and and thinking about um what people need in buildings and so I think I'm just curious for the how the PD plans for next year overlap with some of those areas that are identified in staff survey uh specifically on discipline concerns and training and restorative practices um thinking about supporting students from different backgrounds and then um training and PD that staff felds really improves their work in the building um so I'm just curious kind

045of what are the things we're keeping for the for next year and then are other things we're adding to that yep um couple things uh districtwide we'll we will likely continue with our theme of inclusion that we worked with this year um we are in that spot right now where um you know buildings will be coming up on their school Improvement planning um and a lot of that coordination between the district strategic plan and the building's School Improvement plans are what uh we use to inform um topics more than that or I should say in addition to that uh we also have a professional learning committee that was um reformed this year and we're thinking about all of the structures that go into professional learning um and we've got an additional meeting coming up uh

046after spring break where we're kind of zeroing in on structures that we may want to adjust um without knowing exactly where that's going yet from the team um you know I'll I'll wait until we wrap up to come back and talk to you guys again uh but you know really thinking about how are all of these things aligned um you know the reason that I spent so much time I'm talking tonight about the implementation of of the new programs is that you know when we talk about professional learning that Educators really need a lot of times when they say that they mean what is helping in the classroom right now and what was so wonderful about that work this year is this is something that they were doing in the classroom right now you know

047after that first step when we just were using the program or just doing the thing um they very quickly got into you know how are we doing it well and so the the learning that follows that what you know this is direct application and this is what's making learning better for my students today when I leave this learning um that's that's really what that professional learning committee that we've got in place this year that's really what we're trying to think about um and and how do you not only pull that off in terms of facilitating but how do you even know it in the first place which goes back to extending those meetings to Lincoln um you can look up all kinds of topics that people you know might be interested in but what really

048directly is going to be a lever on on what they need to make classrooms um better or learning for a particular group of students better or more effective um is is what folks are thinking about yeah that's super helpful um and I think I I agree with you and I think having led a lot of professional development myself I know having that spiral of curricul or spiral of you know professional development and making sure you come back to it and and all those pieces is really important um on that note it seems like the cast uh structure has been really good for like distributive leadership and thinking about like how do you distribute that leadership across buildings across teachers across teams um do you see that structure being used in other areas in the district

049like moving forward I know it took a lot of time I know there's a lot of pieces to that um but it did seem to be an effective use so I'm just curious if you see that being used in other spaces uh absolutely actually um you know as we start to look ahead to other curricular reviews and implementations that'll come up um we do plan to use it um in the not too distant future we'll be talking about math um and we do plan to use that structure there as well so great question um and it's interesting you ask I I spoke with with one of our Contin are Specialists after one of our most recent meetings um and she said you know I I feel like our team has developed more this year than

050we have in a lot of years which is interesting that that has happened with a program implementation but you know through conversation I think what we both realized is that um kind of exactly what you're saying Jen that um this not just not just the distributed leadership of that particular individual but um as a team talking about something in common that moves uh away from uh having to make sure that our calendars are organized um and aligned uh and and actually getting into like the curriculum that happens in the classroom so so short answer yes thank you for that and yeah I was just thinking about it within some of this other context of like thinking about discipline thinking about like who are the experts that can bring that when new people come into the

051building and and really thinking about like who can own that that isn't necessarily the the you know admin or or you or or any of those pieces so yeah 100% that I have one additional question uh which is just getting back to when you were talking about the difference in how different people experienced the January 6th uh PD uh and really thinking about the opportunities for certified staff versus non-certified staff in professional development um and that are there differences in like how they are like how much PD they get which I'm sure there is um and like how relevant they find that to the work that they're doing every day does that question make sense uh yes it does um yes there's a a difference in the amount um there's also a difference in the

052amount this year versus last year and then what we're planning for next year is is is even more um our instructional assistants in particular have their own Institute Day November yeah uh which has been very well received uh we um Karen schwarzwald worked a lot on it this year and uh I worked with it as well we all did something at some point but we had a lot of outside facilitators then as well um and it was a lot of fun there was a lot of choice built in um it was really well received and we plan to repeat it um as as you know uh within some of the questions I think you can see this list that I won't read at you but in addition to these we plan to repeat that one

053as well and I just want to add to we also implemented um more training for our instructional assistants when they come into uh our school district and we've repeated that throughout the year as we've had more hires um and something that we are oh my gosh we are going to have like a mentoring program that we are starting next year for our instructional coaches which I think is going to be huge so we're excited about that um and typically uh what we've done with the professional learning for our instructional assistance is we have a day in November as well as another day in the fall so that it's early in the year and it can focus on different things like last year I think we did social emotional learning and typically in November we offer

054different choices um to to the individuals so that they can pick what they want to see um and I think I don't know if I was going to add anything else [Music] thank you thank you for that I appreciate it Kar anything you want to add oh okay thank you she just thumbs down you're very far away from me and I can't see visual cues very well I apologize okay did anybody else have any questions or comments Chris uh first of all Aaron thank you good to good to see you again and hear this update from you um kind of piggybacking on on Jen's question on the the cast structure which sounds awesome MH uh and I just I I I wonder though as we expand and introduce new curricula I know we have math

055coming up and I just worried about scalability of that especially at the elementary schools where you know if you've got now multiple teachers in a grade level who are part of these cast structures and having a just fill in with I mean I'm just are you at all concerned that we'd be able to scale that appropriately or do you think that's something we'll be able to handle um I'm I'm confident that we can do that again but uh maybe I should clarify the the cast structure for ELA and reading will will end and then we'll pick it up with math okay um in fact we've already got a little more than 50% of folks who are interested in doing that for math that about right more than 50% so the idea is that these these

056cast teams are kind of the year one of implement okay I understand that that's that's helpful thank you yeah pretty soon everybody will be on the cast team right yeah well I mean it's it's working so well I could see why they would right I mean well it's cool that they will come into a math implementation knowing that what was successful will be able to be repeated so there's comfort in that too that's great yeah nothing bre success like success right that's right um my next question is more of a a general one just on the general topic of PD I mean it's it's clear that there's a lot of stuff that we're doing and and by and large it seems that what we are doing is being well received um I did notice and

057again I know we're not talking about the uh the staff survey results yet but one of the items in there was that uh only 72% of respondents said they had opportunities for training or professional development to improve my work that seems a little low to me especially given all the things that you're clearly doing so I I'm just wondering is there a disconnect there is there a is there an awareness issue where maybe not everyone is is aware of what opportunities are out there excuse me maybe I don't know speak to that a little bit cuz and maybe that number isn't low maybe it's what it should be yeah I I'll I'll lead in with its probably more complicated than anything that I could just answer but I'll speculate for a moment um you know

058I think this year uh so so the theme of the speculation will be communication and I think this year uh the the structure that I shared with you allowed us to dig right into teams I mean you know when I come here to Fairview and I meet with a grade level team I'm talking specifically Fair viiew fourth grade specifically Fair viiew second grade with an ml teacher with special education right like going directly into their grade level and a and a Content area and so the the the learning need and suggestion that comes out of that is both theirs and extremely specific again back to Lincoln why we wanted to extend that structure so that we could learn more specifically for each of those grade levels in those content areas what they are thinking about

059um I think where we can broaden that um and and I do think it's something that our professional learning committee is currently thinking about but I think where we can we can broaden that is maybe even the other 30% of roles that are small but they exist at each building um it's um not complaining here but it's not not easy to know what every single role is doing and and what they need to do next um but what this demonstrates is that we believe they know right and so the the more we can learn about that and and and I mean learn about that through conversation and direct work with them um not on the tail end in a survey the more that that we can do that um I think the more we will

060uh tap into their needs and their interests I would just also jump in that that school perception survey data that was taken in the fall and so I would hope and expect that if we were to give that ask that question at this point in the school year I would anticipate that we would have a much higher result and just to build on what um Erin was mentioning you know and I'll talk about this more in that portion of the meeting but the disaggregation of people's employees groups I think is really critical for us because that's really the work that we're engaging in now to try to understand you know was that consistent across employee groups clearly that was a kind of aggregate score for you know all employee groups but where did we see

061pockets of you know higher lower um I think that you know did that vary by school did that vary by you know non-certified versus certified so that those are those are great questions and I think it's a very fair one and ultimately um let's teaching and learning department is leading the charge and and pursuing that and trying to make that 100% even if it is in the fall you know because by that point you already had many days with kids so we don't want to be waiting till the year for that to be 100% so I offer that as well as Erin's analysis to that question no that's I appreciate that do that's good perspective that I hadn't thought about but so so next fall we'll see that number be all right great thank you

062yeah thank you anybody else before I move on okay thank you so much thank you uh next report is our safety need assessment planning update okay thank you um in your board packet you received a um memo that just provided my um understanding of the assignment and I hope that I was accurate in that understanding I know that last month we had an initial conversation around this and um based on that board discussion last month um I tried to organize um an initial framework of data sources that we have access to that are existing as well as ones that my team and I generated as useful data sources to pursue should the board instruct Administration to um allocate time and resources to the pursuit of you know a comprehensive analysis of Safety and Security so

063I think tonight um just in summary um the existing data sources that we have at our easy disposal would be our 2021 security audit recommendations um we also have relative to that report we have Mount Prospect Police Department chief atos's analysis and sort of um articulation of priorities that based on that security audit report we also have quite a variety of survey data available to us um through our Equity audit survey our five essential survey data our school perception staff climate survey data as well as each of our four buildings have some variation of kind of student survey data related to safety belonging and those topics so um we have not undergone a wide analysis of the kind of Gap analysis between how all of those overlap I think we have anecdotal understanding certainly let

064me back up we have absolutely and very um very carefully reviewed our security audit recommendations and pursued those very strategically and are very comfortable and confident that we are in a good place with those my comment I just made that I want to clarify is more so though we have access to the subsequent s data sources we would need to engage in a comprehensive analysis of how there's overlapping themes a gap analysis of Safety and Security through the lens of these data sources um and then for the recommended data sources um you know I think that anecdotally we have existing understanding of our current usage and interaction with our M Prospect police department and spoiler alert I'd say we are very happy with our M Prospect Police Department collaboration um I don't think that would

065surprise our board I don't think that would surprise our community that's something that we're extremely grateful for and I think it's evident in the way that we have a lot of collaboration with that governmental agency and not to mention our fire department cuz I think when we talk about Safety and Security I regret not including that agency as well um but certainly we don't have very comprehensive um existing data sets that reflect and quantify those interactions um we'd also likely find it helpful to do a deeper analysis of the current market in this topic um doing an analysis an audit of kind of neighboring School District safety security Staffing models and the associated costs of these um as well as a lit review of the current research about Safety and Security recommendations models for elementary

066school districts like ours as well as relevant reports you know from the FBI and any other kind of um larger scale empirical studies around this topic that we would find Illuminating this may not be exhausted exhaustive and I am certainly open to feedback from the board but this represents what we my team and I have generated as a starting place um and hopefully a useful starting place for the board to give feedback and Direction about okay so with that in mind I just want to clarify or maybe restate something that you just said which is in terms of the existing data sources right these are things that we have access to currently but that we haven't necessarily looked at in conjunction with one another to determine sort of an overall picture of you know the

067status of our safety protocols and procedures in our district and certainly I appreciate um the recognition of any extra information or additional information that we don't have that we haven't tracked um that would need to be factored into a full scale analysis um I guess are there any questions or comments about what Dr gorg shared Karen all right let me get this going um I appreciate the amount of work that went into this and um the the detailed nature of the analysis of the um the data sources that you had put put together Dr Gore um be I would personally before um moving into doing any of the recommended data sources would want to have an analysis of our internal data sources as well because if there's no indication that there's a um a necessary

068uh feeling of insecurity or lack of safety in our schools by our students and our staff I don't really see the need for you to spend the um exceptional amounts of time and resources that um Gathering the information from those recommended data sources uh have so I just wanted to share that excellent thank you Jen did you want to speak to anything uh yes I I think I feel similar to to Karin and that um especially you know I I think I really want to understand like a root cause analysis for like why we're moving you know into any direction so I think that starts with internal sources um and really understanding those different data sources we do have all the survey analysis or survey data we do have um the things that that Chief

069etno has already said um when he went through our our audit um and so I think I would personally want to start with our our inal data like like for inst a second ago okay does anybody else have anything to share Vicki yeah um M thank you so much Dr Gore for yeah taking what was said last meeting and really running with it um I I think I'm very much overlapping with Karen and Jen um in terms of let's start with what we have and you know what's actual um specific to our district before we kind of Branch out my only um maybe thing that I might add is I I saw that you included the audit of District usage interactions with mppd and the fire department under recommended data sources um but I visualize

070it as actually internal too um if it's going to take a long time to like throw that in then of course I I wouldn't want you to maybe spend that time now when there's so many existing things but if possible then um I I do see that as linked internal so um it would be nice if possible it would be good to kind of throw that in and and I that's a good point an audit probably is the most formal um interpretation of that I think that on the Continuum it could look as informal as Gathering our administrators you know as We Gather frequently and doing an analysis of their satisfaction you know um feelings of um their needs being met um you know looking at our 911 logs like those are the types of

071things that I don't I don't it doesn't necessarily have to be formal if the board permits some of those kind of initial um offerings and I I I appreciate you saying that because I don't mean to over complicate any of this because that good could be that could be done relatively easily you know and that our principles know very very easily the answer to you know what what's your interactions with police do you have your needs met do you feel like when there's an emergency you get a timely response you know those are the types of things I mean we're regularly having that conversation anyways but it would just be the compilation and then truly the board's direction of the formality of how they want that how the depth of that analysis so e yeah

072uh I I agree with Jen Ken and Vicki to do the internal proc process first before going [Music] out Chris did you want to speak to them I do I was going to wait for Pam but I thought I saw your hands up if not no not so myed up so I have several comments here [Music] um I I think we need to be a little careful in this area especially of relying too much on current data and believe me I I love data I'm I'm an engineer I love data I'm data driven this is an area though where I think risk mitigation is really key right everybody feels safe and secure until they don't right and we don't want to wait until our staff and students are reporting they're not feeling safe to do

073something right that's the worst time to do it right so we need to be a little careful about just looking at what the data says in that area we got to get out in front of this right we want to be preventing not reacting so I I I think that's a that's an important thing we got to think about here especially in this area the worst time to start paying attention to Safety and Security is when you absolutely have to right the best time is when you recognize a risk and do something about it so I I feel pretty strongly that this is not something that we can solely rely on what we're hearing today although that is important we need to look at what the risks are that we haven't maybe fully mitigated yet

074so that's one point um I I guess I'm not sure I understand the lack of desire to look at this issue holistically if we're going to take time to analyze our internal data the natural next step is let's get the whole picture here let's look I think these things you listed here Dr Gore are fantastic we should look at all of it right I mean we are always as a district and a board looking for Best Practices that's why we go to Triple I every year that's why Jen and Karin are where they are right now right so why would we stop short of that in this area we should be looking at what others are doing and what's working and what's not working I also will say you know just going back to data

075discipline is clearly an issue in the district I mean it was the three of the bottom five respon I know we're not on the survey data yet three of the bottom five were discipline related discipline and security and safety are very closely related so there's clearly a problem there so I you know if the if the will of the board is to not pursue these additional data sources then that's what the will of the board is but I think we'd be making a big mistake if that's what we did okay I appreciate those comments and I guess just to sort of further develop I think what what you said oh I'm sorry eile I didn't that's okay um I was just going to reference you know that survey also where I believe it was 95%

076of the teachers felt that say they felt safe and secure I mean I think part of the discipline thing is to find out what that specifically is whether it's just being disruptive to the classroom saying we have to stop what we're doing to be like okay let's let's deal with what's going on with you versus actually being um you know you know aggressive or whatever it might be I think knowing that is also key in what the discipline is so that's that that's that was all my point and I just wanted to respond to something um that Chris you said so I think for me and I think I heard it from other people too that we use the word start so let's start with the internal so I hear you so I wouldn't want

077to give any you or anyone the impression is um let's start and end with internal and and and then we're good I mean I agree with you there's everything that you suggested Dr Gore is great I'm just thinking we can't do you might not have time to do all of it now so if there's going to be let's do 1 two 3 4 one would be internal and two would be looking at the neighboring districts and three could be looking at best practice I I just meant start um yeah I guess to me we can walk and chew gum at the same time I mean what what are we talking here Dr Gore TimeWise I mean is this you didn't mention that and not to put you on the spot but I mean is this

078a well using our strategic plan member letto as our guid point we are pretty ambitious with the work we have set we are which we are charged and ready to pursue but I do I and I mentioned this last month I I I the allocation of resources and time to do this well requires my team and and me to do it with the Fidelity that it deserves so it's it's not currently on our list of tasks which is a full list of tasks to get done um and I don't say that to say I don't value it or I will not do it that's the opposite it's just to understand that if there's a approach to doing so in a way that almost is um teered in its path that would allow for us to

079I think be managing um this as additional work on top of the plate yeah and I guess maybe to that point and again I don't expect you to answer this now but what would we not do if we did this right what would get sacrificed because I do not want to sacrifice any of the critical work we're doing so so maybe if I had a more concrete idea of yeah this sounds great but if we do this now we're not doing this or maybe I'd say good this is more important than that we should be doing yeah I think that based on tonight's Direction I think that's that's reasonable um to to follow up with based on the Direction with an approximation of what we anticipate is a reasonable um time allocation for this the

080task that we're being charged with and also just uh accountability to deliver um you know an end date and certainly driven by the board's Direction you know I work with that direction always okay go ahead Pam well now I do have something to say and as an experienced public librarian I will say that discipline um is multifaceted behavior issues are multifaceted so you might have a 2-year-old who's screaming on the second floor in the reference department and that would be you know a discipline issue you know the the you would want to distract the child and and get the child to stop screaming sorry and that is opposed to discipline problem with sorry with someone in a higher grade maybe sixth seventh 8th where the discipline is hey stop fighting Keep Your Hands to Yourself

081or you know what do you have in your pocket what what is that you don't bring that to school right that kind of discipline so I think defining what the behavior issue is and you know it's it's very easy to say that there's a lot of discipline problems I can tell you as a public librarian that when school gets out and the middle school kids come in it's a whole different second floor all of our middle schoolers are well behaved are kids from other schools that are making problems I'm only joking um Jen I think you had unmuted did you have something you wanted to add also I did um I think two things based on on the conversation we're currently having I think one is using the internal data to figure out what the

082root cause is as to what we're trying to actually solve I think is really important um and I I don't it doesn't mean that we won't move to those other steps I think I just want to understand what the problem is we're trying to solve and I think that internal data is where we get to um I also want to be really careful of completing discipline and security um like again thinking about like what is the problem we're trying to solve here uh you know a lot of the things I saw in the audit were around like making sure we know how to use restorative practices correctly and like being trained in those things and that's very different than you know a question around some of these other things that are are listed in this

083audit so I think I just want to be really careful in conflating those two people pie yeah I appreciate that and I think um we can all recognize as as Pam was saying right there's sort of a scale of discipline concerns and I think it would be important to look at sort of what that spectrum is within our district and get a sense if we can of how many incidents are we having that are sort of at that higher like end of the spectrum that um would potentially generate a broader safety concern as opposed to just like a classroom disruption or um you know somebody who's having a bad day or a rough go of it on sort of the the Lesser end of things um so I'm I'm hearing some consensus about oh yeah

084sure go ahead yeah I I again I just want to be careful about us talking about getting to the root cause when it comes to Safety and Security we never want to have to get to the root cause of why something happened we want to identify risks if there are any we want to mitigate those risks right that's what this is about so I just want to point that out sure I appreciate that and I I do think to the point of you know many of the other members that have commented certainly starting with our internal data hopefully would bring some light to that um I I'd like to think we could sort of do both things at once as you as you said right walk and chew gum um and it could start at

085least with an analysis of our internal resources um so I'm I'm hearing a consensus that that's sort of where we want to begin and start to move forward um I guess are there any potential existing data sources that aren't listed that we would want for Dr Gore and her team to review Jen or Karen if you want to unmute okay that's fine [Music] um so I guess with the exception of the the discipline aspect um sort of weaving that into what's already listed to just get a sense of you know how many incidents are we encountering that are like really escalated and um severe I guess for could I add a suggestion to that I mean we do have some existing data around you know discipline data um we we certainly have some mandates that

086we have to report there I mean there's there's C that exists I think what might be more Illuminating to the board might be um the feedback from our administrative team I'm looking at principal Kelly in the audience I mean our principles are really best positioned to articulate the impact that you know discipline is having on the experiences of safety they're certainly not the blend all lens I'm not privileging their um lens as the only stakeholder group but I think from a from an insight and Direction place I think they are The Logical starting place to listen to their experiences as the leaders of their buildings because I think that they will be well positioned to be able to address some of the nuances that have been talked about you know there there's working with kids

087inherently means working through behaviors um I'd even dare to say working with human beings is working through behaviors we just all bring our full selves to our work you know and our little ones part of our work in schools is not just academic it's the development of pro-social behaviors and how to how to exist amongst a community of other human beings you know so some of the lens through which we View Behavior Support in our schools certainly is through our own philosophies around this is our work and we also recognize that the needs of our students have at scale intensified in education you know that that post pandemic I think it's been National media cover I mean we we know that the needs of our kids are changing and our schools and our communities are

088are seeing impacts of that and our staff and their experiences around this is is important but I also want to preserve the um I want to preserve the focus of this charge because if it's going to start becoming expansive to a behavioral analysis and sort of like that I think we're Lo we're potentially going in a different and even more nebulous direction that I just want to I want to just offer that observation and I don't I I will provide an update on you know behav Behavior I can provide that data I just want us to I think maybe in the spirit of what are the research questions we want answered what is the framework we will use to evaluate if we have um risks that are unaddressed compared to Empirical research or Market data

089like all of those things I think will I will feel better about the Integrity of this work if I have Clarity around the direction about what questions do we seek to answer and I think right now Safety and Security are worthwhile themes and worthy of our highest priority and I would argue to say remain our highest priority in our work but I just need some direction around what the board is asking Administration to pursue around questions to answer so that's where I just want to throw that response out there based on the conversation cuz it's all good I mean um well I think based on what everybody's already shared it sounds to me and I'll certainly let others chime in to clarify that there's sort of two main questions that are running in Tandem and

090I think they're related to each other one is what is our current level of risk for a major safety security incident and I I think sort of related to that is are we accounting for that currently with the processes and procedures that we have um and some of the data right the the staff survey and and things like that are indicators of both of those things right if if somebody didn't feel safe in their role they would say and that would be a level of risk to the degree that somebody says no I I feel good I feel protected I feel secure that's an indication that our processes are working it may or may not necessarily be an indicator that there's a risk or not um so I think th that's those are sort of

091the two main focuses in my mind does that seem fair to everybody okay thanks that's I come back in April with kind of a response to that I I I think by April I will have begun to do this work with my team so I don't say just April with a proposal I think April can provide an initial reporting of what we've been able to um analyze and sort of do the analysis of the interplay between these existing documents and hopefully we'll have a a good start of that work and I think minimally a prognosis of what remaining timeline we need to to keep going does that that sounds veryable I'm seeing lots of nods okay yeah I do have a comment that I would like to interject of course okay um I would I

092would much rather us have a very a narrow scope for this question at least additionally if we're looking at the question questions that we're wanting to have asked and the data that we have we have the Safety and Security audit that did um was done in conjunction with the Mount Prospect Police Department two years ago um so taking a look at that what we have what we have accomplished what we have yet to accomplish um what is still on our list of things that we want to be doing and whether or not our our students feel safe and secure our students and our staff members members feel secure in their buildings um I think those two are more accurate representations of what we're looking for at this point you guys can correct me if I'm

093wrong um and I also want to add in that one of the things that I think is really important in this conversation is that we're going to have a new middle school in two years so a lot of the safety concerns because let's face it we're talking about the middle school a lot of the safety concerns that currently exist in that building are no longer going to be a con concern so I'm not saying we don't look at it over the course of the next two years while that building is being built but there is certainly um that to take into some consideration about the need moving up um moving forward well certainly the any concerns that might be related to that specific building would not exist right but I think as Dr Gore was

094was saying to the extent that there's anything interpersonal that would play into a safety concern right like it's it's the same people that are going to or um the fact that it's people at all that are going to be in the building is sort of part of what we would want to look at um so Karen just to confirm I'm I'm hearing you saying that you would sort of prefer the focus to be on what's sort of hanging out there as yet unfinished from the security audit and then what was the other aspect that you said I apologize and so at that point so um whatever is left in the security audit and really taking account of what we have done with in the context of that collaboration with the non Prospect police department and

095also then the second part being the um the analysis of the rest of that internal data of how do our students feel how do our staff feel when it comes to their SEC safety in the workplace so if we have those two things together I think that would start us a long way in um getting a do we need to move further in this kind of analysis um are we in a place as a board based on that suggestion to say that at a minimum for April those are the things that we want to have a report about and certainly to the extent that Dr Gore and her team are able to come back with anything beyond that um we would welcome to hear that as well is that fair or do we want to

096fam go ahead I'm just curious as to what the behavior is that's initiating the discipline comments you know how is it just kids you know being a normal sixth seventh eighth grader is it somebody in third grade who is doing something that is that you would have shared with us already I will um when we get to I I first of all I apologize that I didn't do the staff survey um report first cuz I'm noticing that that would have been smarter and I apologize um but I promise to talk about that topic within the course of that and I and I certainly can in understanding that concern I can certainly incorporate that into my April preliminary kind of feedback for the board you know I I I don't disagree that it's a related and

097and clearly any major security issues we know in society are often the work of very um people who are not within a circle of connection and belonging and so we know that sometimes the function of behavior is communicating a feeling of not being within the circle of belonging it isn't always sometimes it's reflective of different functions but we want to be mindful and that's where I think should we go further on this just incorporating research around you know what what has been learned of these incidents of greatest catastrophe that we all live in fear of ever happening and you know so but noted and I think I can incorporate and elaborate a little bit more even tonight on those topics Chris uh sorry I forgot what I was going to say now oh uh no

098I mean I I think I was going to respond to is that I I think we should take the time to do this right and be thorough and so I don't want to rush it so you know you have other things to do and we should do this well so I don't want you to feel like you have to overpromise here I will I promise to be honest in the in the work and I will not cut Corners obviously in this topic I I this becomes it this I also just want to enforce that to all families listening and to staff this Safety and Security remains our number one focus and US pursuing this I think is not with the recognition that this has dropped off of a priority you know this is this remains

099a priority and this is a daily Act of prioritizing through our behaviors through our the envelopes of our schools our practices and looking at Dr K who lives and breathe this um but you know it is a it is a daily hourly minute by minut minute commitment in that we are charged to protect the kids that come and the staff that come every day so it's what it will remain such throughout this work regardless of the formality of this reporting okay Vicki um I just wanted to say so I appreciated your comment or your observation kin that we should kind of um give give a tighter um set of directions and goals I will say that um and maybe I misunderstood but initially when I oh let's look at what's unfinished from the security audit

100then my fear was but then if we're just focusing on the findings of the security audit and what's unfinished then we're going to miss or we could miss other things not identified by the security audit that really we need to be talking about as well but then I hear you and I appreciated what you said Chris like let's let's start somewhere and let's start in a good place and not let's not make it so this gigantic expectation by April so yes so I I I think that's a great place to start and all of us agreeing and knowing that it is a start and we're going to just keep building and building cuz it's a priority for everyone so yes thanks yeah I mean I I think there was still consensus about those two main

101questions that I had highlighted but to to narrow and sort of say those are still too big to say in April here's my response to those to start with um curan suggestion of you know looking at the security audit and figuring out what progress we've made there and what remains and whether those lingering items pose any risk or not or what risk we've already mitigated by um taking the steps that we have so yeah I I think Vicki it's a good point I mean looking at old data is reactive right but inherently that's what it is and while that is important it can't be all that we do right so I think I would just anticipate that we will probably need to meet in close session in April because some of you know it some

102of the highlevel things um we can report out in public but just in the spirit of the Safety and Security some of the audit recommendations by nature of you know the level of it we'll probably want to review that in close session and we can even see if Chief atero is even available to join because he is such a collaborative and supportive partner and I if available I'm sure he would welcome the opportunity to provide even updated analysis for us I think that's a fantastic idea yeah i' love to see that so wonderful and supportive and I'm sure he would do it if if he was available so let's see what his availability is and if he's not I think we can absolutely do so ahead of that meeting and provide a summary of his

103analysis for that meeting so okay well we'll leave that to you and your team and the work that you're able to or the Headway that you're able to make on this task between now and then um we can move on then to the thing we all actually really wanted to talk about the uh staff survey well I feel like we've already covered it no I'm confing um well in your board packet you received a summary uh memo just about some of the background of this experience and it's so fitting that um principal Kelly is in the audience tonight on her spring break Eve um just where she wanted to be I'm sure um but I just want to shout out to Katie because um she served as one of our um building leader Representatives on

104our our team um with our Union leadership from MPA and and pespa and our central office team where our charge was to really come together around the topic of Staff climate and beginning a commitment to really quality Baseline data around our current staff climate and using that as a benchmark from which to grow and compare future years so we really hadn't done that work um in a long time I think maybe there were some staff surveys that actually School perceptions might have partnered with the district before my time or maybe back in 2011 it seemed like which I don't recall I'm getting too old um but I I was like I don't even recall that but um you know I think this is good and valuable work because um to the to the themes we've

105already talked about tonight we want to be proactive we want to be understanding where people are at not reactive to when problems are happening and I really want to commend our MPA and and PESA leadership teams for being so collaborative and so um genuine in the way that they prioritize this as our shared work around the organization and I think that was so reflective of their professionalism and their commitment to District 57 um because at no point did this feel like an a adversarial Endeavor and I think we really went in with the spirit of their partnership in in this work is going to only make the quality of our data better because I think our hypothesis was that when admin ask questions of Staff sometimes there's a different interpretation of how staff respond versus

106when their Union organization leadership is saying complete this survey we are at the table we you know chose some of these questions we're going to be holding outcomes accountable to this work I think it adds a layer of trust accountability and transparency that we were really grateful for and um so that was really meaningful work and we were grateful to work with School uh perceptions because they are based out of Wisconsin and for whatever that always feels local our friends to the north um they always feel like they're right there in our corner and they were wonderful because they provide I think a really high quality product in that they have a lot of comparative data uh in this work but they also were really um responsive to how they can customize questions so anywhere

107in our data that we're going to see that ucna it's reflective of a survey question that was meaningful to us and that we wanted added but they didn't have comparison data um I joke yet because maybe they'll use some of those questions because they're so great and over time we will start to have comparison data so um we can go into the presentation and oh he's got it and I can tell me to share it you got it um there we go so really this is pretty obvious but the alignment of this work is directly aligned to strategic plan goal number two that um the number one predictor of outcomes for kids is the quality of the staff um every day that they encounter and interact with and so the wellness of our staff the

108experience of our staff is highly determined of what we can expect our students outcomes to be um so I've already mentioned that this was a meaningful collaboration between our Union leadership and our district um working with school perceptions that specializes in this work and in our first year of doing this at least within the last decade we were thrilled to have just under 80% of our staff um participate with 262 unique respondents so um we're really trying to make sure that we at least maintain that percentage of her participation if not increase it every year so the next slide you can see is just a summary of um the employee groups um that responded you'll notice that some of the titles of these employee groups such as par professional is not one that we use

109colloquially in our district however it is Tethered to the comparison data from school perceptions so that's why educational Specialists is another one there's definitions of which of our job categor ories fall into those those titles but really that's proportionate to um their representation in our staff as well is the locations where they spend the most time in so these are really proportionate to the breakdown of our employee groups from a location perspective so the next slide is when we're going to really get into the meat of the results um keeping in mind that tonight's data is going to be the aggregate District 57 sta member experience but rest assured that we have really disaggregated this data and that we are highly motivated to become informed through a very narrow lens of which employee groups um

110are answering what and what common themes exist between employee groups and also where are areas where there's distinct differences in the experience cuz we really feel like that's going to be the most meaningful starting place to close some gaps so um you can notice in the First Column is the index for our staff responses strongly agree would be a five all the way down to a one for strongly disagree and then any staff who answered don't know or doesn't apply they are not included in the calculation the comparison score the second column is reflective of school perceptions comparison data um the difference is um simply that how we compare anything above zero is a positive difference um and anything below is a negative and um statistically um School perceptions really informed us that anything 0

1112 or higher is a statistically relevant difference and so I I draw attention to that because when you look at it through that lens as well as our comparison um percentiles really objectively it's it's it's very positive data um we won't be satisfied till we get 100 % uh we want to be at the top but we're proud as a starting place that really there's s there's suggestion of healthiness in our our climate um most of all you can notice in our student experience category um all the way um with our lowest being our support category so know that you know as we go through this tonight um it'll be through a lens of trying to be both proud of the outcomes that we currently have but highly motivated to keep continuously improving on behalf

112of our staff and students so tonight I think unless the board prefers I would love to go to our summary hopefully you've had a time to look at the each question that was asked um I do want to draw attention on the slides that talk about um restorative practices and our students handle student student discipline in a consistent manner um you do notice that um that those tend to be a little bit lower unfortunately our restorative practices one was a local question so we don't have comparison but you can notice I want to draw attention to our staff handle student discipline in a consistent manner two parts I want to draw attention to one the way the question is asked really is an interesting one because it doesn't say you know is discipline a problem

113am I you know am I is my classroom out of control or students out of control it's saying are we consistent and we appreciate that question because from the student experience we know that our students do well when there's consistency and what expectations are being held to them across their school day that matters when you're a preschooler and it especially matters when you're a middle schooler because you're moving from so many different classrooms throughout the day so we want to make sure that we're moving to a place of consistent predictable and um you know ultimately effective responses to student discipline um not only for our staff climate but most of all for our students behavior because we know that our behavioral research and brain research is that it's psychology you know when you know what's

114expected and when your needs are being met you're less likely to act out to seek out what is the function of your behavior I digress um but you'll notice that um it's actually higher for District 57 than for comparable districts and so that isn't to say that we at all are the finish line of this work but I think it is reflective of student perceptions um instructions and that this is a nationwide Trend that we know that across the country on the topic of discipline and and these needs these are coming out consistently as areas where we're we're having struggles in the field of ucation so I do want to point out though again we're not at all satisfied with this as a final score but I think it's it's not as when you think

115of it through the lens of comparison data I think it hopefully will provide some context um similarly our school and buildings student discipline practices we do not have comparison data on that but truly that is an area that we would like to see improved and we'll be are in the process of already looking into leaning into that data to understand what could be next steps um let's scroll down to our top five and our bottom five so our top five scores are as follows our staff does a good job educating our students 97% of our staff agreed I have healthy working relationships with my co-workers 98% agreed or strongly agreed I feel safe at work 95% agreed or strongly agreed my school or building has explicit goals for student achievement 94% agreed or strongly agreed

116and I feel supported by my supervisor administrator when I make a decision 93% we were really proud of those five scores and um I think that's a great indication of some really key areas that matter for outcomes for for our staff and certainly our kids our bottom scores were as follows restorative practices have improved our school Community 65% of our staff agreed our staff handles student discipline in a consistent manner 61% agreed our school build and building student disciplined practices and policies are effective 57% our District's pay practices are fair 50% and my job expectations can be completed during the contractual work day 44% now not just for our top five scores but also and probably especially for bottom five as well as the entire survey the value of our analysis is really going to

117be at the work of disaggregating these scores and finding was this consistent across employee groups was this was this really more of a bigger challenge in one school versus another school because we're looking at aggregate across the district um the next slide I think is a great summary for us to At a Glance evaluate people's satisfaction um as a 1 to 0 to 10 how How likely are you to recommend the district as a place of employment obviously one of our themes at the board table is how do we make sure that we are the destination district for educators to pursue and work we want our number at 10 uh 100% of it but um right now our our average score is 7.28 which puts us in the positive but believe me we want to

118get even higher because we know that uh the recruitment of high quality staff members is is really connected to great people no other great people and so how can we keep improving those recommendation scores so I've alluded to this but next steps really um are the work we're in the process of right now um our administrative team our building leadership teams that also have staff members and our MPA and andesa Leadership teams not only at the at the executive level but also at the school-based level are working collaboratively um on analyzing this data determining what groups of employees do we need to get back together for some focus group work or you know have kind of content specific meetings as an example our building principles held optional um meetings for their instructional assistant teams to

119review this data at their school levels but from the in instructional team members data to try to say hey this is what our results for as a te as a school what are some of your um thoughts about this and and what what input might you want to add to this um and so there will be formally um School Improvement uh teams developing um Improvement goals related to some of this climate and culture data as well as our district goals for next year will have um connections to areas where we want to see Improvement um all of our districts uh building teams have received an analysis of this data with the exception of the admin building so um they will be having that after spring break and so we'll be going over our kind of

120building specific data and I think more to come on this um I'm really proud of this as an initial step But ultimately um the work is just beginning in terms of how we want to see improvement over time well thank you so much Dr Gore I know there are questions and comments about this and we've only just scratched the surface from what we've from what we talked up before um who wants to get us started yeah I'll start with one because I know people have um other questions too so first thank you so much Dr Gore um there's a lot in here as you said to be proud of a lot of great things um uh yeah so kudos to our staff and to you and our admin team um my question um was something

121that surprised me and maybe I don't know it just surprised me but there's a couple questions related to workload so one of them was um you know it was one of the ones in the bottom one that um my job expectations can be completed during the contractual workday and I know that there was no comparison score there was another one the amount of work that I'm asked to do is reasonable or manageable and there was a comparison score and ours was less and so that's one where I wonder and I don't expect you to know this off the top of your head but um just curious that was there differences there in terms of position cuz you mentioned you yeah I think um yes there there was there there was a theme of our certified

122staff tended to rate that more negatively than our non-certified staff I think that's probably pretty intuitive and that our non-certified staff are incredibly devoted and wonderful and essential members of our team but they tend to have jobs that are more Tethered to a start and end time and though our certified staff those of whom are union members also have a start and end time the reality of the work of being a classroom teacher or a speech therapist we I think it's it's widely known I mean you don't leave your students work on your desk you are grading you're you're giving feedback you're having kids email you throughout the night I mean and I think it's difficult because there's an um there's a dissonance between the reality of we want to protect that and also just

123we have staff who go above and beyond because that's who they are and so I'm not dismissive of this as something that we're concerned about I think we're trying to lean in and become more curious about how what might help and support that experience um because I think I would believe that there are some staff members who filled that out that said and I don't expect to complete my job and my work day that's they probably giggled when they were being asked that because I don't know many teachers who would say my work ends at my contractual end day I am constantly is a lifestyle and I administrators too you know so it's it's a it's a worthwhile question and something but I definitely found there to be some distinctions in terms of job categories

124that tended to score higher and lower yeah ien did you indicate you wanted to say something too I kind of already talked about a little bit but um is there any way to I guess adjust these questions in some way so that it's more accurate to what you know is experiencing between of our staff you know especially with what you were saying yeah I think that um so from from a development experience um the school perceptions team provided us sort of um a list of possible questions if I'm remembering correctly and we um our team really tried to go through one by one and tried to capture um through the lens of what was most useful to us and also what felt like the most manageable survey because we wanted to be mindful that the

125longer the survey got potentially we were risking people's willingness to complete it so in our first year it'll be interesting um when our survey team comes back together if maybe we say you know what we ask that last last year but that really didn't give us the the type of meaningful information we needed so maybe we'll take it out or maybe we'll just that'll be an interesting question I don't I don't know how the the the interest of the group might change for those reasons the question would be maybe rearrange the questions yeah and the ones that were at the end put at the beginning I'm just throwing that out there maybe thank you yeah I want to with school exceptions you want to be one of the the survey an analysis analysts anybody over

126here any comments Chris well first of all I I think it's wonderful the fact that we're even doing this I think shows a real level of dedication to our amazing staff and their Wellness so I I think that's great and thank you principal Kelly's here for for uh for sticking around this long and for for leading this effort um so I I had a just a couple questions the the comparison score is that a I just want to make sure I'm clear on that that's like a national average of everyone that this group does yes so School perceptions really is the they are the owners of that proprietary comparison data but they're the the comparison data is similar school districts I'm sorry I had my coffee didn't kick in it just was failing me couldn't

127complete the sentence um um so we weren't being compared to like large urban districts okay you know so they're providing us with you know similarly situated suburban school district elementary school districts who serve similar demographics of students that was my main and I apologize for not that would be a relevant thing to have shared um because it's important that you know we're trying to compare to the best of our ability Apples to Apples so when Fairview and lines Park get their comparison data they're being compared to Elementary suburban school districts who serve similar demographics of students and similar uh similar uh you know geographical locations so oh that's Wonder that's that's great that that's what I was hoping you would say but that's good um I'm curious the the scale was 5421 NO3 right does

128that mean that there was no neutral answer or am I not reading that correctly I have to go back and this is on slide six where it says the the breakdown neutral I think I think they did take out a neutral I'm looking at I think yeah and I think they're probably rationale was trying to let me let me verify this um but I I'm thinking I'm looking at the people that yeah that's right I think they're trying to really push people because I think this the value of neutral is kind of useless um from a from an action standpoint so we're really trying to nudge people to kind of pick one it's an up or down can I give you kudos for doing that because I in you know we we've done this in

129um in my company and neutral whenever neutral is an answer it's by far the most comp yeah CU it's kind of like because it doesn't require any thought to say neutral right I don't have to think and it's also not really helpful to us well you're apathetic on this or are you happy neutral are you mad you know yeah so really that's that's great that's that's really good job there um can and if you uh alluded to this and I missed it I'm sorry but how come some of the comparison score data was not available for yes no and that's it is confusing that's reflective of any questions that we locally contributed and school perceptions didn't have within their database and so they therefore couldn't provide us comparison what we will be able to do

130is um should we include them next year we will be have at least a year-to-year comparison but it'll be like a local metric so um and then just a thought on because I the the surveys are great because you get a lot of data they're not great because you can't really drill down into the meaning behind something some of the data right so one thing in my experience that that has worked well with this is to try to follow this up with focus groups where you can actually you know assuming that you have groups that are willing to provide that info is to really get into the okay can you really explain what this is here so I don't know if that's something you've considered but yeah and that's already been initiated I mean in

131through the form of the instructional assistant focus groups um Ju Just precisely that and I think the um the theory we're going off of um and I'll look to our principles and not to put ktie on the spop but if she'd like to share but I think our theory is that sometimes employee groups there's a there's a safety in saying I'm not I didn't necessarily say this but a group of my colleagues who work in this building said this right so it takes this pressure off of saying I don't have to be the bear of the bad news I don't have to hurt anyone's feelings by saying it it's already out there and we presented to our staffs we tried to really convey that like no one's offended by this data we are all committed

132to getting better we are grateful for people's honesty and in anywhere where it's there's room to grow which there's plenty of we take that as the path forward and we take that as a reflection of a group of people who believe we can be better so we're and that's relevant to those focus groups because I think it it holds hopes to take away some of those um psychological reasons that people don't want to talk about these things cuz they don't want to be difficult they don't want to create problems they don't want to hurt someone's feelings and I think the more and I really commend our principles and assistant principles because they are modeling that every day that they are walking that talk by saying no one's mad you know you or and and us

133as a district office team we're not mad we agree we are the first to agree there's things that we know we want to get better what this does is it gives us I think a little bit of useful way of where to start you know what areas do we want to prioritize as our our first steps so yeah but I agree with you and I didn't mention this but there's qualitative data as well where if any of the respondents provided comments um that data has been summarized and is available to our administrators and staff as well so that's another area for greater illumination great and then last question um you mentioned that one of the next steps is developing action plans is that something you would be sharing with us sure yeah I mean that's

134in it's in development right now so I think to by by the spring I think we you know end of school year as those School Improvement plans are being developed for the following year I think that's a reasonable thing that we can provide an update for the board the summer great yeah see a thumbs up as the building leadership representative please endorse that decision with your colleagues wonderful um I I was just going to Echo I think a point that you made Chris about sort of following up with like the understood meaning of some of the questions right I think I had a similar thought around the ambiguity of a question like restorative practices have improved our school Community it's not to say that restor practice restorative practices are ineffective um or that our school

135Community has not improved right so you sort of have to like how did you mean that when you answered um that would certainly be helpful to to dive into uh Karen did you have anything you wanted to add no okay do we still have Jen yeah I'm here okay did you want to share anything all right okay um I do have two questions goad so okay uh one I think I know we are already doing stay interviews with people I'm just curious if any of these types of questions are being incorporated into those interviews um that's a great question We are continuing oh no it's happened to me sorry the curse of the echo okay um I the stay interviews are continuing and in some ways even expanding because we are going to offer some

136options around which administrator um employees would potentially like to meet with to have their state interview so that's an interation that we're expanding this year so that you know maybe you want to meet with your building principal and debrief about your experience about where you're at at at that employee experience year years of experience that's that's where we've managed it from a sustainability we've tried to kind of pick groups of pockets of years of experience to get some slices of early Educators within our within our organization and then people who are more veteran and we're trying to play around with it but um in general these themes I think are Incorporated but specifically um we're trying to create the protocol open-ended to allow the participant to really take it where they want to go CU

137I think if we too formally frame it up we might be missing some themes around you know their experience but I do think in the spirit of the interplay between that qualitative data and then this quantitative data I think we really are going to have some nice interplay between some of the triangulation of themes we're getting but I I would say we're not narrowly no we're probably going to keep those open-ended to be led by the participant yeah and that makes sense I was just curious see why like if some of these are some of the themes that are covered in those um just so you know instead of piling on more work of like putting together all these Focus scripts and doing all these things like you are you have a structure um so

138just thinking about ways to use that to to be able to get some of this data too um could be just something to like kind of think about at the theme and um I think the other question I had just was around you know I saw that like the support category is the the lowest of the indexes um and the comparison like 50th percentile um range and I was just curious if School perceptions have any of the resources of like what other schools have done or do they give any um of the best practices for that or is it just purely the survey analysis from them it's a great question they actually do have some um capacity to connect us with other districts through their Partnerships and I and I think would be very willing

139to do that um candidly we haven't yet pursued that um in our process because I think we're still within the you know the the part of just some local digestion around where our local um you know stakeholders are wanting to guide the next steps but absolutely we are always looking to you know try to be connected with other districts who are more successful in this work and on that note within our schools there's some schools within our district who are comparatively more successful in certain areas and others and how to we leverage our relationships both locally even just on a micro level where you know some of our staff experiences are in some cases more positive and also being very mindful that we never want to sort of weaponize this data in a way that

140creates you know competitiveness we want to look at this very um you know very open to where this takes us but recognizing there's unique reasons why people might answer one way with one staff another but yes I I think they do have that potential in our partnership with them and we are very um I think very happy with the way that they're responsive the way that they connect us I think they work well with us um and we're very we're very pleased with them as a resource for us so thank you anyone else questions or comments on that that's one more question um it's about discipline a topic that we already um addressed one thing that I noticed um so in the bottom scores and there was no comparison group the question are school buildings

141student discipline practices and policies are effective um 57% agreed or strongly agreed um and I did read some of the comments that staff made but I would love to hear your perspective and maybe even unpack it was there differences in groups or was it pretty consistent no that was very fascinating the differences in groups were very fascinating um both school to school but also employee group to employee group um generally our non-certified staff were the most critical of that um question and our working hypothesis is is around a couple thoughts one um those staff members tend to have to supervise kids during the least structured portions of their day and sometimes that means they're more challenging Behavior because it's it's when they're releasing they're it's more student L it's it's recess it's lunch it's a

142more social time and that's where we see sometimes conflicts happen and that's okay but I think just thinking about why why might that be a response from certain groups more so than others but I think that would be a general theme that we saw but we also both within you know our building leadership team and our school-based teams trying to really understand you know what what what are some of the trends we're noticing around that because getting back to our earlier board agenda topic when kids are having inconsistent responses to their behavior across their school day or even grade level to grade level it's very hard for kids to understand and start to modify their beh behavior and and start to make improvements and so having structures having consistency having training for our staff who

143are veteran and brand new and making sure we are keep pouring skills into our teachers and our staff so that they're feeling very equipped with all sorts of challenging Behavior you know and that that's a a constant challenge because student Behavior can just keep teaching us new things every day so like just learning what's working and how to replicate success at a systems level is just is the work we're really trying to go through so yeah more to come okay I think that does it we can move on to the next topic our district 214 data sharing can we do a slow clap for this topic we're the night is here Dr RAR is going to proudly present or summarize I should say summarize present and this is really a preview of what's to come

144for the summer so um I just wanted to provide the board with an update um we are I want to start off by saying we are grateful for our partnership with district 214 they have been fabulous to work with we've had a lot of conversations Dr Gore has been there as well as um other people in in my uh in neighboring districts in my role so they have been wonderful they have been very um supportive and responsive to to what we've asked and we've had some great conversation so this is just again providing a background so two years ago I um presented I believe in the summer the redefining ready uh district 214 College and Career Readiness indicators uh so that was the dashboard that 214 put together for all of the sender districts um

145so you'll have information on that and then over the last two years we have really worked as a district in enhancing our own data collection processes so um taking a closer look at things like extracurriculars and tracking that we have also um looked at our GPA for Lincoln Middle School and some other categories um there is a table starting on page three going on to page four of uh some of the data from 214 especially looking at those end grade n outcomes which is a newer data source for us um and this is just from a couple of weeks ago so hot off the presses it's exciting um but we are really looking at the data that 214 has as well as any data that we have so that we can really refine our systems

146and see how we are preparing our students for uh high school and Beyond so College and Career Readiness let us kind of see the our students four years from now and now this will give us a better understanding of kind of that connection to end of grade9 outcome so you'll see that table of of the connection between our data and 214 and then on all of the other smaller tables you will see the current data that we have again we just received this a few weeks ago so this is just a preview um but you can see it's broken down into to three different areas so how our g57 students are doing at Prospect High School um and then comparing that to all uh Prospect high school students and then also comparing that to just

147district 214 so you'll see overall in the the different um uh indicators that our d57 alumni are doing well at Prospect um especially when we compare them to other Prospect students uh as well as district 214 and so there's um I've provided the longitudinal data that we have for that um and then again in June or July um hopefully we'll get all of that data from district 214 as well as our own data so that we can provide more connections and more analysis so I just again providing an overview of the information that we hope to or that we will receive from district 214 and really our goal is to identify how our students are doing we want them to be successful in high school and Beyond um so looking at some of these key

148indicators will help us to identify our strengths and then areas that we want to grow in questions comments about that thank you so much for sharing I don't think Vicki wants to say anything looking around so this is amazing and wonderful and um yeah so thank you Dr vard Dr Gore everyone involved in um yeah helping us to um take this first look at this type of data it's awesome um I was curious so um at Prospect I don't know if you know but I'm guessing that the majority of students are from Lincoln but do you know roughly it's about half half okay oh so not really the major so half of us yeah South and some others but I know 59 yeah District okay all right yeah I mean I'm I I guess I

149didn't really know what to expect but this data was very encouraging I thought to look at how um Lincoln students in comparison with the rest of prospect in district 214 I mean I felt a great sense of Pride so yeah I mean it's it was very encouraging and I know this just the first look and we can definitely dive deeper but yeah I mean I'm so proud actually so yeah that's too yes ien uh I saying what Vicki says it's great job it's good to see us we're ranked up high there doing uh doing well attendance is awesome and I like the extra Co co-curricular doing um some sort of activity that's high up on there I like that and and I know Vicki is going to continue to help us through the next four

150years at least with this data and more so no but thank you so much I really I and I like the going all the way back too to 2018 for some of these things so thank you for that Chris I mean I I would just Echo what uh Vicky and E said it's amazing that we have this like like you said this has been a long time coming and thank you for your stick tutiven and in doggedly pursuing this uh I think this is great um you know unfortunately the now that you've supplied us with this data the first thing I want to do is get more data which is the curse of that's what happens when you uh but I I'm wondering um and I hate to even ask this question but like just

151thinking about trying to break this out even further at some point and I'm I'm really thinking about are there looking at the different programs we offer Ela math I mean are there is there a way to further disaggregate to see how are our kids doing in those specific areas of prospect just to know kind of you know we've we've instituted a new Ela curriculum is that going to show results at Prospect uh at some point so I and don't get me wrong it's awesome that we've gotten to this point um and I guess I I just going to keep asking you for more data but but that I mean that would be my only comment I think it's awesome that we have this the numbers I didn't know what to expect either but I think

152this is certainly encouraging and yeah it's great to see we are super proud of our students in our staff um and obviously like Dr Gore shared we always want to improve I think that's something that we are also interested in seeing what's the connection between the our programming and then how our students are doing especially at end of grade nine um again this is hot off the presses so I I think district 214 is still working on revising their dashboard that's available to cender schools obviously they are working with lots of CND schools so everyone wants a little something different um and I I think even there are different components like we can start to see how um kind of how students are uh if if they're finishing their initial placements um and but there's

153questions as to like when is the initial placement decided is that based on our recommendations is that day one where students are starting is that 3 weeks in so some of that's going to be hard to find but I think I will continue asking those questions and having those conversations because I think that's um something that we would we would want to know as well Jen did you have anything you want to share yeah I have a couple questions um you um that you have made making this available for all snd school so um really appreciate all the work that has been done there um I think one question I had was just how often are they going to be giving this data is it a yearly thing is it a semester thing um do

154you know how often they're planning to share data with us right now we just have the draft dashboard especially for end of um grade n outcome so we can see some of that uh semester one outcomes um I don't have a specific uh timeline in in mind uh but I I believe at least yearly potentially at semesters too okay that's helpful I I mean I assumed it would be a semester or a year I didn't think we were going to get it more often than that that's okay we don't need it all the time um so thank you uh and then I think and thinking about making sure kids feel connected to something um at District 57 and I'm just curious if there's a way to find out you know what District 57 students are

155at Prospect like what are those extracurricular activities that really seem to you know I heard even the student board members tonight talking about like a debate team and you know a financial literacy you know and those types of things so like I'm curious how to take some of that and what our students are saying board members and then what um kids actually go and do at prospect that we don't have access to I'm just to think about where our places we can add so the data we have is all aggregate data so we just know for example the percentage of students who are in one extracurricular or in two that is a question I can ask um in in one of my future conversations yeah I think it could be interesting sorry I think it

156could be interesting just to know like what are and even if it's not you know direct student to student just like what are students really um getting involved in over there because there are so many activities at Prospect um on The Trusted adult front um you know one thing that Prospect added this year that was really interesting was this idea of adding in Who The Trusted adult is for students in Infinite Campus so the man management system for uh grades at Prospect um and what's interesting is like I get to see my kids trusted adult uh obviously the teachers there due too and uh kids can update it and I was just thinking about like this connected question and making sure students have someone they can go to um and just wondering if that was

157something that we think of or that we've done at in 57 then thinking about how to share that information U potentially with parents or potentially with other or how that sorry your connection's not the best so I think you're done asking your question but uh if I don't answer it fully please let me know uh so student connectedness uh and and having a trusted adult is something that we have asked at Lincoln and they've done a lot of great work in um for for students who don't have someone who's a trusted adult kind of helping to BU build that relation ship with someone um and I think that's an area that we can continue to grow in and just even thinking about how district 214 defines student connectedness and the types of questions that they

158ask we've already had conversations about like what are those different things that you're asking so I I think we want to continue to have conversations and learn from them about the different tools that we that they use that we can um potentially bring to our district or modify it uh so that we can kind of see that that connection so I think that's a a great thing that we can look into further and and see what's possible did that answer everything that you said or asked okay it did it did thank you Karen did you have any questions I can't see you so no I'm good okay thank you anybody else they were both on there there we go yeah I don't know if if we could request our esteemed technological assistant to minimize them

159so that we can see them both at the same time um it's just helpful for me to know who's responding to what and who needs attention and who has something to contribute I appreciate that thank you um okay thank you again we will continue on to our building brighter Futures update all right Dr K is going to give some high level overview of the work that's happened in the last month we heard a little bit about it from our student board members but um he'll be sharing some exciting news sure absolutely sure make it exciting now you know what 9:23 here it comes um so uh before we jump in I just uh want to give you an update on Westbrook which is not part of the slides tonight but um since our last meeting

160uh at Westbrook we actually have formed now the steering committee there as well they've met once um and looked at um just the layout of the building uh we've gone back to some of the focus groups getting more information uh the principal actually talked to um Mr hner talked to uh the staff today at the staff meeting was that today today at the staff meeting um about um just looking at what all the input and then what kind what they're looking at for a layout of a floor plan um so it's been moving along uh we'll have more to share soon uh with you all uh tonight we wanted to talk just uh and show you about Lincoln um last uh week on Monday night um we had our first Community Gathering since the referendum

161um and so uh opportunity we had a presentation which is online and we can find on our website for anyone listening at home um and then an opportunity for as you can see in the pictures for the community members to walk around look different uh pictures and we'll show you some of them tonight as well um in case you couldn't make it um and um just an opportunity to really have some some conversations I thought it was pretty well attended um we did have um strr Architects there as well as uh Nicholas and Associates our construction management team there to help answer questions as well and so um just going to talk through briefly but what we showed them thank you yet uh we talked about what the current building looks like and where it

162is um and then when we jump to the next slide it shows um where the new building is so really I think helped people uh picture um exactly what we're talking about and where that new um building will uh reside the third slide then uh showed the site plan so what it looks like um and we're continuing to work on this nothing is set um we already have updates I can tell you um so we're we're continuing to work on it but um this really shows you know where parking is traffic flow uh it shows the track in there it shows where the building is um you know the purple area which would be like the three floors um the gym and the cafetorium and and everything about it so this is kind of the

163site plan and looking at that the next slide then this is we're starting to get as our Architects say they're starting to get to Fat lines which means instead of having like just the outlines of all the different rooms we're now actually figuring out where walls are and what's inside rooms and what's it going to look like um so for example on the top left is the gymnasium and we're starting to actually see where lockers will be in the locker room or uh there's a bathroom for example in the fitness room and where does that go um so all of those examples the stage in the cafeteria which is the pink in the uh purple maybe in the in the middle there um and so like where does that and how how do you get

164onto the stage and how do you get off the stage so things like that so we're starting to really design it I can say even this is um something that we're continuing to update um and having good conversations with we had another steering committee meeting this week with um with our Lincoln steering committee um sharing with them some of the input we've received some of the conversations are happening with specific groups so science classrooms we've we've met with the science teachers and talked through that um or Jim is a good example we've met with all the PE teachers and talked through you know what it looks like there as well so continuing to refine um and starting to really get into that um design development so you move from schematic design where all the boxes

165go the blocks go um and stting getting into that design development what do the the rooms look like within all those boxes now um the next slide just shows uh the second and third floor so similar um to the first floor and then the bottom there's the second floor that lays on top and then the third floor um on on the top of the slide as well and so talking through exactly what that looks like um how does flow look like for for students within the building um and again this presentation or these were all these slides were from our presentation there were more slides as well um and that is on our website um and so we're excited about it I will say that our student uh our student board members today um they

166did give some insight I know they didn't share it but they were actually talking through in our cafeteria right now the cafeteria is showing all Circle tables which is just what the Architects did at this point to show how many kids could fit in the cafeteria um and they quickly saw that and we haven't that hasn't been decided or even discussed like exactly what it's going to look like but right away some of them were like o but you know if it's eight kids at a circle table but you want nine kids how does that work and so they already started talking about like maybe having options and some are Circle tables and some are rectangles and you know other chairs to pull up or things like that so we had some good conversations about

167that so they were giving some great insight into you know just some of those things that maybe we don't always think of as adults and they definitely think of as kids so we're talking about our next um opportunity for um uh update for the community on April 24th um and I think we're finalizing the 5:30 time I think I think we're good there but we're finalizing that as well um and so we'll be getting that out to the community soon um once it's finalized and so I think that's you know we we continue to um we we we kind of went away this month we'll come back to it next month I'm sure but we went away from those timeline slides that we had this month just to give you a break from them um

168but we do continue to um have all the meetings our regular weekly meetings um and working closely you know with the village and with our Architects and our construction management team questions any questions I can answer I you you said that there were a couple changes potentially that you already from the I'm just asking what were the changes sure no absolutely I think um we things like um we had a tech classroom on the second floor and we had a sore classroom on the first floor and right now we're looking at switching those for a bunch of different reasons um looking at how our sensory rooms are we had um a sensory room that we were trying to figure out how how to make sure the sore classroom would have access to it um so

169we've looked at that um I'm trying to think through science in the pictures on those have a um a prep room in between the two science rooms we've moved uh that to there's hallway storage now to give them more room it was getting really tight with trying to figure out how the tables and all the lab tables would fit and so moving that prep room it's now hallway storage with with big wardrobe closets um and then they have more room within their classroom so things like that we're starting to just finalize so it's it's I feel like at Point you're tweaking it um we have pretty much the model but we're looking at you know what's going to be best and and as we just continue to get input and then from that first community

170meeting was what was the feedback from from the community that showed up I know there were a lot of neighbors they had come that are neighbors of Lincoln um how did because I was only there for part of the meeting sure sure no absolutely I think you know we're we're at at this point in that listening mode um I think that there are concerns that we want to be able to address and so we looking at it there was a traffic study that was being done last week um so we're paying for a traffic study to be done in order to um get some more insight into exactly what uh it looks like now and what we anticipate um because that's a big conversation that the that the um neighbors are having you know it's

171it's definitely an issue at Lincoln we know it we know that there's parking as an issue we know that traffic is an issue uh traffic flow is definitely an issue so we're working on that as well so but yeah we've definitely been in communication with some of the neighbors and and meeting with them and talking to them and continue too okay thank you sure wonderful Vicki yeah I had a um thank you so much Jason I had a similar um with Eileen I was at the I thought the community the um update the construction update was really I mean well attended um and specifically I I talked to one gentleman and I think he talked to you as well he was interested in either joining some kind of steering committee or really having a direct

172line I think to give some input and just curious if there are any community members out there what's the best way to get involved or give input I know there's so many ways but do you have some suggestions sure um if it's the person I was thinking of it was a very specific request of looking at I want to oh see I'm trying to remember it was definitely something specific about exactly what he had an interest in helping support oh I remember what it was it was about um I think it was either sight sound or lighting with the stage so he had some experience with that um and really um will you know anybody that has some of those expertise definitely reaching out uh um we obviously have um you know our Architects are

173putting us in touch with the people that we need they for example um they're bringing in their food services expert to help us develop what the kitchen's going to look like so we do have people but we're always happy to to get more insight and more input we don't uh we're not going to have a committee for everything but when he brought came to me I said absolutely that's a great you know please please let's work together on that not yet cuz we're not there yet but when we get there um so yeah but they can anybody could always reach out to me and we can try to figure out how to best utilize their skills sure okay Pam one of our foundation um board members husband is a structural engineer and I was speaking

174with him on Saturday at the mini golf fundraiser and I would like to send him to you he he um he said yeah he's you know he's pretty quiet but boy he he knows his stuff sure great thank you wonderful Chris did you have something thank you as always Jason for these updates um the yeah the questions I'll probably be asking you every month until we uh cut the ribbon on these buildings um are we on schedule still as far as you know is there are there any surprises that have come up anything that we need to be worried about no I I we're on schedule I mean there's still a lot a long way to go and and a lot to do um but we're on schedule I think we've um re received some

175preliminary feedback from the village that we're working through but nothing that is alarming to us you know we always expect to be conversations going back and forth and so we've had some great conversations with them and some feedback that we'll work through um I can share that that I did talk to another District that's don't get too excited but that they opened some bids recently for uh building their their building and the bids came in under what their budget was so that's exciting no idea how they created their budget so I I don't I don't know anything but it's always good news you know we're obviously next question right we're obviously watching closely I did talk with you know our construction manager we're definitely not at a place where we they even felt like we

176could even have a conversation about buying anything right now but they did say that they understand it's a it's it's an interest of the board to to have that conversation and so when we're there we can definitely talk about it but they're not currently revising their estimates up from what weed for material okay no we actually uh have been continuing working with them on estimates but they're not as they're not revising them up good great thank you sure Karen Jen anything you want to add okay I'm seeing shaking heads I can see you both now this is great okay uh wonderful I was just going to ask with regard to the subsequent Community Gathering I'm assuming right these these gatherings these touch points are meant to be comprehensive to the construction not necessarily specific to

177one building or the other uh correct I think we we well I would say that so so we did decide that we wanted to be specific to Lincoln in the first one and I think that was our thought on the second one as well is that we'll continue to be specific to to linkoln and give people choices but um I think we're open to any conversations I just thought we definitely thought that Lincoln had um just the scope of what's being done was was so large and looking at site plan versus you know Westbrook looking at an addition we know where the addition is going so it's not as much of a conversation there um so I think we thought for Westbrook we were waiting till we were a little fur along to show them

178more of like what it's going to look like um not just because we we had at the referendum time we had a pretty good idea of what it not that it hasn't changed but a pretty good idea of what it was going to look like and where everything was going to be and there'd be the library and the multi-purpose room in the classroom so we we had that idea so it wasn't right now too much new um until we have a better design of like what maybe the outside looks like and and even some um of the landscaping and things like that sure that's fair I mean Lincoln is the biggest of the projects and it's changing the most and makes sense to prioritize communication about that just because of the scope um I was

179curious and maybe this is again premature and maybe not even a question Jason that you could answer um but it occurred to me right with with laying out sort of the the core subjects in that tiered three story section and then having sort of the more common areas I mean that's going to change quite a bit about the way that students get around around in the building um you know part of the problems we have now is like the library is over here and science is over here and the gym is you know um I guess I'm I'm just curious when we get to that point to what degree the the building itself was sort of change maybe even the schedule like the bell schedule yeah uh it's it's actually been brought up just a

180lot of different things some of these conversations they'll come up in like a steering committee or in a focus group and we'll actually sit there and and The Architects will look at me and I'll look at them and we'll be like that's really a building conversation at some point you know do we need three minute passing periods or four minute passing periods I think it's definitely going to change it's going to be really for the better I think it's very exciting um I'm also excited that I think the people sitting around the table at the steering committee for sure um are really looking at even flow of students and how does it work where do they come in and where do they go down the stairs how do they even get to the cafeteria what

181if they're in the gym so for example the gym right now uh has a plan to have Cubbies so that you know we the thought of kids they're going to come they're going to come with stuff they're going to need to go somewhere where does the stuff go so things like that just that thought process of it um all the lockers are planned to be in the that that academic Wing so those three stories um so kids will definitely start their day over there where they go and what that looks like yeah it's a great conversation but um absolutely it's it's it's something that they might look at especially for those passing periods or what does it look like in the morning how does that happen how much time do kids need need to get

182in in the morning how much time do they need to get out at the end of the day those types of questions yeah I I'll just as a as an aside I think part of what I'm learning so much about through this process you know the the building itself is one thing but the way it changes sort of the culture and and the uh the practice and habits that we have I think it's going to be it'll be interesting and I I hope that as we're going along we're sort of preparing students and staff for those changes too it's one thing to be excited about like oh everything's going to be new and shiny and clean and fresh um but it's going to be an adjustment to get around and especially you know I'm thinking

183many of our students by the time this project is done like they will have started in the old building and be finishing their school year in the new it'll it'll be it'll be interesting but exciting um okay thank you for that were there any other comments I think we're good okay and then we have our foyer report no foyes report today well that was quick and easy okay uh new business then I understand oh no we don't have any new business so that brings us to the consent agenda Pam I understand you did the bills I did the bills I looked at them carefully invoice by invoice but it was electronic um and I I took note something stood Out Among the bills and it was the two invoices for special education and because I

184believe that we should not be totally insular we should be looking at impacts from the outside particularly the federal government today was the day that the executive order was signed to dismantle the Department of Education and I don't have to tell you that um it's the Department of Education that works closely with special education funding and school vultures are very much a part of the idea behind the new federal government initiatives you probably know that private schools are not mandated to teach hang on a second Pam I'm sorry just really quick I I want to keep our conversation to the bills so you were saying the bills were fine okay but I would like to continue because there are people listening to this or who will come on and this is important to me and

185and to our community um private schools are not mandated to teach special education students um they're not mandated to have Behavior students they can decide who comes it's the public education that needs the funding for special education because it's the public schools that are mandated to work with all students in the community whether they're here documented undocumented special ad Behavior whatever and I just wanted to get that point across because it jumped out at me and really made the impact of of what we do here okay thank you um okay so the bills are good at this time I will entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda so moves second m M Chung yes member choke yes yes member qualek yes member Leto yes member Nelson yes vice president Bennett kill yes president Fay

186yes okay and that takes us to our unfinished business starting with our fiscal year 26 Staffing plan so you will recall we reviewed this last time were there any additional questions or comments about it [Music] hearing none I will entertain a motion to approve the the um Staffing plan oh you know what I think that was I apologize that's an error because um that was the same memo as last month and that was at the first read so I apologize but and technically by approving it it's like giving Administration the approval to um pursue those positions and bring them forth technically the approval and the action is taken when you take action to approve contracts so I apologize for any confusion around this but it's yeah I mean I have it in my notes to

187take action and I I know we typically do you would right yeah at least indicate right because in this circumstances yeah I think the confusion is probably that the memo is the last month's memo that is in information because there's no action because we weren't going to vot so I apologize yeah so okay um so just to be clear motion to approve the consent agenda Staffing Staffing plan sorry we did that already yes the Staffing plan so moved second okay member choke yes member qualek yes member Leto yes member Nelson yes vice president Bennett kill yes member Chong yes president Fay yes and uh next we have action on our meeting dates for next school year for the board there any major conflicts I know one of us is expecting a baby do we have

188any vacations not you personally of course but um any major vacations conflicts anything just with the June meeting as I told you yes yeah okay um June 20 June 2026 oh no the June une 2024 meeting I won't what what year is it but that's not part of this so it's not relevant you won't be here a year ago I'm reminding our president that of that I appreciate that okay in that case I will entertain a motion to approve our board meeting dates for the next school year so moved second member qual yes member Leto yes member Nelson yes vice president Bennett hill yes member CH yes member choke president Fay yes we have another opportunity for Community comments I see there are no interested parties so we will move on uh we have no

189items scheduled for board discussion at this time that takes us to our Communications uh starting with our nsseo report yes uh NSO governing board met on Wednesday March 5th uh couple things to report Jennifer Browning was named the new principal of Kirk campus uh she works in District 59 currently and actually used to work at Kirk so she's kind of coming back home which is always cool um so that was announced at the meeting which is great and we all got to meet her and welcome her and it was a wonderful time uh one of the things that I've mentioned in these meetings before coming out of the Strategic plan that nsso developed was addressing one of of the concerns that really was coming out of the member District administration team where there were just

190some concerns about the the quality of the frequency of communication and information back to the admin teams and so that's kind of been one of the first things that we've been working through uh as a governing board and as an nsseo admin team is well what do we do about that right this is clearly uh an issue that we need to address how do we address it well there's been a team of uh I think all of the member district superintendents including Dr Gore that have been getting together and and kind of brainstorming well what do we want to do to address that and close that Gap and they've proposed creating what's called an operational board right which would work in conjunction with not replacing the governing board but the idea would be that they

191would be more involved in some of the more uh into the weeds items I guess I would call it on how nsseo is is administering its business right um and this would be a group that would be sub they would have public meetings they'd be subject to Oma laws and so a lot of formality around that and so at our last at the March meeting we had a really good discussion about that as a governing board on you know is this something that we because ultimately the governing board would have to approve this which means that all of the member district boards would have to approve it and so and I will say and and I was probably maybe the most vocal governing board member about this that I I do have some concerns about

192creating and this is a really big change in the operational structure of nsseo and and the question that and concern I have is is this really the the best way to solve this problem I I think we all and any of us who were at the strategic planning meetings heard loud and clear there are definitely concerns from the member district admin teams about the quality of and frequency of communication they're getting but does that really necessitate the creation of this entire new operating board and in my opinion I I I think there are other ways to accomplish this goal or that goal without that uh creating an operating board has a lot of potentially negative effects as well you know the OM law has its own you know things that you have to be concerned

193about and um there is some idea about kind of yielding some of the current responsibilities of the governing board to this operating board I personally have a little bit of a problem with that I think especially when it comes to any decisions that involve spending taxpayer money those decisions need to rest with the governing board uh who's accountable to the taxpayers the operating board would not be so things like that right so we had a good discussion about it um out of that we're we decid to schedule a committee of the whole meeting which will be on March 31 where it'll be an open meeting but this will be the only topic that's discussed and so we'll have a chance as a governing board to um discuss that discuss our concerns and maybe talk about

194well what might be a good path forward here so uh to be clear there's been nothing formally proposed yet by the governing board um once there is and only once there is uh will we all bring that back to our board so obviously when that happens uh I'll share that with you we'll have a chance to discuss it in one of our meetings uh as long as it takes before we then vote on that at the governing board meeting so uh nothing happening yet but that's kind of where we are um and again I should have some more uh substantive items to discuss after our um uh committee the whole meeting so when I when we have our April meeting uh we'll probably have a lot more to discuss about this then and we may

195have a formal proposal then as well so that's what's happening there uh and then last thing on nsseo the finance committee has met three separate times uh Dr K has been part of uh I think all three of those meetings and so uh those meetings all lead up to the creation of a draft budget uh at our next meeting the governing board will vote to allow that budget to then be shared with the member districts uh what I will do and I think we've done this in the past is have Gavin come and present to us uh hopefully at our April meeting and share that just to be fully transparent on what's in the budget and how it affects us and what our part of that is uh we then will vote on that budget

196as a district 57 board at our May meeting so we'll have over a month to review it discuss it ask questions and then the nsseo board would vote on it at our June meeting so so plenty of time there to do that but just want to let you all know that's coming and again we have the committee of the whole meeting to talk about the operating board on March 31st in our next governing board meeting is actually just two days after that on April 2nd so it'll be a busy week just real quick with regard to the operating board proposal um obviously it's a public meeting and so those of us that are community members would be welcome to attend absolutely um I would just caution right that when three of us are in a

197room together that makes a meeting and so if anybody is going to attend um I maybe coordinate with me just so we can be certain of it's live streamed too it is because I watched that part of the meeting and I was intrigued by hearing about all that and um I thought you guys all had very good points some were like like you know maybe we slow it down don't go right into this and then like you said what what does the operating board do what does the governing board do knowing each person's role and I think that slow down to see you know what each person's or what each board's role would be and to your um to your point about um the monies that is very important because we were elected to that

198yep so right hearing back what you guys kind of discuss and who knows maybe I'll tune in yeah so please tune in or or show up it's a it's a pretty small it's a room much smaller than this it is much smaller so if we decide to come we'll let you know too yes yes thank you y please um and I just to clarify right you indicated there's there's no formal proposal there's just these preliminary conversations so there's you know to talk about the ins and outs of the operating board and what's even being discussed right it's not an appropriate time it's too way too early for that okay fair enough um okay Ed Foundation uh no meeting for the Ed foundations last time we met uh they are just preparing for the big Gala

199which is on April 5th so if you have not gotten your tickets yet and you are planning to go please buy those soon um I know there's been communication sent out a couple times to your parents Square so check your email for that one um and then they are meeting to do some um planning for it over spring break or right after um they're putting together all the baskets and all that for the raffle but no official meeting on the calendar yet wonderful um Karen do you have a PTO report sorry my mouse does not want to do anything it was bound to happen at least once so oh it's happened so many times so the last um Lions Park PTO meeting was March 3D and um all is well with the alliance Park PTO

200I had asked if they had anything to bring back to the board they did not so quick and easy report the next board meeting is Monday the 7th of April at 7M okay um do we have a Fairview report we do keep it simple it was this past oh it was Monday March 10th um they are fundraiser raised 27,000 they had some fun prizes like principal for the morning they had the police ride which are all setting up the fire department ride Public Works ride and then one person got to pick like I think a movie theater themed party like separately all together uh they had their science sphere did well IR testing that they just finished up um they also looked into and they talked I believe to admin about planting a tree and

201they were given a go- ahead so now they're looking into what type of tree something of course more substantial so that a child can't climb and tip it over and break it so that's something that they're doing now and uh the next board meetings in April it's on a Monday I don't know what date yet though fair enough show up every Monday I mean she loves being here anyway so it's fine um Pam do you have a Westbrook report I do have a Westbrook report so um let me just see one of the things that was talked about was the a family dance that took place the planning for it they were talking about balloons um they're talking about a parents uh social parents um Night Out social meeting at Red Bar um and they're

202going to um send out photos from there ceries um will be in April Flyers will be circulating and that's where um teachers and local dignitaries like Schoolboard people maybe um dish out ice cream for the kids and then uh um they're talking about the school supply packages that you can buy that would be uh timesavers for uh families so that was uh so far they have 16 orders um they've they were talking about teacher appreciation and and I won't say what the theme is is because I think it's going to be a surprise um and then birthday books they need to order more birthday books for the kids um and they might need more funding for that so that was nice and that meeting was on um Tuesday March 11th and I know there's one

203coming up in April but I don't remember the date sorry that's okay fair enough yes fear viws meetings April 14th 6: p.m. oh lrc okay thank you appreciate that Vicki for Lincoln so Lincoln's um PTO meeting this month was cancelled um their next meeting is Monday the 21st April okay wonderful um that takes us to our board president report um you can all cross off our meeting on April 3rd we will not be meeting that day uh we have no business to address at least at this point um but I could certainly come up with some if you really want to get together I know me one we've seen a lot of each other lately so um and then I want to recognize the fact that Jen and Karin are not at the table with

204us because they are in Atlanta representing our district at the Cosa National Schoolboard [Applause] conference um do you all want to share a little bit about um your presentation and what you're anticipating uh yeah sure we um are presenting on kind of the Journey of the district over the last four years our presentation is called how student voice and Community engagement enhance initiative success um so we're really excited to be doing that on Saturday and we will certainly bring back uh the learnings from that we have a couple of strategic questions that we're going to be asking people from around the country just about the journey that we had um and kind of thinking about our next steps and what we want to do uh moving forward um so we'll be excited to present on

205that um and then we were just looking through all the different sessions that we can attend uh tomorrow and Saturday and just making sure that we're going to different sessions um so that we can bring back all that learning to the board so thank you to to the board and to the community for allowing us to be here and to really um be able to represent the district and also to bring back our learning from a from a National Conference could you also maybe bring back some sunshine it's going be cold next week so you guys uh yeah I mean we will try we it's supposed to be really nice here on Sunday uh and tomorrow and Friday look look lovely but not quite as nice as Sunday so we'll do our best for you

206well we expect you'll be Hol Up in a conference center most of the time anyway so Pam I just wanted to thank um both of you for doing this you have put us on a higher plane you are now leaders Nationwide and thank you thank you thank you this is this is a big deal for um for reaching out and for and for getting our name out there thank you yes thank you very much yes yeah we have a special recognition on the screen for you all um certainly hope you enjoy your time but we're excited to hear about everything that you learn um having the the national um sort of level of resources to to pull from so we're excited to hear everything that you can bring back to enhance our initiatives too um

207we'd also like to have a statement from vice president Ben Hill at this [Music] time the hits just keep on coming all right um thank you I'm proud to acknowledge that member choke was selected Court seven each year Schoolboard Partners selects diverse Rising leaders who are representative of their school communities recipients of the fellowship receive additional training and support to be more effective board members and pass kids first policies in datadriven ways that create better outcomes for our kid member choke is one of 70 school board members from across the country to receive that this Fellowship volunteering additional time and resources to become a leader real policy change for kids please join me in offering our congratulations to Jen on this honor the district and our children will only benefit from her hard work and

208dedication we have another lovely Banner for you Jen as well um and and uh just want to thank you for taking the initiative to put your name in the Hat for this opportunity um we're excited certainly for you personally but again for the ways that the knowledge that you will gain from this experience can benefit all of us as a board and as a district so congratulations on that honor um speaking of honors I would also like to recognize Jen again as well as um Vicki and eileene for achieving the established level at the internet uh Illinois Association of school boards board leader recognition program yes so this is an acknowledgement of all of the training that you all have put into your roles as school board members um through the iasb and we're just

209so pleased for your dedication and the the time that you take to learn how to be a good school board member so thank you very much and then as just one final comment um you will recall that our May 1st meeting will be dedicated to our board reorganization so we expect to be welcoming new and returning board members to our board as well as potentially shifting some roles in terms of the leadership on the board um so anyone who is interested in an executive position uh please let me know so that we can take account of your interest and start making plans for how we will um you know make choices about who continues who leads the board or continues to lead the board moving forward yeah may I ask for um you to develop

210a like a job [Music] description I'm not interested but I just I would like to see a job description for the rest of sure thank you and in the meantime I we can send the there's a policy existing board policy that gives kind of a overview of the responsibilities M yeah I was going to say I think in one of our previous meetings at a governance committee update there was um some language developed around the responsibilities of the President and Vice President um so we could certainly circulate that again and make sure that that gets in front of everybody and then again as Dr Gore said um there's some policies that speak to the individual roles if I can just pop in there real quick um that is work that the governance committee continues to

211do and I'm hopefully going to have an update for you by the end of this week so so that we have something for the April meeting okay fabulous okay it was end of next week well it's it's technically the end of this week already so she means the end of next week Ken you mean the end of next week right or do you mean I mean the end of next week okay thank you okay had a heart attack well whenever you can get it we look forward to it okay um that brings us to a need for close session uh we have a need for close session for the purpose of the appointment employment compensation discipline performance or dismissal of specific employees um I will at this time entertain a motion to enter close session

212so moved second member Leto yes member Nelson yes vice president Bennett hill yes member Chong yes member choke yes member qual yes president Fay yes